Two hundred years ago today, on February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England at his family home.
That occasion marked the beginning of a life that would profoundly affect the course of human history. He developed and told the world about the theory of natural selection, the first fully naturalistic and scientific explanation for the diversity of life on earth. Darwin today is widely recognized as the single most influential scientific thinker in human history.
Today, "Darwin Day" celebrations all over the world mark the 200th anniversary of his birth. The Atheist Times joins this celebration and honors Darwin's enormous contribution to the long, slow evolution of human understanding of the universe and our place in it.
The great contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett likens the theory of natural selection to an intriguing imaginary substance, "universal acid." Dennett describes the substance in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995).
Did you ever hear of universal acid? This fantasy used to amuse me and some of my schoolboy friends--I have no idea whether we invented or inherited it, along with Spanish fly and saltpeter, as a part of underground youth culture. Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like?
Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea--Darwin's idea--bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways. (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 63)
On this day, February 12, 2009, Darwin's idea remains as dangerous, transformative--and controversial--as ever. The human mind seems to have an innate need to answer the question "why?" and one of the most challenging of all "why" questions is "Why do we exist?"
Before the explanation offered by Darwin, the only ways people knew how to answer that question inevitably involved supernatural forces or entities, such as a creator god. But today, we can understand our existence without needing to believe that the universe is essentially incomprehensible.
Evolution gives us a way of explaining the wonders of life within a conceptual framework that includes the principle that all events have natural and fully explicable causes. Nothing exists due to any process outside of the universe of natural law. Universal acid, indeed!
Thank you, Mr. Darwin.
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