Happy Birthday, Charles!

Today is the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday 203 years ago.  It's easy for an evolutionary biologist to get depressed these days what with the prospects of getting a GnOPe candidate that has even the slightest regard for science essentially nil.  And even worse when because your understanding of science suggests policies that run afoul of conservative ideology, they label you unAmerican conspirators in undermining the USA.  There was a time in this country when policy was debated, but then politicians found out it was easier to deny the science rather than debate policy, and now the people who do the science are being demonized.  If these ideologues have their way the USA will fall even further under the sway of fundamentalist theocrats, and thus our society will begin to converge on that of Islamic countries charging forward into the past, the distant past, the Dark Ages, at a time when fewer and fewer realize that embracing science is one of the few avenues to maintaining any type of competitive advantage internationally.  This is so depressing the Phactor seldom blogs about it, but he wonders what is going to happen when people who make up their own facts and their own history actually try to use their fantasies to interact with the world at large and run smack dab into a serious dose of reality.  More denial?  More demonization?  So it would seem.  And the worst part is that so many people so readily fall for it.  Depressing indeed.