Saturday, June 24, 2017

Down With Religion and Science Fundamentalists!



I, as someone who believes in evolution, hope that scientists don't become evolution fundamentalists. By that I mean, as Dr. Bart D. Ehrmanputs it, "No fun, too much damn, and not enough mental," because we don't have a "Theory of Everything," which Albert Einstein and many other scientists have given their life to find. For instance, in science there is no known way to combine carbon and radioactive dating with the idea of oxidative corrosion, which is also a form of aging. However, the discipline of corrosion study is very inaccurate, and will probably always seem that way. It is not a reliable way of studying history, and I believe that if the truth is found, the earth won't be billions of years old, full of stories of epochs of history that are counted in millions of years. Truly, if that is true, I would accept it, but as someone who has taken an Ecology and Evolution Class, as well as a Comparative Chordate Anatomy class, worked in an electrochemistry lab, and read quite a bit of Richard Dawkins writing, I still believe we are probably overestimating the age of things in our world.

Also, I don't believe natural selection is the driving force of evolution. Rather, I believe it is fetish selection that results in the formation of new species. By that I mean natural selection selects for the fittest. However, most species are not the fittest, and they are more likely to become extinct, but nonetheless some species select for things that are queer or unusual in nature, and when reckoned with a mighty sex drive, that is a very powerful force for speciation (the creation of new species).

Part of the reason why I feel this way is from a Richard Dawkins book I read. The question was, "What would it take to disprove the theory of evolution?" The answer was finding something out of order in the fossil record. That has already happened and evolution's fundamentalists closed their eyes and hoped it would go away. The finding was a Coelacanth, a fish long thought extinct for millions of years was showing up in fishermen's catches. "Coelacanths were thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago, but were rediscovered in 1938 off the coast of South Africa.[6][7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth


The same is true for biblical literalists that would bet their life that the creation week was literally created in 7 24hr days. They say evolution can't happen, but that is easily proved wrong when examining old world snakes, such as pythons. On the outside of a usual python there is not a hint that it has legs. Yet, if you dissect a python, you will find evidence of a pelvic girdle and limbs, suggesting at one point in history, the ancestors of snakes walked on 4 legs!