syrinx

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online, that is.
Assuming one is evolved enough to read and comprehend symbols used as communication over time and space. See, he thought something, made scratches on paper with dark liquid, had someone else make other impressions of dark material on light background in physical form, and now, years later, we can retrieve either iconic representations of those original abstract arbitrary representations of logical symbols, or we can retrieve equivalent abstract representations of those abstract symbols. For example, the word "evolution" means the same thing whether it is written by hand by a quill pen on parchment or by a Waterman pen on quadrille graph paper, or whether it is represented by pixels on a CRT or an LCD display in Ariel or Courier font in 10 point or 9 point type in bold or italic. Unless, of course, you are a fundamentalist religious creationist anti-intellectual who doesn't believe in evil-ution, which means that you don't understand what the symbolic abstract scientific theory and basic principle for which the word is a shorthand "tag" or "meme" is used for.
One of these days I have to get around to reading The Origin of Species instead of just looking at it sitting there on my bookshelf...

tags: evolution darwin charles language symbols semiotics