Monday, November 21, 2005

Food for Thought

Newsweek:
And there was an even more troubling implication to his [Darwin's] theory. To a species that believed it was made in the image of God, Darwin's great book addressed only this one cryptic sentence: "Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." That would come 12 years later, in "The Descent of Man," which explicitly linked human beings to the rest of the animal kingdom by way of the apes. "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," Darwin wrote, offering a small sop to human vanity before his devastating conclusion: "that man with all his noble qualities ... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."