"A fly is just as evolved as a human. It's just evolved to a different niche." -- Jeremy Niven

This is a Mantis Fly.

Euclimacia nuchalis
(species)
Taxonomy: Animalia: Arthropoda: Insecta: Neuroptera: Mantispidae: Euclimacia: nuchalis
Common Names: Lacewings, Mantidflies, Mantispids, Mantid lacewings, Mantis-flies

David Rentz says

Mantispids are members of the Neuroptera, the order that includes lacewings, ant-lions, sponge-flies and the like. They are fairly common in Australia. Greyish ones a usually found at lights were they prey on smaller insects. The mantis-like appearance of mantispids is because they both have raptorial forelegs that are used to capture insect prey. Mantispids have a complicated life history. Many are obligate parasites of spiders. They have an active triungulin larva that mounts a spider and enters her eggs sac to feed on the eggs. Some species retard the growth of their hosts by chemical interference. Some Australian species congregate at times in great hundreds laying small eggs on stalks. But for the majority of species, we really know nothing of their life history. To return to our story, shortly after E. nuchalis arrived, this darker coloured fellow appeared on the same light sheet. Is it the opposite sex of E. nuchalis, a variant or a different species? I have no idea. But it resembles another wasp. If is the same species, it has different genetic history to one that resembles the vespid wasp. This one looks a bit like some of the pompilid wasps that seek out spiders in our part of the world. What a complicated genetic history this little insect must have.

I found this at Jerry Coyne's blog. It's about three moronic religious cults (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and the fucking idiots who belong to those cults.

Dear President Donald Trump, FUCK YOU ASSHOLE.

Under Trump, E.P.A. Has Slowed Actions Against Polluters, and Put Limits on Enforcement Officers

By ERIC LIPTON and DANIELLE IVORY 

An analysis of enforcement data at the E.P.A. shows a substantial drop in activity against polluters when compared with the Obama and Bush administrations.

New York Times - December 2017 - EAST LIVERPOOL, Ohio — The highway billboard at the entrance to town still displays a giant campaign photograph of President Trump, who handily won the election across industrial Ohio. But a revolt is brewing here in East Liverpool over Mr. Trump’s move to slow down the federal government’s policing of air and water pollution. The City Council moved unanimously last month to send a protest letter to the Environmental Protection Agency about a hazardous waste incinerator near downtown. Since Mr. Trump took office, the E.P.A. has not moved to punish the plant’s owner, even after extensive evidence was assembled during the Obama administration that the plant had repeatedly, and illegally, released harmful pollutants into the air.

Please click the link for today's science lesson. It's a comic strip that doesn't let me put it here. The lesson is about the number of stars in the Universe.

Brewster Rockit December 10, 2017

The god-soaked are constantly looking for a hiding place for their magic god fairy of the gaps. It would be so much easier for them to grow up and stop pretending magic is real.

I answered a question.

"I get that you believe in the Big Bang theory, I do to. But what caused it to explode it must had been some form of force, and that force would be God right?"

I like Yummy Elephant Candy's answer: "a gigantic godfart".

When there is a gap in human knowledge then scientists call it a research opportunity. You would call it a hiding place for your god of the gaps.

Your idea translated: "I don't understand how this happened therefore nobody else understands and also every scientist in the future, thousands of years from now, won't understand, therefore the Magic Man Did It."

Do you see how childish that is?

If you still don't understand why invoking a magic god fairy's magical powers is ridiculous and extremely childish then you should visit this place: http://darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com

In China big brother is always watching, just like in the book 1984 by George Orwell. I recommend watching the BBC News video.

BBC News - In Your Face: China’s all-seeing state

China has been building what it calls "the world's biggest camera surveillance network". Across the country, 170 million CCTV cameras are already in place and an estimated 400 million new ones will be installed in the next three years.

Many of the cameras are fitted with artificial intelligence, including facial recognition technology. The BBC's John Sudworth has been given rare access to one of the new hi-tech police control rooms.

----------------------

Another problem with China is their out-of-control internet censorship. Also, China is not a democracy.

In America we have freedom of speech, the government doesn't watch us, there is no censorship, and we can vote. The government works for us and we can fire the president and everyone else every 4 years.

China is probably an interesting place to live and make lots of money but I prefer being a free person here in America.

Today's religious news. Some violence. Lots of stupidity.

Wall Street Journal - Initial Mideast Violence From New U.S. Policy on Israel Is Limited

"Clashes broke out Friday between Israeli forces and protesters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but thousands of Palestinians prayed at a holy site in Jerusalem in a largely peaceful gathering peppered with some protests."

In other words thousands of Muslim morons talked to themselves.

Planet Earth has a human apes problem.

I wrote a comment at the Wall Street Journal about the anti-science Republican Party.

I noticed many scientists call the Republican Party "the anti-science Republican Party". I'm not surprised. Most Republican voters and most Republican politicians (including virtually the entire Trump Administration) are science deniers. Evolution makes Republicans cry.

It's unfortunate. The Republicans have some good ideas but they have a serious stupidity problem. For example look at the numerous moronic anti-science comments for this book review. These Republican idiots for Jeebus think there is a debate about the established truth of evolution which is as ridiculous as a debate about whether or not the Earth is flat. The Jeebus idiots keep repeating "micro not macro". The stupid, it burns.

I hope Trump continues to be healthy and safe because if he dies then the new president (Mike Pence) will be a brain-dead know-nothing creationist. America would be a laughing stock.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-charles-darwin-the-origin-of-the-specious-1512771556

This treehopper lives in Brazil.

"Treehoppers pierce plant stems with their beaks and feed upon sap. The young can frequently be found on herbaceous shrubs and grasses, while the adults more often frequent hardwood tree species. Excess sap becomes concentrated as honeydew, which often attracts ants. Some species have a well-developed ant mutualism, and these species are normally gregarious as well, which attracts more ants. The ants provide protection from predators. Treehoppers mimic thorns to prevent predators from spotting them."
Wikipedia - Treehopper

At the Wall Street Journal there were so many dishonest moronic creationist attacks against evolution I decided to tell the truth about these fucking assholes for Jeebus.

Evolution does not need defending because it's a basic scientific fact. The religious alternative, magical intelligent design creationism, is the most ridiculously stupid idea in the history of the human race. Creationism is more than an idiotic fantasy, it's a disease, a severe mental illness. Why do Christians deny the established truth of evolution, despite massive, powerful, and still growing evidence that's been accumulating for more than 150 years? There can be only one possible explanation. Christians (and their Muslim terrorist friends) are uneducated morons.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-charles-darwin-the-origin-of-the-specious-1512771556

May 21, 2010 - 18 minute video - "Craig Venter and team make a historic announcement: they've created the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA. He explains how they did it and why the achievement marks the beginning of a new era for science."

At the Wall Street Journal an asshole for Jeebus wrote "Truth is established by evidence, not consensus." I wrote something for the moron.

"Truth is established by evidence"

That is correct and evolution has tons of it.

There is something called "looking things up". Have you ever done that?

You might not know how to use google so just click this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent

It should take you at least a year to study the whole thing.

But of course you won't even try to understand any of it. Evolution deniers deny the established truth of evolution because they go out of their way to know nothing. That's quite a feat in the 21st century.

--------------------------

Then the moron for Jeebus invoked one of the idiots who work for Crackpot Central. I wrote this which was a waste of time. Extreme stupid can't be fixed.

"Stephen Meyer" I know who this is. He is a professional science denier. He works for the Discovery Institute which has never discovered anything. Biologists call the anti-science Discovery Institute "Crackpot Central".

This is your problem. You people get all your information about science from professional idiots. And you people go out of your way to never understand the discoveries of real scientists. This is why science deniers will never learn anything.

Nobody cares. It's their wasted life.

Several Muslims wearing burkas with weapons and suicide vests murdered several people in Pakistan. Only one of these morons successfully blew himself up but they're all dead. Muslim scum blow themselves up every day. The stupidity will never end.

PESHAWAR: At least nine people were killed when terrorists clad in burqas stormed the Agriculture Training Institute in Peshawar early Friday morning in an attack reminiscent of a deadly assault on a university in Charsadda in 2016. Over 32 people – among them a police sub inspector and two army soldiers – were also wounded in the assault claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the outlawed umbrella of terrorist groups.

A quote about reality (aka atheism) I found somewhere.

On Atheism

1. Gods are creatures of the human imagination.

2. Faith in imaginary beings does not prove their existence.

3. All laws and moral rules are man-made.

The Wall Street Journal is infested with god-soaked evolution deniers, aka assholes for Jeebus. I wrote something for them.

The people who think evolution is wrong should take their complaints to the National Academy of Sciences.

"Today there is no scientific doubt about the close evolutionary relationships between humans and all other primates. Using the same scientific methods and tools that have been employed to study the evolution of other species, researchers have compiled a large and increasing number of fossil discoveries and compelling new molecular evidence that clearly indicate that the same forces responsible for the evolution of all other life forms on Earth account for the biological evolution of human characteristics."
-- The National Academy of Sciences

Another quote from a University of Chicago biologist:

"If anything is absolutely, rock-bottom true, it’s that life evolved, beginning about 4 billion years ago, and that the creation myth of Genesis is completely wrong."
-- Jerry Coyne

"Trump’s election may be the second coming for creationism in schools." Assholes for Jeebus and their never ending war against science education, with much help from the Trump Administration.

Trump’s election may be the second coming for creationism in schools.

By Emmalina Glinskis May 27, 2017

One day in science class in 2014, C.C. Lane, then a sixth-grader at Negreet High School in Sabine Parish, Louisiana, came across a fill-in-the-blank question he didn’t know how to answer:

“ISN’T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The answer was “Lord.”

Lane’s teacher, who had included the question on a test, also routinely told students that “evolution is impossible” and that the Bible is “100 percent true,” according to a lawsuit later filed by the ACLU of Louisiana, which was eventually settled.

Louisiana remains one of three states that protect teachers who bring religious ideas into the classroom. The states have all passed “academic freedom” laws inspired by Seattle-based think tank the Discovery Institute that allow the teaching of creationism and climate denial in schools’ curricula. Although the Discovery Institute calls itself a secular organization dedicated to promoting “thoughtful analysis,” critics say it’s been pushing a Christian agenda under the radar for more than a decade.

Since Donald Trump’s election and his appointment of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — who once called her work in education reform helping to “advance God’s kingdom” — a new wave of bills with verbatim ties to the Discovery Institute made inroads in statehouses across the country. Three of the bills had never come so close to becoming law.

“That kind of changed the landscape for the Discovery Institute and other religious-right groups,” said Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor who studies creationism and church and state issues at Southeastern Louisiana University. “They now see opportunities that had been foreclosed to them prior to the election.”

In most states, teaching religion in public schools violates the separation of church and state. But “academic freedom” laws label established science, like climate change and evolution, “controversial issues,” which opens the door for teachers to offer alternatives, like climate denial and creationism.

“They now see opportunities that had been foreclosed to them prior to the election.”

Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee all have academic freedom laws on their books inspired by the Discovery Institute. This year, similar legislation was introduced in South Dakota, Texas, and Oklahoma. Though the bills didn’t pass, they gained more support than ever before. All three also took language directly from a mock bill the Discovery Institute posted online in 2007 with fill-in-the-blanks for state names and sponsors. The same key clause appears in each of them: that teachers can’t be prohibited from discussing “the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories,” like evolution and global warming. Over 70 academic freedom bills introduced in state legislatures since 2004 follow a near-exact word structure.

The Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, the program responsible for the mock bill, states its mission as advancing “the understanding that human beings and nature are the result of intelligent design.” It’s a pseudoscientific theory that an intelligent entity — in other words, God — created the universe and everything in it. Yet the Discovery Institute insists it’s a secular think tank. “For the record, our model legislation explicitly forbids any attempt to use the law to promote religion,” spokeswoman Sarah Chaffee said.

“What [the Discovery Institute is] really doing is trying to cover up what they’re really all about,” said Frank Ravitch, a law and religion scholar at Michigan State University. “They’re trying to make it seem like it’s not about religion, it’s not about creationism, it’s not about intelligent design — [but] that’s the goal.”

Zack Kopplin, an activist and journalist from Louisiana, has seen plenty of evidence that creationism is taught in public schools throughout the state, which passed its academic freedom law in 2008. He leaked emails from Louisiana teachers, school board members, and parents in 2015 that detail schools using Genesis as “supplemental material debunking various aspects of evolution.” And one fifth-grade teacher wrote in an op-ed that she’ll never teach children that they evolved from apes. “God made science, and unlike many adults, these kids KNOW that,” she wrote.

