Apr 10 2009
Charles Darwin is either an asshole or the hero of our liberation.
Tell the world there is no such thing as purpose. Tell the world that all life is a miracle.
Then you get Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”. Did you know Darwin was religious? Have you read Darwin’s text? If you want to understand a crucial aspect of the education system today, look to Darwin. You might find it of considerable relevance to your life if you are a student in American schools, or in any school for that matter. You will find out why there was so much controversy to the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, and why it has such an impact on education today. To believe in God and to learn Darwin’s texts would be a huge confrontation of your own self understanding. Even to believe in any faith, to have a frame of mind that you are important to society, will conflict with the implications of evolution and natural selection.
Evolution and natural selection might also justify our beliefs in the importance of our own life in the world. Just as any fact of history can justify any perspective of the present, Darwin supports those who are religious and those who are not. Some kind of force called nature selects what survives in a given geography. Location makes all the difference to how species evolve. The surroundings rule over adaptation. So maybe this implies we must stay in our place. Maybe it has something to say about globalization. Will the human species survive if it keeps moving all the time? Will it survive if it is depleting the world’s soil of its nutrients with industrial agriculture? Is global warming a joke? – Very many say it is.
Let’s think of Darwin and even Malthus, even if you are not an agriculturalist, even if you hate reading scientific texts, even if you don’t care about politics or the world that comes after you. Let’s think of them to entertain our thoughts on where we are right now. Just to humor ourselves. I’m just a college kid who read about Darwin in some required course to get my liberal arts degree. But Darwin changed my impression of everything. I wonder how others think of him today. I wonder if anything is ever obsolete: I did not know anything about Darwin for the first 19 years of my life. I learned about evolution in junior high, but the significance of his argument did not strike me until several years later. It was only his theory that made me realize the importance of the opposing stance. Only when I read Darwin did I approach the notion that maybe believing in God helps us survive.
