Expelled

[Trav]

I hate to say it Kido, but you make a valid point. Maybe a bit narrow to say that all good moral leads back to JC but adherently we are all taught good from someplace. For most it is from thier parents. And they learned from thiers, and they learned from thiers, ect, ect.

Over generations of social upbringing, religion and a so called after-life for the good doers has been a mainstay of what people were taught. A reward so to speak for taking the good path instead of following what is natural to the human species wich is to be opportunistic, greedy, and, selfish.

I think the past is what links the religious sheep to thier beliefs. It is a social tendacy to conform that drives. It shouldnt be that "my Dad was a Jew so I am too", it should be "I choose my own way and will to be a better person". But for most they need the crutch/cloud of religion to do good or their weak moral will give in to the dark side. You cant even do a 12 step-program until you convert your will to a higher power. That higher power being your"will". I find it all insane to disillusion yourself to be better, but for alot of people they are too weak without the smoke and mirrors.

Anyway, I stray. I just wanted to say that Kido is right that we are all taught by someone to be good and that someone may have been taught by someone that may have followed the teachings of some 3000 year old text. Wich, in part might be of some religious values checks and balances.

Yet I remind you Kido, that we are evolving everyday. Further and further from the teachings of our ancestors. I think that is the point Al will agree on. People who dont belive in evolution cant see the evolution thats right in front of them. Think of the advances the human race has made in just the last century. If that isnt evolution then what is? If we seen horses start to shoe themselves we would say they were evolving. Wouldnt we?

[Phil Lilley]

"Evidence That Demands a Verdict" by Josh McDowell - a good read..... If you have the guts!!!!!!!!!

This statement is way over the top. Let's keep it respectable please. I think especially Al, and everyone else, has shown respect for each others beliefs in this discussion.

[Trav]

Phil

Maybe its because I dont read literature I see as "opinion" not related to mine, But I dont see the comment as "over the top" so much as it is a dare to read said literature.

Its like saying..."read Mien Komf...if your not scared"

or "read I Ching.... if your man enough"

or "read Dianetics....if your not too stupid"

or "read the Hebrew Bible.....if your Jew enough."

Literature is just text and if it isnt factual it is fiction. Facts can be proven and disproven. Fiction distorted into fact is for sale everyday via the National Enquirer. And it is no dispute that alot of people "have the guts" to read that.

[Trav]

Charles Darwin

by Doug Linder (2004)

Charles Darwin might have spent his life quoting Genesis rather than studying speciation had it not been for his friendship with a professor of botany at Cambridge, John Stevens Henslow. Two years into his training for the Holy Orders, Darwin fell under the wing of Professor Henslow. The two men frequently strolled the campus together, prompting dons to call Darwin “the man who walks with Henslow.” Darwin later recalled that his mentor’s “strongest taste was to draw conclusions from long-continued minute observations.” In 1831, when Henslow received a call from Admiralty asking whom he could recommend as a naturalist on a voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle to map the South American coastline, he identified his favorite pupil. Darwin’s father at first fought the idea, preferring that his playboy, dog-loving, “rat-catching” son stick on the road to the clergy. Eventually, however, he relented—perhaps persuaded by the argument of Charles’s uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, that “the pursuit of natural history, though certainly not professional, is very suitable to a clergyman.” (DB, 466-67)

Over the course of Darwin’s five-year voyage on the Beagle he became a different person. Writing late in life, Darwin remarked, “Looking backwards, I can now perceive how my love for science gradually preponderated over every other taste.” (CD, 78) He came, as he put it, to discover “the pleasure of observing and reasoning.” (CD,79) His love of close observation, coupled with a desire to come up with a theory for everything, lay at the heart of his genius. Previously, the world had seen many great fact-gatherers and many others adept at theorizing, what it had never seen before was a biologist who combined both these skills and who could present to the world a powerful and encompassing vision of the development of life on earth.

Darwin’s theory did not, contrary to popular opinion, suddenly pop into his head as he observed differences in the beaks of Galapagos finches. His thoughts on the origins of species developed slowly. For one thing, his understanding of the age of earth made any theory such as natural selection seem impossible. Prior to a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa with esteemed geologist Sir John Herschel in June 1836, near the end of the Beagle’s voyage, Darwin shared the popular view that Bishop Ussher’s chronology was essentially correct. “As far as I know everyone has yet thought that six thousand odd years has been about the right period,” he wrote in a letter to his sister, “but Sir J. thinks that a far greater number must have passed”—and clearly Darwin soon thought Herschel had it right.

The great notion of how selection—for centuries understood in the context of engineering plants and livestock—might apply in the wild came two years after Darwin’s return to England. He recalled later that inspiration stuck in October 1838 when he was reading “for amusement ‘Malthus on Population.’” Writing of the event, he said: “It at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable one to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.” (DBD, 469) Malthus’s work demonstrated how, unchecked, populations could soar to astronomical levels over just a few generations. Darwin grasped how, in nature, disease, predation, and weather events conspire—over the long run—to favor those variations of a species that provided even modest defenses against the grim reaper. As Darwin observed, even a “trifling difference” can “which shall survive and which perish.” Those with the right chance adaptations survive to breed and pass along their new trait, while those that lack the adaptation perish without offspring. (Hux, 245) Over the next several years, the great naturalist expanded his ideas on speciation through natural selection into a 230-page abstract. Then, remarkably, he let his revolutionary work gather dust for fourteen years while he raised a family and tended to other scientific studies. (BB, 383-85)

A letter from a young naturalist in 1858 finally spurred Darwin to publish his theory. The letter came from a friend of his, Alfred Russell Wallace. Wallace laid out a draft of his own ideas on the subject of the origin of species. Darwin quickly that Wallace’s ideas bore a striking resemblance to his own. “If Wallace had my manuscript sketch,” Darwin wrote, “he could not have made a better short abstract.” (BB, 386)

Darwin found Wallace’s letter strangely bothersome. Ideas that he developed only through years of careful and plodding work came to his young friend in a single insightful flash. It hardly seemed fair. Nonetheless, Darwin recognized Wallace’s contribution.

On July 1, 1858, Darwin buried his retarded eighteen month-old son, who succumbed to scarlet fever. That same day, the theory of evolution was announced to the world—or, more accurately, thirty or so persons at a meeting of the Linnaean Society. The paper bore the names of both Darwin and Wallace. Wallace, for his part, generously referred to the theory forever afterwards as “Darwinism.”

