Today is also known as Evolution Sunday.   Many church congregations celebrate the genius of Charles Darwin today. 

I celebrated Darwin by going to the St. Louis Zoo with my six-year old daughter. The zoo has a terrific ape exhibition area.  We focused on gorillas, and they put on a great show.   The scenary inside, including the murals on the wall might fool you into thinking the photos were taken outdoors–they were not. 

I brought a Canon S1-IS camera with me and captured some wonderful images.  For camera buffs, I didn’t do anything fancy.  I just turned off the flash and braced myself against walls, shooting through thick plexiglass.

I’m dedicating these photos to today’s army of Creationists, those intrepid souls who bravely dare to assume that the overwhelming phenotypic and genetic similarities of human animals and gorillas result from the piddling of a Creator, i.e., that these similarities are mere accidents.  Such a strange bunch, those Creationists who disparage fruitful “accidents” only when attributed to the systematic ratcheting effect of natural selection, not when when they have no rigorous explanatory basis at all!

But, I digress.

I was in awe at these marvelous creatures today.  I’m posting these photos here with the hope that they will inspire you, too.