Word: darwins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...design" in in science class. In the article, evolutionary biology professor Fiorenzo Facchini, who teaches at the University of Bologna, pondered whether the theory, which holds that the complexity of nature makes it, necessarily, the product of the design of a conscious creator, should be taught alongside discussions of Darwin. His conclusion: "This is not how science is done...
...Studying notebooks, manuscripts and historical records, we've dissected the creative process of people like the Wright brothers, Charles Darwin, T.S. Eliot, Jackson Pollock, even business innovators like Citigroup's John Reed. We find that creativity happens not with one brilliant flash but in a chain reaction of many tiny sparks while executing an idea...
...They have tons of ideas, many of them bad. The trick is to evaluate them and mercilessly purge the bad ones. But even bad ideas can be useful. Darwin's notebooks, for example, show us that he went down many dead ends?like his theory of monads. These were tiny hypothetical life forms that sprang spontaneously from inanimate matter. If they died, they took with them all the species into which they had evolved. Darwin spent years refining this bizarre theory before ultimately rejecting it. But it was a critical link in the chain that led to his branching model...
...Where to begin? Well, first of all, proponents of ID point to what they insist are serious flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. The truth is that the theory is not only an overwhelmingly powerful explanation for how life on Earth manages to come in such a bewildering array of different types, but the only such theory in science. Like any scientific theory, it can't explain how every aspect of every organism came to be, but each time scientists find new evidence-fossils of dinosaurs bearing feathers; fossils of the mammals whose descendants are whales...
...Alas, ID isn't going away. The Kansas school board recently endorsed new educational standards that downplay evolution, and new assaults on Darwin's brilliant and unsettling idea are sure to continue. Meanwhile, there are still gaps in Einstein's theory of relativity and the germ theory of disease and the theory of plate tectonics. However, none of these contradict the sacred text of any religion-and so no school board is likely to be looking for some way to counter them...