On the day most of us think of as President Lincoln’s birthday, well-known local author and naturalist Robert Michael Pyle makes a habit of commemorating another famous historical figure.

“I hope you will all remember to honor Charles Darwin as well as Honest Abe on Feb. 12,” Pyle told the Columbia Forum audience Monday night at the Seafood Consumer Center. Sporting a Darwin finger puppet in his lapel and with a portrait of the bearded scientist who came up with the theory of evolution displayed on an easel, Pyle launched into a talk titled “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Darwin.”

He said Darwin, whose 200th birthday is just two years away, was not only the father of modern evolutionary science, but also a great naturalist and the inspiration for his own scientific career.

Calling evolution the most important idea in modern science, Pyle said the scientific edifice built by Darwin is based on the “clear, crystalline organizing principle of natural selection.”

A series about Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle published in Life magazine in the late 1950s sparked Pyle’s lifelong interest in the scientist’s life and work. When he announced plans to turn his bedroom into a laboratory full of specimens, like Darwin’s house in Kent, England, his father gave him a copy of “The Origin of Species” instead.

Pyle went on to earn a master’s degree in nature interpretation from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He is a popular lecturer and teacher and the author of a dozen books, most recently “Sky Time in Gray’s River,” about the flora and fauna of his home in southwestern Washington and the rural lifestyle he cherishes.

Pyle studied in England, walking in the footsteps of his hero, visiting Darwin’s house in Kent with the specimen-filled study he had read about in Life.

Over the years, he has accumulated a “trove of Darwiniana.” His understanding of the man keeps growing. “I have yards of Darwin on my bookshelves,” Pyle said.

Darwin started working on “The Origin of Species” in 1838. When the book was finally published in 1859, it was received with both excitement and fire,” Pyle said. Critics included Bishop Wilberforce, the first major religious figure to ridicule the idea that humans and monkeys are related, but definitely not the last.

“Today, the nay-saying has descended into demagoguery, Pyle said. “It’s got to a ludicrous state in our culture.”

He said “the silliness crested” in this country in 1925 at the Scopes Monkey Trial, which put a high school teacher on trial for teaching evolution in the classroom. At that time, Pres. Woodrow Wilson testified that of course, like any educated man, he believed in organic evolution, Pyle said.

The “silliness” recently resurfaced in Kansas, Texas and even Naselle, Wash., where the school system once brought in a speaker from the Creation Institute. And lately, Pyle said, the Dark Ages have reared up in the guise of “Intelligent Design.” It was a concept Darwin himself wanted to embrace. Pyle said until late in life, Darwin wanted to accept a benevolent designer, but knowing what he did intellectually, he could not.

After his talk Monday, Pyle said about 75 percent of Americans have serious doubts about evolution. “That’s like saying 75 percent of people have serious doubts about gravity. So it’s an appalling statistic, in my view,” Pyle said. And he blamed it on the rise of fundamentalist Christianity and the decline in leadership at every level.

“We have so many school board members and legislators right up to the president, who are ignorant of one of the basic laws of nature,” Pyle said. “And we now have a president, one of at least two recent presidents, who is a creationist. Bush and Reagan are not only creationists, they’re Armageddonists.”

Noting that The Daily Astorian and Chinook Observer’s recent poll showed many area residents favor a liquefied natural gas facility in the Astoria area, Pyle said democracy doesn’t change facts.

“I wanted to make the connection that because 75 percent of people have serious doubts about evolution, that doesn’t mean that evolution is three-quarters open to doubt. The fact that half the people support LNG does not imply that it’s half desirable or that it’s half right or half wrong. It doesn’t say one or the other. What it says is, in my opinion, is that half the people are inadequately informed, as roughly three-quarters of the people are about evolution,” Pyle said.

Pyle warned of possibly drastic results if the health of the Columbia River is not preserved. “Natural selection still does operate in our time … and if we continue to diminish the diversity and stability of the Columbia River ecosystem, natural selection will take care of the rest. In the long run some animals will evolve to be able to deal with our insults and others will not. Frankly, I think we will be one of the species that does not,” Pyle said.

KMUN will broadcast the talk at 7 p.m. Feb. 25.