Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: ChessExpert
Darwin clearly considers speciation to be a very gradual process. Is it so gradual that all the evidence is historical? Or could one look around and find some evidence in the present - different varieties or races?

It depends on how rapidly a species reproduces. Bacterial evolution is quite visible in the lab. For other species where thousands of generations can take a long time, the evidence is in the fossil record -- as expected.

My complaint is with modern dogma. We must believe in evolution. We must not be racists.

You don't have to believe in evolution (or atoms, or relativity, or anything else that bothers you), and you can be a racist if you like.

One should reject racism for humanitarian reasons; it's just not nice to people. But it seems to me that a complete discussion of human evolution would include a discussion of race.

Darwin discusses the races of man extensively in The Descent of Man. And he concludes that we're all the same species. Interestingly, that wasn't a mainstream view in his generation.

131 posted on 06/25/2005 8:46:57 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. The List-O-Links is at my homepage.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 130 | View Replies ]


To: PatrickHenry
Allow me to rephrase the obvious (with apologies to Rich Cook):

Evolution today is a race between scientists striving to build a bigger, better, idiot-proof model of the history of life on Earth, and Nature trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, Nature is winning.

132 posted on 06/25/2005 10:38:22 AM PDT by balrog666 (A myth by any other name is still inane.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 131 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson