Posted on 11/18/2005 6:58:47 PM PST by MRMEAN
"It is like confessing a murder." So wrote Charles Darwin in 1844 to botanist Joseph Hooker of his now famous theory of evolution by natural selection. At the time, the dominant belief was that all species were created by God in their present form. So Darwin, loath to provoke controversy, nurtured his idea in secret for nearly two decades before finally revealing it--first to a few trusted colleagues, then to the world in his book, On the Origin of Species. Published in 1859, the book quickly became the talk of Victorian England.
Tomorrow the Darwin exhibition opens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In it, visitors trace the steps of the legendary naturalist leading up to the birth of the idea that today stands as the cornerstone of modern biology. And from the live Galapagos tortoises stationed at the start of the exhibit to the orchid display at its end, the show is well worth the $21 entry fee ($16 for students and seniors; $12 for kids).
Lucky for us, Darwin was a prolific letter-writer and journal-keeper, and many of his writings are on exhibit. The most thrilling, to my mind, is a page from one of his notebooks on which he sketched the first evolutionary tree in 1837. It's nothing fancy, just a stick figure with a trunk labeled 1, branches labeled A through D, and the words "I think" scrawled at the top. But it compellingly illustrates his ground-breaking realization that all organisms on earth are related.
Darwin the man is also revealed, mostly through his correspondences. We find out that he was a slacker in school; that his father thought his plan to sail around the world on the HMS Beagle was "a wild scheme" and nearly refused him permission to go; that he made a list of the pros and cons of getting married before proposing to his first cousin Emma Wedgwood; and that he agonized over the anguish that his ideas caused his devout wife.
Darwin comes at a bewildering time for science education in our nation. It's nearly 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, yet creationist objections to teaching evolution in the classroom have created in some parts of the country an intellectual climate not unlike that of Victorian England. To wit: the Kansas Board of Education's recent decision to approve new public school science standards that cast doubt on evolution. Thankfully, though, voters in Dover, Penn., decided to oust the eight members up for re-election to the school board that had been sued for introducing into the biology curriculum the notion of intelligent design as a viable alternative to evolution. Niles Eldridge, curator of the Darwin exhibition, says of the show: "This is for the school children of America. This is the evidence for evolution." Following its debut in New York, Darwin will travel to the Field Museum in Chicago, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and, lastly, London's Natural History Museum. Too bad it's not going to Kansas.
I want a Flying Spaghetti Monster exhibit there.
It is amazing that a supposed scientist would live his whole life with his head so far up his @ss that it would make it so hard for him to see things clearly. Just like so many other liberals whose heads are deeply imbedded likewise, their hidden agendas never see the light of day!
So how did the first cell come about, with all it's complexities?... then explain to me how the first molecule came about, with all it's complexitites?... then go back to the very first atom... where did it come from.... Nothing? How do you get something from nothing? Well?
I still find it interesting how honest debate is derided for the sake of empty attacks. Darwin certainly would not have behaved the way his progenies have. The disingenuous response has been unbecoming scientists of any stripe and the dogma runs deep especially for those who want to take the path that others have also taken in the past with unsavory results and turn Darwin's respectable theory into a method of encouraging a sort of politics of human minimalism and veiled atheism.
How many times I've read the false assertion that humans are basically hairless chimps. It would not be so bad if this were an accurate factual representation of the research conducted at MIT, Havard, and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis which made the claim in Nature that 98.77% of our genome is the same that of chimpanzees. This is the popular assertion and most don't have go much further than accept it or reject it.
I can see why the general public would not know better, they don't know that huge expanses of DNA are excluded from such comparisons as "junk DNA", nor do they know that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and chimps have 24 pairs though there is evidence of what is left of a centromere as if two chromosomes somehow fused. The critical thing which evolutionary scientists are aware but seldom bring up is that comparing gene coding sequences is much like comparing lists of functions in a computer program while many of the same functions are used in many different programs it is the way the functions are executed or in the case of genes how they are transcribed that matters. The genes may look similiar in chimpanzees and humans but the proteins they eventually code for can be very different.
There are approximately 250,000 difference proteins where as there are no more than 40,000 genes which helps one illustrate how insufficient comparing gene coding sequences alone can be when comparing two genomes. It is just inaccurrate to say human beings are 98.77% chimps, it is not factually true and even though those doing the research know that this is a false representation of their research we continue to see a concerted push in what appears to be an attempt to deceive the generally population into believing that humanity not only is only slightly different than common apeas but can not be expected to act much better.
We don't have a clue where abiogenises occurred. Hot vents have been suggested, pools of primordial soup have pretty much been ruled out (though most don't yet know this), and interstellar gase clouds. We are not much closer to knowing how the immense information content required for even the simplist life came about. Maybe some day in a lab the right sequence of events can be discovered that caused the normal entropy of chemical systems to held at bay long enough for a primitive form of RNA based life to arise. Rabies, measles and Ebola viruses are some well known life forms that do not use DNA and are true RNA-based life forms but as of yet there seems no middle road and it may be as likely that RNA life forms are the opposite of what has been assumed and they are descendants of organisms that had a DNA stage and for whatever reason lost it. It is often misrepresented that biology has only one arrow from simple to more complex but this is not based upon anything empirical and is more an expression of bias than anything else.
Something as essential as the ribosome, which is capable of reading the 30-40,000 odd genes of our genome and transcribing approximately 250,000 different complex proteins synthesizing them an amino acid at a time, shows a complexity that is absolutely essential to life as we know it.
"The ribosome is so fundamental to life that many portions of this molecular machine are identical in every organism ever genetically sequenced. " -Los Alamos National Laboratory http://www.sciencedaily.com/print.php?url=/releases/2005/11/051101223046.htm
Of course Charles Darwin, and his theory of evolution through natural selection as the origin of species, did not even address any of those questions. If you could get to New York and visit the Darwin Natural History Museum exhibit you might get a better understanding of what Darwin said, his research, and how the theory of evolution came about, and what it does and does not say.
Some of your questions are addressed here: Did Life Come from Another World?
check to see if thread evolves
YEC INTREP
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