Today is Darwin Day. As I generally post late in the evening, for most readers this will effectively extend Darwin Day from the actual date of Charles Darwin's birth, February 12th, to February 13th, thus claiming another day for the celebration of rational thought.

I read Darwin's The Origin Of Species when I was nine, and it changed my life. I already knew this story of men being made from earth and women from ribs was a fairy-tale, so when Darwin gave me his grand scientific explanation, everything fell into place. I was overwhelmed by the logical sense of the world, and by the power of my mind to comprehend it.

I credit Uncle Charles with pointing me to the rational path which eventually became my rocket ship: humanism paired with a deep, logical agnosticism. There are many things I don't know, and perhaps cannot know. I don't know how life itself began... no-one does. Beyond that flash point, I know the likely way all life differentiated and continues to change, because Charles Darwin shared his thoughts on evolution with me.

Here are some Darwin resources:

The official Darwin Day Celebration site

DailyKos' groovy write-up on evolution

The Panda's Thumb, a great forum on evolutionary theory

The Talk.Origins archive

Darwin's Wikipedia entry

Charles Darwin Has A Posse, evolution awareness stickers designed by Colin Purrington (print and paste 'em everywhere... I do.)

One of my favorite passages from The Origin Of Species:

"On the ordinary view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is; -- that it has pleased the Creator to construct all the animals and plants in each great class on a uniform plan; but this is not a scientific explanation.

The explanation is to a large extent simple on the theory of the selection of successive slight modifications, --each modification being profitable in some way to the modified form, but often affecting by correlation other parts of the organisation. In changes of this nature, there will be little or no tendency to alter the original pattern, or to transpose the parts. The bones of a limb might be shortened or flattened to any extent, becoming at the same time enveloped in thick membrane, so as to serve as a fin; or a webbed hand might have all its bones, or certain bones, lengthened to any extent, with the membranes connecting them increased, so as to serve as a wing; yet all these modifications would not tend to alter the framework of the bones or the relative connection of the parts. If we suppose that an early progenitor --the archetype as it may be called --of all mammals, birds, and reptiles, had its limbs constructed on the existing general pattern, for whatever purpose they served, we can at once perceive the plain signification of the homologous construction of the limbs throughout the class. So with the mouths of insects, we have only to suppose that their common progenitor had an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of maxillae, these parts being very simple in form; and then natural selection will account for the infinite diversity in the structure and functions of the mouths of insects. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that the general pattern of an organ might become so much obscured as to be finally lost, by the reduction and ultimately by the complete abortion of certain parts, by the fusion of other parts, and by the doubling or multiplication of others, --variations which we know to be within the limits of possibility. In the paddles of the gigantic extinct sea-lizards, and in the mouths of certain suctorial crustaceans, the general pattern seems thus to have become partially obscured."