Today is Darwin Day! Let’s all raise a pint (or your beverage of choice) in honor of the man who helped make modern biology what it is today. In fact, raise two, because this one is special: The 200th anniversary of his birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publishing of The Origin of Species. That makes 2009 Darwin fucking year. There are plenty of events througout the world, and frankly, too many to link to. I’m afraid I’d leave out some thing important. So in this case, Google is your friend. Quite a lot of colleges and universities have science lectures in honor of the day, and I think that learning (or teaching) something new about science would be a fabulous way to honor the man’s work.
There’s a cool aggregation of related posts over at Scientific Blogging: 
Personally, I have the science community (and by extension, CD) to thank for getting me started out of fundamentalist xianity. I used to be a young-earth creationist for many years. Then I found talkorigins.org. I wanted to get an idea of what “the enemy” believed. I soon found that many of the arguments I had learned and used against evolution were based on misconceptions, misunderstandings, and sometimes good old-fasioned lies. It took me about six months to get to the point where I acknowledged to myself that what I had believed wasn’t true. In getting there, I spoke with my pastor about my doubts, and some of the specific arguments. His reply?
“Those evolutionists lie!”
That’s all. Really? All of them? By that point, I wasn’t really drinking the kool-aid anymore, and it wasn’t hard to go from, “All they’ve told me about evolution is wrong”, to “All they’ve told me is wrong.” I started finding deconversion stories on the web. I read Losing Faith in Faith, by Dan Barker. I told my wife I didn’t believe anymore. But that’s a story for another time.
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