Happy B-Day Old Man!!!

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!!

One of my many, varied, nuanced and irrationally passionate pet-peeves are the idiots (and yes you are an idiot if you have drank this particular brand of Kool-Aid) who believe (yes I am using the word believe) in Intelligent Design. It really gets my blood boiling because of their insistence in wrapping their particular pile of dog shit in scientific mumbo-jumbo and passing it off as Science. If these nut-jobs stopped there it wouldn’t be so bad because the peer-review process of modern science would weed these kooks out; but, they use the levers of democracy to try and out flank real science by inserting their poison into public schools.

Ok, the point of this post isn’t to rail against modern day “Earth is flat” morons, but to celebrate Darwin and his contribution to our understanding of how the universe works. Most people know that Evolution and its underpinning description of reality that is Natural Selection is the foundation for modern Biology; however, his theories have profoundly “evolved” many branches of science. One example that I have learned about (thanks Scientific American) is Superorganism Dynamics. My feeble amateur explanation would be to describe it as the evolutionary process happening on a macro-scale. Think of a colony of ants evolving as if it was a single organism. The interesting part is that this has implications for very non-biological systems as well. The same rules seem to apply to traffic patterns and how memes spread through the internet.

Cultural evolution and the study of the evolutionary processes that accompany human language are two more areas where evolution has had a profound impact on non-biological areas of study. My point is that Charles Darwin’s theories have had a more profound impact on our understanding than any other individual since Aristotle. And since it was nearly 2000 years before Aristotle’s ideas began to really blossom and move us exponentially forward, I think that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the impact of Mr. Darwin’s theories.

200 years ago today Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born. If you know me at all, you know that I am a huge Lincoln fan; but, Pres. Lincoln doesn’t hold a candle to the impact upon the world that Charles Darwin has had.

Take a moment and raise a glass to Darwin.

EDIT: If I have offended you with this post, sorry. I am not really sorry but I felt like I should apologize just the same.