The sketches and essays of Darwin and Wallace, which filled seventeen pages of the Linnaean Society’s 1858 journal, in the words of Darwin, “excited very little attention.” He recalled later that the only published response provoked by the papers came from a Dublin professor “whose verdict was that all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old.” (DB, 469-470) At the end of the year, Thomas Bell, the president of the Society, noted, “The year which has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize…the department of science on which they bear.” (DB, 464-65)

Darwin fretted whether his editor, John Murray, might find his ideas too unorthodox to be published. He asked a scientist-friend whether he should point out that he did not “bring in any discussion about Genesis…and only give facts” or whether it would be wiser to “say nothing to Murray” in the hopes that he will not fully grasp how revolutionary his work truly was. He needn’t have worried; Murray decided to publish after reading only the chapter titles. (DB, 474-75)

Darwin’s work on evolution, called Origin of Species, was published in London in November 1859. His editor, skeptical of the level of interest in such a theory, encouraged him to write next time about another interest of Darwin’s: pigeons. “Everyone is interested in pigeons,” he assured him. Despite his editor’s reservations, the first printing of 1,250 copies sold out on the first day, and the book has remained in print ever since. (BB, 380-81)

Nowhere in the first edition of Origin of Species does the word “evolution” appear. Instead, Darwin refers to his theory as “descent with modification.” Only in the sixth edition did Darwin, finally giving into widespread use of the term, substitute the term “evolution” for the phrase he favored. (BB, 384)

Critics soon began pointing to alleged problems with Darwin’s explanation for the emergence of new species. First, they argued that the earth was far too young to allow for the gradual evolution of species as Darwin proposed. By this time, thanks to the work of Buffon and others, scientists unanimously rejected Ussher’s estimate of a 6,000 year-old-earth. Nonetheless, they generally agreed that the earth must be only tens of millions of years old, not billions. Lord Kelvin, a respected applied mathematician of the day, had calculated that in about 24 million years a body the size of the sun would consume all its available fuel—and, it scarcely needed to be pointed out—the earth could not be older than the sun. A second difficulty with Darwin’s theory seemed to be the scarce fossil support. Scientists wondered why, if Darwin was right, there were not hundreds of (“transitional”) fossils representing “missing links” between species. (BB, 389-90)

Another criticism of his theory, however, gave Darwin more difficulty. Critics saw little chance that complicated organs such as the eye could have emerged gradually. They must, it was believed, be the work of an intelligent designer. Darwin seemed to admit to having doubts himself. He wrote, “It seems, I freely confess, absurd to the highest possible degree” that natural selection could produce such organs gradually. (BB, 390) Nevertheless, Darwin believed the theory could account for such things, given enough time. In Origin of Species, he speculated how an organ such as the eye might have developed, writing that "any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light" and that step could begin a process, "though insuperable to our imagination" that could lead to formation of "a perfect and complex eye...through natural selection." (Decades later, evolutionary biologists would take up the challenge of tracing the evolution of the eye. They would point out, for example, that the human eye shares many “quirky vestiges of extinct ancestors, such as a retina that appears to have been installed backwards.”) (SP,51)

Eventually, most scientists—if not laypersons—would see flaws in Kelvin’s calculations and transitional fossils would begin to appear. (Conveniently, one such fossil was discovered in 1861, just two years after publication of Origin of Species. It was an archaeopteryx, a creature that sharing features of both dinosaurs (teeth) and birds (feathers).) (BB, 389) Moreover, there gradually arose an appreciation of how difficult in was to become a fossil. Over 99.9% of all living things end up as decayed matter, and even the .1% that don’t are unlikely to be fossilized and then discovered.

Over time, the theory propounded by Darwin and Wallace became increasingly viewed as Darwin’s alone. Wallace’s interests veered off towards socialism, women’s rights, extra-terrestrials, and communication with the dead. (BB, 387-88) Most significantly, Wallace began to back off from the implications of his own theory. He concluded that the mind could not be a product of evolution, and could only be the design of a superior intelligence. He rejected the idea that man was subject to “the blind control of a deterministic world.” (SP, 28) Darwin expressed some misgivings about Wallace’s new spiritualism. In a letter to his old friend he wrote, “I hope you have not murdered too completely your and my own child.” (DB, 472)

In Origin of Species, Darwin kept his focus on explaining how new species emerged over time. He carefully avoided any discussion of the origin of humans. In 1871, however, Darwin made the connections between apes and humans explicit when he published his second great work on evolution, The Descent of Man. Darwin argued that his theory could account for the emergence of a species capable of self-conscious thought. The human brain evolved from the brains of extinct species, he concluded. The mind, despite all of the mysteries it held, was just the accidental outcome of random variations over time. Man’s “wonderful advancement,” according to Darwin, “largely depended” on the evolution of “articulate language,” not on any special programming added by a watchful creator. (R&L, 42)

To his critics, these ideas robbed man of his special place in the universe. The implications were profoundly troubling. Darwin made man the consequence of a series of improbable events. Our chances of being on this planet, his theory suggested, were remote in the extreme. Replay the universe a billion times, and in none of those replays would humans likely have emerged. A single break anywhere on the long chain that led to us—and there have been several periods of mass extinctions—and there would have been no human history.

In his last years, Darwin felt freed by evolving social attitudes toward religion to reveal an agnosticism that he had long kept hidden. Writing in 1879, he observed, “Nothing is more remarkable than the spread of skepticism or rationalism during the latter half of my life.” (CD,95) Reflecting on his years aboard the Beagle, Darwin described his religious views at the time as “quite orthodox.” (CD,85) He wrote, in an autobiography edited by his son Frank, “I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.” During the two years after his return to England, however, Darwin’s views on religion evolved. He came to see “that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted that the sacred books of the Hindus, or the beliefs of any barbarian.” (CD, 85) His loss of orthodoxy seemed to him a consequence of his greater understanding of science: “The more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become.” (CD, 86) Despite growing doubts about “Christianity as a divine revelation,” Darwin moved to agnosticism gradually and reluctantly. “Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but at last it was complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.” (CD, 86-87)

A famous argument for the existence of God left Darwin utterly unconvinced. In 1802, William Paley presented the “watchmaker” argument in the opening passage of Natural Theology: "In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there." Paley’s “common sense’ conclusion—there must have been a watchmaker—leads him to the obvious analogy: the marvelous designs of nature must have been the work of a Creator. As he argued in his popular book, "Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation."

Darwin wrote that Paley’s argument, which “formerly seemed to me so conclusive,” fails “now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue,” Darwin continued, “that, for instance, a beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man.” Darwin said natural selection persuaded him that “there is no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.” (CD, 87)

There is a hint in Darwin’s autobiography that he recognizes that a natural world governed solely by fixed laws loses some of its magic. He quoted how, in the journal he wrote while on the Beagle’s voyage, he had described the grandeur of a Brazilian rainforest: “It is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.” (CD, 91) Darwin remembered being filled with “conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” His understanding of natural selection and the passing years emptied this feeling. “But now,” he lamented, “the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in the my mind. It may truly be said that I am like a man who has become color-blind, and the universal belief by men of the existence of redness makes my present loss of perception of not the least value as evidence.” (CD, 91)

Darwin’s theory, by implication, suggested that evolution might also explain morality. Indeed, he saw in animals the types of empathy that underlie moral systems. (R&L, 41) A belief in God, he speculated, is “perhaps an inherited effect on [children’s] brains” and that it “would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of the snake.” (CD, 93) When Charles Darwin’s son, Frank, edited his father’s autobiography in 1885, the quoted portion of preceding line was one that prompted a concerned letter from Darwin’s wife, Emma Darwin, who had reviewed Frank’s compilation. She called it “the one sentence in the Autobiography which I very much wish to omit.” In part, she acknowledged, she objected to it because “your father’s opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me.” She complained that the sentence “gives one a sort of shock” and worried how readers might react to the equating of spiritual beliefs and “the fear of monkeys toward snakes.” (CD, 93n2) The sentence that so shocked his wife, is also, it turns out, one that goes to the heart of a controversy that remains heated to this day: Is there something in our epistemological make-up that makes us ask the God Question?