SOARING DONATIONS

While the Discovery Institute’s most recent tax forms aren’t publicly available, 2015 saw the highest ever revenue from contributions and grants: $5,773,002. That’s a jump of more than a $1 million from the year before. From 2011 to 2014, revenue had been decreasing alongside a stagnation in states adopting the institute’s mock bill.

The new money last year came alongside a presidential candidate who vowed to “protect Christianity.” After his election in November, Trump even named a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, Bill Walton, as a transition-team member for the Treasury Department.

For her part, Betsy DeVos has poured millions of dollars from both her own and her mother’s foundation to the Christian group Focus on the Family, which has worked with the Discovery Institute to pass academic freedom legislation in the past. One of Focus on the Family’s religious-right affiliates, the Louisiana Family Forum, provided the legislative muscle for passing Louisiana’s academic freedom bill in 2008. The Discovery Institute and Focus on the Family also co-produced one of the main educational videos about intelligent design, Unlocking the Mystery of Life.

The idea of teaching intelligent design has another powerful ally in the White House: Vice President Mike Pence, who in 2002 called intelligent design the only theory that “provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe.”.

“Now that we have recognized evolution as a theory, I would simply and humbly ask, can we teach it as such, and can we also consider teaching other theories of the origin of species?” then-congressman Pence said in a speech to the House of Representatives. And the same year he became a senator, now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the separation of church and state “unhistorical and unconstitutional.”

SEE YOU IN COURT, KID

Along with a favorable conservative political climate, the Discovery Institute’s carefully worded tactics are a key factor in the recent adoption of its mock bill. For example, the bill makes no mention of the words “creationism” and “intelligent design” and only permits, rather than requires, disparagement of evolution and global warming. Section D also makes it clear that the law “shall not be construed to promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine.”

That could make judges reluctant to rule against the laws as a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, according to Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. “They’re going to say, ‘No, the only thing where we’re allowed to take account of is specifically what they said on the record with a straight face about their purpose,’” he said.

Since their adoption, none of the academic freedom laws have faced a direct legal challenge. In fact, the Discovery Institute was caught pushing a religious agenda only once — in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, one of the most high-profile legal cases ever about teaching evolution in 2005. According to the case, the Discovery Institute had advised a Pennsylvania school board that required teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution.

In its decision, the federal court called out the Discovery Institute’s religious agenda. “ID’s [intelligent design’s] backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class,” Judge John Jones wrote. “This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst, a canard.”

Even if future cases can prove the laws in Louisiana, Tennessee, or Mississippi also have religious intents, that likely won’t be the end of the fight.

“I would guarantee you if this gets struck down because of its connection to the Discovery Institute, some new think tank will come up that doesn’t have any sort of supposed connection,” Ravitch said. “And they’ll have some new proposed bill after. They’re not going to give up.”

AFP news agency - Published on Dec 6, 2017. The most complete skeleton ever found of an Australopithecus, a forerunner to modern man, goes on display for the first time in Johannesburg following a 20-year process to excavate and assemble the 3.67 million-year-old remains.

For some reason you have to click "Watch on YouTube" to see the one minute video.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a book review that correctly ridiculed the book, "CHARLES DARWIN: VICTORIAN MYTHMAKER" By A.N. Wilson. Wilson obviously wrote this dishonest bullshit about Charles Darwin for anti-science morons.

The book is bullshit but the book review is excellent. Even better was a comment written for a bible thumping asshole for Jeebus. This is a copy & paste job of the moronic comment and the well written reply, then a copy & paste job of the entire book review which people can't read unless they have a WSJ subscription.

This is what the Christian fucktard Mr Stinnett (typical know-nothing asshole for Jeebus) wrote:

"Mr. Irmscher has done exactly what he was tasked to do: review a book so that others may determine whether they'd like to read it or not. I think I would like to read it. And I grant that Mr. Irmscher has a passing familiarity with evolutionary thought--he seemed to think it quite a settled question--yet I have a misgiving or two. First, his acceptance of the finch beak thing (What the Grants had seen was, according to Nature magazine, “evolution in real time,”) betrays the age-old bait and switch between microevolution (adaptation to changing circumstances) and macroevolution (one organism transforming into another--dinosaur into finch, for example). Second, the dismissal of others who have pointed up the impossibilities of Darwinian evolution, Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe for example, leads one to suspect a lack of familiarity with the literature. Committed non-creationists like Thomas Nagel and Francis Hitching hold deep reservations or even rejections of Darwin, too."

Well done reply from Mr. Garrett:

"Mr Stinnett, you are much better off taking a class in molecular biology and genetics than reading this pathetic attack on one of the world's greatest naturalists. The evidence for natural selection in the basic mechanics of cell biology, fossil record, and actual experiments, is so overwhelming and clear that for anyone with even a modest intellect to discount it without any evidence to the contrary, simply disqualifies them from intelligent debate. Simply asserting it seems so complicated it just couldn't have happened on its own, is an argument unworthy of a 5 year old. To cite Michael Behe, an almost lone dissenter in a sea of tens of thousands of qualified biologists, propped up by the religious right, who has disgraced Lehigh University, and if not for tenure would have been given his walking papers, is utterly dishonest. It is so sad that here in 2017 we have to re-endure the Monkey Scopes trial."

Then Mr. Fucktard Stinnett wrote this bullshit:

"Mr. Garrett, I sense you disagree with me. Thanks for suggesting additional reading for me. Perhaps I was unclear regarding natural selection. I'm not aware that anybody disputes that environmental pressures on populations result in changes over time (hence the finch beak thing). It just does not follow, though, that one species will morph into another by similar means (note that the finch beaks return to earlier form when the circumstances change--they don't continue to develop toward some other goal that would result in a fundamental difference). You don't have to like Behe, but you should at least be able to answer his central thesis and the evidence he cites. And I would be fascinated to know how you care to answer Thomas Nagel, a committed atheist, who has declared that the rejection of Darwinian evolution is the exercise of common sense."

I wonder how this fake atheist, Nagel, explains the diversity of life. There is no shortage of morons on this planet.

Then somebody else (Hutchison) wrote this:

"You are sadly misinformed. No where does anyone believe that organisms 'transform into another' unless by 'transform', you mean the millions of years and many mutations and multitude of selections that take place for nature to organisms to change. Perhaps you are thinking about the 'tranformation' of a wolf into a house pet."

Then I wrote this for the bible thumping moron:

I was wondering what part of this you didn't understand which was written by Mr. Garrett:

"The evidence for natural selection in the basic mechanics of cell biology, fossil record, and actual experiments, is so overwhelming and clear that for anyone with even a modest intellect to discount it without any evidence to the contrary, simply disqualifies them from intelligent debate."

