Posted on 01/22/2004 11:10:22 PM PST by Destro
Settling the dispute between Darwinism and Christianity
It seems that you don't have to be an atheist to believe in Darwinism. Just make sure you don't get religion and science confused
By Michael Ruse
Saturday, Jan 10, 2004,Page 9
Are science and religion fated to mutual enmity? Every schoolchild learns how Galileo was forced to his knees to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, or how the Church was up in arms again in 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, arguing that all living organisms, including humans, result from a long, slow process of evolution. Today, especially in America, many Christians, so-called Creationists, still argue that mankind's origins are to be found in the early chapters of Genesis, not in any scientific discovery.
But the interplay of evolution and religion is more complex than opposition and conflict. Evolutionary ideas are born of religion. The ancient Greeks had no idea of progress, directional time, and linear history, culminating in humankind. This concept is a legacy of Judeo-Christianity, and in the 18th century the earliest evolutionists -- people like Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus -- framed their ideas within the context of this religious account of origins.
Darwin himself was much influenced by Christian ideas, especially where we least expect it: in his belief in natural selection -- the bane of the Church -- as evolution's motive force. Darwin argued that more organisms are born than can survive and reproduce; that this leads to a struggle for existence; and that success in this struggle partly reflects the physical and behavioral differences between the winners and the losers. The winners are those that are well adapted to their environment -- that is, they develop features that help them to survive and reproduce.
Behind Darwin's emphasis on adaptation lay his Christian upbringing. One traditional argument for the existence of God, the so-called "argument from design," stresses that organic parts are adapted, and argues that the only way they could have come into being is through the workings of some kind of intelligence. The eye, for example, is like a telescope. Since telescopes have telescope makers, the eye must have an eye maker -- the Great Optician in the Sky. Darwin accepted the design-like nature of organisms and their parts. But rather than the Christian God, he appealed to the scientific concept of natural selection.
Science and religion still wrestle over the legacy of Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. As the well-known Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins notoriously remarked, "Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Without natural selection, the appeal to God made sense. But after Darwin and natural selection, we have a non-God-driven explanation for adaptation, making it possible to be a non-believer, even in the face of design-like organisms and their parts.
But Dawkins goes further and argues that if one is a follower of Darwin, then sensibly one ought to be an atheist. Dawkins agrees with the Creationists on one thing: the incompatibility of Darwinism and Christianity. In his book River out of Eden he writes: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
Elsewhere he attacks religion directly: "The kinds of views of the universe which religious people have traditionally embraced have been puny, pathetic, and measly in comparison to the way the universe actually is. The universe presented by organized religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited."
Now, I, for one, am not quite sure how poky the medieval universe actually was. Most thinkers back then accepted the Arab estimates that the universe was 320 million kilometers across, which is enough room to swing quite a few cats -- or Oxford atheists!
But obviously, whether or not you do believe in the existence of the Christian God (or any other kind of god), Dawkins's gloomy conclusions do not follow. You may not have to be a Christian in the light of Darwinism, but this does not mean that you cannot be one.
In fact, Pope John Paul II, a man not usually described as soft in his religious commitments, has openly endorsed evolution, even Darwinism. True, he demands a special intervention for the arrival of human souls, but souls (if such there be) are hardly scientific concepts anyway.
People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions.
There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs -- and stays within these boundaries.
Michael Ruse is a professor of philosophy at Florida State University, and author, most recently, of Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?
Copyright: Project Syndicate, January 2004.
That is how I see it. After all is not the creation of Eve from the ribs of Adam a way of describing asexual mitosis to primitive peoples? Maybe by the time Adam and Eve's soul's were kicked out of the Garden, God made sure a pyhsical form existed for which to place their souls in?
Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs -- and stays within these boundaries.
Another way of saying "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" ?
Consider also human genetic variation. The Bible suggests that all humans are decendants of Noah and his wife. Absent some mechanism of significant evolutionary change, this notion would be completely preposterous. But add in evolutionary mechanics and it becomes at least vaguely plausible.
Why, then, do some people oppose evolution on religious grounds when it is the only explanation by which the religious beliefs can make sense?
On this point, you appear to be in error. The sons of Noah, as well as their wives, were supposedly on the ark. Of course, those sons were all decendants of Noah, but the wives would not have been.
Interestingly enough, this later point would be an easy way to prove or disprove the Noah myth, since if it were actually the case then an examination of genetic drift on the Y chromosome would show a single male ancestor far more recent than the single female ("mitochondrial eve") ancestor that is known to have existed about 170,000 years ago. This would be because all the males in that population would have Noah's Y chromosome DNA, but there would be four distinct sets of (older) mitochondrial DNA.
Irrelevant, since neither evolution nor creation had anything to do with my response to supercat's comment. My response was only to point out that his comment that "the bible suggests that all humans are descendants of Noah and his wife" was simply mistaken.