Charles Darwin understood better than anyone how his theory on the origin of new species threatened prevailing religious beliefs. He referred to himself as “the Devil’s Chaplain” and complained that publishing the theory felt “like confessing a murder.” He knew especially well how his ideas troubled his pious wife. (BB, 388)

Darwin’s view left no place for God--or so it seemed to those who would take up the fight against evolution. Morality, his religious critics would maintain, had to have a transcendent source or all was lost. (SP, 52) Not only would Darwin’s naturalizing of the mind attract the fire of Fundamentalists, but also many other religious leaders who accepted other aspects of his theory. For example, the Pope in 1996 acknowledged that evolution was “more than just an hypothesis,” but he insisted that evolution could not account for “the spiritual soul.” The spirit, he stated, could not develop “from forces of living matter.” Any theory that contends otherwise is not compatible “with the dignity of the person.” (SP, 186-87)

Shortly before Darwin died in 1882 and was buried in Westminister Abbey (next to Isaac Newton), he was visited by a young American studying in England, Henry Fairfield Osborn. Osborn would become, by the time of the Scopes trial, the nation’s leading paleontologist and expert on evolutionary biology. John Scopes traveled to see Osborn at the American Museum of History in New York when he visited the city to meet with ACLU officials coordinating his trial work. Osborn told Scopes of his earlier meeting with Darwin and said, “I was greatly inspired. Now you young men can see me, and I hope you’ll be equally inspired!” (GMT, 94) Osborn told Scopes that his wife’s illness would prevent him from traveling to Dayton for the trial, but he promised to secure a letter of support from Leonard Darwin, the great naturalist’s son and president of the Eugenics Education Society.

Osborn was true to his word, and Leonard Darwin sent his note of encouragement to John Scopes. Darwin congratulated Scopes on his “courageous effort to maintain the right to teach well established scientific theories.” Darwin told Scopes, “To state that which is true can not be irreligious.” He ended the letter with the words, “May the son of Charles Darwin send you in his own name one word of warm encouragement.” (GMT, 94-95)

[Trav]

Thomas Huxley

by Doug Linder (2004)

What paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called “the most famous story in all the hagiography of evolution” involved the person who also become the most important disciple of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Thomas Henry Huxley. The occasion was the June 30, 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, an event highlighted by the first prominent debate over the controversial new theory proposed the previous year by Darwin and Wallace. Seven hundred people jammed into the glass-roofed long west room at Oxford’s Zoological Museum, enticed by the prospect of hearing “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, the influential and eloquent bishop of Oxford, present his attack on evolution.

As Gould observes in an essay in Bully for Brontosaurus, the story of Wilberforce’s speech and Huxley’s rejoinder “has been enshrined among the half-dozen greatest legends of science,” ranking up there with Archimedes “jumping from his bath and shouting ‘Eureka’ through the streets” or Newton being “beaned by an apple.” (BfB, 386) As the story is generally told, the program got off to a contentious start when Bishop Wilberforce turned to Huxley and insisted that he state whether his relationship to apes came by way of his mother’s or his father’s side of the family. Huxley, when it came to reply, responded (as reported in an account he later approved for publication):

I asserted…that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with…success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real points at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. (BfB, 394)

Raucous laughter broke out after Huxley’s sharply worded response to Wilberforce. As the standard account goes, while emotions still roiled, Robert FitzRoy, Darwin’s former ship captain on the Beagle, roamed the halls, holding up a Bible and shouting to all within range, “The Book! The Book!” In fact, however, the evidence suggests that another pro-evolution speaker, botanist Joseph Hooker, took the podium after Huxley’s remarks and delivered a thoughtful argument for evolution, ending the meeting on a intellectually-exciting, though not especially chaotic, note. The stirring event left a public clamoring for repeat performances. When a friend suggested as much to Huxley at a party that evening, he replied, “Once in a lifetime is enough.” (Hux, 280)

The confrontation between Wilberforce and Huxley most likely was not so decisive a victory for evolution—if, indeed, it could be considered a victory at all—as is generally supposed. Wilberforce, in a letter written three days after the meeting wrote, “ had quite a long fight with Huxley. I think I thoroughly beat him.” Surprisingly, one of the few extant eyewitness accounts, by a scientist in attendance, agreed, writing, “I think the Bishop had the best of it.” (BfB, 389) The most accurate conclusion to be drawn of the famous meeting is that each side left claiming victory, much as sides would in Dayton sixty-five years later (BB, 393-94; DB, 476)

From this initial battle at Oxford, the brilliant Huxley would go on to become “the greatest popular spokesman for science in his century.” (BfB, 401) Although a first-rate zoologist (Huxley, for example, first proposed the dinosaur ancestry for birds and was England’s leading expert on reptile fossils), it is as a publicist for evolution that Huxley is best remembered.

Adrian Desmond, author of a masterful biography Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest, offered a variety of titles—many of them religiously-based—-for Huxley, all of them a testament to his influential role in promoting the theory of evolution: “the Apostle Paul of the New Teaching,” “a new Luther looking for a pulpit,” “rapier-wielding doubting Thomas,” “the materialist with a messianic streak,” “Darwin’s Rottweiler.” This skeptical man who coined the term “agnostic” and saw himself as the champion of science considered organized religion his enemy (he first employed the military metaphor “war” to describe the relationship). He fought with zeal, he fought effectively, and he spared no ammunition.

Desmond describes the major role played by Huxley in reshaping a society suddenly thrown into crisis by Darwin’s shattering theory:

He was born into an age of bishops in cauliflower wigs deliberating on God’s goodness in Nature. At the end he was riding a penny-farthing through a new world, lit by electricity and criss-crossed by telephone wires. He left a secular society probing human ancestry, a society led by intellectuals proudly wearing his ‘agnostic’ badge. (AD, xv)

Huxley surmounted his Dickensian background to become a new type of science celebrity. He drew overflowing crowds of laborers to hear him tell tales of an ancient earth roamed by dinosaurs and of pre-humans climbing down from the trees of Africa. He presented original arguments such as they have never heard: “Fossils that prove birds descended from dinosaurs—amazing!”

Huxley served as the diligent and unpaid marketer of the reclusive Darwin’s ideas. With his gift for words, Huxley’s essays on natural selection helped the theory of evolution gain new supporters. Nature picks the best of the struggling individuals of a species, he explained. They were “like the crew of a foundered ship, and none but the good swimmers have a chance of reaching land.” (Hux, 264) Darwin expressed admiration for his younger friend’s talents. “The old fogies will think the world will come to an end,” he wrote to Huxley after reading one of his popular essays on evolution. “I should have said that there was only one man in England who could have written this essay & that you were the man.” (Hux, 264) Where others balked at the startling Darwin’s startling conclusion that all species came from one primordial life form, or that man was as much a product of evolution as any other species, Huxley went the whole way. To Darwin, he was his “warmest and most important supporter.” (Hux, 267)

The darkest days for Huxley, just as for his friend Darwin, came in the days and weeks following the death of his young son, another victim of scarlet fever. When he received, in that dark fall of 1860, a consolatory letter for a Cambridge history professor, promising a reunion with his three-year old son in the hereafter, Huxley responded in moving words that might be the credo for any true lover of science. Suggesting to the history professor that he put away all prejudice and re-evaluate his belief in immortality, Huxley wrote: “Sit down before fact as a little child. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.” (Hux, 288)