You wrote "You don't have to like Behe, but you should at least be able to answer his central thesis and the evidence he cites."

Everything Behe wrote can be translated to this: "God did it". Behe is a laughing stock. He is your excuse to know nothing about evolution.

How hard is it for you people to study what real scientists have discovered? You science deniers are never going to learn anything from idiots like Behe.

There is absolutely no excuse to not accept the evidence for our relationship with all other life. You people who are too lazy to educate yourselves have my contempt.

HERE IS THE ENTIRE EXCELLENT BOOK REVIEW:

Review: Charles Darwin, the Origin of the Specious? A.N. Wilson portrays Darwin as a good naturalist but a bad theorist whose ideas came from the social world, not nature. But if so, why has later science validated those ideas?

By Christoph Irmscher Dec. 8, 2017

In the summer of 1858, struggling to finish a book he was reluctant to call more than a preliminary “abstract” of his theory, Darwin sent the manuscript of “On the Origin of Species” to a friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. As it turned out, Hooker’s house was a rather unsafe destination. “I find that my children have made away with upwards of ¼ of the MS,” a mortified Hooker admitted to Thomas Huxley. Darwin’s precious manuscript, weighing in at nearly two pounds when it arrived, had “by some screaming accident” been transferred to a drawer where Mrs. Hooker kept scratch paper for their steadily growing brood of children to draw on. And draw they did, as a “brutified, if not brutalised” Hooker told Huxley. If only Darwin had gotten angry at him. But Darwin, who had kept a copy, was a more than indulgent father himself, and perhaps the accidental defacement of his work seemed oddly appropriate to him. It presaged further, and worse, trouble to come. Writing about evolution, he had told Hooker more than a decade earlier, felt like “confessing a murder.”

A.N. Wilson would likely agree with the latter statement. What he claims that Darwin killed, or had attempted to kill, was not just our belief in a divinely ordered world but also our confidence in human distinctiveness: the lovely, comforting idea that our cultural achievements make us so much better than the animals. Natural selection, Darwin’s main contribution to a theory that Mr. Wilson tells us others had pretty much put in place before Darwin came along, has long been discredited scientifically anyway. Or so says Mr. Wilson, who seems hell-bent on exposing Darwin for what he believes him to be, an emperor who has no clothes. Mr. Wilson, a novelist by trade, has written biographies before, among them a well-received life of Queen Victoria. But his new book, “ Charles Darwin : Victorian Mythmaker,” is less a biography than an indictment of a man he finds wanting in so many respects that the reader wonders how Mr. Wilson could stand spending so much time writing about him. Had Mr. Wilson been one of the Hooker children, Darwin’s manuscript would have been rendered illegible in no time at all.

CHARLES DARWIN: VICTORIAN MYTHMAKER

By A.N. Wilson

Harper, 438 pages, $32.50

Mr. Wilson’s book offers no fresh information on Darwin’s life—no new archival research, no new discoveries, no unexpected insights. It doesn’t even pretend to capture the full arc of Darwin’s career—there’s no mention of his glorious first book on corals and only a glancing reference to his last one, a wildly successful study of earthworms. Mr. Wilson’s notes draw mostly on the published correspondence, and there is no real evidence that he has familiarized himself with the considerable body of scholarship on Darwin or evolution, instead deriving his information from popular science books and the works of familiar anti-Darwinians such as Michael Denton of the Discovery Institute and the Australian philosopher David Stove.

Most of Mr. Wilson’s reservations about Darwin are deeply personal. As Mr. Wilson describes him, Darwin was motivated by one desire only, to be the “cock of the walk” of Victorian science. To achieve that goal, Darwin borrowed liberally from colleagues without thanking them for their trouble and coerced friends into defending him in public while settling comfortably into the life of a spoiled country squire: a grown man who called his infinitely tolerant wife “Mammy,” liked to play with his many children, and readily gave in to a variety of partly real, partly imagined illnesses. Mr. Wilson’s Darwin was a navel-gazing, humorless, flatulent bore, too dumb to learn foreign languages though curiously just smart enough to recognize good scientific ideas he could steal from others. Benign only to those who never crossed him, Darwin was a schemer and manipulator intent on asserting his right to scientific discoveries that weren’t his.

Mr. Wilson seems most disturbed by how much money that crafty grandson of the founder of the Wedgwood pottery company had amassed without so much as lifting a finger. Sitting on a pile of unearned cash, Darwin naturally found it easy to dream of a world in which the wealthy prosper and the poor wither away. How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Darwin! “Slithery” is an adjective that Mr. Wilson likes to associate with that sinister wizard of evolution. In Mr. Wilson’s hands, Darwin is the veritable snake in the garden of cultural history, a corrupter of minds who deserves to be seen clearly for what he always was: a footnote in the history of science.

Most of the dirt that Mr. Wilson has dug up looks awfully familiar. I will admit, though, that there’s a certain bizarre pleasure in seeing everything negative that anyone has ever said about Darwin squeezed into one relentless book. At first I found reading Mr. Wilson’s laundry list of offenses strangely addictive, like studying the “Wanted” posters that hang in the Post Office. As I carried on, however, pleasure slowly gave way to annoyance. Mr. Wilson’s scientific misunderstandings, of which there are many, seem to come straight out of the creationist playbook. Chief among them is the standard complaint, repeated frequently in Mr. Wilson’s book, that those transitional fossils that would prove that species transmute from one into another simply don’t exist. Let us ignore, for a moment, that evolution doesn’t mean that animals change shape in two to three easy steps; such transformations usually happen over many generations and through a series of chance mutations. Let us also disregard Mr. Wilson’s argument that if evolution really takes as much time as Darwin said it would, predators would have long gobbled up vulnerable species too preoccupied with evolving into something better. What matters is that paleontologists have indeed identified thousands of these transitional fossils that Darwin predicted would turn up. Arguably, Mr. Wilson’s claim would have already been moot in the early 1860s, when Archaeopteryx, with its birdlike feathers and reptile-like teeth, was first described. Some of the more recently discovered candidates have wonderful names, too, like the fishapod, which, among other weird features, apparently had ears that could hear in both land and water, or my personal favorite, the frogamander, wide-skulled like a frog but sporting fused ankle bones like a salamander.

