Orchids are back at the Missouri Botanical Garden

Once again the orchids are on display at the Missouri Botanical Garden. I snapped some photos or these incredible beings. After all, they are our cousins. Richard Dawkins estimates that animals diverged from the plant kingdom about two billion years ago. orchid1 I've written previously about Darwin's fascination with orchids here. For today, I will simply paste in a few new photos of these incredibly beautiful plants. I've posted many more of my photos of today's show at one of my public web albums at Picasa.

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Barack Obama extols the virtues of Abraham Lincoln and that other guy

In today's speech, Barack Obama extolled the virtues of Abraham Lincoln, mentioning Charles Darwin along the way. It's a terrific speech articulating the balance between individual liberties and the common good. A key quote: What if we were "consumed with small things--petty things--when were were called upon to do great things." To hear an American President actually mentioning the work of Charles Darwin in a good light, listen in starting about the 6-minute mark.

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What Darwin did not know, but you do.

I have Darwin on my mind these days, perhaps because tomorrow is Darwin Day. To celebrate Darwin Day, I sat down to read the February 2009 edition of National Geographic, which, according to the front cover, features an article entitled "What Darwin Didn't Know." Once you get inside the magazine, however, you'll see that the main article is actually entitled "Darwin's First Clues." It is an extraordinary article setting straight some of the misconceptions about the manner in which Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection. You can read that article online here. you can also watch a short introductory video by writer David Quammen, who explains that Darwin "is a man who just will not go away," and whose ideas are not only still relevant, but "central" to the field of biology. If you read this article, you'll see that Darwin's first clue toward evolution occurred not in the Galapagos, but three years earlier on the northern coast of Argentina, where Darwin found fossils of giant sloths. You read about his numerous fossil finds of giant mammals, "extinct Pleistocene giants." Quammen's article points out that, for all of his gifts, Dawn was not a comparative anatomist. For this reason, he entrusted much of that work to others, including John Stevens Henslow, a botanist at Cambridge and Richard Owens, "an up-and-coming authority on extinct mammals." Darwin was certainly aware of the implications of the diversity and distributions of the flora and fauna he studied. The fact that fossils of giant extinct mammals could be found in the same places as still-living relatives suggested the idea of "relatedness and succession among closely allied species" rather than a God who had specially created species, placing them on the planet in arbitrary locations. Darwin's explanation was certainly "more economical, more inductive and more persuasive than the creationist scenario."

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Darwin Day: Threat or Promise?

February 12th, 2009 is the 200th birthday of Chas. Darwin. Yes, one of our famous politicians shares that exact birthday, but Abe the rail splitting lawyer is not the point of this post. So what does Darwin Day mean? To most of the world, he was a man who found the missing link between the observation of evolution (that was accepted as reality before he was born) and a workable theory explaining it. He changed the understanding of how it happens from "What the (expletive)?" to "Well, duh!". But this is America. We have to be different. We have to be independent. Less than half of Americans seem to share the world consensus on the value of Darwin's contribution. A survey conducted by Science Magazine (313:765-766) showed only Turkey having a lower public rate of understanding of the theory of evolution than the United States. Of course, the survey didn't have access to even more starkly theocratic nations. Here's the summary of what people think of the theory of common descent:

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Rejection of evolution across the pond

Great Britain is catching up to the U.S. when it comes to the rejection of evolution by natural selection.  Consider the following from The Guardian: Half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22% preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the…

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