Posted on 01/22/2006 4:28:17 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Among the many traits that made Charles Darwin one of the greatest minds in science was his pertinacious personality. Facing a daunting problem in natural history, Darwin would obstinately chip away at it until its secrets relented. His apt description for this disposition came from an 1867 Anthony Trollope novel in which one of the characters opined: "There ain't nowt a man can't bear if he'll only be dogged.... It's dogged as does it." Darwin's son Francis recalled his father's temperament: "Doggedness expresses his frame of mind almost better than perseverance. Perseverance seems hardly to express his almost fierce desire to force the truth to reveal itself."
Historian of science Frank J. Sulloway of the University of California, Berkeley, has highlighted Darwin's dogged genius in his own tenacious efforts to force the truth of how Darwin actually pieced together the theory of evolution. The iconic myth is that Darwin became an evolutionist in the Galápagos when he discovered natural selection operating on finch beaks and tortoise carapaces, each species uniquely adapted by food type or island ecology. The notion is ubiquitous, appearing in everything from biology textbooks to travel brochures, the latter inveigling potential travelers to visit the mecca of evolutionary theory and walk in the tracks of St. Darwin the Divine.
In June 2004 Sulloway and I did just that, spending a month retracing some of Darwin's fabled footsteps. Sulloway is one sagacious scientist, but I had no idea he was such an intrepid field explorer until we hit the lava on San Cristóbal to reconstruct the famous naturalist's explorations there. Doggedness is the watchword here: with a sweltering equatorial sun and almost no freshwater, it is not long before 70-pound water-loaded packs begin to buckle knees and strain backs. Add hours of daily bushwhacking through dry, dense, scratchy vegetation, and the romance of fieldwork quickly fades.
Yet the harder it got, the more resolute Sulloway became. He actually seemed to enjoy the misery, and this gave me a glimpse into Darwin's single-mindedness. At the end of one particularly grueling climb through a moonscapelike area Darwin called the "craterized district" of San Cristóbal, we collapsed in utter exhaustion, muscles quivering, and sweat pouring off our hands and faces. Darwin described a similar excursion as "a long walk."
Death permeates these islands. Animal carcasses are scattered hither and yon. The vegetation is coarse and scrappy. Dried and shriveled cacti trunks dot a bleak lava landscape so broken with razor-sharp edges that moving across it is glacially slow. Many people have died, from stranded sailors of centuries past to wanderlust-struck tourists of recent years. Within days I had a deep sense of isolation and of life's fragility. Without the protective blanket of civilization, none of us is far from death. With precious little water and even less edible foliage, organisms eke out a precarious living, their adaptations to this harsh environment selected for over millions of years. These critters are hanging on by the skin of their adaptive radiations. A lifelong observer of, and participant in, the creation-evolution controversy, I was struck by how clear the solution is in these islands: creation by intelligent design is absurd. Why, then, did Darwin depart the Galápagos a creationist?
The Darwin Galápagos legend is emblematic of a broader myth that science proceeds by select "eureka!" discoveries followed by sudden revolutionary revelations, whereupon old theories fall before new facts. Not quite. Paradigms power perceptions. Sulloway discovered that nine months after departing the Galápagos, Darwin made this entry in his ornithological catalogue about his mockingbird collection: "When I see these Islands in sight of each other, & possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure & filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties." That is, similar varieties of fixed kinds, rather than the myth that he already knew that evolution was responsible for the creation of separate species. Darwin was still a creationist! This quotation explains why Darwin did not even bother to record the island locations of the few finches he collected (and in some cases mislabeled) and why, as Sulloway has pointed out, these now famous "Darwin finches" were never specifically mentioned in On the Origin of Species.
Darwin similarly botched his tortoise observations. Later, he recalled a conversation he had had while in the islands with the vice governor Nicholas O. Lawson, who explained that for the tortoises Lawson "could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought. I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the collections from two of the islands." Worse, as Sulloway recounts humorously, Darwin and his mates ate the remaining tortoises on the voyage home. As Darwin later confessed: "I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted."
