Posted on 06/25/2007 5:18:09 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
Right from the get-go, there on a sign at the entrance to the Evolution exhibit at the Field Museum, real science takes a stand:
"Evolution is one of science's best-supported theories."
Perfect. A profound truth flatly stated, without a hint of equivocation.
Why this pleases me so much, I'm not sure. What did I expect from one of the world's great natural science museums? A diorama of Adam and Eve tossing Frisbees to dinosaurs?
Evolution is, to be sure, one of science's most solid theories, right up there with the theory of gravity, and about this there is zero controversy -- among scientists.
But step outside the realm of real science and rational thought -- step instead into that parallel world of pseudo-science and faith before reason -- and you might pick up a different impression.
You might even come to believe, swayed by the junk science and misinformation of religiously motivated critics, that evolution is one absurdly crazy idea -- c'mon, men from monkeys?
You'd be wrong, of course. You'd be on the same side of history as the biblical literalists who mocked Copernicus and Galileo for saying the Earth revolves around the sun.
But what the heck. You could still be president.
George Bush himself says the study of Intelligent Design (biblical creationism dressed in a borrowed lab jacket) has a place in science classrooms.
I've often wondered about that. Is the president pandering to the religious right? Could be. Or is he just profoundly ignorant for a Yale boy? Also entirely possible.
And then there was that debate on TV a couple of weeks ago among the nine men running for the Republican nomination for president. When the moderator asked them to raise their hands if they ''didn't believe in evolution," three hands went up -- Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado.
I was stunned. I was mortified.
I turned to my son and shook my head and said: "Jesus. ..."
Next time those three bright boys come through Chicago, they had better visit the Field Museum.
Look for natural explanations "We're a natural history museum -- we're not a seminary, we're not a religious organization," said Lance Grande, senior vice president and head of collections and research at the Field Museum. "Our job is to look for natural explanations for complex phenomena." Grande was walking me through the museum's new Darwin exhibit, which runs through the end of the year, and the museum's permanent Evolution exhibit. Both shows represent an effort by the museum to champion the scientific foundations of evolution -- natural selection and genetics -- at a time when evolution is under political and religious assault.
Polls show that at least 40 percent of Americans reject evolution, believing that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.
But Grande said he doubts that most people have seriously thought the issue through.
"There's a huge number of the population that really doesn't care," he said. "So they go to a spiritual adviser. It's not as though they've looked at the evidence and decided evolution is wrong."
All the same, I said, the Field Museum must have anticipated a backlash when it mounted its Evolution and Darwin exhibits.
Grande nodded. "Let me show you something," he said.
Debating an ID man Back in his office, Grande printed out a remarkable 10-page document that, until now, he'd shown only to colleagues. It was a copy of a debate he had carried on by e-mail for about a week in fall 2005 with a defender of Intelligent Design. Scientists are usually loath to debate the Intelligent Design crowd, largely because it's impossible to reason with zealots. But this particular man, a retired elementary school science teacher back East, struck Grande as thoughtful, earnest and -- perhaps best of all -- cordial.
The teacher, whom Grande asked me not to name or quote directly, offered the central ID concept of "irreducible complexity" -- the idea that some things found in nature, such as the human eye, are simply too perfect, too complex, and composed of too many otherwise useless parts to have evolved from anything else. The entire eye could only have been "designed" all at once by an "intelligent" force. You know, like maybe God.
Grande's reply was to point out that every time proponents of ID resolve a mystery of nature by crediting an "intelligent designer," they create a scientific "dead end."
"We already know that there is a theological explanation available for any unresolved question about nature. But that is not science," he wrote. "In science, we need to investigate what needs investigating, not what we have given up on by considering it unexplainable by natural causes. ... Once something is accepted as of divine origin, it is no longer an issue of science. It has become something else."
To another argument made by the teacher -- that the personal religious convictions of many famous scientists over the centuries means God has a place in science -- Grande replied: "Just because religion has been accepted by various scientists through history, this does not make science out of religion. It only means that in addition to having an interest in science, many scientists have also had religious beliefs."
And that, in fact, was Grande's overarching message in the e-mail debate: Science is science, and religion is religion. They are not necessarily in conflict but belong in different realms.
"Even in schools where religion is taught," he wrote, "religion should be taught in religion classes and science should be taught in science classes, and comparisons of the two are a job for philosophy classes."
Evolution predicts the future Darwin's theory of evolution explains and organizes much of what has come before. But like all established theories in science, it also has predictive powers -- it can tell us what comes next. Scientists are hard at work on a vaccine for avian flu, for example, because they can confidently predict it's just a matter of time before the deadly virus mutates -- a form of evolution -- and jumps species from birds to humans.
"The theory of evolution," Grande says, "benefits a society interested in improving."
Tom McNamee's "The Chicago Way" column runs Mondays.
mailto:tmcnamee@suntimes.com
I wonder where the Bible says that the Earth is the center of the universe? That inane statement makes the rest of his article worthless.
Everything we perceive requires some form of faith. So what distinguishes evolution from creation must be the belief systems. Perhaps you could tell us something about the differences between the two belief systems.
Absolutely.
It is a new species. Two populations belong to different species if they cannot successfully interbreed. These underground mosquitoes cannot interbreed with their aboveground relatives. New species.
Oops, sorry. It's Monday and I'm under-caffinated.