In the years that followed, Huxley worked on his own study of evolution and carried his message about our ape-ancestry to the great unwashed. Crowd after crowd packed venues such as the great theater at Picadilly to hear Darwin’s magnetic disciple mix science with a little philosophy. Understanding our evolutionary background, Huxley told the mostly working class audience, is a check on “the arrogance of man,…admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust.” (Hux, 293) We rose from brutes, he said, but we are “assuredly not of them.” (Hux, 294) His lectures proved so popular, that enterprising audience members took shorthand notes and soon he found his words peddled in bootleg pamphlets on newsstands around London. “I regret that I did not publish them myself and turn an honest penny,” he complained. (Hux, 310)

In 1863, Huxley published Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. With its cover showing skeletonized man “tripping ahead of his ‘grim relatives’” (a procession of apes), it was the first work to address the controversial subject of human’s origins, and the public rushed to buy copies even at the high price of six shillings. Darwin expressed admiration for the “clearness and condensed vigor” of Huxley’s prose. Within a week, publishers rushed to print a second run. (Hux, 312-13) Critics of all sorts sprang forward to denounce Man’s Place for a variety of sins, including undermining the racist assumptions of the day and lowering mankind into a cesspool of “absolute materialism” and “atheism” from whose darkness the universe will seem “quite unintelligible.” (Hux, 320)

For the next three decades, Huxley campaigned, in his hard-edged and uncompromising style, for evolution as if there were to be an election between science and dogmatic religion, and that all of England would be voting. Voters must choose which side of the “great gulf fixed between science and theology” they were on: with the “anthropomorphism of theology” or “the passionless impersonality…which science shows everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena.” (SOG, 18) Huxley believed science could elevate the masses and provide the basis for a new and fairer morality. As Adrian Desmond observed, “Science in Huxley’s hand had a religious potency.” (Hux, 626) The title of his important 1869 collection of essays, Lay Sermons, suggests how he saw scientific thinking as the substitute for traditional easy answers to life’s central questions.

In July 1876, Huxley boarded the Germanic, a tramp sailing ship, for a seven-week passage across the Atlantic to the United States. Arriving in New York harbor on August 5, Huxley studied Manhattan’s skyline and observed, “Ah, that is American. In the Old World, the first things you see as you approach a great city are steeples; here you see…centers of intelligence.” (Hux, 470)

For the next six weeks of that Centennial Summer, Professor Protoplasm (as one American publication dubbed him) traveled more than 3,000 miles around the eastern half of the United States proselytizing for Darwinism. In one packed lecture hall after another, Huxley extolled evolution. Offers for additional lectures continued to pour in. His stops included Tennessee, where a half century later the Scopes trial would test the ideas he now presented to welcoming audiences. He hobnobbed with Tennessee’s Governor Porter and on the campus of Nashville’s new Methodist university, Vanderbilt, Huxley discovered that a bust in his likeness. A three-night run of lectures at Chickering Hall in New York City drew capacity audiences. As he told mesmerized audiences that fossil discoveries on the American plains proved evolution to be “a matter of fact,” he was backed by blown up photographs of chicken-sized dinosaurs and American fossil-toothed birds. A headline in the New York Herald after the first night’s lecture proclaimed, “The Gauntlet Thrown Down by Modern Science.” (Hux, 480) The Daily Graphic ran a full-cover cartoon of “Huxley Eikonoklastes” battering a statue of Moses. The Tribune issued a 10-cent commemorative issue containing the texts of Huxley’s New York speeches on the morning following his final lecture.

In addition to lecturing, Huxley took time to study American fossil collections and meet with leading American scientists. The Peabody fossil collection at Yale impressed Huxley mightily. He declared that seeing the Peabody’s Badlands fossils was alone “worth all the journey across.” (Hux, 471) He journeyed to the banks of the Connecticut River to study primeval three-toed tracks. A collection of fossil horses from the Nebraska hills convinced him that the modern horse had an American ancestry. The collection ranging from the fox-sided Orohippus to the pony-sized Pliohippus was, Huxley decided, “the most wonderful thing I ever saw.” (Hux, 473) He spoke at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and met with America’s leading evolutionists, including Harvard botanist Asa Gray, whose brand of evolution mixed with intelligent design elements that Huxley found strange. When Huxley set sail back for Europe in late September he had many Americans believing, in the words of Yale’s Othniel C. Marsh, “to doubt evolution…is to doubt science.” (Hux, 482) Darwinism had come of age.

Darwin’s admiration for his great disciple and friend continued to grow to the very end. “Huxley is the king of men,” Darwin wrote in a letter to an American friend. Students in Professor Huxley’s class at the Royal School of Mines were surprised one day to see Huxley enter the classroom with an older friend. “Darwin was instantly recognized by the class…and sent a thrill of curiosity down the room, for no one present had ever seen him before.” (Hux, 510) On March 27, 1882, Darwin wrote the last words in a thirty-year friendship to Huxley: “I wish to God there were more automata in the world like you.” (Hux, 519)

When word of Darwin’s death reached Huxley, he met with Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, to arrange a burial of “royal character” for the great naturalist. To do otherwise, Huxley argued, would be an historic mistake. “Fifty or one hundred years hence it would seem absolutely incredible to people that the state had in no way recognized his transcendent services to science,” he declared. (Hux, 520) Arrangements were in fact made, and Thomas Huxley was among the pallbearers who carried the coffin containing the agnostic’s body to the northeast corner of the nave of Westminister Abbey, where it was laid to rest next to the monument for Sir Isaac Newton. The Times reported on the chosen resting place for Darwin’s body, commenting, the “Abbey needed needed it more than it needed the Abbey.” (Hux, 521)

Huxley’s crusade for science transformed the world. The world he left in 1895 was far different than the one that existed when he began his career as a zoologist and publicist for Darwinism nearly a half century earlier. By the end of his life, the industrial and professional classes had been liberated, and the previously overwhelming power of the Church and the Anglican universities constrained. Huxley contributed to creating an open, skeptical society in which intellectuals for the first time had access to power. He emancipated dissent and helped shake the complacency of the Victorian age.

[Trav]

Stephen Jay Gould

by Doug Linder (2004)

Five-year-old Stephen Jay Gould visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York with his father, a court stenographer, in 1946. Gould gazed in amazement at the sight of his first dinosaur, a twenty-foot-high tyrannosaurus. Gould later recounted, “As we stood in front of the beast, a man sneezed; I gulped and prepared to utter my Sherman Yisrael. But the great animal stood immobile in all its bony grandeur, and as we left, I announced that I would be a paleontologist when I grew up.”

True to his word, Gould became a paleontologist—the most widely known paleontologist the world has ever seen. In his incredibly prolific professional career spanning over thirty years, Gould published twenty popular books and hundreds of articles, most of which developed his critique of current evolutionary theory or explored the “supposed conflict” between science and religion. Through it all, Gould remained creationism’s most determined and effective opponent.

