News: Scientists consider Darwin's contribution

Scientists consider Darwin's contribution

Charles Darwin's upcoming 200th birthday is prompting some U.S. scientists
to consider the Victorian-era naturalist's contribution to modern science.

Kevin Padian, a University of California, Berkeley paleontologist, said the
coming bicentennial of Darwin's birth is the ideal time "to reflect on just
what constitutes Darwin's enduring greatness in Western thought," the San
Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.

"Perhaps no individual has had such a sweeping influence on so many facets
of social and intellectual life," Padian wrote in an essay published in this
month's issue of the journal Nature.

Padian wrote Darwin "has been invoked as the demon responsible for a variety
of heartless ills of society," including atheism, Nazism, communism,
abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research and same-sex marriage.

Among Darwin's critics are creationists, who insist the Bible's descriptions
of the world's beginning are literally true, and some scientists who argue
that life is the product of intelligent design.

Padian, a professor of integrative biology at Berkeley, is president of the
National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, Calif., watchdog group
that monitors controversies over evolution in schools.

"Finding the genetic basis of evolutionary development is really amazing,"
Padian said, "and it vindicates Darwin's view of the tree of life
completely."

Copyright 2008 by United Press International
http://www.physorg.com/news122018308.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


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