Noah is a nice story not unlike many other ancient religious stories
That is an understatement; it is a story remarkably similar in details to other accounts; which suggests that some or all of those accounts may have a common source.
Evolution has long since been proven as factual
Ignoring the fact that such an opinion is nonsense (evolution is merely the model that best explains the facts as we currently perceive them; it is far from "proven as factual", since science doesn't work that way), it is also irrelevant, since my response had nothing to do with evolution.
And no the two can never live together, either you believe in science and the pursuit of knowledge or you don't. Either you question the world around you.. or you dont'.
Your comments are oxymoronic. You seem to accept evolution on faith ("proven as factual") as something that cannot be questioned, while at the same time insisting that "either you question the world around you.. or you dont'", while not understanding that those two world-views are incompatible.
In your rush to defend your irrational faith, rather than intellectual belief, in evolution, you didn't even seem to grasp that my post had no anti-evolutionary content whatsoever; it merely corrected an error on the part of the original poster and provided a real-world test that could be used to disprove the Noah myth.
On this point, you appear to be in error. The sons of Noah, as well as their wives, were supposedly on the ark. Of course, those sons were all decendants of Noah, but the wives would not have been.
Unless you're going to suggest that somehow the son's wives managed to subsequently have children with men other than Noah or his sons (or their offspring), the original statement is entirely correct. All humans living today (or living in any generation beyond Noah's sons) would indeed be "decendants of Noah and his wife".
Any offspring of the wives would be the grandchildren of Noah and his wife, and thus still "descendants of Noah and his wife", and so would any of their children's children unto the Nth generation.
This article sort of speaks to that subject:
First published in:
Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 9(2):139–140, 1995
Mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother, via the egg, and has been checked for variations in the world-wide human population in an attempt to determine genetic ancestry and geographic location of human origins.1 From this approach came the idea of ‘African Eve’—the hypothesis that humans had a female parent, in Africa, and at a time so recent as to surprise most evolutionists. Maryellen Ruvulo, using the ‘molecular clock’ hypothesis, estimated that modern humans diverged from a common ancestor between 55,000 and 455,000 years ago.2 Of course such age estimates depend on what rate the ‘clock’ is chosen to run at, and that is very much determined by uniformitarian assumptions about the age of the earth, so the molecular data are very much consistent with the Biblical model of human origins.3
In the 1970s, Haigh and Maynard Smith investigated the variation in human haemoglobin and concluded that the human species must have gone through a population bottleneck in the recent past, if most of the variants are due to neutral mutations (that is, mutations not subject to selection).4 Researchers at the University of Oregon Medical School pointed out that Noah’s flood would have provided such a bottleneck.5
Dorit et al. recently investigated the variation in a segment on the human Y-chromosome which is not subject to recombination, from 38 men from different ethnic groups around the world.6 This DNA segment was chosen because it is inherited only from the father, and, being an intron, it is thought by evolutionists to be subject only to neutral mutations (not subject to selection), because it does not code for a protein. Introns are commonly regarded as ‘useless left-overs’ of evolution, so that changes in them would not affect the viability of the individual and would not be selected against. Of course the proposition that any DNA is ‘useless’ or ‘junk’ is highly questionable.7
Much to the surprise of the researchers, they found no variation in the intron, which consists of 729 base pairs. They then estimated how long the human kind could have been around since its origin, with no variation in such a DNA segment, and estimated between 27,000 and 270,000 years, depending on what assumptions were used in the model of population genetics. The 95% confidence intervals for both estimates included zero years. In other words, a date of origin consistent with Biblical chronology is within the confidence limits, even with the evolutionary assumptions employed. Because of the lack of variation (polymorphism) the researchers were unable to draw any conclusions about geographic origin of mankind.
The multi-regional models of human origin favoured by many evolutionists, such as Wolpoff, are not consistent with these data. The Biblical account of a recent origin with a single pair of ancestors, Adam and Eve, and/or a genetic bottleneck at the time of the Flood are consistent with the above findings.
References
Gibbons, A., 1993. Mitochondrial Eve refuses to die. Science, 259(5099)1249–1250. Return to text.
Gibbons, Ref. 1, p.1249. Return to text.
Wieland, C., 1993. African ‘Eve’ revived. CEN Tech. J., 7(2):201. Return to text.
Haigh, J. and Maynard Smith, J., 1972. Population size and protein variation in man. Genetical Research 19:73–89. Return to text.
Harkins, R.N., Stenzel, P. and Black, J.A. Noah’s haemoglobin. Nature 241:226. Return to text.
Dorit, R.L., Akashi, H. and Gilbert, W. 1995. Absence of polymorphism at the ZFY locus on the human Y chromosome. Science 268:1183–1185. Return to text.
Junk moves up in the world. CEN Tech. J., 8(2):125. Return to text.
