One criticism of evolution is that there are gaps in the fossil record. This presupposes that an example of every organism that ever lived must be preserved as a fossil, which is unrealistic. And transitional forms are very rare: creationists leap on this as evidence that all creatures were created as it were hermetically without any link from one form to another. Intelligent designists use essentially the same argument. But it's far more likely that one form gave way to a later form because one previously numerous organism was environmentally challenged, dropped precipitately in numbers, then was superseded by a mutation that adapted the original form in a way more suitable to the environment, eventually giving rise to a more fully adapted form that became numerous enough to leave a fossil record.
HOW MANY fossil humans are there, for instance? Becoming a fossil requires you to die in a very particular way, so that you calcify rather than rot. This is very very rare, so their absence from fossil records is not an indication that there were no humans before biblical times, or that we didn't evolve from earlier primate ancestors.
It seems that the opponents of evolution theory want to say that any gap, however small, completely confounds the theory. Yet they ignore a welter of evidence that can be inferred not only from fossil records and carbon dating but from myriad examples of evolution that go on around us on a smaller scale. (Examples include the breeding of animals for certain traits and the ability of bacteria, insects and weeds to acquire immunity to substances used against them.) The anti-evolutionist answer to this seems to be that the act of creation created a cosmos not from the very beginning, but somehow at a snapshot point 6000-10,000 years ago with teasing false evidence of age, in order to test whether people would go on believing.
Their reaction to evolution's small but resolvable problems is pretty much one that could be taken straight from the Gospel, when Jesus talks of offering to take a mote (splinter) out of your neighbour's eye while ignoring the beam (tree trunk) in your own.
It's not that she simply points out the negativity of the creationists' arguements, or the lack of substance of their so-called "theory" of intelligent design that makes it a good article. No, she does all this and does it with a clear, easily-understandable writing style. What's great is that she shows how religion and science can, and do, peacefully co-exist at the most basic levels, and those that insist otherwise are sadly misguided at best:
Mother Basil, however, was a scientist as well as a Catholic, and a Brigidine nun to boot. Brigidines are a doughty, unsinkable order: full of holy women who are also political activists. She would say, often, (and only now do I realise the significance) "Science doesn't ask why, girls; science always asks how."
Rather than religion intruding into science, you could say that science intruded into our religion classes. Mother Basil was my headmistress, biology teacher, RE teacher and life coach. At the start of my matric (year 12), she had decreed that we were going to enter Melbourne University's science talent quest. "We" consisted of the other biology student (it was a small school then) and myself. Our entry was a genetic experiment, modelled on 19th-century monk Gregor Mendel's work with peas. Peas take time, so we were to breed albino rats with black-andwhite ones over several generations to demonstrate dominant and recessive genes. We began in February with a guaranteed purebred black-hooded rat, Beta, and her grumpy albino mate, Alpha. By June we had run out of Greek alphabet; by August there were about 70 of them, eating, fighting, screwing, pooing; we had run out of money for cages and had to segregate the sexes.
It's an excellent read. I encourage folks to check it out.
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