JoB
Ken, thank you for the link to to the Wikipedia segment on the wedge. I finally had time in the wee hours to go back and read it. And thank you Wes for your thoughtful questions. And thank you House… what thoughtful post.
I got distracted by questions of faith.. which i don’t think belong in the evolution/creationism debate as it is currently framed but which i can never resist as they are of the heart.
Who knows if Darwin got it “right”. We can’t refute what he observed… but as science learns more about the world we live in and discovers more.. we find that most early science got it mostly right.
What he got dead on was that in different micro-environments (for want of a better word), similar creatures turned out differently…
What is evolution? To me this is simply every living creature and anything created by them adapting to the changes in their world.
What proof is there of evolution? Well, House nailed that one if there is proof… we can actually watch microorganisms “evolve” when we introduce new stimuli into their environment. It is certainly logical to assume that if we do it on a micro level.. it also occurs on a macro level.
When did you realize evolution was true and why? Like House, i grew up in the woods with a family that was heavily tied to a home farm. I listened to breeding discussions in the kitchen and saw evidence that selected breeding worked. I saw the wild creatures that tried to coexist with that farm.. and watched as “pests” became “resistant” to the attempts to destroy them. It simply made sense to me. We use evolution to our own benefit and call it breeding. Why wouldn’t the rest of the creatures on earth have similar mechanisms for survival? I was 12 when i first confronted the question on an intellectual basis.
If any creature is to survive it would have to be able to adapt to the changing reality of our world.
What i find curious, is that we always assume that man is at his highest level of intelligence and awareness right now. We (our modern civilization) is not alone in this. I am certain that Michelangelo could conceive of nothing more glorious than the world he lived in.
Yet, archaeological evidence is destroying the idea of some sort of time line of civilization daily. What they find in current excavations in the desserts of Asia is that there have been many civilizations and they all had contact with one another long before we thought was possible.
We are arrogant to impose our standards on the skeletons we find… arrogant enough at one time to destroy anything which didn’t agree with our concept of civilizaton… what the Taliban did to far more than just “graven images” or what the English did to artifacts in Africa. We can only wonder at how much evidence was destroyed by those who didn’t want their interpretation challenged.
What is.. is as real as anything gets for us… how we look at those realities changes drastically depending upon the information available to us.
What i find frightening about the current debate… if it can be seen to be one.. is how far those who don’t want their interpretation challenged will go to deny the rest of us the information to make our own decisions about those interpretations.