Word: darwin
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Although Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel were contemporaries, they never met. By the 1860s. Darwin had already published The Origin of Species, assuring himself a slice of eternity and a reputation as one of history's most influential scientific thinkers. But, Mendel remained an obscure Austrian cleric, an inconsequential geneticist whose genius was not recognized until 20 years after, his death. Darwin was certainly unfamiliar with the monk's work, and Mendel has left no word of what he thought of Darwin's evolutionary theory, a theory that tried to explain the diversity and similarities among organisms, both past...
...were never opponents, never contestants in a common debate. It is doubtful that either would have known if their work was related. Yet, when Mendel's work was revived in 1900, his experiments dealt Darwinism a nearly fatal blow. The popularity of Darwin's thought was already on the decline when Mendelism came into favor, but the monk's researches seemed to influence greater reproach for his theory. In 1907 a biologist named Vernon Grant had written a book citing dozens of objections to Darwin's theory and offering 24 alternate explanations of evolution. Many of his ideas sprang directly...
...Darwin in the Dock
Your article "Putting Darwin Back in the Dock" [March 16] was helpful in dealing with the creationist campaign to have the biblical version of man's origins taught in the schools. But if there are problems with Darwin's theory of evolution, there are also problems with the creation story. Genesis gives two accounts of the beginning. The first and second chapters differ significantly in describing how it came about. The Bible educates Jews and Christians about who created the world and why. It does not teach when or how. I am content to leave that to science...
...least. But they are based on a sincere, though often appallingly distorted and overstated, conviction that evolutionary doctrine, as it has come to affect modern society, deprives man of a sense of individual and moral responsibility for his own acts. Says Georgia Judge Braswell Been: "This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, pills, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornotherapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types." Behind the rhetoric lies a basic question that touches the ultimate reaches of science and the most ancient source of faith. Creationists tend to put it as follows...