In my never ending quest to debunk the religious ideologist here we go again with a science tidbit that proves once again the empircal basis for evolution. Study: Earliest Birds Have Dinosaur Feet
The earliest birds had theropod dinosaur-like feet, according to a new study released yesterday based on the best reserved Archaeopteryx fossil.
These findings support the arguable theory that Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, was a closest relative of the theropod dinosaur, and that modern birds arose from the dinosaurs, German and U.S. researchers said in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Science.
And the New York museum has opened its controversial display on Darwin, with
no corporate funding thanks to the pressure groups from the right lobbying against evolution. Which is fine by me we have to much corporate scientism being offered as science.
The same right whingnuts who denounce climate warming as junk science are really saying that evolution is junk science too.
Ok lets be clear here they are actually saying science is junk, just believe in the big white guy in the sky.
Florida State University Michael Ruse, author of The Evolution-Creation Struggle echoed that, calling America "a peculiarly religious country" which was also a "science powerhouse. How can it be such?" he asked.
Ruse suggested the answer lay partly in history, not least being the Civil War after which Southerners turned to the Bible, and evolution "was taken to represent everything about the North that they disliked."
The result, he said, was the "red state-blue state clash -- It's not science versus religion as such -- but very much a cultural clash that we've got in America today." Others concurred, saying that the schism was part and parcel of a broader cultural war over contentious issues like abortion, gay rights and gun control.
Part of the problem with Darwinism, is that it is the identification with the theory of evolution with one man. Evolution is not just a theory of Darwin there were others including Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace and Darwin collaborated on the theory of natural selection. But given the dominace of the need for bourgoise culture to create a solo individual hero, we have forgotten Wallace and equated evolution with Darwin only.
In reality evolutionary theory pre-dates Darwin and influenced his own work.In particular the work; Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
Here we have another example of the missing link in the history of science and ideas, the role of the masses, and in particular the working classes; mechanics, in reading and practicising science as an aspect of their trades. Such was the case since the founding of the Royal Society in England, the clash between the aristocracy and its erudition of scientific experimentation and the mechanics who read their works and improved if not proved or disproved their hypothesis.
It was the creation of the popular culture of reading and study, of the science of the common man that was the basis for Darwins later popularity. But without those who came before him, promoting a materialist history of the world to counter the dominant hegemony of the Church, we would have no Darwin.
And those who came before him like Wallace and the unknown author of Vestiges were social reformers, radicals. Darwin was not as radical as his predecesors, but benefited from the reforms in the society around him that allowed him to publish and confront his antagonists with relative safety.
Evolution as a theory was the result not only of pure science, as there is no such creature, but of the movements to challenge the ideas of the day, the movement known as Free Thought, closely aligned to atheism, which was still a hanging offense in England. Luckily such is not the case now, though the rightwhingnuts might make it a capital offense again should they gain political and cultural dominance.
The history of science and evolution in the 19th Century is the history of social reform and radicalism, as much a part of the workers movement as it is of the parlour rooms of the bourgoise.
Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. James A. Secord. xx + 624 pp. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Most historians of science have treated Vestiges as a minor remnant of mid-Victorian culture. It has been typically regarded as an indicator that the evolutionary ideas earlier formulated by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck continued to intrigue and trouble, even after they had been thoroughly repudiated by established scientists. Chambers's book is certainly remembered because Charles Darwin feared that the clever but amateurish "Mr. Vestiges" would render the intellectual public ill-disposed to any evolutionary understanding of life. James Secord conceives of Chambers's book in quite different terms. In Victorian Sensation he contravenes the usual presumptions. Because of his striking erudition and extraordinary scholarship, he has produced an argument that cannot be ignored, even if it must be resisted.
Through some 16 chapters, Secord details how Vestiges was physically made (with steam presses, but with hand composition of the lines of print), the way in which prices of the various editions determined its public (it became a cause only with the "people's edition"), and the manner in which different segments of British society (from working-class mechanics, to radical reformers, to Whig scientists, to Tory churchmen, to the Queen herself) read the message of the book and what meanings they imparted to their reading. Middle-class consumers, for example, took up the book with the same enthusiasm they felt for the latest novels of Sir Walter Scott. High Churchmen condemned its materialistic message, whereas radical reformers thought it supported their efforts. Scientists quite generally dismissed its shoddy zoology and botany.
The second subversive reason for focusing on the reaction of the reading public is that it allows us to advance another model of science. We need no longer be in thrall to the heroes of science. We can, rather, look to underlaborers such as Chambers who made Darwin's so-called genius possible: "Like all forms of hero-worship, this celebration of the author undermines possibilities for individual action, for none of us can be a Darwin, at least in the terms that the myth provides. It sets an unobtainable ideal?the genius revealing great discoveries?as the model of what a scientist should be." So histories such as Secord's have a pragmatic, even a moral purpose. It is troubling, though, to recommend Chambers as a model for even the mid-Victorian scientist. As far as we know, he never identified a fossil, never cracked a rock with a geology hammer, never charted the course of the planets.
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