It Didn't Start From Me Wanting To Diss Chuck It Was About A Missing Link Found - Hate Mail

Ah, no, dear, "Darwin's theory" is not evolution, it is a. natural selection, b. common descent of all species from a common ancestor.  

The first is something I've come to reject because it's too vaguely defined, proposed to mean too many different "things" some of which may not be real things but are the products of ideologically informed imagination, a theory too often modified to maintain a coherent idea and which has, over and over again, produced depraved results in the human population.  

The second I believe in quite strongly, though the farther you get back in time the less evidence there is for it.  I think the work of Lynn Margulis and others comes up with some good reasons to suspect there might, might, have been different organisms which combined and which may not have had a common ancestry*, though that is, also, unevidenced.  Since I doubt it will occur to you, someone who believes in common descent of species obviously also believes in evolution, even if they don't believe in natural selection.  Notably, Schaaffhausen doesn't seem to have believed in the second one even as Darwin cited him in support of natural selection in a way that would depend on him also having to believe in common descent for Darwin's argument to work.  I have read, though I have not actually read about it,  Schaaffhausen came up with a theory of evolution before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so he obviously believed in evolution.  

I know it's a bit an issue a bit more complex than is presented in PBS and BBC costume dramas about the life and work of St. Charles Darwin, but, considering your super-hero was advocating ideas that were rather completely adopted by Nazis, those defeated in 1945 and those which persisted and arose after the war, it's a rather important and serious issue, an issue on full display in Charlottesville,  Virginia a few weekends back.   That my dissing St. Chuck makes you have a sad day is no reason to stop pointing it out.  As it is, I was answering Daniel, who gave me the link I'd been looking for for more than four years.  I think that deserved an answer. 

*  I think if life arose more than once on the early Earth and that different surviving lines of life converged to produce eukaryotic cells and multi-cellular organisms had that level of compatibility, that the probability of that happening by random chance just becomes unbelievably improbable and something which is justifiably considered superstition.  Which I know atheists just hate the idea of, evolution being, for them, primarily an ideological weapon to kill off God, not science.   Including, I suspect, some of the scientists engaged in that line of speculation.  I'd think it would be better for the science if those kinds of uses of it were not in the mix. 

Update:  Bah, I've got beans to freeze and sauerkraut to make. I've said as much as I'm going to, today. 

Update 2:  Sorry, forgot to answer this.  I have stopped with the pretense that anyone who has any position about science "knows" its truth, they believe it.   The phony separation between areas of though into "knowledge" and "belief" is a pretense that what is known is adopted through some involuntary act on the basis of pure reason.  It isn't, it is dependent on choices just as belief is.  What is lost in hubris and arrogance by giving up that phony distinction is more than made up in the virtues of humility and whatever impediment that uncertainty gives people when they want to use what they claim to know to do bad things.   As the great, late Joseph Weizenbaum said:

The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence.  His certitude is an illusion.  Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion.  In his praxis he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all.  He is rather like a theatergoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events.  The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument.  Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime.  Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be:  a true believer.  

You can read more of it here.