More seriously, some of Mr. Wilson’s criticisms of Darwin are the result of intentional falsification. Take his summary of the research of Peter and Rosemary Grant, who have spent not just “twenty-five summers” but more than 40 years studying two species of finches on a small island in the Galápagos. What they have found, through studying beak morphology, coloration, song, bird size and cross-species hybridization, is not that Darwin was wrong, as Mr. Wilson asserts, but that the process he had discovered was likely even more powerful than he had expected. What the Grants had seen was, according to Nature magazine, “evolution in real time,” in constant flux, not limited to linear pathways. Mr. Wilson’s representation of their work relies not on the Grants’ easily accessible accounts of what they have been up to but on a couple of hasty and obsolete paragraphs in John Hands’s best-selling survey of the evolution of everything in the universe, “Cosmosapiens” (2015). As it happens, Mr. Hands is also a defender of intelligent design advocate Michael Behe, another one of Mr. Wilson’s unorthodox sources.

Since Mr. Wilson is a literary man, I was particularly disappointed by how unreceptive he is toward Darwin the writer. Only someone who is tone-deaf to Darwin’s irony will think, as Mr. Wilson does, that the glorious final sentence of chapter 3 in “Origin” sounds like it’s been taken from a bedtime story told by a father who feels he has frightened his child too much: “When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” Mr. Wilson earnestly objects that anyone who has seen a zebra mauled by a lion will question the idea that no fear is felt in nature. But Darwin’s sentence is tongue-in-cheek, a fake concession to readers exactly like Mr. Wilson who need the comforts of religion or culture to get on with their lives—“may” they go, sighs Darwin, and find the consolation they need (not in his book, though!). Darwin’s sarcastic little alliteration of “healthy” and “happy”—loaded words, if one remembers that Darwin was a lifelong invalid—is a nice additional touch.

Even more worryingly, Mr. Wilson doesn’t get the rationale behind Darwin’s subversive decision to call the massive book he published in 1871 “The Descent of Man” even though only the last 50 pages, after some 750 about the mating behaviors of birds or monkeys, are actually devoted to humans. Darwin’s point is, precisely, why “Descent” was so challenging: human courtship behavior is, in the mind of the evolutionary theorist, a mere afterthought to all the evidence he has accumulated from the animal world. This was bound to shock Victorian readers—just as it obviously shocks Mr. Wilson today.

A hundred and fifty years later, the work of that barnacle-dissecting country squire from Kent has been modified, augmented, superseded and improved upon, as well it should be. Darwin was quite wrong about many things, and of course he didn’t know squat about genetics, as Mr. Wilson never fails to remind us. And as a human being, Darwin probably did a few things he shouldn’t have done. But the enduring provocation of Darwin’s thought, for scientists as well as humanists, lies in how he envisioned, more radically than anyone before him and few after him, a world teeming with life in which humans are not the main actors: “How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.”

As I was finishing Mr. Wilson’s book, something rather unexpected had happened to me: I had become more curious about him than about Darwin—perhaps not a good sign for a biography. Somewhere I discovered that Norman Wilson, our biographer’s father, used to run the Wedgwood factory. (Those were the good old days, when the company had not yet deteriorated into a multinational purveyor of luxury goods.) Unlike Darwin, who had sponged off his grandfather’s fortune, Norman Wilson reported for work every day, including Saturdays, at that same factory. It is certainly helpful to think of “Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker” as a biographer’s covert attempt to settle a bit of an old score.

But a degree of uneasiness remains. The sheer effort Mr. Wilson has put into toppling Darwin from his pedestal, as if he were the faded statue of a Confederate general headed for the scrapyard, ironically proves that he is not obsolete yet. Samuel “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford who once foolishly asked an elated Thomas Huxley on which side of his family he was descended from an ape, would derive some posthumous pleasure from knowing that someone is still protesting. Yet the modern reader will end this book, as this reviewer certainly did, with the awkward feeling of having been forced into witnessing a fight that no longer needed to be fought. The handful of passages in which Mr. Wilson writes about his subject with genuine understanding—a notable example is his description of Charles and Emma Darwin “clutching at straws” as they watch their 10-year-old daughter wither away—reveal him to be a writer capable of remarkable empathy and even tenderness. But this is not a lasting impression. Throughout this book, Mr. Wilson’s dogged impulse to unmask Darwin as an ungenerous bully has, I am afraid, turned him into a bit of a bully in his own right. If Darwin once—regrettably, as Mr. Wilson is certainly right to remind us—congratulated himself on being an Englishman, many American readers will congratulate themselves on being neither English nor famous, so that they will, presumably, be safe from Mr. Wilson’s biographical efforts.

TWO MORE EXCELLENT BOOK REVIEWS:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/charles-darwin-victorian-mythmaker-an-wilson-review

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2144643-radical-new-biography-of-darwin-is-unreliable-and-inaccurate/

I found this grasshopper but I don't know what this species is called. Lots of color. It's beautiful.

Everything you always wanted to know about insects

Not that anyone cares but I just won one of my best chess games, 41 moves with zero errors according to computer analysis.

https://lichess.org/vrMfdRq8/white#0

President Fucktard Trump chose Betsy DeVos to be United States Secretary of Education. Her goal is to make students as stupid as she is.

DeVos is an evolution denier (aka uneducated moron) as is almost everyone else in the Trump Administration, including the Vice President FFS.

DeVos is an asshole for Jeebus.

Wikipedia: "DeVos in 2001 listed education activism and reform efforts as a means to advance God's Kingdom".

Wikipedia: "DeVos is known as a fierce proponent of school vouchers that would allow students to attend private schools with public funding."

At some public schools the teachers are incompetent so having alternative schools can be a good idea. The problem with DeVos is she thinks it's OK to have taxpayers pay for religious schools that teach bullshit.

For example a voucher school supported by taxpayers calls evolution a destructive faith, calls slavery "black immigration", and says Jews plotted to kill the Magic Jeebus Man. The students learn how to hate science because they thing it's boring and wrong. They learn how to be racists. And they learn how to hate Jews. In other words the students (aka victims) learn how to be uneducated morons.

Voucher Schools Championed By Betsy DeVos Can Teach Whatever They Want. Turns Out They Teach Lies. These schools teach creationism, racism and sexism. They’re also taking your tax dollars.

Wikipedia - Betsy DeVos

I answered a dumb question.

"Is there Salvation for those who do not follow Christ? What about Jews, Muslims, those of other faith systems who are good people?"

