Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets

[David]

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: March 3, 2010

Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.

Read on >>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/scien ... te.html?em

Scary stuff indeed. The Dark Ages anyone?

[jackson_uk]

I don't intentionally intend to offend anyone but this picture is quite funny/true...

[David]

I reference that graph frequently. Education is the answer to all our problems....

[jackson_uk]

I can't say i'm not bitter about not having my own spaceship thanks to religion!...

[David]

Or cures for cancer, war, poverty, global warming, overfishing, pollution, etc. etc. I know what you mean. I'd probably have a combo spaceship/submarine....

[Jellyfish123]

I happen to be a strong believer in christianity, but, could the both be merged? for example, If scientists state that days are getting shorter, that means they would have been longer then, which means the 60,000,000,000 years it took for humans to evolve could have been the day God made Adam. True?

EDIT: And I don't wanna get all freaky about this, but God probobly has a plan for the end of wars etc. etc... or America could have picked a better president...:P

[Izzy]

Here's my thought for you, Jellyfish123...
A "day" for whatever "God" you believe in, is likely not a standard "24-hour day" to us. A single day could consist of millions, if not billions of years to us mere humans. Also remember that biblical stories are meant to explain what is observed from the point of view of the existence of a deity. Basically what that means is that they are one way to explain things. Here's another, proven by science. (I can back up all of these facts with scientific peer-reviewed papers and evidence, but for now, just take me at my word, and if you have any questions I'll cite things for you.)

A <brief> summary of the major events in the evolution of life on Earth
An entire college course summarized in a few paragraphs...

The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. That's 4,500,000,000 years. Our solar system is 4.54 billion years old. Life was probably existent on Earth by ~3.5 billion years ago, maybe as early as 3.8 billion years ago, and definitely by about 3.2 billion years ago. But the Earth was very different then. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere, which was pretty thin. The continents were all in very different places, and the oceans chemistry was very different. (It was super-saturated in carbonate, something we can't imagine today.) There was TONS of volcanism, and surface temperature was extremely high. There was definitely NO life on land, because (among many other things), it would have gotten fried by the UV radiation that easily went through the atmosphere, because there was no ozone layer back then. We don't know exactly how or when "life" in the prokaryotic form (basic cells lacking a nucleus or organelles, eg. bacteria) began, but there are definitely guesses, about all sorts of ways that life originated. Some include "primordial soup" where there are bunches of chemicals around that when electrified, perhaps by lightning, created amino acids and life. Other hypotheses suggest that life began at hydrothermal vents. Others suggest that life was seeded on the planet by a meteorite from an extra-terrestrial source. No one has any idea what the right answer is, but one thing is certain - it originated in water, salty water, like the oceans. But at any rate, life, in the form of prokaryotic microbes continued, from ~3.5 billion years ago to around 2.2-2.3 billion years ago. That's when there started to be oxygen accumulating in the atmosphere. This basically caused a huge revolution in Earth's history. It allowed for the evolution of eukaryotic cells - that's what we're made up of - they have a nucleus, organelles, mitochondria, etc. They require more oxygen to survive. Around 800 million (0.8 billion, note the time-scale shift) years ago we start to see evidence for multicellularity and around 650 million years ago we start to see evidence for animal life. At 530 million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion occurred, and basically all the typical life forms (basic body plans for the phylums) that we see today appeared. Around 450 million years ago plants began to colonize the land, and they were followed by some animals ~50 million years later. Basically the ocean is where life began. Life had to overcome many challenges to survive on land (including being able to survive without drying out, etc.) I can give you all of that info at a later time, but I'm in a hurry now, so I'll spare you the details.
But basically only a few groups were successful on land - the vertebrates (tetrapods) were one of them - that includes you and me, plus all of those things you think of as "animals" - racoons, cows, giraffes, and everything else with 4 legs and a backbone.
And evolution continued, through a time when dinosaurs ruled the land and great ammonites (animals like nautalises) ruled the sea along with giant sharks and other huge jawed and armored fishes through to the present, the age of mammals, where mammals rule the land and jawed fish (teleosts) rule the sea.

Now to give you an idea of scale, because that is definitely the most important thing to understand here, and it takes a LONG time to fully understand, let me give you some examples. Time is a very hard concept to understand, and deep-time (the time I'm using to explain this) is even harder. What does 10 years mean? You can answer that - you've been alive for 10 years, you understand that. What about 100 years? Again, you can probably imagine that - you've learned about things that have happened in the past 100 years in history class. How about 1000 years? 10,000? Now we're into the realm of fuzzy understanding. How about 100,000 years? Then the kicker, 1,000,000 (million) or 1,000,000,000 (billion) years? Man, that's a long time. How long?

Basically the best way to think of it is in terms of generations. How many generations of humans could have lived in 100 years? 1000? 1 million? 1 billion? What about bacteria?

For humans - we've been around ~200,000 years (maybe less, ~150,000). Lets imagine for now that humans have an approximately 10-15 year generation time (for most of our existence, >99% of it, we reproduced much younger than we do today in this society) So that means we've been around for 13,000-20,000 generations.

Now for scale, lets add some zeros to that... 2 million years (2,000,000 years) would mean 130,000-200,000 generations of humans. That's 10 times more generations than we've had. How about 2 billion years (2,000,000,000 years) - that's 130,000,000-200,000,000 generations of humans. Do you see where I'm going? Basically its time scales incomprehensibly huge to us.

