Evolving With the Times

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
   
Ezekiel: All His Skeletal Connections Prove Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution.  It all began with these words: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” And this is also when all the fun began. Men who had free will argued about the moon and the stars. Adam’s descendants thought the sun revolved around the earth in the center of the universe, until that idea was disproved by Copernicus and Galileo. But a 19th century intellectual named Charles Darwin with his theory of evolution has bedeviled religious saints and unrepentant sinners during a time when science has made more progress in 150 years than in the four million years since Ardipithecus ramidus, the first “human.” (But digging is not over. There well could be a six-million-year-old “human” resting in some deep ravine.)

In that I have a certain curiosity about questions eternal, I thought a book about evolution by an atheist could be fascinating. It is. Richard Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion,”  has written “The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution.” He has written several books about scientific and religious subjects while serving as Professor for the Understanding Of Science at Oxford University.

Dawkins is blunt in Chapter 1: “Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact ...
It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips … continue the list as long as desired.” It’s hard to get more definitive than that.
Man: From Swamp Scum To King Of The Pack
Although there is overwhelming evidence that “Ardi” is four million years old, the latest find in the ever-growing search for our elders, a recent Gallop Poll showed that 44 percent of Americans reject Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the 2008 Republican race for the presidential nomination, three of the ten candidates, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Mike Huckabee, raised their hands enthusiastically when the candidates were asked to deny evolution. The cynical Voltaire described the power of the brain: “The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is he wants to believe.” Why, even the very conservative Pope Benedict admits that evolution is taking place. The 44 percent who deny evolution also believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”  So much for the reliability of carbon and uranium dating and other scientific methods for determining ages of fossils and other finds. Scientific estimates of the universe’s age now range up to 15 billion years. Just a few weeks ago astronomers estimated that the universe contains over 2,350 planets similar to earth.

Scientists use the term “theory” in discussing Darwin, but here is the definition of “theory” they use: “A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.” This definition doesn’t leave much wiggle room for the religious deniers of any belief.

What could be a deciding fact against evolution? The discovery of a single fossil among the millions upon millions of fossils cataloged by scientists that did not fit in a geologic period. Not a single fossil has ever been found that did not fit in its geological stratum. In other words, as Dawkins says, “No rabbit fossils have been found in the Precambrian Period!” The oldest fossils may range in the billions of years, but none have been found “out of place.”  So-called “missing links” are found all the time.

How Long Is A Bible Day?
We think we live in turbulent times. We just went through another Rapture and “end times” prediction. At least all of my acquaintances are still around. But for centuries people have been bugged about the age of the earth and its accouterments. In the 13th to 17th centuries Roman Catholic Jesuits, an intellectual order, came up with many ideas that challenged beliefs about the time of creation. A Protestant Irish bishop by the name of James Ussher decided around 1625 he would determine the age of the earth by examining the ages of people and events mentioned in the Bible. After 20 years of concentrated study Ussher computed that God created the earth at the beginning of the night which preceded October 23rd in the Julian Calendar year of 710. He then recomputed that date to “Christian” time to 4004 B.C. That’s why a majority of Bible-Thumpers believe that the earth and its inhabitants and environs are about 6,000 years old.

To accept this premise one must be a literal interpreter of the Bible. Bishop Ussher’s formula is too lengthy for a short column, but if you believe that Adam was 130 years old when he sired Seth, Ussher’s scheme works. St. Augustine figured that although Adam was 130, there were longer life spans in the beginning because the earth was so new. Evidently this is what happens when all foods are organic and Viagra-like. Ussher calculated the ages of the twenty-one generations of the Old Testament. According to the Bible Adam lived 930 years.  Adam’s great-great-great-great-great grandson Methuselah is the oldest to ever live on the planet at 969 years. Ussher spent 20 years on the establishment of a date for the creation, using thousands of reference materials, books, manuscripts and a collection of 10,000 volumes in his personal library. He was quite influential in the publishing industry. The most popular Bible in the 17th century contained Ussher’s work. Critics said the bible sold well because it also depicted bare-breasted Biblical women. And so the world goes.