Only Christian scum magically fly to a magical paradise to magically live forever while everyone who didn't suck up to the dead Magic Jeebus Man is tortured forever by their loving god.

I discovered another moronic religious word: Fideism: "the doctrine that knowledge depends on faith or revelation"

Fideism: "the doctrine that knowledge depends on faith or revelation"

In other words knowledge depends on making things up. The god-soaked and their ridiculous excuses for believing in bullshit, the stupidity is overwhelming.

Every year America is wasting $700,000,000 of taxpayer money on the Muslim scum of Palestine which is being used to reward the families of terrorists. Even if we weren't subsidizing terrorism we should not waste a penny on Muslim morons.

The U.S. is the PA's biggest donor to the tune of approximately $700 million per annum, directly or via the UN. The PA, in its turn, paid out $355 million to terrorist -- or, as they say, "martyr" -- families in 2017.

Jerusalem: Trump and Congress Challenge the Palestinians to Grow Up

Are there blue butterflies? I looked it up.

Wikipedia - Papilio ulysses, the Ulysses butterfly (also commonly known as the Blue emperor), is a large swallowtail butterfly of Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Its size varies depending on subspecies, but the wingspan is about 10.5 cm (4.1 in) in Queensland.

This butterfly is used as an emblem for tourism in Queensland, Australia.

Once a week at the Wall Street Journal there is a moronic article about religions. The comments are usually written by Christian assholes. There is one person there who tries to explain to these morons why they are wrong about everything. This is a good example. Very well done.

A Wall Street Journal article about bullshit

In the Bible, God is a strong and ever-present actor in the world of human affairs. He talks audibly, he inscribes on stone, he firebombs villages, he send his angels around, he turns people to stone, he stops the sun, he makes a new star, he creates new languages, he sends scourges and plagues, he kills people, he sends his son and gets him killed- all of this up to around 100 AD. Then something happens- or more accurately, nothing happens- God exits the stage, he goes completely silent, does nothing whatsoever.

To any person possessing a logical mind, this is a red herring. Why would an interventionist god suddenly become impotent? And remain so for 19 highly momentous centuries? The effort needed to answer these questions is like trying to pick an apple hanging 5 feet off the ground- the god described in the Bible is fictional.

Science has advanced to a highly sophisticated level, but to date has found nothing that requires any kind of supernatural intelligence to explain. This did not have to happen. We could have determined the age of the earth to be 10,000 years, in which case evolutionary theory would have been impossible. We could have found the universe to be so precisely designed as to beg the question of how it could have happened on its own.

What this implies is that if there is an all-powerful god as proposed by Christianity, that god must be choosing not to manipulate anything beyond the natural order, or, in other words, to completely conceal his presence. However, this concept does not square with Christianity, with its idea of a personal, hands-on, and prayer-answering god.

It seems almost beyond belief that by now science would not have found some footprint or subtle effect of this god somewhere on earth or in the universe. Instead, all that we have observed indicates that there is no god anywhere, no god doing anything, no god designing anything, just plain no god.

The failure of science to detect any kind of a supernatural activity is strong evidence that the god of Christianity does not exist.

In Idiot America only 25% of the population agrees humans and dinosaurs definitely did not live at the same time. This means 75% of Americans are uneducated morons.

https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/06/18/jurassic-world/

Muslim crybabies cry like babies.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Jordan, one of the most moderate U.S. allies in the region, said the White House’s decision “fuels anger and inflames the passions of Muslims and Christians throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.”

My comment: As if Christians are going to start shooting Jews and blowing themselves up. The only violence will be more Muslim atrocities. Muslim crybabies never stop crying.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians erupted on Thursday, sparked by tensions over Jerusalem a day after President Donald Trump ordered the first steps toward moving the American embassy to the holy city.

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, called for a new uprising against Israel. Battles broke out in West Bank cities and near Gaza, according to Palestinian authorities, who said about 50 Palestinians were injured.

The Israeli military said it had beefed up security with hundreds of soldiers in the West Bank and put reserve forces on standby. Youths burned tires and threw stones at Israeli soldiers, who responded by firing tear gas and rubber bullets.

My comments: Any excuse to kill people for Allah. This is what religions have given the world, never ending violence not to mention extreme stupidity.

Did Trump fuck up because he didn't suck up to idiots? It doesn't matter to me. If more Muslim morons get killed that's a good thing.

"Youths burned tires and threw stones at Israeli soldiers." Children are brainwashed to hate Jews. That's the only thing they learn at their worthless religious schools.

I found this somewhere and I don't know who wrote it. It's about the very strange Christian death cult.

Let’s take a quick look at the basic biblical narrative:

There is an indescribably powerful and intelligent being called God who is in existence prior to the dawn of time. For whatever reason, he decides to create the universe and pays particular attention to planet Earth. Having created the universe, Earth and all the species on it (through ‘creating’ the Big Bang and ‘guiding’ evolution in the Williams style of interpretation), he decides to focus all his attention on a collection of tribal groupings in the Middle East, in particular the Israelites who are his ‘chosen people’ and who he obsesses over, while apparently ignoring the rest of the world’s population. He lays down numerous often primitive and arbitrary moral and ceremonial laws, then gets involved in inner tribal politics and land disputes, inciting acts of brutality, war crimes, genocide, and rape along the way.

Fast forward to the Middle East under Roman occupation and God decides it’s time to put in an appearance. By mystical means he comes to earth in human form, being born of a virgin. He becomes incarnate as a Jewish male and wanders around what is today Israel-Palestine, imparting pithy social commentary (but never giving any systematic explanation of how such ideas might be made politically useful), engaging in faith healing (removing ‘demons’ from people), magic tricks (such as walking on water and raising a dead man), and ranting on and on about sin, eternal punishment for the majority of the world’s population, and the impending end of the world. He gets himself crucified, in order that he can sacrifice himself to himself for our good. A few days later he walks out of his tomb and wanders round with some of his followers (noticeably not bothering to make himself known to anyone but those who already believed in him), before ‘ascending’ into ‘Heaven’, to wait for the time when he will return to raise every human who has ever lived in bodily form for judgement, then cast most of us into a pit of fire and take a select few into his ‘kingdom’ for eternity where they will live happily ever after.

Why science works and why religion is bullshit.

"In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."
-- Carl Sagan

Richard Dawkins believes science’s ability to admit ignorance is one of its greatest strengths. On the flip side, he proposes that faith remains arrogant and all too certain of its validity without any rational set of proofs.

