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Re: [Phys-l] Intelligent designists fight back



Let me offer two additional factors that I think make it difficult for many (seemingly the majority in the U.S.) to accept evolution and that make ID an attractive alternative.

1) We see only the end-product of the evolutionary process. All the dead-end paths are gone--at least for macro-evolution. Only by studying 'real' biology and current experiments in species with short reproductive cycles might one view direct evidence of the blind alleys. With only the very complex end products in evidence to most, the urge to accept that such complexity is 'by design' is very strong.

2) (This may actually be a 'fault' of evolution--at least it is suggested by Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion".) Our intrinsic understanding of time and space seems limited to our experience and may be limited by evolutionary imperatives. We can understand a 100 years and can be pretty good at conceptualizing one or two orders of magnitude beyond. But when it comes to having any real understanding of a million years--we don't cope well. A billion years is really not in our genes. As scientists we 'know' such time frames exist and can extrapolate well enough to work within such frames, but can we really conceptualize and understand? The same goes for space. Our world, evolutionarily, is limited by the range of our sight (on earth). Again we can deal with a couple orders of magnitude more than the few kilometers we can directly observe, but who really can conceptualize a light year, much less thousands, millions, or billions of light years.

Really understanding evolution requires some form of understanding what hundreds of millions of years means. That is very difficult.

Rick

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Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN
rtarara@saintmarys.edu
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Free Physics Software
PC & Mac
www.saintmarys.edu/~rtarara/software.html
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Cohen" <Robert.Cohen@po-box.esu.edu>

Maybe you've seen the evidence that supports it but many people haven't.
Many classrooms just present the information as fact without providing
the evidence because they don't want, or don't know how, to evaluate it.
And microevolution doesn't count. Non-evolutionists will ask to be
shown an instance when a bacterium evolves into something we would no
longer call bacteria. Or, better yet, a bird that evolves into
something that we would no longer call a bird.