Free Republic

I've been having an offline debate with another Freeper on the topic of "Creationism," and there's been some friction over jsust what that term means. To me, especially on FR discussions, when someone proclaims themself a "Creationist," that means something akin to "I believe that (a) God created mankind pretty much as he is now, relatively recently, and there has been no macro-evolution." However, my pal claims to be a Creationist, but to her it means "I believe that God created man through scientifically discernable natural processes, including evolution from non-human forms over the scientifically accepted geological time spans." So:...

In a stunning example of evolution at work, scientists have now found that changes in a single gene can produce major changes in the skeletal armor of fish living in the wild. The surprising results, announced in the March 25, 2005, issue of journal Science, bring new data to long-standing debates about how evolution occurs in natural habitats. “Our motivation is to try to understand how new animal types evolve in nature,” said molecular geneticist David M. Kingsley, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “People have been interested in whether a few genes...

Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do. Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies...