Another salvo in the evo-wars

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, evolutionary debate, polemics

Jerry A. Coyne isn't going to convince Duane Gish or Pat Robertson, but there's a chance that a good many people will at least find reason not to spend time and effort in fruitless combat. Dr. Coyne has written Why Evolution is True as a direct assault on creationism and "intelligent design", primarily among Americans. As he points, out, the primary resistance to education that includes evolution is found in the United States and in Turkey, the two nations that include large contingents of more fundamentalist believers, though the former is a "Christian nation" and the latter is Islamic.

In his introduction, he allows that religion by itself is not necessarily contra-evolution: "You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion." I cannot speak for any Muslims, of course, but among Christians, I do know that the great majority are not zealous creationists, meaning that while they believe in God as the creator, they are not bothered by evolution as a biological explanation for the vagaries of life on Earth.

Isaiah wrote (45:15) to God, "Truly you are a God who hides himself…" I take this to mean that rationalistic inquiry is not useful for finding God. Job admonished his friends, "But it is the spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding." To those who count that the Bible is true, there is a spiritual organ within us that is the right means of learning of God. This spirit is not our mind. Based on this crucial notion, we understand that scientific search and understanding are about the material world only, and cannot research spiritual things.

Then, to take up the author's key arguments, let us use the briefest definition of natural selection, the one favored by Darwin: Natural selection is descent with modification. Every living things shows, whether in its embryonic development or in this or that bodily feature, signs of being modified from earlier beings. Thus, for example, a large class of fishes has four main fins; in a few groups these fins are on lobes that can function as primitive legs. Amphibian legs are clearly seen to be modified from these "lobe-fin" appendages. Reptile legs are a further, more robust development, and mammals and birds have legs that are further refined. Evolution has not changed the number of legs, but has developed the same four legs in various ways. Dr. Coyne writes:

"There is no reason why a celestial designer, fashioning organisms from scratch…, should make new species by remodeling the features of existing ones. Each species could be constructed from the ground up. But natural selection can act only by changing what already exists."

To that last statement, let me add the proviso, that the original features, such as the fishes' fins, were based on simpler structures, but eventually you get an ancestor that didn't have any limbs at all, and somehow they were developed. Producing the first fins apparently took hundreds of millions of years, once the first vertebrates came to be in the first place. Thereafter, amphibians developed from lobe-finned fishes in a much shorter time.

Cartoons like this pretty much sum up many folk's understanding of evolution (Cartoon © Baloo [Rex May]). Somehow, fish "wanted" to go onto land, and amphibians resulted. But, observing fish that can "walk" on their lobe fins, we find that they don't "want" to walk, they have to walk when food runs out or water dries up. Necessity was the mother of this invention also. By the way, lobe-fin fish have really good moisturizers in their skin; the cosmetics industry might wish to take note.

To me, living in a body composed of a large number of features, all modified from earlier beings, can he a bit of a drag. Back troubles that plague more than half of us could have been forestalled were our backbone Designed with verticality in mind! Human bodies are filled with makeshifts like this, that work well enough for thirty or forty years, enough for us to raise children and maybe give a bit of help to the parents of our grandchildren, before we begin to decrepitate and decline. A well-designed human body would function well for a designated span, pre-chosen by its Creator, then a valve would pop off somewhere and "Pow!" we'd be done for. Maybe we'd have a day's notice so we could notify our own next of kin, with a clear schedule. To put it rudely, if my body was designed by God, I have a bone or two to pick with Him!

The author marshals his evidence, like wave after wave of an infantry: embryo development (we start out looking like little fish), geographic patterns of species ranges, sexual selection (the peacock's tail for example), and the mechanisms of speciation, how one species becomes two and so forth. I find the timing of speciation most fascinating. Some creatures, such as the Coelacanth fish and the Ginkgo tree, many sharks and cockroaches, have remained unchanged for tens of millions of years. Other species, particularly among land vertebrates, split and split again every million years or less.

I once read that most mammal species have a natural span of about four million years, but that primates tend to last only a tenth that long. In other words, a population of lemurs, for example, may spread out in the landscape and, because of some barrier between one group and another, evolve into two new species, both of which differ from the "parent" species, in a few hundred thousand years (perhaps fifty thousand generations). Among a different sort of creature, the genetic changes might take ten or a hundred times as long to occur, though a change in environment will hurry things up considerably. However, how long should it take, to produce the great diversity of visible-sized living things?

There are at least ten million species on Earth today, and some claim there could be 100 million or even a billion living species. This is not counting bacteria, which are quite a bit harder to count! How long must the average doubling time be? Let us take our zero point as the end of the Permian, when 99% of living species were wiped out, and assume that ten million species of beetle have arisen from just one beetle species that "made it through" the great Permian extinction.

It takes just 24 doublings to produce more than sixteen million items, from one. The Permian extinction was 251 million years ago, and 251/24 = 10.46. Thus, if each beetle species splits into two new beetle species at least each 10.5 million years, at least 16 million species of beetle might be found today. Actually, beetles speciate faster than that, and many species go extinct without producing any new species.

The author scarcely addresses "young Earth" believers, who don't agree with all this talk of millions of years. They can barely handle the thought of ten thousand years, at the outside. I know some that accept a great age for the Universe, but not for the Earth.

But I also know of a hillside in Wyoming, part of the Yellowstone Petrified Forest, that is actually twenty petrified forests, one atop the next. Each forest contains trees with several hundred growth rings, and fallen logs even larger, so that each required more than a thousand years to develop. Each forest was killed by ashfall from volcanic activity at Yellowstone some time in the past. An unknown interval of time passed after the killing of one forest and the growth of the large trees in the next began. But it is certain that this one hillside contains at least 20,000 years of history, and probably much more.

I know of "varved lakebeds" in Scandinavia, in which a very thin layer of sediment (a varve, usually less than a millimeter thick) is laid down each year; some of these lake bottoms contain more than 100,000 varves. I know of the ice cores drilled in Greenland that contain a continuous record of 400,000 years of snowfall (and dustfall). These are all things that don't depend on radioactive decay measurements.

So, let me say a word to my Christian brethren (sisters included), who are wondering about evolution: it is not anti-God. Believing in Creation does not mean you are a creationist. Creationism is a certain set of beliefs about creation, based on a distorted view of what the Bible is saying. The "Gap" between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 is very real, and the language, fairly read, indicates a great upheaval that led to God's Spirit "brooding over the waters." The six-day sequence recorded in Genesis 1 is a restoration from a damaged condition, caused by events mentioned in quite a mysterious way by Isaiah (ch 14), and alluded to by Jesus: "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven".

How likely is it that a brief catastrophe, quickly righted by divine intervention, would show up in the sediments? Particularly as it occurred near the end of the last ice age, when the breakup of the ice sheets was causing cataclysms in a number of places, such as the Channeled Scab-lands of Washington and Oregon states.

Jerry Coyne wants to convince those who might be wavering, that evolution actually happened in the way that biologists now think, by natural selection operating over long spans of time. Whether you wish to believe this yourself, I hope that at least you will realize that such a theory does not lead to either better or worse morals, nor is it a threat to the sovereignty and goodness of God. God truly is a God who hides himself, but also One who lets those who seek Him find Him. He isn't afraid of evolution; neither should His people be.

Finally, some balance

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, evolutionary debate

I know Protestants are loath to hear a Catholic witness, but Augustine really did say it best:

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics [the Earth, the heavens, the motion and orbit of the stars, the kinds of animals and shrubs]; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation ... Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

—Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis; parenthesis above supplied by Dr. Ayala to summarize the prior text; emphasis on the closing phrase in the original.

Francisco J. Ayala, a Professor of Biological Sciences at U.C. Irvine, and a well-schooled Catholic, found himself astonished by the extent of American Christians' opposition to the teaching of evolutionary biology. All during his education in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, the prevailing sentiment toward science and religion was collegial, based on Galileo's quip, "The Scriptures tell us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." He has distilled his experience and understanding into a marvelous volume, Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion.