"Our old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook him by the hand, and said, 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these 15 years.' That is science at its best. That's the very opposite of faith. That's knowing when you're wrong, and even being pleased to be disproved."

"Well, I think it's about time we started criticizing faith. The truth is that without this convention of good manners which pervades our society, faith couldn't withstand criticism because it has no resources with which to do the withstanding. How can you defend a position when there are by definition no arguments in its favor?"
-- Richard Dawkins

Evolution by natural selection is the strongest fact of science.

A quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The authority of this kind of test is overwhelming; each of the thousands of genes and thousands of proteins contained in an organism provides an independent test of that organism’s evolutionary history. Not all possible tests have been performed, but many hundreds have been done, and not one has given evidence contrary to evolution. There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Evolution

Lots of colors on this beautiful dragon-headed planthopper

The dragon-headed planthopper photographed in Belize

We live on this blue marble. This was the last time human apes walked on the moon, 45 years ago.

Wikipedia - The Blue Marble is an image of the Earth made on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft at a distance of about 29,000 kilometers (18,000 miles) from the surface.

76 years ago on December 7, 1941 Japan attacked America. Two terrible bombs in August 1945 ended the war. These days America and Japan are best friends and we always will be best friends.

American warship destroyed on December 7, 1941.

An atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945

Trump is not very popular in America and he's even less popular in the rest of the world according to a Wall Street Journal article which I will copy & paste here.

Wall Street Journal - The World Has Taken Trump’s Measure. From Asia to Europe, he has squandered America’s influence and moral authority. December 5, 2017.

Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to make America great again. As president he is doing the opposite: He is making America smaller than at any time in the past 100 years.

By pulling the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Mr. Trump has ceded economic leadership in Asia and beyond to China, whose president touts the Chinese model to other countries that want the blessings of prosperity without the inconveniences of liberty. To back up this offer, China is investing huge sums in its “One Belt, One Road” plan and in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

These moves are having the intended effect. Myanmar, which had long been dominated by anti-Chinese sentiment, is now accepting China’s blandishments. The country’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, went to Beijing last week for a conference hosted by the Communist Party.

Vietnam, which has looked to the U.S. as a counterweight against its historical enemy to the north, now wonders whether it must accept Beijing’s economic leadership and yield to its claims in the South China Sea. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has made noises about abandoning his country’s alliance with the U.S. in favor of China. Even Australia, one of our closest allies, is openly debating how to deal with American decline.

In the Middle East, the Trump administration is busy giving ground to Russia. Vladimir Putin is conducting Syrian peace talks while America languishes on the sidelines. Turkey, a member of NATO since 1952, is endorsing the Kremlin’s leading role. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently met with Mr. Putin and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani to support negotiations on the future structure of the Syrian government and state.

Egypt was another long-term linchpin of American diplomacy, and Mr. Trump has lavished praise on its autocratic leader. Yet Cairo has just struck a deal allowing the largest Russian military presence on its soil and in its airspace since 1973. The U.S. doesn’t even have an ambassador in Egypt, let alone a coherent policy to deal with this pivotal country.

Even in Europe, America has been diminished. Mr. Trump’s early ambivalence toward NATO, which gave way to a grudging expression of support, have left a residue of doubt about the credibility of American guarantees. He has driven a wedge between the U.S. and Germany, long our closest ally on the Continent. The “special relationship” with the United Kingdom may not survive his repeated gaffes, capped by his impulsive decision to retweet discredited anti-Muslim videos from a British fringe group.

Close to home, Mr. Trump’s brand of leadership is sorely trying Canadians’ patience: 93% view him as arrogant, 78% as intolerant, and 72% as dangerous. Mexico’s people have also been united against the U.S., by Mr. Trump’s ham-handed immigration policies and heedless negotiations to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement. This may well lead Mexicans to elect an anti-American left-wing populist as their president next year. That Mr. Trump has no discernible policy toward Central and South America is probably a good thing.

Squandering America’s economic and political influence is bad enough. Far worse has been the way Mr. Trump has dissipated our moral authority. Yes, the U.S. has struck deals with unsavory regimes, especially during the Cold War, and has sometimes failed to respect the outcomes of free and fair elections. In the main, however, America has pushed for free societies and democratic governments around the world, while speaking against repression in all its forms.

Until now. The Trump administration has all but abandoned democracy promotion. In practice, an “America First” foreign policy means being indifferent to the character of the regimes with which the U.S. does business.

I wish I could say that President Trump shares this indifference. In fact, he prefers autocrats to elected leaders. He admires their “strength.” He envies their ability to get their way without the pesky opposition of legislatures and courts. He probably wishes he had their power to shut down critical news organizations. In his ideal world, everyone would fall in line behind his goals, and his will would be law.

The world has taken President Trump’s measure. In a 2017 survey of 37 countries, 64% of people expressed confidence in Barack Obama’s ability to do the right thing in international affairs, compared with 22% for Mr. Trump. The current president’s figures were 11% in Germany, 14% in France, and 22% in the U.K. The principal exception was Russia, where Mr. Trump enjoyed 53% approval, compared with 11% for Mr. Obama.

In 1776, at the threshold of American independence, the Founding Fathers espoused a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Today, citizens of countries around the world regard the U.S. as morally diminished under Mr. Trump’s leadership. He shows no signs of caring, and he probably doesn’t.

Another beautiful insect. What's this colorful creature called? Sphaerocoris annulus or Zulu Hud Bug. Take your pick. The next time you're in tropical Africa you might see this wonderful bug.

According to Wikipedia - Sphaerocoris annulus Sphaerocoris annulus can reach a length of about 8 millimetres (0.31 in). The basic color is green, with eleven ring-shaped spots on the elytra. The colors and the design of these bugs represent a warning to predators. They also emit a noxious odour when disturbed.

Jeebus and Mohammad are sexist pigs.

One more time to help people understand: Charles Darwin killed the ridiculous Magic Man fantasy.

Before I write about the Magic Man I will explain how Mr. Darwin killed at least two major religions, Islam and Christianity.

Christianity is a bit more flexible about evolution but not Islam. Muslims are required to believe Allah magically created the human ape species out of nothing. If a Muslim accepts the obvious fact our species evolved from ancient apes then they have to throw out Islam. I did much research on this. Muslims might be able to accept evolution for other creatures but not human apes.

What about the numerous branches of the Christian death cult?

Some Christians totally deny all of evolution. They think their Magic Man magically created human apes and 400,000 species of beetles.

