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
Nope. Both dogs and wolves are in the species Canis Lupus and can interbreed. There is no proven speciation, one species from another, that I’ve ever seen . . .
Does the molestus subgroup in London interbreed with the molestus subgroups not in London? If so it is the same species. Then if it is the same species, and that species interbreeds with pipiens, the two species are one. The molestus subgroup is just hard to breed with pipiens, as I said earlier, the chihuahua and the wolf . . . not an easy mating, but same species.
Get back to me when that program writes itself without any input from you whatsoever. Thanks!
Still mosquito (sp?) isn’t it?
“attacked to regularly by people who offer even less evidence supporing their own theory.”
The TOE stands on its own. It matters not how much evidence anyone else offers for their own theory.
But my parents had a chihuahua that would’ve loved to give it a try!
They'd have to find a different species of Bible. LOL!
Really? No support?
This is a little off-topic but I always found that to be an interesting story: from what I understand, early dogs were wolves who, for some reason, were friendly to humans. And the cavemen knew enough to drive off the hostile wolves and keep the friendly ones around and breed them to make hunting partners. I still marvel, when I look at my old dog (half-shepherd, half-collie), that this at times ferocious-looking animal is safe to keep in the house.
Nobody actually uses the TOE except as a topic of dinner debate.
I'm not sure what this question asks. Before colonizing underground the ancestral species was C. pipiens, an above-ground mosquito species that feeds chiefly on birds. This species colonized the subway and was selected for a suite of characteristics such as feeding on mammals, laying eggs without a blood meal, breeding in enclosed spaces, and year-round activity.
It is difficult to say exactly what genetic changes occurred. You ask "was the speciation from loss of genetic material rather than gain or change". The major creationists are always going on about "information" (never defined) and about gain and loss of such. In actuality most of the change that occurs during speciation involves gene regulation, so change is the rule. Addition and deletion of genes (which as far as I can tell is what the creationists mean by "information", except when they're talking about alleles (alternative sequences for a gene)) is a rare event. Our genes are extremely similar to chimpanzee genes in sequence, the reason we look so different is because of when these genes are turned on, for how long, and when they are turned off.
The London C. molestus population is incapable of interbreeding with C. pipiens. As I mentioned in a post to someone else, C. pipiens seems amenable to forming the underground phenotype in other areas, but in these places the two populations can still interbreed.
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
Genetic studies show that is is most closely related to C. pipiens of the area, and have ruled out colonization of the subways by C. molestus subtypes transported from somewhere else. It came from C. pipiens, that's a done deal.
Please see #53.
From what I've seen so far in this thread, sarcasm is the main supporting "proof" of evolutionary theory. I've never debated it before, so it's my first foray into this, but the only proof of speciation offered so far in this thread of evolutionary theory is an article on a London mosquito, but in the same article cited for proof of speciation, the authors declare that no position on speciation is taken and give citations to those who dispute that speciation occurred.
No proof, just a feeling of superiority based on faith in a commonly believed in theory. 150 years of Darwin and not a single example of a species arising from another species. That's a long, long time for such a heavily researched area of science to have no proof.
See #79.
Ah,#82, sorry.
Yes. Many.
Natural selection is no more random than water flowing downhill rather than up.
It is an interesting topic. One idea is that the wolves sort of domesticated themselves. Some would have hung around human populations and eaten leftover food, bones, and hide. This would have placed selection on the wolves for a shorter flight distance, the distance at which they would allow a human to approach before running away. Wolves that spent all of their time running away wouldn’t have been very successful in this strategy. Humans probably contributed by killing aggressive wolves that threatened their children. Over time humans would have captured some of these semi-domesticated wolf pups and started selectively breeding them.
You say that there are many proofs of one species arising from another, but I’ve never seen one.
If my memory serves, didn’t Darwin once explicitly lay down proving or disproving his theory as a challenge to future scientists?
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