[Buddha-l] Darwin's 200th centennial

[Jim Peavler]

Precursors of Darwin are, I think, non-existent since Darwinism  
consists of the idea that speciation is caused by natural selection.  
The idea that living things might "evolve" out of earlier forms can be  
mildly suggested by lots and lots of precursors, but until they are  
verified by tons and tons of individual facts (which Darwin provides)  
don't mean much. Hell, it would be possible to make a case that the  
very idea of kharma is a precursor of evolution because of the notion  
of all effects grow out of causes. It is probably easier to defend  
kharma from the Intelligent Design people than it is to defend  
evolution because it is not possible to just create something out of  
nothing.

The very silliest "precursor search" I ever heard of was the study  
group my secretary in Idaho belonged to (and I visited) in which we  
were reading the most popular works of Plato (Phaedo included) looking  
for the evidence that he was proto-Mormon. We weren't looking to see  
if there was evidence -- we were looking to find the evidence that was  
certainly there.

You can be discovered to have presursed damn near anything in either  
myth or prophecy.

On Feb 14, 2009, at 4:20 PM, jkirk wrote:

>
> On another list, someone just claimed that "Darwin was
> prescientifically
> 'preceded' in the Tibetan mythology, where mankind has origin in
> monkeys."
>
> Anybody know about this intriguing bit?
>
>
>
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Jim Peavler
jmp at peavler.org