|
|
"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
|
Charles Darwin: Evolution of a Scientist
|
|---|
| Parent(s) |
Issue
|
| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Nov 21, 2005 02:12pm |
| Logged |
0
|
| Category | Profile |
| News Date | Monday, November 21, 2005 08:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | He had planned to enter the ministry, but his discoveries on a fateful voyage 170 years ago shook his faith and changed our conception of the origins of life.
By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
Nov. 28, 2005 issue - On a December night in 1831, HMS Beagle, on a mission to chart the coast of South America, sailed from Plymouth, England, straight into the 21st century. Onboard was a 22-year-old amateur naturalist, Charles Darwin, the son of a prosperous country doctor, who was recruited for the voyage largely to provide company for the Beagle's aloof and moody captain, Robert FitzRoy. For the next five years, the little ship—just 90 feet long and eight yards wide—sailed up and down Argentina, through the treacherous Strait of Magellan and into the Pacific, before returning home by way of Australia and Cape Town. Toward the end of the voyage, the Beagle spent five weeks at the remote archipelago of the Galapagos, home to giant tortoises, black lizards and a notable array of finches. Here Darwin began to formulate some of the ideas about evolution that would appear, a quarter-century later, in "The Origin of Species," which from the day it was written to the present has been among the most influential books ever published. Of the revolutionary thinkers who have done the most to shape the intellectual history of the past century, two—Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx—are in eclipse today, and one—Albert Einstein—has been accepted into the canon of modern thought, even if most people still don't understand what he was thinking. Darwin alone remains unassimilated, provocative, even threatening to some—like Pat Robertson, who recently warned the citizenry of Dover, Pa., that they risked divine wrath for siding with Darwin in a dispute over high-school biology textbooks (click here for related story). Could God still be mad after all this time? |
| Share |
|
|
2¢
|
|
| Article | Read Full Article |
|
| Date |
Category |
Headline |
Article |
Contributor |
|
|