Other Christians accept the established truth of evolution but always, 100% of the time, they say their Magic Man invented or used or guided evolution. That's bullshit. We know all life evolved and we know a magic god fairy's magical powers had absolutely nothing to do with it. Therefore evolution kills Christianity.

Also the dead Magic Jeebus Man was most certainly a creationist which means Christians worship a dead uneducated moron. Some Christians have told me Jeebus accepted evolution but that's dishonest. Jeebus didn't even know what evolution is.

What about the Magic Man? Did Charles Darwin kill that idiotic fantasy?

Some people tell me evolution only kills the Genesis story in the Bible. They don't understand why they're wrong.

This should be obvious to everyone who has a brain: If something as complex as the development of new species did not require supernatural magic then it's ridiculous to pretend magic was ever required for anything else. A god fairy who never had anything to is a fairy who never existed.

Of course even without the science the idea there's a magical being hiding somewhere in the universe is too childish to take seriously.

By the way a Christian fucktard told me the Magic Man hides outside the universe. No evidence provided. He was just making things up. I never met a theist who wasn't full of crap.

Since it's obvious there never was a god why do billions of people still believe in it?

I think breathtaking stupidity has something to do with it. Also cowards can't exist without their ridiculous magical-2nd-life fantasy and that's why they don't want to throw their magic fairy out.

I don't like Trump. I voted for Clinton in 2016 and I will vote for anyone who is not Trump in 2020. However in my opinion our celebrity clown president did something right.

This is a quote from the Wall Street Journal:

"President Donald Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and directed the State Department to begin moving the U.S. Embassy to the holy city, in a White House speech that threatened to spark protest across the Middle East."

I googled "capital of Israel". The result: Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. This is a fact. So of course it makes sense to have our embassy there.

What about Muslim crybabies who will complain about it?

I don't care. Muslims are scum. They don't belong on this planet. If something makes them cry that's a good thing.

Will the Muslim scum get violent because of Trump's decision? Of course they will get violent. These fucktards blow themselves up every day.

Drop dead Muslims. You have my contempt.

This is a controversial subject. That's what the comments are for if anyone disagrees.

Some more Charles Darwin quotes

The other list of Charles Darwin quotes is at Charles Darwin quotes.

I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

We have happy days, remember good dinners.

One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

I cannot see ... evidence of design and beneficence ... There seems to me too much misery in the world.

Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.

...conscience looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind of dissatisfaction, which if weak we call regret, and if severe remorse.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

As some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.

I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts.

I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please.

Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.

Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee and spirituous liqueurs.

The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.

So great is the economy of Nature, that most flowers which are fertilized by crepuscular or nocturnal insects emit their odor chiefly or exculsively in the evening.

The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand.

Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.

Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.

Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.

A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.

With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.

On your life, underestimating the proclivities of finches is likely to lead to great internal hemorrhaging.

The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, ... says "Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

I feel like an old warhorse at the sound of a trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles.

Who when examining in the cabinet of the entomologist the gay and exotic butterflies, and singular cicadas, will associate with these lifeless objects, the ceaseless harsh music of the latter, and the lazy flight of the former - the sure accompaniments of the still, glowing noonday of the tropics.

“Till I compare all my notes, I feel very doubtful about the share males and females play in sexual selection; I suspect that the male will pair with any female, and that the females select the most victorious or most beautiful cock, or him with beauty and courage combined,” he wrote in late 1859, following the publication of Origin.

Man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master.

When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.

It is well-known that those who have charge of young infants, that it is difficult to feel sure when certain movements about their mouths are really expressive; that is when they really smile. Hence I carefully watched my own infants. One of them at the age of forty-five days, and being in a happy frame of mind, smiled... I observed the same thing on the following day: but on the third day the child was not quite well and there was no trace of a smile, and this renders it probable that the previous smiles were real.

If worms have the power of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and over their burrows, as seems the case, they deserve to be called intelligent; for they act in nearly the same manner as would man under similar circumstances.

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion but it would take an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal can blush.

He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms so different from each other and dependent on each other and so complex a manner have all been produced by laws acting around us.

Each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio . . . each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction . . . The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.

I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.

Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

The man that created the theory of evolution by natural selection was thrown out by his Dad because he wanted him to be a doctor. GAWD, parents haven't changed much.

It occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made of this question (the origin of the species) by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it.

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could have ever been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.

This creature is a not leaf. It's a beautiful green insect that looks like a leaf thanks to natural selection. The idea is a bird would not want to eat a leaf.

This insect is called a planthopper because it can hop like a grasshopper. However it prefers to walk very slowly to not attract attention. Planthoppers eat plants.

Wikipedia - Everything you always wanted to know about Planthoppers.

The stupidity of Christian scum is overwhelming.

The bible god is an idiot. If it was real we would have to kill it.

Charles Darwin quotes.

Click this to see some more Charles Darwin quotes

I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.

I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

The more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become, - that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, - that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, - that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses; - by such reflections as these... I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.

I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.

A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relationship to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.

I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true.

Only the fittest will survive.

It's not the strongest, but the most adaptable that survive.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats.

The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.

It is not the biggest, the brightest or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.

The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life.

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.

Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.

Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us - of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.
The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.

Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.

We are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps.

The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference.
Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?

Even the humblest mammal's strong sexual, parental, and social instincts give rise to 'do unto others as yourself' and 'love thy neighbor as thyself'.

He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Light may be shed on man and his origins.

Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

It is a truly wonderful fact - the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity - that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group.

I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower from, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult--at least I have found it so--than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.

There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved.

What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.

I believe there exists, & I feel within me, an instinct for the truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, & that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. ... To group all facts under some general laws.

Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of Evolution, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists. But I look with confidence to the future naturalists, who will be able to view both sides with impartiality.

I am actually weary of telling people that I do not pretend to adduce [direct] evidence of one species changing into another, but I believe that this view is in the main correct, because so many phenomena can thus be grouped and explained.

I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

Of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important . . . [I]t is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment's hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause.

I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History; and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.

I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things. As far as I can conjecture the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.

I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.

Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

After my return to England it appeared to me that by following the example of Lyell in Geology, and by collecting all facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and plants under domestication and nature, some light might perhaps be thrown on the whole subject.

He who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity .... and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.

There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one—And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press.

If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly have been said to have done so instinctively.

But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.

The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career; yet it depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose.

It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.

I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.

Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man.