Dear Concerned Defender of Science,

Please e-mail the two researchers listed below. They helped discover new elements on the Periodic Table of the Elements that are not yet named, and hence have the right to help name them. Please ask them to name a new, not-yet-named chemical element on the Periodic Table of the Elements after Charles Darwin. Feel free to use the arguments and talking points below that I wrote up, if you want to. Please use any of your own arguments that you think of as well. It is important to add your personal thoughts, since this note is going to many people who will act on it, and it will be more effective if the researchers do not get the same cloned letter, but receive a variety of ways of expressing the wish for an element named for Darwin.
The researchers and their e-mails are:

Dr. Ken Moody moody3@llnl.gov

Nancy Stoyer stoyer2@llnl.gov

By the way, llnl stands for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where they work. Check the e-mail address carefully to make sure it is correct when you e-mail them. Thank you very much for your help on this important issue.

Sincerely yours,
David Seaborg
 

Dr Moody looks on the idea with favor, but requests no more communication on this subject. Both point out that "naming rights" have not been granted to anyone (as of May 2007) so email at this time may be more annoying than productive. — website mgr.

Why We Should Name a Chemical Element on the Periodic Table After Charles Darwin
— by David Seaborg

1. Elements are named today after only by a small group of chemists and physicists who work on discovering new chemical elements, and only for a small group of such scientists. The small group names elements only after those in the small group. They are great scientists, but not the best in history. There is a need to honor history's greatest scientists. Of the three greatest scientists in history, only Albert Einstein has an element named for him. The other two, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, do not. Darwin is also the greatest biologist ever. So one of the three greatest scientists, and the greatest biologist, in history, Charles Darwin, has no chemical element named for him. In fact, it is far worse: No biologist has an element named after him, a clear demonstration that the process of naming chemical elements is far too parochial. This is also unfair, cheapens the naming of any element after any given person, and calls into question the objectivity of the process.

2. Naming an element for Darwin will help in the debate in the U. S. on evolution vs. creationism. There is an assault on science in the U. S. by religious fundamentalists, who want to stop the teaching of evolution in public schools, or give creationism equal time, and re-write textbooks to favor creationism or make it equal to evolution. All of this would be a disaster for science and education in this country. If the prestige of a name of an element on the Periodic Table were given to the scientist who originated the theory of evolution by natural selection and gathered the evidence that convinced the scientific world of its validity, this would strike a blow for science and evolution against superstition and creationism in this debate. This argument should be especially appealing to the Russian scientists who have a part in naming newly discovered elements.

3. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is the only scientific breakthrough that caused a paradigm shift in two ways. Every major scientific breakthrough has produced a paradigm shift in our thinking in one of two ways, with the exception of evolution. The first way is making the human and God less important and central, as Copernicus' heliocentric solar system, which took the earth and thus humans out of the center of the solar system, and refuted the teachings of the church, lowering the importance of a God. The other paradigm shift is showing everything is deeply interconnected, as quantum physics did, with its non-objectivity and non-locality, which show that consciousness and particles can influence particles that are far away with no lapse of time, showing the deep interrelatedness of all parts and entities of and in the Universe. Evolution has the lessening of the importance of humans and God, since the human is brought down from a special being with a soul and apart from and above the animals to merely an another animal, albeit with a special adaptation, intelligence. Natural processes replace the Genesis story of creation six thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden, diminishing the importance of God. But the theory is unique in that it also shows the profound interrelatedness of all phenomena, since it shows all organisms descended from one or a few common ancestors, so are all related. We are brother to the tiger, cousin to the plant. And all evolve by the same law of natural selection. Hence, Darwin 's theory of evolution is the only big scientific insight that led to a paradigm shift in both of the two major areas of paradigm shift that scientific breakthroughs lead to.

4. Add any other ideas that you think of yourself—that is, please think, then add your own ideas. I repeat: It is important to add your personal thoughts, since this note is going to many people who will act on it, and it will be more effective if the researchers do not get the same cloned letter, but receive a variety of ways of expressing the wish for an element named for Darwin.