How is "Darwinism" a gift to religion? Simply put, it solves the problem posed by Theodicy, the problem of evil. There are many ways to state it, but Darwin made a clear Theodicean statement when he wrote, "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." (F. Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, v2, p105)

The attitude of nonbelievers about God, considering the existence of evil, is summed up thus: Is he unable to prevent evil? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but unwilling? Then he is malevolent. Otherwise, how could there be evil? Even more so, per Darwin's statement above, why would he create so many creatures, and have the vast majority of them be parasites? (Every animal species known has at least one specific parasite species, including the parasites!) Some literalists claim all this is "corruption of the creation because of sin," and there are verses that seem to support their idea. But millions of parasitic species is really going way too far! They ought to heed Augustine.

Dr. Ayala traces the history of 20th Century anti-Darwinism; though it has roots in the controversies of the 1870s and 1880s, it is unique. Modern anti-evolutionists are primarily strict literalists, who believe that every word means literally what it says. Particularly in Genesis, they state that a day is a 24-hour day, "Let there be light" produced light three days before the Sun or Moon came into being, the flood that lofted Noah and his Ark to a mountaintop covered every trace of land on Earth and "fifteen cubits more," and so forth.

Now, having lost several legal actions designed first to keep evolution off the public school curriculum, and then to force the teaching of "creationism" or "creation science", the literalists have introduced a new term, "intelligent design." I'll abbreviate it ID, as many others do. They have had to take up hypocrisy as a result, because they know they can get nowhere if they connect ID with Biblical creation beliefs. However, the lie is easy to discern, and it is evident that they have no allies among those of other faiths (not that they would want any).

The core chapter of Darwin's Gift makes it clear that the "designer" proclaimed by ID proponents must be pretty poor at his job. Do you have all your teeth? Most people who can afford it have their wisdom teeth removed these days. I am the only person in my workplace with 32 teeth in his mouth. Why have them out? The jaw of most people is too small for 32 teeth; 28 is a better fit. One of my son's teeth never developed, so he only had to have 3 removed, but his jaw was too small to leave them in (he got that from his mother's side). Some people need 8 teeth removed, having a 24-tooth-size jaw. This makes no design sense, but it makes perfect evolutionary sense; we don't need the huge ape jaw any more.

Maybe God is a Puritan, who re-uses everything. Only that would explain that the three arm bones, a 2-for-1 elbow joint, a rather awkward shoulder, and a 5-finger hand attached to the human arm are in the same arrangement found in dogs, whales, and early fossil horses (but not modern ones, which have but one finger per foreleg and one toe per hind leg)...even rats. A truly intelligent designer would not begin with a dog foreleg and morph it into a human arm; he would produce an appendage more suited to use for carrying, manipulation of tools, and throwing things, all of which the dog leg cannot do, and the human arm does well enough, but breaks down after a while. A really well designed throwing arm could fire 150-mph fastballs well into a pitcher's 60s. But the closer you look at the "design" of living beings, the more you realize they were designed quite a bit more blindly than intelligently.

I won't take space going into how natural selection accomplishes evolutionary change. Sufficient to say, it is not the "random process" set up as a straw man. It does not make large changes quickly, but over time the changes can be very great. The changes it makes are based on what exists; the mammalian forelimb is good enough for long enough, so it has not become what an engineer might produce from scratch.

Dr. Ayala does us even more of a service in two final chapters, wherein he clearly explains what Stephen Jay Gould called "non-overlapping magisteria". Science is one way of knowing. Some scientists say it is the only way to know anything, but science cannot explain aesthetic feelings, spirituality, or ethics. We need other ways of knowing, and faith is one of them. Most people of faith believe in God or gods; some do not (Buddhists, for example). But they all believe in a way of knowing that science cannot address. Faith does not operate upon scientific terms, so fair is fair: They do not overlap.

