Last night I remembered that human intellectuals first learned about evolution just 96 years before I was born! That means that on the day I was born, there were many old people still alive who had lived the first few years of their lives on a planet on which even Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Jefferson didn't know how humans got here in our present form!
99.9999% of all the humans who have ever lived never knew! But we do know!
Darwin's publishing of Origin of the Species in 1859 was almost as powerful and strange an event as an alien invasion! It transformed people's sense of connection with nature and time, and, for people with critical thinking ability, made the man-made Gods in the world's major Iron Age "holy" books seem as ridiculously unlikely as Santa Claus.
Cool article about the useful genes of Neanderthals!
Interesting stuff, JP!
Last night I remembered that human intellectuals first learned about evolution just 96 years before I was born! That means that on the day I was born, there were many old people still alive who had lived the first few years of their lives on a planet on which even Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Jefferson didn't know how humans got here in our present form!
99.9999% of all the humans who have ever lived never knew! But we do know!
Darwin's publishing of Origin of the Species in 1859 was almost as powerful and strange an event as an alien invasion! It transformed people's sense of connection with nature and time, and, for people with critical thinking ability, made the man-made Gods in the world's major Iron Age "holy" books seem as ridiculously unlikely as Santa Claus.
Cool article about the useful genes of Neanderthals!