Chapter 1: Variation Under Domestication

Chapter 1 opens with general overview of how animals differ from one another under domestication and yet in many cases come from one source species. He claims this as a promising place to look for explanations of how so many species came to be.

It's interesting what a paltry sample he has to draw from in conducting his analysis; scientists today have a crushing wealth of taxonomies, specimens, numbers, research going back dozens of generations about species Darwin never knew existed. So he is wrong in some of his assumptions about domesticated animals (for example, he guesses that dogs are so varied as to likely come from more than one ancestor), and about the sources of some of the variation (like drooping ears in some domesticated animals arising simply from disuse of the ear muscles).

I do not believe, as we shall presently see, that all our dogs have descended from any one wild species….

That's right: there are many things Darwin was wrong about. (Creationists love to chuckle and point at these places, as if they're the ones who discovered his errors through their own research and the arrogant scientists don't know about it yet.) This is what's so great about science: when science is wrong about something, it gets disproven and is no longer believed to be true.

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In celebration of Darwin in Malibu, which I'm directing at the Generic Theater in March, I am finally reading The Origin of Species and posting chapter-by-chapter summaries and commentary. Part 0 covers the history of the book, plus its title page and introduction.

Part Zero: The Origin of the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin was a naturalist. He was on track to become a doctor, but he proved a rather squeamish medical student, and left medical school for Cambridge to become instead an Anglican priest. His father, a doctor, was disappointed enough by this to say, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." While at Cambridge, he found his true calling: that of a naturalist, an all-around scientist of the natural world (and especially the creatures which inhabited it). "Naturalists" were the progenitors of modern biologists, and like so many very early men of science, the best of them  became masters of many disciplines. Naturalists combined aspects of what we know today as biology, botany, entomology, taxonomy, chemistry, geology, and more.

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We are not trained to think. In classical education–the kind engaged in by the ancient Greeks and those in later generations who sought to emulate them–the study of learning was nearly as important as the learning itself. Logic was taught, so that the educated could understand where they were apt to be wrong and avoid being so. The intellectual leaders who poured the philosophical foundation upon which the United States of America was built–Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Monroe–were inspired by the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, the rediscovery of whom ended the Dark Ages. Jefferson himself believed no education could be thought complete without a full reading of Homer and Virgil in the original Greek and Latin. Can you imagine such a thing being spoken today, even by a President? The Renaissance (literally "rebirth") was a replanting of the classical spirit of self-discovery, and the Catholic Church–by nurturing the bud back into bloom through patronage–boosted its own prestige but doomed itself to death at the hands of the very tools it had kept safe: reason, education, and art. No church can survive the application of reason, and once its robes are exposed by education as imaginary, art steps in to make us laugh at the nakedness.

The American founders had no respect for the Church, nor for the Protestant denominations which followed it, despite treading carefully so as not to offend them and lose the support of the superstitious people they hoped to elevate. Fortunately (unlike in modern America) they had only to make occasional token gestures to appease the believers, like putting "and nature's god" (originally uncapitalized and clearly a Deist statement, not a religious one) into the Declaration of Independence, because nearly everyone allowed to vote back then was educated. That time was called the Enlightenment, and its leaders were writers and thinkers like Paine, Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant–men (and in rare cases, like Mary Wollstonecraft, women) who stood on the very edge of the Dark Ages and held up a light.

Bertrand Russell somewhat-famously said, "The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." The men who stood at the edge of that darkness were the doubters; they stood up against centuries of certainty because the truth was more important to them than the comfort of what they already believed. In other words, it didn't matter what felt true, it only mattered what was.

Does Reality Matter Anymore?

Can you imagine such a test being applied to the debate over health care reform?

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A couple of months ago, I started writing a long post about the movie Expelled. I made the mistake of assuming there were but a handful of sane voices in the meeting-place of public opinion, and that I needed to join them to be heard above the crowd cheering on this insidiously dishonest movie. But when I showed up at the meeting, the crowd was jeering and the filmmakers had already been laughed out of the room. My humble services were not needed–much to the relief, I'm sure, of those who would have received them.

So I just slapped together this list of links so you can enjoy the saga if you like. For those who are curious about the Expelled kerfuffle (a polite term deriving from the Latin word "clusterfuck"), I include the following one-paragraph synopsis:

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