I once read a short article called "Non-Reproducible Phenomena". It averred that there is an activity in which nearly all people participate. Some do it more than others. Most who do so receive much pleasure, and most people react with pleasure to some, but not all, incidents of such activity. Some use various tools, some do not, to carry out this activity. One person may cause a number of others great pleasure, while another person, engaged it would seem very similarly does not do so. The article stated these things in such a way that it seemed to be discussing hypnosis or mind reading...but in the end it stated: the activity is music.

Some aspects of music are amenable to scientific study. Some are not. But the nonscientific aspects of music are what lend it all its charm. So with the things of the spirit.

More ID debunking, 10 shots across the bow

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, evolutionary debate

I must be getting saturated. For the first time, I've read a book that had nearly nothing new for me. This is not to fault the authors; it is a sign to me to reduce my attention to the creation-evolution debate.

Cameron M. Smith and charles Sullivan, both professors, both popular science writers, both of whom write for Skeptical Enquirer, collaborated on ten essays under the title The Top Ten Myths about Evolution. I can summarize the ten chapters thus (in my own words):

• Survival of the Fittest — As Solomon said, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong"...and a wag added, probably Ambrose Bierce: "...but that's the way to bet." The common understanding of "the fittest", taken to an extreme, would result in a planet with a very simple ecology: Lots of some plant, probably a grass, lots of some grazer, and a single hermaphroditic predator who gets to have it all to Urself. The 10-20 million visible-sized species that inhabit this planet show that there are many ways to define "fit". My favorite example: the common blacksnake is a more efficient predator than any rattlesnake species in a ranch setting, which is why rattlesnakes are seldom found near dwellings.
  
• It's Just a Theory — So is every single scientific principle, but we bet our lives on the Germ Theory of Disease, and on Antibiotic Theory, all the time (except Christian Scientists); the Engineering principles used to design the bridge you just drove across are based on either the Theory of Trusses, or on Finite-Element Theory of Stress (if it looks like a trestle, it is the former). A theory is a model of the way something works, which has been tested by a lot of scientists who'd just love to get a Nobel Prize by proving it is a bad, incomplete, or inadequate model...but so far they can't do so. The "theory of Evolution" is actually "descent with modification" (Darwin's first term for it) or "natural selection" (his second). These are proposed mechanisms to explain why life changes...and it has been shown to change. Evolution is a fact, or actually, a collection of millions of facts; it is Natural Selection that is the theory used to explain the facts.
  
• The Ladder of Progress — Where are all the Trilobites? The last one died out a quarter-billion years ago, and every ecological niche that once supported a Trilobite now supports a Crab, a Lobster, or some similar critter with a lot of legs and a hard exterior. Where are the Neandertals? There are three choices: our ancestors ate them or slaughtered them (depends on taste); or ate everything they could eat (sort of like the blacksnakes and rattlesnakes above); or interbred with them but swamped their characteristics by outbreeding the mixed descendants. When Cro-Magnon came on the scene, it was one of at least four hominid species running around; the others gradually vanished, like all other apes are vanishing today. Cro-Magnon went through a few significant changes in social behavior and tool use to become "modern humans". But is this some kind of directed progress? No, rerun the scene, perhaps with a slight delay in C-M development, and today Neandertals might be running the show (see relevant Geico ads for a cute take on their abilities).
  
• The Missing Link — There are a few sedimentary sequences that show a set of species changing through time. In one case I've seen, the clams near the bottom of the layer have lots of ridges on their shells, perhaps 25 or so, but the number varies from 20 to nearly 40. Midway through, there are fewer ridges, and they are a little thicker and more pronounced. The range is about 15 to almost 30. Some clams at this level look nearly identical to some deeper ones. At the top, the number of ridges ranges from 12 to at most 20, and they are much heavier. Some of the "top" clams with 20 ridges look a lot like the "bottom" clams with 20 ridges, except for having thicker shells. Such a sequence is called a Cline. Over less than a million years, the environment gradually changed to one with heavier surf (steeper coastline?), and the clams changed to accommodate. OK, now. You are given a heavy-shelled 15-ridged shell and a thinner-shelled 28-ridged shell, and told only that the second one is a million years older than the other. Are they members of the same species? Suppose you are then shown a shell identical to the 28-ridged one, taken from a layer the same age as the younger one, but several miles away, where the environment didn't get as rough. Is this clam a different species from the 15-ridged clam of the same age? Answer questions like that first, then consider where on some "ladder" of progress these clams fit. There is no ladder.
  
