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evolution, creationism, creation science, fossil, fossils, evolve,
science, philosophy of science, biology, life science, fundamentalism,
genesis, Bible science, natural history, paleontology
Genesis
Why can't scientists just leave genesis alone?
Why do they always have to poke around into the origins of things?
Why couldn't Darwin have just stuck to studying insects and barnacles?
We already had an explanation for the origin of life (in a book called
Genesis) -- wasn't that good enough? Since scientific discoveries
of the origins of living things seem to upset some people, why don't
we just drop it? What difference does it make, anyway?
Well, it makes a BIG difference.
Take corn, wheat, and rice, for instance. These grains provide maybe 75% of the food the world eats. Today, a corn plant produces twice the grain it did 30 years ago, and probably 10 times what it could a century ago. Why? Because we know -- we have found out -- that living things are changeable. Over many generations we can change them into things that serve us better. Nowadays we do it very systematically and on purpose. We've done it more haphazardly for thousands of years. Somewhere in our dim past we discovered that if we mate our best plants and animals, or save the best seeds, and destroy or eat the less perfect ones, each generation will get slightly better -- more fit, by our standards. But corn, for instance, is still being improved, and still has enemies. One way we could improve it is to find its wild ancestor, the native grass that our ancestors started cultivating. The problem is that we have changed corn so much that it now looks very different from any wild grasses. But understanding that corn has evolved has allowed agricultural researchers to find its wild cousin. Now, using the science of genetics, we can "borrow" genes from that relative to improve corn. We are making it more resistant to disease and insects, and more tolerant of salt and drought.
That's
one thing we can do with a knowledge of evolution and genetics:
feed a hungry world. Research into improving animals - livestock
- is just as dependent on modern evolutionary biology. How could we even
conceive of using ancestral genes to improve breeds if we thought all
plants and animals were just created, in their present forms?
If
you want to see evolution in action, almost literally happening before
your very eyes, all you have to do is look for things with very short
times between generations: insects, for instance. 
A major problem with bugs (from our point of view) is that their generations
are so short that they can evolve fast. So what? So every
farmer must be painfully aware that he has to be very careful about
how he uses pesticides. If he uses too much, too often, he may force bugs
to evolve rapidly and become resistant, so that the poison no longer kills
them. This isn't "just a theory" -- it happens. There
are many pesticides that are now useless, because the bugs they were used
on have evolved into something that is no longer bothered by those
poisons. They may not be new species yet, but they are no longer the same
insects, either. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the multi-national,
multi-billion-dollar agribusinesses take evolution very seriously
.
Consider
those other "bugs": germs. Modern hospitals have learned the hard way
just how fast bacteria can evolve. They have accidentally "created,"
by using too many antibiotics, new breeds of super-germs that have evolved
resistance to antibiotics. It's now a very chancey race: can we find
new antibiotics fast enough to keep up with the mutation-and-natural-selection
rates of killers like resistant staphylococcus? And if we do find something
that kills it, do we run the risk of forcing it to just evolve
again into an even more unstoppable form?
Our
first step in understanding AIDS was to figure out what it had
evolved from -- it didn't just appear magically. 
We have also discovered that it will be very difficult to make an
AIDS vaccine, because the HIV virus has developed the trick of evolving
so fast, that something that prevents it this year, probably
won't next year. Another of its tricks is to mutate (evolve) into many
different strains within each victim's body, so that the immune system
can never find and eliminate all the viruses. If researchers didn't
know that life has always changed, and continues to change -- if
they didn't believe in evolution -- how could they deal with the
turbo-charged evolutionary rates of these tiniest and deadliest life
forms?
Then there's
oil. Oil? Black gold. Texas tea. We need it. 
We pay people a lot to find it. Those people are called oil exploration
geologists. To learn how to find oil, they spend years at A&M, UT,
West Texas State, Rice, studying........ fossils! They know
that some creatures appeared on Earth earlier -- millions of years earlier
-- than others. Therefore those fossils are buried more deeply than
those of creatures that appeared later. This simple fact is so dependable
that these geologists can look at the fossils brought up by the oil drill
and tell how old that layer of rock is. Where the oil is, and whether
there is any, has a lot to do with how old the layers are. Geologists
use the evolutionary sequence of fossils because it works
. It earns the oil companies (and therefore the geologists) big bucks
.
Finally, a (true)
horror story. A few years ago there was a little girl, known to the concerned
public as "Baby Fae," who needed a heart transplant. Human donors are
hard to find, especially for infants, so a daring surgeon convinced the
parents to let him implant a baboon's heart. 
A hopeful world held its breath, while skeptical biologists scratched
their heads (a baboon's heart?), but everyone hoped for
the best. Sadly, Baby Fae died after a few weeks. Among the contributing
factors may have been that her immune system had recognized the heart
as something foreign, and attacked it. After the sensational news stories
had died down, it was reported that a biologist asked the surgeon why
he had chosen a baboon donor, which is a much more distant relative
of ours (in evolutionary terms) than a chimpanzee, which is our closest
relative (DNA ~99% identical). Wouldn't there have been less danger of
rejection with a heart from a closer relative? The surgeon's answer:
he hadn't even taken that into consideration, because he didn't
believe in evolution! To him, no creatures were related
to each other, since they had all been created at once, in their present
forms.*
Maybe a chimpanzee's heart wouldn't have saved Baby Fae either, but the chances might have been better. It's hard to find words to describe a doctor who would do this kind of experiment on a child, then later reveal that his decisions were based on a complete denial of the best modern science. I hope you are never faced with a life-or-death decision between what science says the world is like, and what you think it is like. But scientific progress is unstoppable, and all modern life science centers around the knowledge of the evolutionary genesis and relationships of living things. And there's no sign of that changing anytime soon.
*Response from a gentleman
researching this and other creationist craziness for a dissertation:
I tracked this down, to a radio interview given by Bailey to the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation program "Health Report," hosted by Norman
Swan, aired June 3, 1985. I have obtained a copy of the tape.
It's true, Bailey says exactly that the concept of homology did not
play a role in the selection process of donor species, but it was
a case of availability and size. HLA testing was done, and the
closest match was used. However, baboons have type A blood, while
Baby Fae was type O. The blood antigens caused a severe rejection
of not only the heart graft, but also damage to liver and other organs.
The doctors thought that blood type immune response would not be
sufficiently developed in a neonate to make a difference. Bailey says
he's a fundamentalist, he can buy microevolution, but that millions
of years of separation of species boggles his mind. Homology
of this kind did not count at all!
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Other possibly interesting essays, on evolution and other topics |
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Links to other excellent sources of information on evolution
R. J. Riggins
darrwin@aol.com
Use or repost at your pleasure, just leave my name on it, please.
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