Today is Darwin Day, and what better way to celebrate than with some primordial soup and maybe a sandwich? (See TedBlog for the validity of adding the sandwich.)

I’ve been enjoying Evolution on PBS with narration by Liam Neeson. It’s a great resource for what evolution is and how it works, for example, to make an eye or a wing. Other good sources are Richard Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable or the video Growing Up in the Universe.

Why not throw a party with either video? Then there’d be no fooling us about transitional fossils. No one would trick us about complex design of eyes or wings. The only thing not covered in the above suggestions is abiogenesis. Fortunately, you can find abiogenesis on the net.

So I suggest a Darwin Day resolution for a bit of entertainment and education. Besides nothing feels better than being able to say “Why yes, actually, half an eye could be quite useful” and being able to explain why. Ah the power of a little science and a little learning.

Did Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution advocate racism and genocide?

Ken Ham thinks so. He is the leader of the Christian group Answers in Genesis and the founder of the Creation Museum built last year in Petersburg, Kentucky. Ham just released a book titled, Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots.

The New York Times includes several of Ham’s comments:

”What Darwinian evolution did I would say is provide what people thought was a scientific justification for separation of races,” Ham said in an interview.

In the new book, Ham says that Darwin’s theory that natural selection caused gradual biological changes over time, puts some races ”higher on the evolutionary scale” and others ”closer to the apes.”

”Although racism did not begin with Darwinism, Darwin did more than any person to popularize it,” Ham writes.

Ham further contends that the theory fanned the flames of ”ethnic superiority.”

”Stalin, Hitler and Mao were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions — and it can be shown they did this because of the influence of Darwinian naturalism…,” Ham writes.

The Darwin Report has this to say:

Historically speaking, Charles Darwin came from a family of abolitionists. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, strongly disapproved of slavery. And Charles Darwin wrote negatively about the slavery he witnessed on his travels in his book, The Voyage Of The Beagle. Darwin’s The Descent Of Man is also an argument against racism, since one of the points in it is the common ancestry of all the humans races. And simply using the word “savage,” as Darwin did, in its 19th century context doesn’t make a man a racist. Political correctness and cultural sensitivity were more than a century away.

But of course, David L. Schultz, associate professor of biology at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, sees the bigger agenda, calling Ham’s attempts as “a ploy to get evolution out of the curriculum.”

”Of course everybody’s against teaching children racism, so if you call it racist, you can have it removed,” said Schultz. He testified before a Louisiana legislative panel that took up the bill that would have tied evolution with racism. The measure was eventually stripped of any reference to Darwin.

I think I’d rather take the words of a true biologist with scientific reasoning on his side instead of a non-scientist, creationism-loving nutcase who believes that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together.

Europe has issued a resolution against an “evil American phenomenon”. It’s not pornography or violence in our Hollywood movies. Nor does it have to do with abortion or stem cells. On October 4, 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution titled “The dangers of creationism in education.” The resolution includes twenty points but I think point 11 and 15 are the most important and elegant expressions of the reason why Humanists and others join in the fight to keep evolution taught in our schools:

11. Evolution is not simply a matter of the evolution of humans and of populations. Denying it could have serious consequences for the development of our societies. Advances in medical research with the aim of effectively combating infectious diseases such as AIDS are impossible if every principle of evolution is denied. One cannot be fully aware of the risks involved in the significant decline in biodiversity and climate change if the mechanisms of evolution are not understood.

15.The teaching of all phenomena concerning evolution as a fundamental scientific theory is therefore crucial to the future of our societies and our democracies. For that reason it must occupy a central position in the curriculum, and especially in the science syllabus, as long as, like any other theory, it is able to stand up to thorough scientific scrutiny. Evolution is present everywhere, from medical overprescription of antibiotics that encourages the emergence of resistant bacteria to agricultural overuse of pesticides that causes insect mutations on which pesticides no longer have any effect.