Current mood:

busy

Happy Darwin Day!
So today is the 200th anniversary of Darwin, the British naturalist who first created a detailed, rigorous, and lucid account of then emerging theory of common descent and natural selection, which provided a solid explanation for the facts of biological evolution that were known back then and managed to correctly predict thousands of the future observations. Although nearly everything we know about evolution today did not come from Darwin, and he'd never understand a word in a modern research paper, his work is the underlying basis of modern biology much like Newton's laws of motion are the basis of modern physics.

And yet I live in the only non-islamic country in the world where the nutcases who think that all of the modern biology is wrong are not a ridiculous minority, but comprise 40%-60% of general population (Miller et al. (2006) Science 313:765-766 say 40-45%, Pew Research Center says 63%). Their leaders and spokesmen not just make stuff up and pass it as some sort of secret truth, they publish books, make movies, built a museum, and continually attempt to force the schools to teach their lies. Major league politicians and celebrities openly confess their ignorance. If you run into a creationist, an IDer, or one of their ilk online, make sure to have http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/ open in your browser, because their claims are almost never original, and have been debunked before.

As for some cool recent discoveries, check out the early and later whale ancestors or the turtle ancestor, or the new work on the evolution of hair.