OU's Darwin Celebration Getting Flack in Tulsa

You might think that 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the overwhelming scientific support for evolution would be enough to convince even the skeptics of Darwin's legitimacy.

You'd be wrong.

Right here in River City (aka Tulsa), the Tulsa Beacon, a conservative weekly, is fuming over the University of Oklahoma's celebration of Darwin and his ideas. Why to hear the Beacon tell it, some of your tax dollars are going to recognize a Godless heathen, a man who would deny everything good in the world.

But they'd be wrong.

Yes, OU is celebrating Darwin and they may even be using some tax dollars to do so. But Darwin wasn't wrong about the origin of species and he wasn't against everything good.

In fact, Darwin was, by all accounts, "a humane, gentle, decent man, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend," as Olivia Judson noted this week in the NY Times.

Moreover, Darwin was opposed to slavery, unlike many of his contemporaries. In the Times, Judson provided this illuminating passage from Darwin's travels:

Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal…. It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.

Stirring language, and yet another reason to celebrate Darwin.