Happy Darwin Day

The sign is from the Chicago Field Museum -- the grand entrance to their revamped fossil exhibits. The most excellent fossil exhibits of all. Go! (And when you've done that, go here as well.)

It is not labeled "The Hall of Dinosaurs" or "Ancient Earth" or anything so quaint -- the chronologically arranged, masterfully interpreted collection is called Evolving Planet.

The Church of Jebus Christmas and the Latter-Day Flat Earthers can suck it.

It's not the job of scientific educational institutions to cater to the carefully cultivated sensitivities of those who stick their fingers in their ears and hum You Light Up My Life when confronted with the central organizing principle of all biological science.

The Facts, The Truth, and the credible voices of interpretation and controversy surrounding them, are the sworn duty of science educators.

If Born-Again Bob gets his knickers in a knot when he takes little Elijah and Rachel to see the Giant Head of Sue and is confronted as well with the toothy science of life on earth, well, sucks to be Bob. If you can't manage the 21st century, could you take a stab at the late 19th? Guess he'll have to schlepp the house apes off to the Creation Science Museum for an exciting account of how Our Lord Walked With Dinosaurs. Then be astonished when Elijah can't get into even a Caribbean medical school on the strength of your paranoid home-schooling and further indoctrination at Oral Roberts U, and Rachel practices sexual selection at age fifteen by getting knocked up by an alpha-male well-adorned with prison tats and a grill.

Because the only thing that hasn't, in 150 years, conformed to the principles of natural selection is the idea-bank of the tiny-brained mammals for whom the realities of the natural universe threaten to completely annhilate their deep, strong, unshakable faith in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving deity who is currently fully occupied sticking pins in the immortal soul of Charles Darwin.