Posted on 03/14/2006 9:45:42 PM PST by Mr. Silverback
Sometimes you have to wonder about the New York Times. It printed a long, breathtakingly written, scientific-sounding piece that just had one problem: It wasn’t news. Now, why would it do that?
The article, titled “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story,” was run prominently on the front page of the New York Times last week. The reporter excitedly announced that scientists had found “the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving.” That’s big news. What was the evidence? “Researchers have detected,” the story says, “some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years. The genes that show this evolutionary change,” the reporter continued, “include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color, and brain function.”
In other words, human beings over time have adapted to their surroundings, and they continue to do so to this day.
This is news? I hate to throw cold water on the Times’s big story, but the fact is that most people are well aware of natural selection and how it works. Whether one believes in Darwinian evolution or not doesn’t apply here; it’s common knowledge that groups of people and animals routinely experience this kind of change.
What this does not mean is that one species ever evolved into another. As Dr. Jay Richards of the Acton Institute explains, “All we’re talking about here is the action of natural selection on an already existing population. . . . There’s nothing in this story about the emergence of new genes via a mutation merely under selection pressure. . . . At most,” says Richards, “it would refer to a tweaking of an already existing gene under selection pressure, which isn’t inherently problematic.”
To sum up, there’s nothing here that is new or exciting. So why is this non-story given more than fifteen hundred words on the front page of the New York Times? It’s not too hard to guess. The Times has been on a crusade of late against the intelligent design (ID) movement—“crusade” putting it mildly. Recent headlines in the paper include “Unintelligent Design” and “Intelligent Design Derailed”; another headline referred to ID proponents as “Politicized Scholars.” According to the Times editorial section, they’re also “misguided,” “inane,” often “ignorant,” and guilty of “recklessness.”
So why the non-story? Well, it’s a pretty safe guess that this latest piece is just one more effort in that direction. What better way to give evolution a boost and strike a blow against intelligent design? Just print an innocuous piece reminding your audience how natural selection works, and trust that most of them will automatically assume that it helps prove Darwinian evolution.
Funny it didn’t go on to report that Darwin himself spent years doing pigeon-breeding experiments, all of which showed adaptation, but not one species becoming another. Well, let’s just say that with this misleading and downright lazy strategy, it is not the intelligent design movement that is made to look out of touch.
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The important issue here has nothing to do with intelligent design, but with the probable effect of genetic changes on human history, due to the scale and rapidity of the changes. Or conversely, to the effects of human culture on human genes. This is very interesting in itself. Humans do not need to become another species in order to be very different from even their recent ancestors.
Here's an interesting non-genetic study - English skulls have changed significantly in only 700 years -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4643312.stm
On the basis of this, it seems that in just that short time a rather major rearrangement of the typical brain has occurred, probably an expansion of the frontal lobes.
If you have ever read ancient documents or stone tablets one thing becomes very clear about human beings or the human condition, nothing has changed.
I agree with you that the info in the Times article desn't debunk intelligent design, or support species-to-another-species-evolution. That said, I think Colson's probably right about the NYT's motives for running it.
What's your screen name a refrence to? IIRC, the official model number of one of the Japanese Zero models was A6M3.
The Times reporter must not know any liberals.
The evolutionists apparently need all the misleading press they can muster while they cling to a last vain hope that they'll survive extinction. *chortling* Ah, I love the smell of heathen desperation in the morning.. means there might be some chance they'll grasp the truth finally..
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”[1.1] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell
Steven Pinker would be proud.
The photo of the winners of "the fittest family" contest is worth a click.
The original paper that this is based on is here:
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040072
Well-said.
A Darwinistic grasping at straws.
Banzai.
Your close. His problem is he thinks Manhattanites evolved from an inferior lifeform called the Conservative. :-)
Your=You're
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