What if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is inaccurate? What if the way you live now affects the life expectancy of your descendants? Evolutionary thinking is having a revolution. Oliver Burkeman writes in the Guardian:
The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There’s a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.
The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for … “about a full day!” Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the “myth” of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong — according to another creationist rumour, he’d recanted on his deathbed, anyway — and here, at last, is scientific evidence!
Inevitably, those of us who aren’t professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn’t waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin’s theory of evolution — or, at least, Darwin’s theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it — is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?
Read More in the Guardian
Latest posts by bluemana (see all)
- U.S. Fails on Happy Planet Index - Jun 18, 2012
- Homeless Man in Texas Finds $77,000, Gets to Keep It - Jun 18, 2012
- Male Spider Castrates Himself And Gets More Stamina - Jun 14, 2012