From a lineage point of view, that is correct; but the original post was discussing the genetics issue, and from that perspective it is a misleading statement. Yes, everyone would be descended from Noah and his wife, but the genetic pool is much larger than just that, because the wives of Noah's sons are not the offspring of Noah nor his wife. While it is inevitable (assuming for the moment we take the Noah story as factual) that we are all genetically related to Noah, there is no actual requirement that we be genetically related to his wife, since theoretically that genetic information could have come from any of three other sources. Specifically, the mitochondrial DNA that we carry today did not come from Noah's wife, it came from one of the three wives of the sons of Noah, and the same can be said for at least half of the rest of the human genome.
Any offspring of the wives would be the grandchildren of Noah and his wife, and thus still "descendants of Noah and his wife", and so would any of their children's children unto the Nth generation
Of course; but I think you may have missed the point of the original post. Supercat's objection (an objection to which I tend to agree) was that a single breeding pair would lack the genetic diversity we see in humanity at this point. But in the case of the story of Noah, we actually have much more genetic diversity than would immediately be apparent.
I understand it, I just don't think it is relevant to the original question. As a stand-alone statement merely restating supercat's statement it is correct, but in relation to the original assertion it is misleading.
You're either descended from Noah or his sons.
This part would be true.
If you're descended from Noah, then you have his wife's genetic material
This is where things get fuzzy. Yes, you statistically almost certainly have some of Noah's wife's DNA. But you can have Noah (and his wife) as your ancestors without having them being the sole contributor (or even the majority contributor) to your genetic pool, and it is this genetic pool, not simple genealogy, which is the issue being discussed. Specifically, if the biblical account of Noah is to be believed, not a single person alive today has the mitochondrial DNA of Noah's wife.
Therefore, Ichneumon is correct to say that we're all related to Noah and his wife.
Giving the flood story the benefit of the doubt for the sake of this argument, I am not disputing this point that we're all "related" to Noah and his wife. The point I am making is that our genetic diversity is much greater than merely Noah and his wife, since much of it is drawn from the wives of Noah's sons, who are NOT genetically descended from Noah nor his wife.
If the story of Noah were literal, there would be less genetic variation in every other critter on the planet (except for the clean critters) than is found in humanity. However, any two humans from anywhere on the planet are more genetically similar than are two chimpanzees from the same troop.
Geneticists point to a genetic bottleneck in the human species about 70,000 years ago which reduced the population to less than 2,000 breeding individuals. Biblical literalists would have you believe the human race was reduced to eight individuals less than 6,000 years ago. The genes don't bear that out.
In addition, every species but the "clean" species were supposedly reduced to two breeding individuals less than 6,000 years ago (the clean animals got lucky with 14 breeding individuals each). If this were the case just about every other animal on Earth would evince less genetic diversity than humanity. The evidence does not bear this out. Indeed, I can think of only two animals in worse shape genetically than humanity -- dingos and cheatahs.
That is a good point. There are some reasons to argue otherwise (such as the shorter lifespan of animals, non monogamous behavior in the animal kingdom, etc.), but such reasons could not easily account for the obvious genetic diversity that we actually see. More likely, the origin of the Flood myth was regional, and the animals saved were merely domesticated animals.
Geneticists point to a genetic bottleneck in the human species about 70,000 years ago
For the mitochondrial eve, the numbers are much earlier than that (170,000 years), but that genetic bottleneck wouldn't seem relevant to the flood myth.
which reduced the population to less than 2,000 breeding individuals. Biblical literalists would have you believe the human race was reduced to eight individuals less than 6,000 years ago. The genes don't bear that out.
Those two points really shouldn't be mixed. The "6,000 years ago" folly is reliably discounted. But the "reduced to eight individuals" cannot be discounted quite so easily. The scenarios usually presented account for the single ancestor by means of conjecture rather than by any deterministic resolution.
In addition, every species but the "clean" species were supposedly reduced to two breeding individuals less than 6,000 years ago (the clean animals got lucky with 14 breeding individuals each). If this were the case just about every other animal on Earth would evince less genetic diversity than humanity. The evidence does not bear this out. Indeed, I can think of only two animals in worse shape genetically than humanity -- dingos and cheatahs
This is probably the second best evidence against the traditional belief of a universal flood (the best being, "where did all that water go that was covering the whole earth?").
There is no version of the universal flood that can be squared with scientific biology and geology. If folks want to believe in a miracle they should not be attempting to rationalize it.
That is why a lot of people don't believe in a universal flood, just a regional one that is theoretically compatible "with scientific biology and geology".
And a case could be made that monkeys were the first in space.
I thought the genome project found "of mice or men" to be more appropriate.
And National Geo found the human/chimp relationship to be not as close as first thought…
Anyway, I don’t think a troop of chimps will be sending anything to Mars soon regardless... .
None of which has any bearing on what I posted.
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