Best Idea in 5000 Years

Born on this day in 1809,  it is appropriate to celebrate the intellectual and human freedoms promised by the work of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.  Coupled with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued only four years after “The Origin of Species”, these documents mark the dawn of a new awareness in 19th Century life, that would prove to be every bit as empowering as the Renaissance in Europe had been during the 14th to 16th centuries.

For his part, Lincoln signed an Executive Order in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation, widely recognized as a foundation document along the way to abolishing slavery. The order strengthened the Union cause both politically and militarily at a critical point midway through the Civil War. Codification of the abolition of slavery would follow in Constitutional amendments in succeeding years.

Darwin’s enunciation of the principles of biological evolution was, in the words of the great human ecologist, Paul Shepard, “the best idea of the past 5000 years”.  Just as Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and Newton had brought forth their ideas into human societies struggling to understand the cosmic and physical world around them, Darwin articulated a succession of ideas that almost instantaneously synthesized observations of the world’s organisms over the preceding two millenia. The compelling framework he described not only explained the diversity of life, but also provided insight into the mechanisms responsible for the distribution, distinctiveness and emergence of diverse forms of plants and animals.

Few works in literature or science have required so little interpretation for their meaning to be clearly understood. Yet the verity and implications of Darwin’s work were so threatening to established Western religions, that even a century and a half later, we still have a plethora of religious apologists imagining and espousing unsupported alternatives to Darwin’s principles.  The protestations of Martin Luther against the Mother Church pale in comparison to the havoc that Darwinian principles hold for the Abrahamic religions and all their derivatives.

It is long past the time for the mannerly traditions of polite discourse to continue to brook the inane ramblings of creationists and racial supremacists. Instead, we can use the occasion of Darwin and Lincoln’s births to examine the question of what kind of society we want around us. One riddled with fear, mysticism and superstition? Or, one joyous of  creativity, imagination, diversity, critical judgement and reason?

Some day, perhaps we will be able to fully understand the broadest possible meaning of, “We Hold These Truths to be Self-evident…”

Cross-posted to The Renaissance Post