In academic circles, Gould became most closely identified with his theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” first formulated in 1972. Punctuated equilibrium holds that evolution occurred primarily in relatively rapid periods of speciation rather than taking place in slow, gradual transformations through the process of natural selection. According to Gould, most species remain largely stable over long periods of time before some cataclysmic event sets rapid change in motion. For example, Gould argued, 65 million years ago, following the impact of the meteor near the Yucatan Peninsula and the resultant death of dinosaurs, the burrowing mammals that survived rapidly evolved and filled vacated ecological niches. Today, after considerable scrutiny of the fossil record, Gould’s once controversial theory has become the consensus view of paleontologists.

Gould frequently distinguished between evolution, which he described as “a fact,” and the theory of evolution, which “is a theory.” He described facts as statements about the world “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” The empirical evidence for evolution easily met that high standard, he believed, despite the conceivability that new evidence could arise to raise doubts. “I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow,” he wrote in 1981, “but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”

Gould made three general arguments for evolution. First, he pointed to the undeniable evidence of evolution within species, such as the breeding that produced dogs as diverse as the toy poodle and the Saint Bernard or the evolving of anti-biotic resistant strains of bacteria. (Virtually all creationists concede intra-species, or “micro-evolution,” but argue that this fact is scant evidence for evolution from species to species, or what is called “macro-evolution.”) Second, Gould argued from the imperfections that appear in so many species. “Why,” he asked, “should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, and I type this essay with the structures built of the same bones unless we inherited them from a common ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design better limbs in each case.” Finally, Gould found compelling evidence for evolution in the fossil record of transitional species. While acknowledging the record is incomplete owing to the rarity of fossils, Gould nonetheless pointed to examples of fossils that demonstrated the route from one species to another. The evidence was especially clear, he thought, in the bones of human ancestors, such as Australopithecus afarensis, with its “apelike palate” and its “human upright stance and larger cranial capacity than any ape of the same body size.”

Gould often expressed frustration that creationist critics frequently cited his attempts to refine aspects of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as evidence that scientists seriously questioned the underlying “fact” of evolution, not just its mechanisms. He accused a “motley collection” of creationists of “willful misquotation” and wrote that they “debase religion even more than they misconstrue science.”

The enemy, in Gould’s opinion, never has been rank-and-file fundamentalists, but rather fundamentalist leaders. After traveling to the scene of the Scopes trial in 1981, Gould wrote that science had “nothing to fear from the vast majority of fundamentalists who, like many citizens of Dayton, live by a doctrine that is legitimately indigenous to their area. Rather, we must combat the few yahoos who exploit the fruits of poor education for ready cash and larger political ends.”

Man’s presence on earth, in Gould’s view, is an incredibly improbable event, not the realized vision of an intelligent designer. Without just the right events wiping out just the right species at just the right times, none of us would be here. In 1989, Gould wrote: “Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.” In evolution, there is no direction, no progression. Humanity is dethroned from its exalted view of its own importance.

Gould relished spirited debate. After his battles with Darwinian gradualists, Gould took on evolutionary psychologists who, he claimed, applied the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm far beyond what the evidence would support. Adaptive theories of evolutionary psychologists cannot be tested, he complained. “You’re reduced to speculative story-telling about hunter-gatherers on the savannah.”

However, the battle that always excited Gould the most was the same one Clarence Darrow fought in Dayton in 1925. The Scopes trial, according to Gould, was “a rousing defeat” for evolution. Despite the common perception that the trial exposed Biblical literalism as foolish, Gould insists that defeat came when “cowardly and conservative” textbook writers chose to de-emphasize evolution in post-1925 editions. No improvement in this sorry situation came about, he argued, until the success of the Russian Sputnick in 1957 finally roused Americans to see the dangers of a second-rate science curriculum.

More than anyone who has ever addressed the subject, Gould attempted to portray creationists as persons out-of-step with established religious traditions. He argued that a “strong consensus accepted for decades by leading scientific and religious thinkers alike” saw no conflict between evolution and religion. In his 1999 book, Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, he strenuously contended that science and religion occupied separate non-overlapping domains (or “magisteria,” to use his favored term), and if each stuck to their appropriate missions, no difficulties between the two could ever arise. Religion and science can, each in their own way, “enrich our practical and ethical lives.” Just as science is of no help in answering the question of how we ought to live, Gould insisted, religion tells us nothing about the laws of nature.

================================================================================

=============================

Gould described himself as “an agnostic.” His understanding of science convinced him that nature “greets us with sublime indifference and no preference for accommodating our yearnings.” On the subject of a Creator, he seemed to share Darwin’s view: “There seems to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”

Despite his own agnosticism, Gould claimed be “fascinated” by the subject of religion and to have “great respect” for it. In particular, Gould respected religions that understood “the natural world does not lie” and that readjusted their teaching when an interpretation of Scripture proved inconsistent with “a well-validated scientific result.” “True science and religion are not in conflict,” Gould stated. While science attempts to describe the character and operation of the physical world, religion “operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values.” He wished for nothing more than to see these “two old and cherished institutions…co-existing in peace.”

The geological evidence “conclusively disproved” young-earth creationism and other biblical stories such as the Great Flood, in Gould’s opinion. He chastised religions that insist upon supernatural events. As he saw it, religions that rely on miracles do so unnecessarily and, in the long run, risk their own credibility.

Gould claimed creationism is “nonscientific” and thus has no place in a science classroom. Those who wish to import creationism into the biology classroom are, in Gould’s view, “zealots…trying to impose their will and nonsense.” He complained that the central tenets of creationism “cannot be tested, and its peripheral claims, which can be tested, have been proven false.” To accept creationism, one must assume that laws of nature can be and were suspended—an assumption scientists, if true to their profession, cannot make. Gould dismissively described creationism as “nothing but a smokescreen, a meaningless and oxymoronic phrase invented as sheep’s clothing for the old wolf of Genesis literalism.”

Gould counts among his proudest achievements his part in the legal battle to creationism out of the public schools. He wrote that it gave him “great joy” to play a role in a fight that had “featured such giant figures as Bryan and Darrow.” In 1981, the Harvard paleontologist traveled to Arkansas to appear as one of six expert witnesses in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of that state’s new “balanced treatment” law. The law, backed by fundamentalists, required teachers who covered evolution in their biology classes to also discuss the creationist critique of evolution and the evidence for “intelligent design.” At the trial, Gould testified creationists distorted both geological evidence and scientific studies on fossil evidence of evolutionary transformation. Several Arkansas teachers also testified. Gould wrote of one high school teacher, asked what he would do if the law was upheld, “looked up and said, in his calm and dignified voice: It would be my tendency not to comply. I am not a revolutionary or a martyr, but I have a responsibility to my students, and I cannot forego them.” Recalling the incident, Gould added a benediction: “God bless the teachers of this world.”

On the flight out of Little Rock after the trial, a fellow passenger came up to Gould and thanked him for “comin’ on down here and helpin’us out with this little problem.” The passenger turned out to be Bill Clinton, who declared that he would have vetoed the balance treatment law had he not been defeated in his recent bid for re-election as governor of Arkansas. The next year, as it happened, Clinton won back his old job and his administration made the decision not to appeal a federal district court decision finding the state’s balanced treatment law to violate the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution.

Despite his hostility to creationism, Gould took a surprisingly sympathetic view of William Jennings Bryan’s opposition to Darwinism. Although seeing Bryan as dead wrong on his skepticism about evolution itself, Gould credits the Great Commoner with “identifying a serious problem.” He noted that Bryan’s crusade against evolution emanated from the same egalitarian impulses as most of the other issues that the longtime Democratic reformer championed. In the early 1920s, German militarists, laissez faire capitalists, and scientific eugenicists cited Darwin as support for their own questionable policies. “Survival of the fittest” became a reason to deny economic and medical support to the poor. Efforts to breed a new superior race of humans captivated thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Textbooks treating the subject of evolution, including the Civic Biology book used by Scopes, misunderstood Darwin’s theory and turned it into an apology for racism and forced sterilization. Misuse of Darwinism was indeed a major concern in 1925, Gould believed, and Bryan was right to call it to public attention. Over his career, Gould himself made plain that he saw in the work of evolutionary psychologists many of the dangers that Bryan saw in the eugenics research of his time. He allied himself with a group of “radical scientists” that sought to discredit research showing that intelligence and many behavioral traits show strong genetic components. Gould’s scientific critics, on the other hand, saw in his attacks on evolutionary psychology the same blind zeal that he attributed to creationist attacks on inter-species.

Gould died of cancer in 2002 at the age of sixty. For twenty years he had suffered from abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and serious cancer usually associated with exposure to asbestos. At the time of his diagnosis, the medical literature stated that Gould’s disease was incurable and had a median mortality of only eight months after discovery. Death finally came to Gould two months after publication of his 1342-page "Magnum Opus", The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

[Trav]

Steven Pinker

by Doug Linder (2004)

Steven Pinker grew up in Montreal’s English-speaking Jewish community. “It was a culture with a lot of arguing,” Pinker recalls. “I was never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13,” Pinker said in a 1999 interview, “but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.” About the same time as he lost religion, Pinker found his interest in the human mind. “I was a 13-year-old anarchist, and wanted to study human nature, through anthropology, psychoanalysis, and psychology. I was a Rousseauan then; now I’m a Hobbesian.” Asked whether parents sparked his interest in evolutionary psychology, Pinker smiled and answered, “Yes, it comes from my parents. The question is how it comes from my parents.”

Pinker stayed in Montreal after high school to study psychology at McGill University. A department head at McGill convinced Pinker to concentrate on “scientific, laboratory-oriented psychology” rather than the more popular field of psychoanalytic theory. Pinker took his mentor’s advice. When he moved on to do post-graduate work at Harvard, Pinker focused his attention on cognitive science. When “I was told that people might pay you to study the mind, I knew what I wanted to do with my life,” he said.

Pinker rocketed to fame—at least the level of fame possible in the world of academic psychology—in 1994 when he published The Language Instinct, which argued that human language is a biological adaptation, not a cultural invention. Pinker’s research into the origins of language soon led him into the controversial field of evolutionary psychology. In his next book, How the Mind Works (1998), Pinker promoted the idea that most common human behaviors are those that many generations earlier contributed to survival and the ability to pass along genes.

Pinker’s idea was not new. Darwin himself suggested that emotion, perception, and cognition evolved as adaptations. (Alfred Wallace, the co-founder—with Darwin—of evolution, disagreed with his friend on this point. Wallace believed that a superior intelligence designed the human mind.) Famous nineteenth-century psychologist William James took Darwin’s suggestion and developed a rich psychological theory based on Darwinian notions of instinct and adaptations such as long-term and short-term memory.

Evolutionary psychology eventually lost favor, done in by its proponents’ overstatements and concerns about eugenics and Social Darwinism. By the mid-twentieth century, things had changed so completely that behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner were insisting that psychology and biology had no relationship to each other. The human mind, according to strict behaviorists, was “a blank slate.”

In the 1970s, the tide turned again. Evolutionary biologists such as E. O. Wilson, author of Sociobiology, and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, drew from new studies to argue that many human behavioral tendencies evolved when organisms interacted with offspring, allies, and adversaries over long periods of time. Soon a new band of evolutionary psychologists began pushing the idea that emotions such as guilt, anger, sympathy, and love all have a biological basis.

Pinker seems to have an adaptive explanation for nearly every human behavior. People in urban areas today fear snakes, Pinker says, because when humans gathered food in the woods millennia ago those that failed to fear them rarely contributed to the gene pool. Gossip is a popular pastime because knowledge of what others are up to was an adaptive advantage.

Such arguments met the fierce resistance of radical scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould, who mislabeled them as “biological determinism.” Gould agreed that evolution shaped the brain, but insisted that individuals and not genes are the unit of natural selection. “Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly,” he argued. “It must use bodies” and bodies “cannot be atomized into parts, each constructed by an individual gene.” Gould described evolutionary psychologists as holding “a penchant for narrow and barren speculation” that amounts to “pure guess-work in the cocktail –party mode.” Gould was by no means the only critic of evolutionary psychology. So strong have been the attacks, in fact, that the efforts to oppose its teaching in colleges and universities has been called by its supporters “the new creationism.”

The criticisms about “biological determinism” did not deter Pinker, however, from taking the Darwinian explanation of psychology a step further. He argued in his 1998 book How the Mind Works that biology partially explains our moral sense. Pinker’s ideas were not novel—E. O. Wilson had suggested as early as 1975 that our moral reasoning was a product of natural selection—but Pinker developed the theory with the benefit of two decades of additional scientific research. New studies showed, according to Pinker, that genes guide the assembly of the brain and allow parts of the brain to “organize themselves without any information from the senses.” He points to studies of twins that prove genetics controls the amount of gray matter in different cortical regions—regions that control intelligence and personality traits. How the Mind Works led to renewed attacks from Stephen Jay Gould—the two scientists engaged in a high-voltage clash in the pages of the New York Review of Books over the scientific legitimacy of evolutionary psychology.

Pinker is convinced that the coming decades will see the obliteration of “the distinction between biology and culture, nature versus society, matter versus mind.” He claims to find that prospect “exhilarating.” While others believe that explaining the mind in physical terms will undermine human dignity, morality, and personal responsibility, Pinker calls all such claims the “confusion between is and ought.”

The argument of Pinker and others that evolution contributed substantially to human nature and moral sense provoked attacks from the right, as well as the left. Creationist biochemist Michael Behe, for example, argued that the “irreducible complexity” of biochemistry prevents incremental evolution of human nature and means that the human mind must have an intelligent designer. Pinker strongly disagrees. He argues that Behe “jettisons all scientific “scruples” and makes claims that are “unproven or just wrong.”

Neo-conservative thinkers, including law professor Phillip Johnson, bio-ethicist Leon Kass (chairman of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics), and commentator Irving Kristol have joined the attack on evolutionary biology. As Pinker notes in The Blank Slate (2002), “It is not clear whether these worldly thinkers are really convinced that Darwinism is false or whether they think it is important for people to believe that it is false.” Pinker is reminded of a scene from the play about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, in which the characters playing Bryan and Darrow are enjoying a relaxing conversation. Bryan confides his thoughts on his fundamentalist supporters: “They’re simple people; poor people. They work hard and they need to believe in something, something beautiful. Why do you want to take it away from them? It’s all they have.”

Irving Kristol thinks humanity itself is threatened if people come to believe they lead “meaningless lives in a meaningless universe.” He argues that unadulterated truth isn’t for everybody: “There are different truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

Pinker recognizes that the implication of Darwinism most feared by creationists is the “idea that evolution can explain mind and morality.” Pinker tries to reassure readers of The Blank Slate that evolutionary psychology doesn’t mean the end of moral responsibility. Evolution might, for example, predispose men to sleeping around, but it doesn’t necessitate or excuse that behavior, Pinker points out. The common fears about evolutionary psychology are misplaced. It doesn’t lead to inequality; it doesn’t mean we cannot hope to make a more perfect society; it doesn’t mean all behavior is biologically determined; it doesn’t lead to nihilism.

Pinker argues that a view of the mind as having been shaped by evolution is not amoral. Morality derives from the physical structure of our brain, he contends. The fact that eighteen-month-old children share toys and try to comfort adults is strong evidence for a moral instinct. So too, according to Pinker, is the universality among cultures of many concepts and applications of right and wrong. Pinker asserts that our moral sense comes from evolution, not God, and that its “circle of application” has expanded over time through reason, knowledge, and sympathy.

Moreover, according to Pinker, our innate moral sense is far less likely to produce evil than is religion. He blames the stoning of prostitutes, the execution of homosexuals, the bombing of abortion clinics, the burning of witches, the slaying of heretics, and the crashing of airplanes into skyscrapers on imagined commands of God. Actions of that sort are not responses to an internal moral sense. The religious “doctrine of the soul,” in Pinker’s estimation, “necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.” The doctrine encourages suicide bombers and prevents such potentially life-saving research techniques as those involving stem cells.

In Pinker’s view, people who argue that evolutionary psychology drains life of meaning seriously confuse “ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now).” The “metaphorical motives” of genes are not the real motives of people. Even if the good, the true, and the beautiful are merely “neural constructs, movies we project onto the interior of our skulls,” it does not mean that those “movies” aren’t real. Pinker compares our innate moral sense to our sense of number—both might have developed to “grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the minds that grasp them.” The Golden Rule might well be just as real as the number 2. Pinker concludes, “If we are so constituted that we cannot help but think in moral terms, then morality is as real for us as if it were decreed by the Almighty or written into the cosmos.”

[Trav]

HUMANS: INVASIVE SPECIES !

Oct 14th, 2007

=================================================================

“We were surprised how intensively these regions were being affected”

by human presence, says K. Heinz Erb, an ecologist at Klagenfurt

University in Vienna. “Only one-third of the natural productivity is

left for all the other species.”

“Some scientists now wonder: At what point do the world’s ecosystems

begin to break down? Or, more frighteningly, has that process already

begun?”

“If the whole world begins to look like Iowa cornfields, …. that

leaves a lot less for other things,” says Foley.

“Foley continues. ‘At what point does this get to be scary?’ ”

=============================================

Science News

Week of Oct. 13, 2007; Vol. 172, No. 15

Invasive, Indeed

One species-Homo sapiens-consumes nearly a quarter of Earth’s natural

productivity

Sid Perkins

Some people live lightly on the land: Bedouin clans roam the deserts

of the Middle East and North Africa; small groups of indigenous

people follow reindeer herds across frigid Arctic terrain; and tribes

of hunter-gatherers forage the plains of southern Africa and the

forests of Amazonia and Papua New Guinea.

Then there’s the other 6.6 billion of us.

When we farm, clear forests, and build cities, dams, and roads, we

dramatically alter the landscape. In some places, we increase the

land’s productivity-measured as the amount of plant life at the base

of the food chain-by adding immense amounts of water and fertilizer.

New research indicates that on the whole, however, human presence

significantly decreases Earth’s biological productivity. For

instance, many of today’s cities occupy large patches of what had

been some of the world’s most fertile land.

Of the biological productivity that remains, people are gathering an

ever-increasing share, sometimes by boosting their quality of life,

but often merely by dint of their burgeoning numbers. In some

regions, each spanning millions of square kilometers, human activity

consumes almost two-thirds of the biological productivity that would

otherwise be available.

“We were surprised how intensively these regions were being affected”

by human presence, says K. Heinz Erb, an ecologist at Klagenfurt

University in Vienna. “Only one-third of the natural productivity is

left for all the other species.”

Overall, nearly one-quarter of Earth’s land-based biological

productivity ends up in people’s hands and bellies, Erb and his

colleagues estimate. Other research suggests that people appropriate

a comparable, but slightly smaller, share of the ocean’s

productivity-defined as the mass of photosynthetic organisms at the

base of the sea’s food chain.

A projected 25 percent increase in the world’s population by 2030 is

bound to strain ecosystems even further. Increasing agricultural

efficiency by irrigating and fertilizing the land can add to the

strain by boosting erosion and the nutrient runoff that creates toxic

algal blooms and large anoxic zones in oceans. Adding insult to

injury, proposals to transition from fossil fuels to renewable

biofuels would place yet more of Earth’s productivity in people’s

hands.

Some scientists now wonder: At what point do the world’s ecosystems

begin to break down? Or, more frighteningly, has that process already

begun?

Reaping, sowing

Before people invented agriculture, they roamed the landscape in

search of sustenance. When resources became too scarce to nourish the

group, it was time to move on. When people began to farm the land,

however, their habits changed considerably, to the detriment of many

ecosystems. Settlers built year-round shelters and often cleared

acreage for their crops.

“The rise of modern agriculture and forestry has been one of the most

transformative events in human history,” says Jonathan A. Foley, an

environmental scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Practices vary somewhat, but typically, people heavily farm the most

fertile land, use marginal lands for grazing domestic animals, and

plant single-species tree farms in areas where forests once stood.

Whatever the use, the production of forest or agricultural goods

comes at the expense of natural ecosystems, observes Foley.

Today, croplands and pastures are among the largest ecosystems on the

planet. People farm about 12 percent of the land outside of

Antarctica and Greenland and use about 23 percent for grazing, says

Foley. Together, land devoted to these uses equals the 35 percent of

Earth’s surface that natural forests occupy, he notes.

To estimate the effect that humans wreak on the world’s land-based

ecosystems, Erb and his colleagues used agricultural and forestry

statistics compiled for 161 nations that account for 97.4 percent of

Earth’s icefree land. Most of the remaining area is located on small,

uninhabited islands, Erb notes. In their computer model, the

researchers divided the planet’s land surface into grid squares no

larger than 10 kilometers per side.

The team estimates that if people weren’t around to alter the

landscape, the world’s natural vegetation would absorb enough carbon

dioxide from the atmosphere to lock away about 65.5 billion metric

tons of carbon each year. However, in 2000, the year for which the

data were compiled, Earth’s vegetation locked away only about 59.2

billion metric tons of carbon, or 9.6 percent less than it should

have, says Erb. Of that smaller carbon total, human activities

removed about 15.6 billion metric tons-a whopping 23.8 percent-from

the world’s ecosystems. A little more than half of the carbon that

people appropriated was harvested and used as food, forage, and wood,

Erb and his colleagues note in the July 31 Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences. Most of the rest was lost to

inefficiencies of agriculture, including the inability of crops to

store as much carbon as natural vegetation would have stored. A small

amount, about 7 percent of the carbon that people take out of the

system, went up in smoke produced primarily by slash-and-burn

agriculture, says Erb. All of this human-appropriated carbon became

unavailable to other species.

