{"id":147,"date":"2002-11-09T13:54:17","date_gmt":"2002-11-09T18:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/evolution"},"modified":"2002-11-09T13:54:17","modified_gmt":"2002-11-09T18:54:17","slug":"evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/11\/evolution.html","title":{"rendered":"Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

As is my custom, I was taking a walk around the Sun campus after lunch, when I saw something scurrying across my path. At first I thought it was a scorpion, but then I remembered that I wasn’t in Palm Springs, so I looked a little closer. It was a five-inch long reddish-brown… lobster. (Ha, M’ris<\/a> — I bet that on your list of things to be concerned about when living in California, you never even thought<\/em> about the vicious and poisonous California Land Lobster! Grrrr! Rrrarrgh!) Now I suppose<\/em> that it could have been some kind of crayfish. However, I’ve seen<\/em> crayfish in Maryland and they were much smaller and grayer. So therefore, logic dictates that it must be a poisonous mutant California Land Lobster, evolved specifically to prey on unwary computer engineers. Be warned!<\/p>\n

Speaking of evolution, NPR’s Science Friday<\/a> last show was on the debate in Ohio on whether to teach “Intelligent Design<\/a>” in high school classrooms. The Intelligent Design advocate was quite slippery, and managed to get avuncular host Ira Flatow<\/a> very angry indeed. Poor Ira pressed the guy for an answer to the question, “Where are the testable predictions that ID makes?” and basically got nowhere. (Which is not surprising, because ID’s approach to answering outstanding questions in biology is to say, “Because God said so.”) <\/p>\n

This is not to say that ID isn’t much more clever than the previous strategy (straight-up anti-Darwinism). Intelligent Design at least couches itself in a veneer of scientific language, and its advocates don’t have to admit to believing in the concept of 10,000-year-old Earth and other such nonsense. ID advocates smartly play to popular opinion and our innate American sense of “fairness” and “equality”. Why not teach both? That sounds fair, doesn’t it? This is what 3 out of 5 Ohioans think<\/a>, anyway. 1<\/a><\/sup> In a sense, Intelligent Design has… evolved<\/em> from its predecessor. <\/p>\n

The funny thing is that a couple of days before this, NPR News had an interview with a teenage Eagle Scout named Darrell Lambert who is getting kicked out of Scouting because he’s an atheist<\/a>. The interviewer asked Lambert how he had come to hold his beliefs. Lambert recounted his interest in science at school, closing with simply, “I’m an atheist. I believe in evolution.” You could almost hear the shrug.<\/p>\n

Now isn’t it interesting that this bright, forthright young man has associated atheism and evolution? Certainly one can believe in the theory of evolution and still be religious — in fact, during the Science Friday show, a Catholic priest called up and made this very point.2<\/a><\/sup> But for decades, this idea has been anaethma to the Christian Right. Isn’t it ironic that by railing away at “Darwinism” for so many years, the fundamentalists have convinced a number of scientifically-literate people to conclude that they can’t be religious and scientific at the same time? Well, no… actually it’s just depressing.<\/p>\n

<\/a>1. Too bad science isn’t a democracy.<\/small><\/p>\n

<\/a>2. For that matter, so has the Pope. See the Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: On Evolution<\/a> (October 22, 1996).<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a sense, Intelligent Design has… evolved<\/em> from its predecessor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}