I have to laugh at some of the responses, though: critical thinking--and spelling--on the part of those who appear to be RR'ers is not a very strong point. The point the author makes about how people in the US are getting dumber and dumber and farther out in left field the greater their connection to the religious idiocy is made simply by reading the comments.
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"....Darwin’s theory of the evolution of organisms was not entirely new. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle offered glimpses of it and more modern philosophers, from Bacon on, added to the understanding that plants and animals did not just magically appear fully formed on the Earth, but changed and developed over eons.
However, it was Darwin who seized upon the idea, inspired by Thomas Robert Malthus’ theories on overpopulation, that "favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones would be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species."
According to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, those organisms that were better able to adapt to their environments were more likely to survive and reproduce than those that had trouble or could not adapt. These favorable variations are then transmitted to successive generations. Variables such as food, predators, disease and climate change makes the numbers of a species go up or down. And, ultimately, every species’ fate is interconnected with that of every other species.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection held that the origin and diversification of species results from the gradual accumulation of these individual modifications. This is the key element of his theory of evolution. This idea has never been accepted by fundamentalist Christians, who believe that god created the world in seven days and everything was ready to go from the beginning. Science proves that this is clearly untrue, yet creationism (or intelligent design, as its supporters now call it) is still treated seriously in the United States as a competing idea of how the world was made. ..."
http://www.reformer.com/ci_13854532?source=most_viewed