CRAIG EDWARD KELSO, Charles Darwin (an annotation)

Charles Darwin was born on this day two hundred and five years ago.

A devoted husband and father, Darwin’s life and character should be the object of a grand personal study.

If you’ve been educated in an American public school, you probably have only heard snippets about his great discovery, and you’ve very assuredly been given a caricature of it and the man.

And while that’s somewhat expected in a mass produced state dominated system, it is also inexcusable not to be literate in either.

Seriously.

Ask someone, even professed college graduates, to explain rudimentary evolutionary constructs.

Ask.

Watch them stumble and revert back to a Kardashian edited down version: Uh, we came from like monkeys and shit; and, uh, it’s just a theory.

Fuck me in the ass!

Gravity is a theory, bitch.

The word “theory” isn’t a magic escape hatch from which to dodge Darwin’s observable truth. What Charles Darwin did do was develop an elegant, empirical, testable, falsifiable way to explain biodiversity, change over time, and life itself.

Ask about the man himself to the same college graduated dolt: Uh, he was, like an atheist and stuff; he was, like, against Jesus. 

It's an incredible insult to a warm, generous mind such as Darwin's not to be in better mental company. 

The man on so many levels is to be admired. I hope you'll take the time to learn from him. Few aspects of your intellectual development are more important. 

And to reiterate, his discovery was four fold.

Elegant: Occam’s Razor cut through a ton of mystical bullshit, and Darwin narrowed down a functional way life could be explained.

Empirical: None of Darwin’s discoveries depend on specialized knowledge. It’s freely available to anyone with the ability to reason, to deduce, to investigate.

Testable: Evolution can be challenged at any point, and scientists are at constant work to fill in the gaps of knowledge, refining and adjusting as new facts come to light.

Falsifiable: Darwin’s assumptions, his huge guesses, have largely panned out. But a lot he just didn’t know, and could not prove to his own satisfaction at the time. Remember, he was an English gentleman, and lived from 1809 to 1882. And though natural science had long suspected gradual change and natural selection, no one had concretized the formula.

Darwin sat on his discovery for TWENTY YEARS.

It’s a mystery. It’s a drama. It’s the juiciest story.

Real life is muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch better than fantasy.

And the implications for Darwinian evolution are profoundly important. Arguably, Charles Darwin is the most important human scientist and philosopher of all time. 

WikiPEDIA

Public educators at all levels once scoffed at Wikis. Yep. Oh, they'll try and deny it now, but I was there when they did so. IT IS THE SINGLE LARGEST ENCYCLOPEDIC COLLECTION OF THE WORLD'S KNOWLEDGE. Nothing touches it. It's free. Open. Anarchic. You can understand why the official educational establishment hates it.

Peer reviewed.

Refereed. 

Annotated.

Cross referenced.

Subject to revision.

No single point of failure.

This is the dream of all freedom loving intellectuals and people of peace. Again, you can understand why teacher union boobs fail to understand its significance.

Use it to learn about Darwin.

The basic goods on Chuck D., click here.  

BIOGRAPHY

The man's personal life and struggles are heart breaking, infuriating, and inspiring.

My favorite book about him can be had in hard cover for like four bucks, click here. 

You can read it for free on google books, click here. 

PRIMARY SOURCE

Read a fucking book.

Not having read On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Means of Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life means you're a bad person.

Better yourself by reading it, click here.  

CONTROVERSIES

Society flipped the fuck out at Darwin's ideas. They did. 

Famously shy, famously nonconfrontational, Chuck allowed his friend to go out and defend the basic ideas.

T.H. Huxley, known as Darwin's Bulldog, went around debating and defending the greatest scientific discovery in the history of humanity. And the stories of his doings are wonderful.

Huxley was himself an amazing orator and writer, and his letters and lines are among the most quotable.

Hilarious and fun stuff, click here. 

Some say Darwin cheated another man out of history's greatest discovery.

That man is Alfred Wallace. Very cool investigation, click here. 

Others have postulated Darwin's findings, true or not, led to horrors unimaginable. Super interesting stuff, click here.

Americans are insanely dumb, and here's a nice documentary proving it. Yes, a teacher was INDICTED for teaching evolution. A very, very famous trial.

And I mean it.

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CONTACT: checalaloskelsos@gmail.com