Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin, 200 years old today. The CBC's brilliant and interesting Michael Enright had a chat with Darwin's great-great granddaughter, Ruth Padel, from London, U.K., on his Sunday Edition last Sunday. She is a writer, poet and scientist in her own right. She has recently published a collection of poetry that is a biography of her famous predecessor.

They chatted about his life and his work, and, more importantly perhaps, the controversy his findings and theories created and are still inspiring. The basis, really, for objections to Darwin's theory of evolution is the idea that Mighty Man could be descended from the "lower mammals".

Hmmm. Let's see now. Every other animal on earth, whether winged, earth-bound or water-dwelling, bar man, lives in harmony with its surroundings.

They fight with each other but not in gangs; they build shelters but not in conflict with nature; they have hierarchies but no bureaucracy. They feed themselves but not to the extinction of other species, eating only what is good for them and only what they need.

The members of our society who would apply a strictly literal interpretation to the Bible come into stone-wall denial with the scientists and vice-versa. Creationism to one side, though, the human virtue that apparently elevates us above and divorces us from the lower orders is our affinity with the divine or spiritual world. This too, no matter how loosely defined, is also denied by most scientists.

The problem is magic. And love. And why bumblebees can fly when science says they can't. And what really happens during pregnancy.

The problem is the inexplicable and, however hard-nosed the theoretician, some of that is going to stay unexplained. Nowadays, there is a positive resurgence of interest in the unexplained. There has been a recent flurry of testimonies about the "Third Man", an unseen presence coming to the aid of a person at risk or potentially so. Naturally, the scientists rush in with rationale about the mind's working overtime to find a solution. None of them experienced the phenomena. Rational explanations are easy from a distance; harder in the empirical moment.

My daughter claims — and I agree with her completely — that everything loves. It is not merely a connection with being fed that causes your puppy to welcome you home so warmly; it is not mere warmth that causes two cats to wash each other and sleep so snugly together; it is not simple habit that keeps a pair of birds (in the wild) together for life.

If this is true, who is to say for definite, who is going to prove, that animals do not also have a spiritual life? They do not build churches, but they do not build high rises either. They do gather together; they mourn death; they clearly ruminate. Who is going to prove that there is no spiritual content in much of their behaviour?

And who is to say that we have the monopoly on definitions? We have not spent the time or perhaps we are just not smart enough to communicate with the other animals of this world, although we have finally conceded, on some levels, that they do have languages. Within those languages, within those understandings, which are outside our comprehension, there may very well be spirituality, a nod to the divine, a higher form of connection than simple vocal or body language.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" the saying goes. This is us now. We have a very little knowledge, for all our bluster, of life around us. We prefer, and always have, our ignorance, our darkness. It is easy to be ignorant; it feels warm in the dark.

Real knowledge and learning can only come with this admission. It is only by confessing our radical rashness and stupidity that we can enter a new day. As long as we destroy to create; as long as war and greed are our answers to everything, we will continue to live in this Dark Age. As long as the cheapest, easiest and most mindless commodities are what please us, we will carry on with our current decline.

There are plenty of voices in the wilderness calling to us as a planet to wake up and come out of the dark depths of the universal degradation in which we exist. Is it all too much effort to live in the sun or shall we, as a species, simply die like the cancer patient who has had too much toxic treatment?

Can our young people take up the revolution? Or do they have their heads buried too deeply in the silly toys we have given them to distract from our terrible truths?