• Evolution is Random — When energy flows, things tend to self-organize. Life has been defined as a self-replicating, evolving phenomenon that is powered by energy flows in environments that are far from equilibrium. Nearly all life on Earth is powered by sunlight, and less than 2% of the sunlight that hits the planet, at that. Photosynthesis is only 1-2% efficient, and nearly all life depends on green plants and other photosynthetic things (like purple seaweed, which isn't a plant, strictly speaking). Get water spinning in a bucket, then drop in some sand in as random a way as you like; all the sand will wind up in a pile in the middle of the bucket. Sand can't reproduce, nor can whirlpools. But living creatures can. Natural Selection has three elements: reproduction, variation, and selection. Reproduction isn't random (except for promiscuous adulterers). Asexual species produce near-perfect copies of themselves. Sexual species produce offspring that are "half like mom, half like dad, but with grandma's nose". If a couple had twenty babies (it has happened), then statistically 99.9999% of both Mom's and Dad's genes are represented in those twenty offspring...but it's a tossup as to which genes went where. Since both Mom and Dad have some 30,000 genes, it is a pretty sure bet that every gene of both parents is out there in at least one child. However, minor changes to the genes occurs with sufficient frequency that every child has 50-100 differences scattered along his or her DNA, that are not present in either parent...or weren't when they were born, anyway. Since only 2% of our DNA is used for making proteins or regulating their production, it is likely only one or two genes are actually affected. Most such mutations make no difference. Some are bad (a very few kill), some are helpful (better digestion, or eyesight, or strength). These variations are truly random. OK that is reproduction and variation. Now, how about selection? Put a child out into the world, provide education and training, and what do you get? You hope to get grandchildren. Maybe you don't. If not, whatever genetic inheritance that child had was selected against. An elm tree produces billions of seeds every year. Only one or two seeds, of all the seeds in a 150-year lifetime, is likely to become a mature tree. For elms, selection is a huge factor. It is not random, by any means. The environment destroys 99.99999999% of all elm seeds; only a very lucky few go on to produce grand-"children" for the old elm. Were selection less intense, an aged elm would not grow eighty feet tall, would produce just a few seeds, would not need much strength to withstand wind or rain or herbivores. It would look more like a moss, which is adapted to a much less "selective" environment. If there is a direction to evolution, selection provides it.
  
• People Come from Monkeys — It is more accurate to say that people come from apes, but it is most accurate to say that people are apes. Humans aren't the largest apes, gorillas are; they aren't the strongest apes for their size, orangs and chimps are neck-and-neck for that distinction; humans aren't the fastest apes, gibbons are (when swinging through the trees in a way Tarzan could only envy). Humans have these special characteristics: upright stance, which helps them see farther without climbing and frees the hands for carrying or working while walking; nearly no hair, so they can befriend fire safely; high intelligence so their social skills are unsurpassed; memory (including for thousands of the noisy symbols we call words) that enhances both social and technical skills; the most efficient hand among apes and good hand-eye coordination; and great endurance so they can run down everything except the dog and the horse. The sense of smell is less acute, a benefit in crowded social conditions, but the other senses are the same as the other apes: good color vision, binocular vision, keen hearing, taste and touch. Every ape species is seen to be much more like humans than any monkey species.
  