Thank you for the link regarding the mosquito. I will research it, am actually interested in this as opposed to axe grinding. Off the top of my head the main questions if this is a different species, as opposed to a micro-evolution, would be a) was this seperate species in existence before it took up in the London underground? b) if not was the speciation from loss of genetic material rather than gain or change (devolution rather than evolution)? c) if not, does it never breed with the non-molestus main species? From what I’ve read so far, in North America the Culex Pippiens group has hybridized, which indicates that the London molestus group may not be truly speciated . . . that it is only a subgroup of the larger species. It is probably very hard to breed a chihuahua with a Rottweiler but they are the same species.
If it truly is a different species I think that the 1st question (did the species exist before it was “discovered” in the London underground) is probably the hard one to overcome for the evolutionary theorist — simple proof of speciation in this instance would be hard to come by.
Any article written by any scientist discussing the “Cambrian Explosion” (google those words) uses the term
“sudden appearance”.
Yep, they just “suddenly appeared” through “evolution”.
Liu, R.; Ochman, H. "Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 2007, 104, 7116.
Cannot or don't.
2)"Theistic evolutionists" contradict themselves when they say that evolution does not exclude G-d but that evolution was not Divinely guided (which is all that ID really says). If Divine guidance of evolution is "creationism dressed in different clothes," then evolution excludes G-d. So why claim otherwise? Unless one is congenitally dishonest, that is. And the argument that a Divine hand guiding evolution will one day be made unnecessary by new knowledge most certainly renders the arguer unqualified to insist that "evolution does not exclude G-d."
3)These people who mock "creationists" are very, very careful about which creationists they choose to mock. These people are perfectly willing to respect and "live and let live" when it comes to Black Baptists, Orthodox Jews, or (goodness knows!) "indigenous pipples." After all, the eighteenth century "enlightenment" gave us the "noble savage," didn't it? No, since religious fundamentalism is a common denominator to all these groups but only one is consistently ridiculed and told to give up their religious beliefs and cling to "reason," then we know scientifically that religious fundamentalism is not the reason this one group is always singled out. And that's a theory about how the world works, not about something that once happened.
Actually, speciation is not clear here.
From the article you cited on the mosquito:
“In the light of these differences it is not surprising that some authorities have regarded the subterranean form as a distinct species C. molestus (Miles, 1977a,b; Miles & Patterson, 1979). On the other hand, many authors maintain that the pipiens and molestus forms are the same species, with any differences being purely physiological variation (e.g. Harbach et al., 1984). Between these two extremes are those who consider them as subspecies or semispecies (e.g. Urbanelli et al., 1981; Bullini, 1982). In this study no assumptions have been made about the taxonomic status of the two types of Culex. The terms pipiens and molestus form will be used to distinguish populations on the basis of the traits set out in Table 1.”
So this paper doesn’t prove speciation, it specifically says that speciation is not addressed and is debated. No proof of creation of one species from another. Do you have proof of one species becoming another species?
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As opposed to "God did it?"
Both the theistic and anti-theistic positions are matters of faith, and do not belong in a science classroom.
Dogs evolved from wolves. They are now separate species. It’s a fact, not a theory.
The term "Cambrian Explosion" is falling by the wayside as we find out it really wasn't an explosion after all, any more than there was a "Permian Explosion" of mammal-like reptiles or a "Cretaceous Explosion" of dinosaurs or a "Tertiary Explosion" of mammals. The Cambrian organisms had their roots in Precambrian organisms--the impression Creationists give is that there was no life before the Cambrian.
The Cambrian is interesting because of the innovation in body plans in larger metazoans than had been present before. There are a variety of reasons for this. Increasing oxygen concentration may have allowed larger organisms to develop. The Hox genes which control body patterning appeared about this time. The success of one type of organism in increasing body size could have triggered the evolution of more larger organisms by providing a large prey source to munch on.
The other myth creationists have is that most modern phyla popped into existence, as if one day there was nothing and the next day modern sponges, clams, and crabs. This is not the case. Many modern phyla did have their roots in the Cambrian, but the first Cambrian organisms are difficult to classify. Many have traits that might place them into multiple phyla (can you imagine looking at a modern organism and wondering whether it's a worm, an arthropod, or a mollusc?) This is because the modern phyla share a common ancestor in one of these strange Cambrian creatures, so in the earliest organisms we see mixed traits from both phyla. Populations descended from these organisms would have evolved along their own lines and lost some ancestral traits while adding new ones. So the first Cambrian organisms are what we would call "stem group" organisms (an ancestral group that shares diagnostic traits with a modern phylum while also having traits that don't match), while their eventual descendants that are in the modern phylum are called "crown group" organisms.
When we study the Cambrian organisms we see that in the early Cambrian there are many enigmatic organisms, while the late Cambrian organisms millions of years later have begun to evolve along separate lines and are much easier to classify into modern phyla.
The evolutionary process in the Cambrian took place over millions of years and is consistent with evolutionary theory.
I think it’s pretty ironic.
And then there’s that pesky Survival Of The Fittest premise: How, exactly, is a lizard {destined to be a bird in a few hundred million years} which is dragging around its stubby “pre-wings” which are no damn good for flying yet but, oh, so cumbersome when trying to slither through cracks in rocks to ESCAPE ITS NATURAL PREDATORS, supposed to be more fit to survive than its non-mutant brothers & sisters?
So yes, I do have proof, and there it is.
You could poll any of the feathered dinosaurs to find that out.
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