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Article: Society fights battle royal over creationism, global warming: Legacy of Newton and Darwin fuels defense of modern science, writes the Tribune's Tom Hundley.
- Article from:
- Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL)
- Article date:
- November 10, 2006
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Byline: Tom Hundley
Nov. 10--LONDON -- When Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and other deep thinkers of the day founded the Royal Society in 1660, "science" as a field of knowledge did not yet exist. So they called their new organization the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge.
The idea, according to Stephen Cox, the society's current executive secretary, was "to replace unsound thinking about the world with knowledge based on observation and experimentation."
The Royal Society quickly became the embodiment of the Enlightenment, and over the centuries its greatest minds--from Newton and Darwin in the 18th and 19th Centuries ...