Through careful analysis of Darwin's notes and journals, Sulloway dates Darwin's acceptance of the fact of evolution to the second week of March 1837, after a meeting Darwin had with the eminent English ornithologist John Gould, who had been studying his Galápagos bird specimens. With access to museum ornithological collections from areas of South America that Darwin had not visited, Gould corrected a number of taxonomic errors Darwin had made (such as labeling two finch species a "Wren" and an "Icterus") and pointed out to him that although the land birds in the Galápagos were endemic to the islands, they were notably South American in character.
Darwin left the meeting with Gould, Sulloway concludes, convinced "beyond a doubt that transmutation must be responsible for the presence of similar but distinct species on the different islands of the Galápagos group. The supposedly immutable 'species barrier' had finally been broken, at least in Darwin's own mind." That July, Darwin opened his first notebook on Transmutation of Species, in which he noted: "Had been greatly struck from about Month of previous March on character of S. American fossils -- and species on Galapagos Archipelago. These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views." By 1845 Darwin was confident enough in his data to theorize on the deeper implications of the Galápagos: "The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions.… Hence both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact--that mystery of mysteries--the first appearance of new beings on this earth."
For a century and a half, Darwin's theory has steadfastly explained more disparate facts of nature than any other in the history of biology; the process itself is equally dogged, as Darwin explained: "It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers." Doggedly so.
"miraculous creation"
I think you answered your own question.
I thought we knew where the waters came from and the question was where they went.
Q.E.D. (& LOL!)
No it wasn't. The Voyage of the Beagle was first published in 1839, and (I'd bet) the text you quote is from the heavily revised and expanded 2nd Edition of 1845.
My first hand knowledge of Darwin's correspondence and notebooks, such as it is, is consistent with Shermer's thesis: Darwin didn't become an evolutionist until after his return to England.
Excuse me, but someone's knocking at my door...
Yes. Darwin was a Christian as a young man, and up until and past the time (circa 1837-38) that he developed his initial ideas about evolution. However his belief in Christianity gradually eroded. (And he had been exposed to "free thought" perspectives as a young man through his father's and brother Erasmus's social circles.) Most scholars think that his final abandonment of Christianity can be tied to the horrible and extended death (probably from tuberculosis) of his ten year old daughter Annie in 1851.
Darwin always claimed that, although he abandoned theism for agnosticism, he never became an atheist.
Thanks for putting in your "three cents" on this topic....
;-)
There is no credible explanation for either the source or the sink of the waters. People who believe the story need to explain where approximately 1 *billion* cubic miles of additional water came from, and where it went after the flood.
Don't tell anyone, but not one of them has evolved into a goldfish.
It is now widely held that Darwin was personally responsible for causing the stock market crash of '29 and the ensuing Great Depression.
Was that before or after he converted to Voodoo and led a few coups in Haiti?
If one cubit is 18 in., then the surface area to house the animals works out to just over 100,000 ft², or just over 2.3 acres.
Would that be enough room to contain 2 of every species?
Not even enough room to contain 2 of every wood-boring beetle. (Not to mention termites.)
Note: the adjective "two" doesn't apply to cockroaches.
The vapor canopy above the earth (which does not now exist) begins to precipitate as rain to the earth. Torrential rain... Rain for many (40) days. Tectonic movements cause great upheavals beneath the ocean, releasing vast amounts of magma and water trapped within existing rock. As the waters rise, and these eruptions occur, great tidal waves sweep the earth, along with the normal tidal action created by the moon's force. As barometric pressure decreases, and the earth cools, immense amounts of limestone is precipitated out of the sea water. Every inundation of land as the waters rise kills more and more creatures. Then the waters entomb their prey with limestone as it forms in the water and falls to the bottom. Layers are formed, one after the other, and some are laid down together at the same time. The rapid burial and high mineral content quickly fossilizes what would have otherwise decayed to extinction. Now the waters are over the tallest mountains, which may not have been quite as tall as they are now. It seems that there is not hope for a planet that is completely covered with water. But there is another phenomena to come.
