Subject: RE: Darwin Day event at the UU Church of Jacksonville (FL)?

From: "John L. Young" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 09:05:20 -0500

Dear Dr. Stephens,

	Thank you for your e-mails. I am attaching the sermon I did last
Sunday. We will be celebrating Darwin Day in February of each year. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dr. R. Stephens [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 11:05 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Darwin Day event at the UU Church of Jacksonville (FL)?

To our Darwin Day friends at the UU Church of Jacksonville (FL), 

In late 2002, Arthur Jackson sent you a long email about Darwin Day.
This is a reminder that the project is ongoing and growing.

Did you know that Charles Darwin attended a Unitarian church and school
during his earliest years in Shrewsbury, England?  We have maps and
pictures at http://darwinday.org/life/shrewsbury.html , in the first
paragraph below the map-picture and also halfway down the entire page.
Darwin's spirit seemed to be like modern UU's, exploring all things and
drawing conclusions from real world evidence.  His family and the
Wedgwoods also showed a social conscience, being early public opponents
of slavery.

You may already realize that Darwin's 200th birthday will occur on
February 12, 2009.  You may have held events to celebrate science and
humanity in previous years.  For those who don't know, Darwin Day
Celebration is a nonprofit organization designed to promote an
international celebration of Science and Humanity each year on or near
Feb. 12, as we proceed towards 2009.  Darwin and the theory of evolution
are being used as symbols of scientific progress, and our goal is to
achieve a global celebration by 2009.  Currently, events are being
registered on our Web site for 2005.

The purpose of this letter is to invite you to visit our website at
http://www.darwinday.org -- and then to consider joining many others in
this constructive educational effort.  If you are the minister of a
Unitarian Universalist church, you might consider a sermon related to
Darwin and evolution.  Perhaps an examination of how knowledge is
obtained through traditional faith (receiving beliefs from earlier
generations, gathering supporting evidence, and avoiding challenges)
versus how knowledge is obtained in science (guessing about truth
through falsifiable hypotheses and encouraging attempts to disprove the
false hypotheses).  You might call for the evolution of IDEAS that do
not promote survival in a new environment.  Perhaps reflect on your
personal evolution and possible lessons useful to others.  Perhaps an
examination on how a failure to evolve one's life skills makes one
vulnerable to sudden shifts in circumstances.  Perhaps you could recount
Darwin's own evolution from a gentleman dabbler to a reluctant
revolutionary, because the evidence he saw convinced him of a new truth.
Perhaps you could reflect on the likely consequences of the recent
results of DNA sequence comparisons that show that all humans recently
lived in Africa until about 100,000 years ago and we are VERY closely
related.  Perhaps something about current events relating to Darwin's
ideas, like the Georgia court's recent ruling that the schoolbooks could
not be required to have labels denigrating evolution.  Or you can
develop your own better idea.

We recently revised the DarwinDay.org site to emphasize science
education and the very HUMAN story of Darwin's life.  Our Web site
offers information to assist you in developing ideas for a celebration
event that is suitable for your own unique circumstances.  To sign up
quickly as a supporter, register at
http://darwinday.org/register/index.php  and to publicize your event go
to http://darwinday.org/regevent/index.php .  If you have reason not to
register at our site, we'd still like to hear what you are doing, so
feel free to e-mail to us at mailto:[email-masked] 

Supporters of Darwin Day include prominent scientists, educators,
philosophers, and writers such as: Patrick Bateson, Provost, Kings
College, Cambridge; Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University; Richard
Dawkins, Oxford University; Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts University; Steven
Pinker, Harvard University; Helena Cronin, London School of Economics;
Eugenie Scott, National Center for Science Education; Steve Jones, Univ.
College London; and many others.  We encourage you to join them and
become an enthusiastic participant in this project. 

Sincerely yours, 

Robert J. (Bob) Stephens, Ph. D. 
Emeritus Director, Cell Biology Program, 
SRI International, formerly Stanford Research Institute. 
Chairman of the Board, Darwin Day Celebration, a nonprofit corporation 
http://darwinday.org 

P.S. If you do not want to receive additional e-mail from Darwin Day
Celebration, simply reply to this e-mail at [email-masked].