http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1M_1caNR6Y

Humanity was born into ignorance. We huddled in damp caves and cramped keeps and we feared what we did not understand. We made up stories to explain the things that confused and scared us and this consoled us. We related these stories to our children and our childrens children until in time we forgot they were just stories. But the story-tellers had become very powerful. And like all powerful people who feel their authority slipping, the story-tellers found a way to hold their sway. They embellished their stories, making them increasingly fantastic and increasingly hostile those who would question the stories. Finally, they added clauses that those who doubted the story would be punished infinitely and eternally for the audacity of their incredulity. The story-tellers who had once consoled humans had become obscurantists who instilled fearfulness and ignorance.

But curiosity is an overwhelming emotion in some humans and there were a small number of people who were unable to contain their questioning nature. This group of weirdos began a program of systematic inquiry a small spark that created a few smoldering embers in the dark. Through centuries of revision, these few men and women and their intellectual descendants developed a very powerful tool which we today call modern science.

Carl Sagan, a famous scientist from planet Earth, compared science to a candle in the dark. The comparison is apt and unavoidable. We have so little light, but that which we do have is a joy for us. It allows us to see our world and ourselves, however dimly, as we truly are. Two centuries ago today an especially inquisitive child was born in England. That child was Charles Darwin and he was destined to become one of the great scientists of all time. He wrote a book called On the Origin of Species and in so doing he clearly articulated an explanation to an enduring question for which humanity had long had only a fabulous answer.

Charles Robert Darwin had answered the question How did we get here? and that day the light of science intensified and we could see a bit further into the dim recesses. On that day Darwin lit his own candle and the obscurantists have spent the last 150 years trying to stomp it out.

Quite unsuccessfully.

Happy Darwin Day, Everyone!