NEWSWEEK COVER: The Real Darwin - His Private Views on Science & God Approaching His Bicentennial, Darwin's Theories Continue to Fascinate and Stir

Controversy; Ideas on Science and God Reexamined

NEW YORK, Nov. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- To a society accustomed to searching for truth in the pages of the Bible, Charles Darwin introduced the notion of evolution. Darwin knew full well what he was up to; as early as 1844, he famously wrote to a friend that to publish his thoughts on evolution would be akin to "confessing a murder," reports Senior Editor Jerry Adler in the current issue of Newsweek.

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Of the revolutionary thinkers who have shaped the intellectual history of the past century, Darwin alone remains unassimilated, provocative, even threatening to some -- like Pat Robertson, who recently warned the citizenry of Dover, Pa., that they risked divine wrath for siding with Darwin in a dispute over high-school biology textbooks. The question of whether or not God could still be mad after all this time is raised by a compelling new show that opened Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Adler reports. "Even people who aren't comfortable with Darwin's ideas," says Niles Eldredge, the museum's curator of paleontology, "are fascinated by the man."

In the November 28 Newsweek cover story, "The Real Darwin: His Private Views on Science & God" (on newsstands Monday, November 21), Adler details the documents and writings by Darwin and the scientists studying him, in the exhibition, which examine his life, his theories and the controversies that surrounded his ideas. In part, the fascination with the man is being driven by his enemies, who like to say they're fighting "Darwinism," rather than evolution or natural selection. But the man is, in fact, fascinating, whatever position you take on evolution.

(Read the entire cover story at www.Newsweek.com.)

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10118750/site/newsweek / SOURCE Newsweek

-0- 11/20/2005

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