The passion of science

Perhaps the only good thing about the Intelligent Design shibboleth is that it has brought scientists out to eulogise about their passions. One such is Xavier at About Town, who has penned a truly wonderful paean to evolution which deserves to be read in its entirety. I'll quote from his conclusion:

There are literally millions, billions of species that exist or have existed, and every one, every single one, is connected, at some point, to every other. This is the beauty of evolution, of life. Intelligent design and creationism can never explain or express that inherent connection of the living world. They could never explain the relationships between the parasitic wasps and hippopotamus, or between the cow and the bacteria that live in its gut, helping it to digest its food. The saddest fact is they don't want to. Intelligent design and creationism doesn't have the power to make sense of the world, to express the subtleties or the fundamentals, or to find our place in it, now or in the past. They rob us of the exquisite vision that 4 billion years of constant change, of a Great Unfolding, has ready for us to find. They literally don't allow us to see the branches for the leaves.

Charles Darwin said it best, I think, in The Origin of Species:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Wonderfully put. Almost makes up for the little scam the About Towners have been running.