Barry Yeoman’s article focusing on Ken Hamm and his group (“Creation Nation,” Feb. 22) was a great way to shine a little more light on the existence and motivations of a group of people that I don’t agree with, but certainly want to know more about. Still, it doesn’t help when we make a common and minor error that serves to further mislead people into thinking that Darwin’s work was focused on Humans as some sort of pinnacle of either creation or evolution.
Darwin’s most famous work was properly titled On the Origin of Species, not (as cited in Yeoman’s article) On the Origin of the Species. Adding that extra word makes it sound as if Darwin’s focus was on “the” species, in this case referring to modern humans. Darwin’s work had more to do with finches than people, and he was trying to show the mechanism of speciation over time, not necessarily that humans came from a specific progenitor.
It’s just one word, but dropping that small word misleads people about the focus of Darwin’s work. Understanding natural selection is not about proving or disproving the existence of God or the origin of the universe. It’s not even necessarily about the origin of humankind, no matter what “the” press tells us.
Britt Steed
Raleigh
