Posted on 03/13/2002 4:47:26 AM PST by JediGirl
It sure isn't "news/activism" and it's inclusion in "general discussion" is a possibility. However, the discussion of origins, even if one of the debaters were Stephen Gould himself, would always be at the level of "faith."
Creationism insists everything's about religion. Then it snorts when science learns some new facts and "changes its story again."
I don't mind when evolution changes its viewpoint on the discovery of new facts. They'd be wrong not to.
Same with the religious view of evolution.
I'm in the ID camp, so I believe we'll eventually arrive at some idea of how the Designer organized the process of creation. But we won't do so if we ignore REAL facts presented in an unbiased way.
I wish there wasn't this division into camps. I wish there was just a willingness to allow people to sit around with the pieces of the puzzle trying to make them fit.
Indeed.
If earth is as old as some say, or even if it is as young as others say (which I don't think), in either case it's still such a huge amount of time that our having gone looking for facts over just the last century, and that only by a relatively small number of people, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Patience in constructing puzzles is a virtue.
You do have to be allowed to recognize what you're seeing when you see it. The last century has greatly multiplied our knowledge. In 1902, we were just probing radioactivity and figuring out that we might be able to explore the nature of the atom. We were still puzzled by the difference between a galaxy and a nebulla. The best light microscopes were as good as it got for seeing small objects. We had just lately proven that microorganims cause many diseases, but had only thought of a couple of things to do about it. (Immunization and sterile surgical procedure.)
By 1902, we had formulated the idea of a gene, realized that they must be hiding somewhere in cell structures called chromosomes, and that was approximately that. We thought the Cambrian sediments were the beginnings of all life. We had no evidence for the origins of man or whales, and only one intriguing fossil for bird origins. We didn't realize that continents drift.
We didn't know how to fly. Hollerith had just lately done the US census with electrical counting machines and punched cards. The latest miracle was the automobile. Gas lights were the rage, but electricity was threatening to displace them.
It took all of the history of mankind minus 100 years to get through 1902. But our knowledge has multiplied several-fold since then. It's an exponential curve, not linear. (At least, it's behaving as such for now.)
Imagine what might be learned in the next century!!
I'm intrigued by SETI.' It could provide significant explanations that we're overlooking; specifically, the "seeding" and "nurturing" of life on earth by ETI would explain the gap between ID's numbers that say there's not enough time for such complexity to have evolved and astronomy's insistence that the earth is only about 5 billion years old. I think ETI is a better solution than Gould's "punctuated equilibrim."
Exactly. (But most of what science thought it did know in 1902 has held up.)
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