WolfeNotes.com

Here’s a message from my former representative and a man I respect, Congressman, Rush Holt.

Holt is a rare bird: a scientist in the belly of the beast of an increasingly irrational Congress dominated by an anti-science climate change denying faction of religious zealots and know nothing Tea Party radicals who have hijacked the Republican party.

Here’s Holt’s message (and even though I have  a Darwin emblem on my car, I did’t know that Lincoln and and Darwin were born on the same day!):

Dear Mr. Wolfe,

No one could have known it at the time, but February 12, 1809 was a turning point in the story of human progress.  On that day, Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky – and across the Atlantic, Charles Darwin was born into a doctor’s family in the United Kingdom.

Many states, including New Jersey, have long established a holiday to recognize Lincoln’s birthday and to honor his contributions to equality, freedom, and progress.  We would do equally well to establish a ceremonial Darwin Day, as I have proposed in Congress.

Through his work, Darwin discovered that the drive for survival of each species produces an evolution by natural selection.  Without his recognition that natural selection enables increasing complexity, our comprehension of the world around us would be vastly poorer.  But to me Charles Darwin represents much more than a discovery or a theory.  He represents a way of thinking, a philosophy.  It was his thirst for knowledge and his scientific approach that enabled him to uncover the theory of evolution.  This lesson is as valuable as the discovery he made and the explanations he gave.

We should continue to celebrate Darwin as a master of clear, evidence-based thinking.  Legislators would do well to emulate his vision and his thinking, and we would all benefit from more people thinking like scientists.