Now I'm going to add another aspect of time. What about bacteria? They existed on the planet an EXTREMELY long time - lets just say from the beginning of life. And lets say that the average bacteria can reproduce approximately 1000 times over the course of a year. (This has been shown in several species, and its just an average, and approximation. You'll find that if you do the same exercise with 100 times per year, or 300 times per year, or 365 times per year, you'll get approximately the same answers.) So now lets go back 200,000 years in bacterial generations... that's 200,000,000 generations. (2*10^8) That's HUGE. That's how many generations of humans it would take to fill nearly the entire history of Earth. So if bacteria have been around for, say, 4 billion years (4,000,000,000 or 4*10^9 years), and they've been reproducing at the rate of 1000 times per year, well, that's 4*10^9 years x 1000 reproductions/year = 4*10^12, or 4 TRILLION generations of bacteria. Again, an incomprehensibly huge number. But if you think about it, that's how long life has been around. Something like 3.5-4 TRILLION generations of bacteria. That's huge, and gives ample time for any sort of evolution to have happened, etc.

I don't expect you to really understand time in an instant - it took me years to really understand it, and I'm still not great at it, but this does give you a starting point.

Anyhow, the point of my post was to suggest to you that if you are a believer in Christianity, there are ways to understand the history of life on the planet without saying "6000 years, and the first 6 days were when everything happened." If you look at the history of life, you'll notice that things do come in some semblance of order...

First there was a planet, with a rocky, very bumpy surface, lots of tectonic activity, volcanoes going off, mountains being made and eroded, continents beginning to be formed, and the Earth starting to settle down.
Then there were oceans - water vapor began to condense and stay close to Earth instead of evaporating or being part of rocks. Around this time a primitive atmosphere also was being developed.
Then there was bacterial life - prokaryotic organisms, the simplest you can imagine. They "ruled" for a long time.
Next came Oxygen in the atmosphere, which made it possible for organisms that needed oxygen to evolve and thrive, and allowed for the eventual evolution of eukaryotic cells.
And over time those eukaryotic cells began to work together, to become multicellular groups, and then eventually into organisms with distinct tissue layers, and specialized organs.
This lead to plants, animals, fungi, and many other life forms, some few groups of which colonized the land.
Several times in earth's history there have been catastrophes, such as 65.5 million years ago when a giant bolloid (asteroid or meteor, we don't know for certain yet) hit the Earth and caused a huge extinction. There was also a huge extinction, cause unknown about 251 million years ago. These were both drivers for new life forms to take up the slack where others left behind. It can be argued that if that bolloid hadn't hit the Earth 65 million years ago, dinosaurs would still be roaming the Earth, and mammals would still all be scavengers, the size of small rats, just biding our time until the dinosaurs were wiped out and their ecological niche is open to be filled by ever evolving other organisms.

Now that you know some of Earth's history in more detail, see what you can think about that in terms of your religion, if you want. I know many people who have come to terms with evolution and Christianity, and are quite happy and comfortable with all that they do in science. You need to think about things, and come to terms with everything yourself. If you have any questions, let me know.

[Cetacea]

I happen to be a strong believer in christianity, but, could the both be merged? for example, If scientists state that days are getting shorter, that means they would have been longer then, which means the 60,000,000,000 years it took for humans to evolve could have been the day God made Adam. True?

EDIT: And I don't wanna get all freaky about this, but God probobly has a plan for the end of wars etc. etc... or America could have picked a better president...:P

I'm not religious by any standards but know many people who are, many of them scientists and very good ones at that. Most of these people believe that 'there is something more' but the bible was written by people who are by definition fallible so would have added their own spins and interpretations, coupled with current superstitions of the time, but the essence of it is true, ie. there is a god and he created the world. So for example some people believe god sparked the big bang and guided evolution but that there was no '7 days' as such, that 7 days was a human made assumption. So they are not completely exclusive.
I personally find that the two ways of thinking are what would cause the most problems for a scientific mind, on the one hand you demand proof for everything, you need facts to support a hypothesis, no matter how simple and straight forward it might seem, on the other hand you accept something completely intangible and unprovable as fact, personally I could not draw a clear defined line- but I do know people who do so, yes, science and Christianity are not mutually exclusive. As long as religion does not pretend to be science, as happens in creationism, there is no problem, it's when religion starts to influence science you have an issue. I am personally not a fan of Dawkins, I don't think someone believing whatever they do is going to harm the world as long as they don't let it get in the way of facts.

I did see a rather interesting article today: Why we should ditch religion
which brought up some interesting points, not meaning to offend anyone either or make any assumptions about anyones beliefs, but for example I do think we can agree that there are more pressing matters than debating on whether gay marriages are evil or not!

When I was little I remember trying to believe... it never worked out for me, I guess I'm not geared that way. My parents are both more or less agnostic but they were very neutral about it when I was little and insisted I took religion in school, I had a children's bible, which meant when I got read a story I could choose what I wanted to hear, because they believed I should have the choice and not have beliefs forced upon me. My mother was brought up catholic so she would answer 'Christian' questions for me to the best of her ability without saying well, but I personally think that's a load of rubbish, it may have rang through she was not convinced but they did try to give me both sides. I just never felt the connection. : shrugs :

[David]

http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_sci ... right.html is pretty interesting along these lines too...

[Jellyfish123]

I see what you are saying, and I agree, but there is no evidence that either is 100% true.

Is it not a good feeling though, to know you have someone there, even when there is no one? in the good and bad times? Someone who loves you and plans your whole life, so that you may work your way to a sucessful end?