Darwin's Private Papers Get Released To The Internet

bibekpaudel writes "ScienceDaily reports that a wealth of papers belonging to Charles Darwin have been published on the internet, some for the first time. Some 20,000 items and 90,000 images were posted today to http://darwin-online.org.uk/. The new site is the largest collection of Darwin's work in history, according to organizers from Cambridge University Library 'This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,' said John van Wyhe, director of the project. The collection includes thousands of notes and drafts of his scientific writings, notes from the voyage of the Beagle when he began to formulate his controversial theory of evolution, and his first recorded doubts about the permanence of species."

Re:So...

[hansraj]

Dead people don't care one way or the other, you know? :-)

Re:I wonder how much the theory has changed

[interiot]

I'm wondering, first of all, how much it's really changed

At the time, Darwin didn't know about any of the actual mechanisms that enabled the transmission of genes, he just inferred that they must exist via statistics. Since then, we've discovered DNA, and it confirmed most of his findings. We've been able to use population genetics to figure out what route humans took to initially expand to all the continents [wikipedia.org], and everything else that the actual mitochondrial/nucleic DNA mechanisms taught us.

Re:Controversial?

[jimlintott]

http://www.expelledexposed.com/ [expelledexposed.com]

Truth is truth regardless of points of view. Open discussions are great but science still places a large emphasis on empirical evidence. When it comes to evolution you can find the evidence everywhere. Half the time the evidence is found lying on he ground.

Re:Survival

[MightyMartian]

This seems to be a confusing of the term. The term "Creationist" when used by almost everyone in discussion of evolution refers to those who advocate one form of special creation or another. Yes, you could probably lump in various types of theistic evolutionists, but Creationism almost always is used to refer to those who deny one of a number of key principals of evolutionary theory including Common Descent, faunal succession, and in particular that humans themselves are the products of a long evolutionary line that includes ape-like ancestors.

What you're invoking appears to be a private definition. Theistic evolutionists (which is what I would count most Catholic theologians) are explicitely not included in this category, because they do not deny any of the above things, but rather add a sort of "guiding" force principle. YOu will find, almost to a man, that Creationists deny not only evolution beyond the species/kinds level, but expressely deny any sort of universal common descent (all organisms having a common ancestor) and specifically that humans are, in fact, simply a relatively hairless, bipedal ape.

As to Intelligent Design advocates, what they believe is cleverly altered depending on who they're talking to. If they talk to someone who accepts evolution, they don't deny the underlying principles of biological evolution, but rather, like theistic evolutionists, invoke some sort of prime mover/grand tinkerer. Inevitably, when they're talking to a Creationist crowd, they pretty much become Special Creationists. That's because ID (as opposed to Theistic Evolution) is a political movement, one of the key constructs of the infamous Big Tent, which is supposed to unite Special Creationists (Young Earth and Old Earth Creationists and everything in between) and Theistic Evolutionists. For the most part, Theistic Evolutionists, including many Catholic thinkers (save for a notable few like Cardinal Schoenborn) have not entered the ID camp, so, other than a small number like Michael Behe, you're dealing with Special Creationists.

So, to put the long to short, when discussing evolution, the title "Creationist" is usually confined to variants on Biblical Literalist Special Creationists (though it also includes Muslim Creationists and other groups that make similar anti-evolutionary claims). It does not include Theistic Evolutionists, who, for the most part, reject the Creationist tenets and have refused to enter the Big Tent alongside these individuals and to lend credence to what is clearly a legalistic attempt to get by the First Amendment.

Re:Controversial?

[Chris Mattern]

Does civility advocate|excuse dismissing opposing|differing opinions as meritless simply due to an innate sense of superiority?

No, but it does allow dismissing opposing|differing opinions as meritless because they *are* meritless.

Re:spluff!

[williamhb]

That sound you just heard was the collective orgasms of the entire RichardDawkins.net forum membership.

The sister project Darwin Correspondence Project [darwinproject.ac.uk] provides access to the letters Darwin wrote, including those describing his own views on science and religion.

According to someone close to the project, one of their hopes is that by opening up Darwin's letters to the public and showing how he took a moderate and considerate approach in his own correspondence, we can move away from the invective-filled polarisation that tends to occur in public discussions on science and religion (the RichardDawkins.net forums being the obvious example).

Re:Micro vs. Macro is fiction

[typidemon]

Transient forms don't necessarily have to hang around for millions of years. Once you get an adaptation that works it can quickly become another total form. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0 [youtube.com]

Re:Micro vs. Macro is fiction

[Copid]

Though it is often argued that macro evolution follows the same processes as micro evolution, famous evolutionists such as Gould have nonetheless proposed theories such as the "Punctuated Equilibrium" theory which states that evolution actually took place in big steps and it wasn't always through millions of accumulated micro-level evolution.

Not so much. Punctuated equilibrium has to do with the distribution of changes over long periods of time, not how gradual changes over short periods of time. The end result of "macroevolution" is still the result of small changes adding up. They just don't happen uniformly over time.

Another reason for this theory is to account for the Cambrian Explosion problem which Dawkins also refers to in his books including the Blind Watchmaker.

Cambrian explosion "problem"?

Some of the other theories proposed for large changes between generations is the Horizontal Gene Transfer theory. However, the problem with this theory is that horizontal gene transfer is seen in simpler organisms like bacteria and is not seen on any other organisms such as vertebrates.

Are you claiming that experts in biology are positing a gene transfer mechanism not found in vertebrates as an explanation for rapid changes in vertebrates?

So is it not accurate to say that micro evolution and macro evolution follow the same processes. Even many prominent evolutionists will disagree with that.

Not at all. I think that you're missing the point of punctuated equilibrium.