The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin's theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin."
This view of gradual change has not been part of paleontology for 20 years or more. The doctrine of Punctuated Actualism is a better description of the current state of the evolution theory. Geologists know that there are long periods of stability, then changes create evolutionary pressures.
Science has demonstrated this in fruit flies and other species in the lab. The genetic mutation rate increases under periods of stress. You heat up the little buggers and they start mutating. You stress them with chemicals, radiation, temperature, or any other non-nominal extreme, the mutation rate jumps exponentially according to an Arrhenius curve.
This old Creationist argument is simply a hundred and fifty year old misunderstanding of the fact that Darwin's ideas have EVOLVED. Darwin isn't Jesus. We have no stake in Darwin's demise or success. He is dead so he has no stake. That's like saying theoretical physicists came up with Quantum Mechanics to explain away Bohr and support Heisenberg. These theories are based upon scientific data and experiment. Scientists don't want to promote evolution to disprove Creationism, they do it to explain the data. Creationists ignore data to disprove evolution and support that their belief is "true". That is simply not science.
Does science always promote the search for truth as opposed to validation of one's work? Well no, but in the CHARTER of science, the search for truth and demonstration of the consistency of the data with that model is ALWAYS still there. Any short-term aberrations always disappear in a short time (like within the life of their proponent). Look what happened to Cold Fusion. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." -Carl Sagan.
Creationists have one agenda: disprove current scientific theory to show that a 2000 year-old mythology is true. Now if it is religion, just say so and stop trying to dress it up as science. It isn't science. It will never be science as long as you have faith and that faith colors your ability to discern fact from fiction. If you want to believe that the Pink Space Bunnies created you, I have no problem. If you want to scientifically prove that the PSBs created you and the geologic data supports it, that is entirely a different matter. Be prepared for some scientific challenges. |
