Papal confession: Darwin was right about evolution

A Century of Evolution: Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) Mayr’s view of Darwin: was Darwin wrong about speciation?

We commonly read or hear that Charles Darwin successfully convinced the world about evolution and natural selection, but did not answer the question posed by his most famous book, ‘On the Origin of Species . . .’. Since the 1940s, Ernst Mayr has been one of the people who argued for this point of view, claiming that Darwin was not able to answer the question of speciation because he failed to d...

Was Darwin a creationist?

Throughout the Origin of Species, Darwin contrasts his theory of natural selection with the theory that God independently created each species. This makes it seem as though the Origin offers a scientific alternative to a theological worldview. A few months after the Origin appeared, however, the eminent anatomist Richard Owen published a review that pointed out the theological assumptions of Da...

More about Mrs. Darwin than Mr. Darwin.

After Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is perhaps the scientist best known. Several biographies have been published and many essays have been written on both men. Indeed, Darwin wrote his own autobiography, for his children, and many of the thousands of letters he sent and received throughout his life have been gathered. All this information has become readily accessible thanks to se...

Myopia: was mother right about reading in the dark?

Was Einstein 100% Right ? *

The confrontation between General Relativity and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. The agreement between experiment and theory is numerically very impressive. However, some recent theoretical findings (existence of non-perturbative strong-field effects, natural cosmological attraction toward zero scalar couplings) suggest that the pr...