• Nature's Perfect Balance — Give any environment a few millennia of stability, and it will develop a well-balanced ecology. Ever hear of ecological succession? After a forest fire or landslide, the disturbed area goes through several stages; one common sequence is shrubs-birch/poplar-oak/maple. At any point in the sequence, it may look like a balanced, stable ecology over a period of a decade or two. But over a longer period, it is seen to be an ecology in transition. Old growth forest appears stable, and it is, until the climate changes, or a wildfire clears some hillsides. A rising water table will force conversion of a temperate hardwood forest into a willow/birch stand, then cypress swamp. Nothing is static, including the purported "perfect balance" of nature at any one spot.
  
• Creationism Disproves Evolution — Creationism requires a supernatural element. Evolution seeks to explain with no supernatural element. Therefore, they cannot be compared, and neither one can disprove the other. However, no explanation that partakes of supernatural elements can be called a science, because science by definition appeals only to natural phenomena. There is no scientific explanation for a miracle. There is no need to do so. Those who have given their lives to "disproof" have wasted them.
  
• Intelligent Design is Science — Intelligent design is negative in emphasis, not positive. ID proposes no natural explanation for the existence of any living beings, and no mechanism other than supernatural intervention for the production of any species now living that did not exist in the past. This reliance on supernatural agents or agencies places ID firmly outside science. This is why ID supporters try instead to show problems with evolution, claiming to be the only alternative. ID is but one of a number of alternatives; the scientific ones have already been disproven, and the nonscientific ones—including ID—aren't in the scientific arena.
  
• Evolution is Immoral — Evolution is like the weather. It just is. Whether someone believes in God or Allah or Alien Gene Designers can make no difference. The dinosaurs and trilobites are just as extinct. Life has changed over time. The modern TB bacterium is quite different from the one that existed in the 1800s; antibiotic use has been a selection pressure that resulted in resistant germs that did not exist 200 years ago. The Anopheles mosquito has changed; certain species are DDT resistant, and these didn't exist 100 years ago as they are now; it seems they are new species. Evolution proceeds rather quickly when a new selection pressure emerges. Evolution, or Nature with a capital N, also provides no guidelines for deciding moral questions. The lion that eats a baby gazelle is not immoral. The "natural" is neither good nor bad; the lion must eat to live, and is equipped to eat gazelles and gnus. Murder is a human invention. When a chimp kills another chimp, that is not murder, though it looks uncomfortably similar. However, chimps do have an emotional response to such events, which are similar to our emotional response to murder. Thus, chimps avoid a chimp-killer just as humans avoid or shun a murderer (if we don't imprison him or her). But, this one thing I learned from the book: Plato proved that "God Says So" is not a proper foundation for morality. This seems surprising, but follow the logic. Is God's command the only thing we can rely on to determine that killing another person is immoral? If so, then before God spoke, killing was not immoral and there was no such thing as murder. But if we say instead that killing is immoral, and God has prohibited it for that reason, then we don't need God's order to say that it is immoral; it is immoral whether God says so or not. Some say that great harm has been done because of evolutionary ideas. No doubt this is true. Equally great harm has been done because of religious ideas (do I hear "crusades", the great tragedy of medieval times?). I said evolution, like weather, just is. The persistent, tragic failure of Russian central planning of agriculture for seventy years showed that great evils can be promulgated even by misusing the weather. Morality is about relationships, and our emotional response to them. One fellow was orating about how prostitution ought to be legal; a heckler said, "OK, send me your daughter tomorrow."

That's my take, told my way. The authors go into more detail (in 160+ pages).

Ignorance on trial in PA

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, creationism, intelligent design, evolutionary debate

The 21^st Century "Monkey Trial" took place in Dover, PA, just a couple years ago. Many folks I knew were incredulous that there could still be such an anti-science bias in a whole school board. After all, Pennsylvania is a politically, socially, and religiously liberal state, the home of "Outcome-Based Education", so hated by conservatives in "flyover country" like Oklahoma or Kentucky (Anti-OBE activism was the particular hobby horse of several good friends when we lived in the Bible Belt). Let's not forget that, if you take away Philadelphia and a couple of elite neighborhoods near CMU in Pittsburgh, you have a state filled with staunch conservatives, regardless of their registered political party.