Human harvests don’t stop at the shoreline, either. The world’s most

productive fisheries typically lie in and near the shallow waters

that fringe the coasts of large islands and continents, says Daniel

Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia in

Vancouver. Scientists have divided such coastal waters into 64 large

marine ecosystems. These areas can vary in character and inhabitants

as much as arctic tundra differs from an Amazonian rain forest.

About 95 percent of the world’s fish catch comes from large marine

ecosystems, says Pauly. For the past decade or so, that haul has

represented about 20 percent of the natural productivity of those

regions, as measured by the amount of carbon locked away by organisms

at the base of the ocean’s food chain.

Efficiency matters

While wilderness areas remain relatively unaffected by people, other

parts of the world are packed cheek by jowl with cities, farms, and

other human imprints.

Southern Asia, a 6.7-million-square-kilometer region that includes

India, is one of the most densely populated and heavily irrigated

regions on the planet, says Erb. There, human activity co-opts about

63 percent of the area’s natural productivity each year, he and his

colleagues estimate. In eastern and southeastern Europe, people

appropriate about 52 percent of the land’s productivity.

At the other extreme, in Australia, central Asia, and Latin America,

the percentage of productivity that ends up in human hands ranges

between 11 and 16 percent. Increasing the use of fertilizers and

irrigation could boost those percentages and help meet the needs of a

growing world population. However, long-term irrigation sometimes

renders the soil too salty for crops, and fertilizer, if used

unsparingly, runs off into rivers and streams and ends up in the

ocean, where it overfertilizes algae and thus creates huge zones

devoid of other life. “There’s no free biomass,” Erb cautions.

In the stampede to replace fossil fuels, some scientists have

proposed the large-scale cultivation of crops that can be transformed

into supposedly eco-friendly biofuels. That, too, might be

ecologically unwise.

“If the whole world begins to look like Iowa cornfields, we’ll have

to take an even larger share of global biological production into

human hands, and that leaves a lot less for other things,” says

Foley. “And those other things won’t be just pretty butterflies and

tigers and charismatic animals, they’ll be things that matter to us,

like the things that clean our water, preserve our soils, clean our

atmosphere, and pollinate our crops.”

“At what point does human activity begin to compromise a lot of our

environmental systems?” Foley continues. “At what point does this get

to be scary?”

[jscheetz]

Hey all,

Well, this is a fun topic! And on a fishing board! And Phil you are right it always should be civil and hopefully with a sense of humor - like the "descendant of a tiny cell" - quote - that was pretty funny to me - seemed to have ruffled some feathers... sorry about that, guess this is a sensitive subject to many of us. That's what I like about you Trav - you have an opinion and a sense of humor about things!

I will say Phil, while you make a good point that the main way the Christian can show their faith is by living their lives as Christ like as possible (and many don't seem to) - I also believe that talking about things like the origin of life is EXTREMELY important as a way to share one's faith to some people. A long time knock on Christians (sometimes rightfully so) from the "intellectuals" is that they are just robots and blind faith followers without a brain. Well, I believe that Christianity does stand up under the scrutiny of honest science and archaeology. While many here have posted that you can't "Test" or "Prove" Christianity and that it is just a belief, there are many ways to arrive at a reasonable conclusion other than a currently provable experiment. Just like in a court of law there are many ways to present a case. - There is the witness of other writings of antiquity, there are eyewitness accounts that have been recorded - now you can choose not to believe them just like you can choose not to believe a witness in a murder trial - but if you have enough witnesses and enough circumstantial evidence then you are compelled to believe a certain way. There is more manuscript evidence for the new testament of the Bible than there is for many famous writers from history like Plato, Aristotle etc etc - much, much more, and yet, you rarely hear these same people complain that Aristotle is just a fairy tale and wasn't real. So I think having sensible discussions with guys like Al who are smart and obviously have contemplated the weighty matters of the world enough to have developed an opinion is a good thing. For both of us - we may never agree, but I think if we respect each other in that we know each has done some serious studying on the subjects then we may both become richer for it.

One of my favorite still active authors is a guy named Ravi Zacharias - he is a brilliant man from India and travels all over the world presenting the case of apologetics for the validity of the Biblical account of history. His book "Can man live without God" is a very intellectual discussion of the points of contention amongst non-believers and he always says that the best way to figure out the truth is to sit down and talk about it. I figure that is a good place to start!

While some of us here have made up our minds about such things as why we are here, how we got here, where we are going - some probably have not. So I think any discussion on the options is a good thing.

In the meantime - tomorrow I go fishing! Will let you know how it goes -

JS

[Trav]

A key factor that we all must recognize is that the vast majority of scientists who believe in evolution are also atheists or agnostics. There are some who hold to some form of theistic evolution, and others who take a deistic view of God (God exists but is not involved in the world...everything proceeds along a natural course). There are some who genuinely and honestly look at the data and arrive at the conclusion that evolution betters fits with the data. Again, though, these represent an insignificant portion of scientists who advocate evolution. The vast majority of evolutionary scientists hold that life evolved entirely without ANY intervention of a higher Being. Evolution is by definition a naturalistic science.

For atheism to be true there must be an alternate explanation for how the universe and life came into existence. Although beliefs in some form of evolution predated Charles Darwin, Darwin was the first to develop a plausible model for how evolution could have occurred - natural selection. Darwin once identified himself as a Christian, but later renounced the Christian faith and the existence of God as a result of some tragedies that took place in his life. Evolution was "invented" by an atheist. Darwin's goal was not to disprove God's existence, but that is one of the end results of the theory of evolution. Evolution is an enabler of atheism. Evolutionary scientists today likely would not admit that their goal is to give an alternate explanation of the origins of life, and thereby to give a foundation for atheism. However, according to the Bible, that is exactly why the theory of evolution exists.

The Bible tells us, "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). The Bible also proclaims that people are without excuse for not believing in a Creator God, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - His eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). According to the Bible, anyone who denies the existence of God is a fool. Why, then, are so many people, including some Christians, willing to accept that evolutionary scientists are unbiased interpreters of scientific data? According to the Bible, they are all fools! Foolishness does not imply a lack of intelligence. Most evolutionary scientists are brilliant intellectually. Foolishness indicates an inability to properly apply knowledge. Proverbs 1:7 tells us, "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline."

Evolutionary scientists mock Creation and/or Intelligent Design as unscientific and not worthy of scientific examination. In order for something to be considered a "science," they argue, it must be able to be observed and tested, it must be "naturalistic." Creation is by definition "supernatural." God, and the supernatural, cannot be observed or tested (so the argument goes), therefore Creation and/or Intelligent Design cannot be considered a science. As a result, all data is filtered through the preconceived, presupposed, and pre-accepted theory of evolution, without alternate explanations being considered.

However, the origin of the universe and the origin of life cannot be tested or observed. Both Creation and evolution are faith-based systems when they speak of origins. Neither can be tested because we cannot go back billions (or thousands) of years to observe the origin of the universe and life in the universe. Evolutionary scientists reject Creation on grounds that would logically force them to also reject evolution as a "scientific" explanation of origins. Evolution, at least in regards to origins, does not fit the definition of “science” any more than Creation does. Evolution is supposedly the only explanation of origins that can be tested; therefore, it is the only theory of origins that can be considered "scientific." This is foolishness! Scientists who advocate evolution are rejecting a plausible theory of origins without even honestly examining its merits, because it does not fit their illogically narrow definition of "science."