Words &c.

The Ashland Daily Tidings, the primary non-university local newspaper here, has a poll up for Darwin Week (February 12th being his 200th birthday). It's admirable that they've taken notice of it, but there's a couple things wrong with the poll.

Whose ideas on the origin of life do you ascribe to?
Buddha
Darwin
Jesus
Moses
Muhammed
Other

First and foremost: Darwin is not the source of modern science's ideas on the origin of life (and given the limitations of 19th century biology, not a lot of people were postulating upon that question outside religion), and are not the be all and end all of evolutionary theory (despite what Ray Comfort might have you believe). Science has advanced quite a lot in the last 150 years since the publication of the Origin of Species (and it is 150 this year!).

Secondly: None of the others here have anything to do with the origin of life. It seems whoever came up with the poll took the major religions that popped into their head (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) and their main holy figures, forgetting that the Abrahamic religions all have the same creation myth, and as far as I know most sects of Buddhism don't really touch on the origin of life (being more concerned with escaping it).

This wouldn't be much of a deal if this was a small town paper in somewhere like Yreka, but this is a university town. Whoever wrote the poll could have cleared up a lot of their own confusion by walking outside and asking a few strangers, much less taking ten minutes to call a professor here. There's also this "internet" thing I've been hearing about, they maybe could've used that too.

I know it's just a meaningless internet poll on a tiny newspaper's website, but come on, try a little.