The Single Best Idea

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PFLsAgain
Posted by PFLsAgain on Tue 12 Feb 08, 11:29 AM

Today is the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. According to the American philosopher Daniel Dennett:

"Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."

If you wish you can see science as soulless and deterministic but as Dennett alludes, to those of us involved in it it is about passion and truth, about meaning and understanding, about the fundamentals of life itself. It's a celebration of all that makes us human and a part of the fantastic world around us.

Can you watch programmes such as Life in Cold Blood and remain unmoved? Can you take to the skies and fail to appreciate the wonder of clouds and hills and seas stretching to the furthest horizon? Can you look at a blood red sunset drowning the countryside in colour and see only a passing day? Or can you open up and be moved by the majesty of creation all around you? Such breathtaking emotion is given to all of us and a passionate love for all we can see and all we can explain and all we must see as mysteries for the future, only makes us more human. A scientist's eyes see beauty just as well as yours and a scientist's heart feels love as equally as does yours.

Today is a good day to celebrate that. Happy Darwin Day!


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