Word: darwin
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Unfortunately, the testimony cited by the learned Justice and his Chief was in error, and this error has been allowed to skew the entire debate on the subject. There is no theory of life's origin in Darwin's work. True to his title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Darwin confined himself to describing the process by which new species, including our own, have evolved from the old. In a letter to American botanist Asa Gray, he dismissed all theological pretensions on his part with the words: "A dog might as well speculate...
...even if he were proved right, the next question that would occur to scientists and theologians alike -- and perhaps even to Darwin's dog -- would be: Who or what created that fruitful vacuum...
ESSAY: Even Darwin could not explain life's origin...
...only a scientist but a great popularizer. As Stephen Jay Gould points out in an excellent catalog essay, the first two volumes of his work Cosmos were seen by their 19th century public as the last word on nature and its origins. Humboldt's ideas were what Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species overthrew. For Humboldt, like Linnaeus before him, saw the natural world as a pyramid of unity, "one great whole animated by the breath of life" -- cooperative within its prodigious variety, with more room for God than allowed by Darwin's harsher scheme of battle...
Mikhail Gorbachev is the Copernicus, Darwin and Freud of communism all wrapped in one. He wants his fellow citizens -- and his comrades -- at last to absorb this trinity of disillusionments and reconcile themselves into a whole and modern society...