NYT: Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution

[Starfury]

Nice editorial speculating on WHY people want to believe in ID.

(...)

Humans feel much more content imagining a world of more human proportions, with a shorter time scale and a simple narrative sense of cause and effect. But what we prefer to believe makes no difference. The fact that life on Earth has arrived at a point where it is possible for humans to have beliefs is due to the steady ticking away of eons and the trial and error of natural selection.

Evolution is a robust theory, in the scientific sense, that has been tested and confirmed again and again. Intelligent design is not a theory at all, as scientists understand the word, but a well-financed political and religious campaign to muddy science. Its basic proposition - the intervention of a designer, a k a God - cannot be tested. It has no evidence to offer, and its assumptions that humans were divinely created are the same as its conclusions. Its objections to evolution are based on syllogistic reasoning and a highly selective treatment of the physical evidence.

Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education.

The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that failure. To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation.

The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/opinion/23tue3.html

[Warren Stupidity]

1. So why are our leaders promoting voodoo as science?

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

[Inland]

2. And why it's hard to grasp

Evolution's primary engine is time, the same time that lifts mountains and moves continents, that darkens stars and spins the universe.

To the unfathomable time add multicausal factors.

I don't grasp it in it's totality, either. But I don't reject evolution because it's hard, hard work.

[Briar]

3. Excellent article

The BBC did a very good series of programmes which dealt in part with this - Earth Story, fronted by the biologist Aubrey Manning, who was particularly interested in the way that geological conditions and life interacted with one another.

If it should turn up on American screens, I can recommend it. The book which came with the series, available in the US when I checked a few months ago because I wanted to send it to a friend, is also worth reading. Popular science, but not bounded by superstition, hubris and fear.