Matthew Chapman, a confirmed liberal and Bush-hater (clearly expressed in several asides), and an apparently born atheist, went to Dover to cover the trial, firmly believing that creationism has no place in the classroom. He came away believing every kind of creationism should be presented to the children, but not for any reason you might guess.

I simply must show the jacket photo of the author. Looking like he's ready to counter-punch the photographer, he plays host, either to some three dozen ants attracted to sugar drippings on his white shirt, or to a bunch of stickers artfully arranged. I vote for the former.

In Forty Days and Forty Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin®, and other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania, author Chapman presents a running summary of the events that preceded and eventually caused the lawsuit and trial, the trial itself, and the aftermath of a divided small town. Along the way, we get glimpses of most of the protagonists—and there were many—from his interviews and observations.

Most of these are likeable folks. Chapman liked them, almost all. A few, particularly Bill Buckingham, who started it all, and a hell-fire preacher who watched proceedings as an interested party, went out of their way to be jerks. Nearly all are Christians, though of widely differing traditions. One couple, who were among those who sued the Dover school board to have Intelligent Design (ID) dropped from the curriculum, left a lasting impression; he came away thinking, "If I were a Christian, these were the kinds of Christians I would want to be like." They lived their faith, and it showed.

How sad, that the Bill Buckinghams of the world are so spiritually insecure they find every little thing a threat, and cannot feel safe unless they ram their narrow vision of what the Bible "must" mean down everyone's throat. As Chapman mentions more than once, it seemed paradoxical that people expecting the bliss of heaven should be the angriest and most bitter. He also exposed the willful ignorance of many, who didn't bother to read or study material from either side of the debate, trusting what others told them, to the point that Bill Buckingham, asked to define ID, gave a pretty good definition of Natural Selection! Jesus did say we ought to be "harmless as doves", but preceded that with "wise as serpents." The pro-ID people are seen to be wise as doves and as "harmless" as serpents.

Of the articles and longer pieces I've read on this trial, this book is by far the best treatment. And why does he want creationism taught? When children have been taught to understand the scientific method and the power of evidence-based reason, you can show them forty kinds of "creation science" and they'll clearly see it isn't science at all.

The Wrath of Pat

kw: evolutionary debate, false prophets

It's much in the news today that Pat Robertson threatened Dover, PA with God's wrath because they voted out eight school board members who'd been in favor of introducing "intelligent design" into the curriculum.

Just so you know. I am a Christian. I beleve in God's creation. I also believe that my senses and my mind give me somewhat accurate information about the world around. All, and I mean ALL, the physical evidence we have supports the view that living creatures—bacteria, fungi, protozoa, plants, and animals—were produced by evolutionary processes over spans of time measured in billions of years. Concerning what the Bible says, I see that it leaves plenty of room for all that time and process.

Furthermore, a few verses in Isaiah explicitly state that the condition of the earth in Gen 1:2 was not a result of the initial creation, and this prophet calls God "The One who hideth himself." Isaiah, like many of us, would have preferred God to intervene in a more direct way, rather than "one word then another, a line here and another there, here a little, there a little." God left it to Bill Cosby to tell us the essence of it: when his comic Noah tells God, about an extra male hippo, "You change one of 'em!", God replies, "You know I don't work like that." Indeed.

Jesus said, "God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust." And when Jonah got angry when God changed his mind and didn't destroy Nineveh, God chided him for his lack of mercy, and indeed lack of logic.

I sadly charge my brother with two errors. Firstly, he denies that God left room in the universe for evolution to do its work. Secondly, he misunderstands the work of a prophet, who knows what God plans (because God told him) and reports it; Robertson presumes that God cannot glorify himself without bringing cataclysm on a rural town, mostly composed of Christians.

I guess he'd rather have God kill a bunch of Christians who disagree with his narrow (and I claim, incorrect) view of Creation, than show mercy as the God who says, "Let us reason together." None of the ardent "scientific creationists" or advocates of "intelligent design" that I have met is capable of reason.