The waters begin to descend. They are draining. But to where? The floor of the ocean is sinking. It descends to an abyss measured in miles, rather than feet. The waters follow this sinking, and the land begins to dry. Huge lakes of sea water have been trapped inland. Their exits begin as a stream. But as the soft limestone is cut, greater amounts of water can flow, and then still greater. Canyons are quickly formed in the soft strata, and become unimaginably huge (e.g. the Grand Canyon). Meanwhile, water is flowing underground as well, seeking every crevice in the newly formed rock. The vapor canopy is gone, and the earth quickly cools. The poles, which were once protected and warmed by a greenhouse effect, are now exposed to a lack of warmth and begin to freeze. As waters descend, and river levels normalize, another phenomenon is beginning. Tectonic pressure within the earth have been building. The earth's new form is not natural for it, and pressures must be removed... And so the earth begins to move. As it moves, solidified rock begins to push horizontally. But this has the effect of thrusting stone against stone, and the forces push upward. Mountains grow as if being pushed into place by infinite forces. Their heights ascend to greater heights until the pressures are relieved which acted upon them.
http://www.conroechurch.com/Articles/Evidences/Ev_FloodMech.html
Brief, simplistic answer but seems plausible to me.
It falls so far short as to be laughable. The Nimitz wouldn't be anywhere near big enough. As I've said before, the story only makes sense to primitive people who think that the total number of species number in the low hundreds.
And that is leaving aside the practical problems of 8 people looking after 20 million+ species for a year. Try talking to a zookeeper about the manpower requirements per animal (and that is with electricity, running-water, food deliveries, plenty of exercise room, vets on call, waste taken away in the sewers or on trucks, etc, etc, etc)
It may seem plausible to you. But there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever for any of this activity, and abundant physical evidence that beautifully matches the standard predictions of mainstream geology. For example the proposed Biblical mechanism of flood sedimentation has no explanation for the common phenomenon of angular unconformities, which are easily explained by conventional geology. Suggesting that formations like the grand canyon were formed in a rapid flood is simply nonsensical. The Grand canyon shows all the hallmarks that we would expect of something worn by millions of years of river erosion through a tough, dry, landscape. In particular the steep vertical sides of the canyon and its meanders are not predicted by flood geology.
Furthermore, the proposed mechanisms involve the suspension of numerous physical laws and untold millions of miracles, large and small. For example, the potential energy loss in the precipitation of the hypothetical vapour canopy would boil the oceans and fry every living thing on earth. And for what? So that a deity can commit terracide in a way that coincidentally accords with the kind of destruction myths that we would expect ancient hydraulic civilisations to have (think Katrina). And then the deity having done this hides all of the physical evidence (guilt?). Obviously a deity can do anything, but choosing such an asinine way to kill almost everyone on earth in order to rid the planet of evil (well, there's a plan that worked ;) ) and then hiding all the evidence except for one story told by a tribe of nomadic goatherds just beggars belief.
Basically, that "scientific" explanation from AiG can only seem plausible to those who have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of geology, hydraulics, soil mechanics, and physics.
Glenn Morton trained as a geologist with the people who proposed that model that you posted. Then he made the "mistake" of getting a job with an oil company that involved him having to deal with real geological data on a daily basis. In his words...
But eventually, by 1994 I was through with young-earth creationISM. Nothing that young-earth creationists had taught me about geology turned out to be true. I took a poll of my ICR graduate friends who have worked in the oil industry. I asked them one question.
"From your oil industry experience, did any fact that you were taught at ICR, which challenged current geological thinking, turn out in the long run to be true? ,"
That is a very simple question. One man, Steve Robertson, who worked for Shell grew real silent on the phone, sighed and softly said 'No!' A very close friend that I had hired at Arco, after hearing the question, exclaimed, "Wait a minute. There has to be one!" But he could not name one. I can not name one. No one else could either. One man I could not reach, to ask that question, had a crisis of faith about two years after coming into the oil industry. I do not know what his spiritual state is now but he was in bad shape the last time I talked to him.
"Glenn R. Morton has a long history of making and repeating fallacious arguments against creationist scientists. For instance, he has been distorting the content and significance of my 1979 paper[1] on isotopic dating for some 25 years. Despite his having been repeatedly corrected during this long period of time, he continues to present it to the unwary. It is for this reason that this reply has been written. Otherwise, Morton’s transparently specious argument is not even worth dignifying with a reply, for which reason no earlier formal response had been written."
http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_jw_02.asp
Is this the same Glenn Morton?
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