I imagine several of you have gone fossil hunting [View all]

[bronxiteforever]

When I cracked open my first rock, searching for Ordovician era marine fossils, I felt a sublime thrill. Many folks here have probably felt a similar emotion either digging for the past with an amateur group or on your own.

My first decent fossil was a lowly Brachiopod shell, encased in brown limestone. It was perhaps the same color as the sea bed it lived on some 400 million years earlier. It sits on my bookcase to this day some 40 years after I dug it out. This lowly mollusk was alive in the shallow sea of an ancient and alien earth.

Just hearing that the SOTH, 3rd in line to the Presidency, believes the earth is some 10,000 years old makes me want to weep for our country. This medieval war on science that champions dark ages ignorance must be defeated at the ballot box.

I will let the 20th President of our Country a Republican, respond as he did in a letter in 1859 (today as relevant as it was 160 years earlier).

I admitted, that the world had existed millions of years. I am astonished at the ignorance of the masses on these subjects. Hugh Miller has it right when he says that 'the battle of evidences must now be fought on the field of the natural sciences.'
— James Abram Garfield
Letter to Burke A. Hinsdale, president of Hiram College (10 Jan 1859), commenting on the audience at Garfield's debate with William Denton. Quoted in John Clark Ridpath, The Life and Work of James A. Garfield (1881), 80.

And more poetically the great Carl Sagan wrote

We've begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.