There is another group of Christians called creationists who believe that the 15-billion year history of the universe has been condensed into 10,000 years by God.  The 10,000 year plan is taught in fundamentalist Christian high schools and colleges in the U.S. As an example, the science departments at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Virginia and Bryan College in Tennessee (named after fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan) spend most of their time squeezing 15 billion years of evolutionist history into 10,000 years.
We Are Still Inheriting The Wind (Proverbs 11:29)
In 1925 the most famous evolution trial ever held in the U.S. took place when a young Tennessee teacher was accused of teaching the theory in his high school classes. That was against Tennessee law. The trial was made into the movie “Inherit The Wind” starring Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow, a famous, sometime atheistic trial lawyer from Chicago, and Fredric March playing William Jennings Bryan, a Christian fundamentalist who was also a presidential candidate. The movie is an absolute gem, discussing many of the questions believers in science and believers in religion pose today. The trial didn’t solve much in a religious or scientific sense.

In a famous exchange with the judge, Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) challenges the anti-science Tennessee law: “Can’t you understand?  That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding. And soon, Your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, backward, through the glorious ages of the 16th century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!”

Darrow-Drummond was referring to the case of Giordano Bruno, an intellectually gifted Italian who courageously supported the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th century that the earth traveled around the sun, not vice-versa. Galileo and Bruno further determined that if the earth did travel around the sun and was not the center of the universe, then other earths might exist where beings like ourselves would also live. The Catholic Church did not like ideas that rejected its teachings. They charged Bruno with heresy after luring him to Rome. Pope Clement VIII turned him over to the Inquisition where they kept him in chains for eight years, trying to get him to recant his beliefs. Galileo recanted his “heresy” after being threatened with torture and death, but Bruno did not. He was finally condemned to death.  Immediately upon sentencing, Bruno’s jaw was clamped shut, his tongue and palate were pierced with iron spikes so he couldn’t speak. He was taken to the Piazza dei Fiori in Rome, stripped of his clothes, and burnt alive at the stake.

Almost 400 years later the Catholic Church studied the issue for 12 years and finally admitted that Galileo was right. The church issued a formal apology. However, the terrible treatment and death of Giordano Bruno was not mentioned.
At Least, Let’s Admit That God And Evolution Has Made The Earth A Fascinating Place
Some scientists say that God provided the spark of life that enabled everything to come out of the primordial scum. I’m OK with that. But let’s not try to condense 15 billion years of life down to 10,000 or 6,000 years without scientific study. The earth is such an exciting place. Practically a significant discovery every day. Here are some that have caught my eye lately:
** A new plant has been discovered on Cape York in Australia which is large enough to eat rats that are enticed into the flower. The discoverers didn’t say the plant needed that much protein.

** Oceanographers from several countries have just completed a 10-year study of what lives beneath 656 feet in the ocean. That’s where all sunlight ceases. They have found 17,650 species living below that depth.

** The human body is home to a heap of microbes. Microbial cells outnumber our human cells by a factor of ten. Most of the microbes are bacteria, so they may make up 90 percent of the cells, but they are not 90 percent of our bulk. A human palm averages over 150 species of microbes.

** Anthropologists have discovered human remains in a million-year-old refuse pile near Burgos, Spain. The site contains animal bones and human bones intermixed with stone butchering tools. The marks on the bones prove that human cannibal feasts were held at the site. This is the oldest known case of humans eating humans while other meat and food was available. Now we kill each other with wars and legislation, not a need for protein.

** Evolution is a funny thing. There once was an Irish elk that had antlers with a span of 12 feet weighing 80 pounds. The elk girls evidently liked the big elk boys with their large antlers, so they continued to breed huge antlers. But the antlers got so heavy for the head and they got so wide it was difficult for the elk to roam through the woods for food, so it became extinct. There must be a lesson in this saga someplace.

** Entomologists have identified 300,000 different beetles. They think there might be as many as a million.

** Here we are battling same-sex marriage and calling gays second-class citizens in legislatures when across the wide expanse of the animal kingdom almost all species are homosexual or bisexual in nature, whether giraffes, horses, monkeys, bonobos, earthworms, penguins, fish, and birds ... In albatross families, as an example, female couples usually raise more chicks than male-female ones.

** So far the largest fossilized snake ever found is a 42-foot titanoboa that weighed well over a ton. Carbon-dating indicates this snake lived 58 million years ago. I wonder if fundamentalists will try to place this snake in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago. No wonder Eve listened to him.

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