[ridenrain]

In the third week of January 1831 Charles sat his final exam. There were three days of written papers covering the Classics, the two Paley texts and John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, then mathematics and physics. At the end of the week when the results were posted he was dazed and proud to have come 10th out of a pass list of 178 doing the ordinary degree. Charles shone in theology and scraped through in the other subjects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin's_education

[bootlegga]

Sapio Sapio:

bootlegga bootlegga:

Sapio Sapio:

Leave all Science to the private sector.

Are you prepared to enjoy life without computers, nuclear power or dozens of other important inventions?

Government supported R&D is key towards advancing technology. Companies only care about how to make a widget faster and cheaper, and don't give one fig for figuring out far more important discoveries than making widgets.

But those things could have been done without government funding and most likely cheaper to us. Plus, the private sector has created way more inventions that the government has or could. Funding science is not the governments job.

Without government funding, we wouldn't have many of the advances we have today. For example, the Manhattan Project and Space race provided hundreds of inventions which people take for granted. If we left it up to the private sector, that might not have happened. After all, how many companies would build a multi-billion dollar super-collider to study particle physics? Not many, because there is no reward in the next quarter (or even trhe next fiscal year). However, lessons learned there might help in inventing something else years later, which is why it's important to build it.

Government funding usually creates the foundations for inventions, which corporations then go on to refine and perfect. As long as corporations are more focussed on the next quarter, instead of the next quarter century, we need government funding in the sciences.

Without it, there will be far fewer advances.

[Bibbi]

Eisensapper Eisensapper:

Im talking about Darwin's Evolutionary Theory of the diversity of life on earth.

The changes in topography are not evolution Bibi.

Oops! To be more precise Darwin based his theory of evolution on Lyell's Theory of Uniformity which dealt with gradual changes in topography and the environment.
Lyell and Darwin were friends. Darwin could be said to have applied the theory of uniformity to the development of species.