Happy birthday Darwin
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One other free speech note from Britain. Today we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, probably the greatest of all the scientists that the UK ever produced. (I know, it depends a lot on how you rank Newton.) Here at Edinburgh we celebrate Darwin as one of our own, and there will be several different events this afternoon. Darwin started as an undergraduate here. (Hated it — said his geology lectures were deeply boring. Whenever I go off to teach a class here, I keep that in mind. Don't be boring. You don't know who's out there among the undergraduates.) He was getting nowhere with the plan to get a degree in medicine, and went away to Cambridge to study theology (astonishingly, he was going to become a country vicar in the Church of England!). But he had joined a student natural history society at Edinburgh, and did other biological work as well, and when he eventually became a full-time (though unpaid and non-professorial) biologist in later life, and developed the radical idea of the gradual evolution of species through natural selection, his devout wife was a bit shocked, but told him he should not suppress his scientific ideas because of her faith. Now that is my ideal of the right attitude toward free speech. Respect me, and whatever religious faith I may have; but know that my beliefs don't override your right to hold and express your opinions, no matter what they are. Darwin's wife Emma truly heard the music. She understood what linguistic, intellectual, and religious freedom should really mean in a diverse and democratic society. And whatever the polemics Darwin was exposed to, despite the formally theocratic nature of the British state (where the monarch also leads the established church), he was never exposed to legal threat for his expression of his ideas.