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This video is what I would say if I could write a letter to Charles Darwin. I am not a biologist, so please notify me of any errors.

I think the best way to help other Americans accept evolution is to educate them on the basics. As a young Christian child I was taught all kinds of incorrect statements about what evolutionists believe (for example, I thought that evolutionists believed that dogs evolved from cats).

Music: Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve
All images and video clips used under fair use.

Transcript:
Dear Charles Darwin,

This should come as no surprise to you given the prevailing world views of your time, but I was never allowed to learn about evolution as a child. I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian family, and so I was taught that Evolution was a lie from Satan to trick mankind into disbelieving the Bible. You have been demonized by religious zealots all over the world – mostly in the United States.

I shed my faith as an adult due to a number of factors not related to your influence. Since then I have been free to learn about your theory of Evolution by Natural Selection and the subsequent research that has shaped many scientific disciplines since you published On the Origin of Species. I recently opened up some science books and educated myself. And what a beautiful world have I discovered!

Science has filled a lot of the gaps and you would be amazed at what I have learned.

While we still don’t know the origins of life, we do know that given the right time and conditions, self replicating molecules (called DNA) form. I learned that the DNA drives an embryological process where cells divide and unfold into physical features of a life form. And that sometimes there are errors in the replication process – changes in the DNA that cause physical mutations. I learned that most mutations are devastating – causing the recipient to die before producing offspring. But that on very rare occasions, a beneficial mutation provides a survival advantage and ultimately gets passed on to subsequent generations to form new features within the group as a whole. I learned that this process is terribly slow and requires eons of time to cause noticeable changes within a group. I learned that individuals don’t evolve, but that entire species evolve ever so slightly from one generation to the next as the beneficial mutations are passed on.

I learned about how evolution happens so slowly that even though we evolve, every child is the exact same species as its parent, but that there may exist minor changes that when piled on over thousands of generations cause major changes.

I learned about speciation – the process where geographic or other types of dividers between groups cause them to evolve in different directions with different environmental pressures driving the acceptance of different mutations until the groups are too different to procreate with each other. And thus multiple species emerge and that’s what causes the diversity of life on this planet.

And suddenly it makes sense to me why there are so many millions of species on this planet that all seem perfectly suited for their environments.

Why there are so many different species of deer, cattle, goats, wildebeests, buffalos, rhinos, sheep, zebras, donkeys, horses, giraffes and other hoofed animals that feed on plants but have different features that help them survive in their different environments.

It makes sense now, that humans were able to cross breed cattle and buffalo to create a new species called the beefalo – which tolerates colder climate than a cow, but is more docile than a buffalo.

It makes sense why it is so difficult to draw the lines between the more than 300 different species of ducks, geese and swans.

And why some salamander groups that migrate into dark caves lose their eyesight after several hundred generations, but develop other features that their surface-dwelling cousins do not posses – like the ability to detect prey by vibrations in the water.

Now it makes sense to me – why we humans are so fond of monkeys and why we look so much like all the other primates – to whom we are so closely related.

It makes sense how we became intelligent bipeds – because geological events on earth created an environment where standing upright worked to the advantage of a group of apes in the newly parched African savanna. But you know what doesn’t make sense to me now? Star Trek.

So curse you Charles Darwin! You freaking ruined Star Trek for me. That was my favorite show you heartless monster!