“What Darwin said” – evolution in a nutshell

7 links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Read them all. HT: Razib Khan. If you don’t already know about his blog, follow this link and start reading; the scienceblog-gnxp is definitely on my current top five of all blogs I read.

You can of course, rather than following these links, also just read Darwin himself here (I have given you this link before some time ago, but in case someone missed it: Here you can find a Danish translation of On the Origin of Species…).

For the record, I value the opinions of people denying evolution’s views about the biological sciences about as highly as I value the medical opinions of people still subscribing to the miasma theory of disease. The parallel is not completely randomly chosen: On the Origin… came out in 1859, only 5 years after Filippo Pacini as the first man ever isolated a bacterium, the Vibrio cholerae bacillus which causes cholera, thus invalidating the miasma theory of disease. One of the main reasons why there aren’t many people who are convinced that the latter theory is correct anymore, is that that particular theory never made it into the churches.