Charles Darwin, happy 200th birthday!

February 12, 2009 by Keith Lockitch

There is a growing tradition of celebrating Darwin’s birthday as an occasion to promote science and reason.

 Why Darwin as opposed to, say, Isaac Newton? (Well, we do celebrate on Newton’s birthday, but only by coincidence: he was born on December 25th!)

 I think Darwin’s birthday is an important occasion to celebrate in the spirit of fighting back against the anti-science, anti-reason viewpoint put forward by creationism and its evolutionary descendant, “intelligent design.”

 Ayn Rand certainly reacted with a fighting spirit when she encountered creationism in the early ’80s. In a 1981 talk at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston (“The Age of Mediocrity,” published in The Objectivist Forum), she explained the philosophic roots of creationism’s attack on science. Commenting on its threat to science education, she said:

To claim that the mystics’ mythology, or inventions, or superstitions are as valid as scientific theories, and to offer this claim to the unformed minds of children, is a moral crime.  

In the face of that moral crime, it is an act of justice to celebrate a man who worked so hard to advance human knowledge and who exemplifies the rational pursuit of truth.