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While Bush and his conservative evangelist rightwingers are still
stubornly in the denial mode of the Evolution (by promoting the idea that "Intelligent
Design" or "Creationism" should be a theory and should be taught in shools), The
The New York Times had this article published on August 23rd, 2005.
I post this article on my website as part of an appreciation note to our scientists
who have had a long hard battle against such conservative religious rightwingers that
always try to dominate, demand, and force mankind to accept nothing but the dictatorial religious
dogma.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was once condemned of
heresy by the early Church because he affirmed that
the Earth orbits around the Sun, the concept that was contradicted to what the dictatorial Church believed at the time.
However, Galileo's ultimate truth stands still as we all know today.
The "theory of creationism" is nothing less than another attempt to assault on the Evolution,
and therefore, assault on mankind's capability thinking, questioning, and exploring its curiosity and skepticism progress.
One would have nothing to say but shrug his shoulder for a pittifully shame on such dictatorial religious dogma,
a dangerous brain-washed entity that ought to stay out, at all cost, of any government political agenda should it
behold nothing but despicable dictatorial conservative point of view.
(Duc Luu)
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Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution. (by Verlyn Klinkenborg)
The New York Times, Published: August 23, 2005.
Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found
several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old -
some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far.
Those kinds of numbers are always a little daunting. Ever since I was
a boy in a public elementary school in Iowa, I've been learning to
face the eons and eons that are embedded in the universe around us.
I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they
mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion
years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid
fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest
distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old.
The truth of these numbers has the same effect on me as watching the
night sky in the high desert. It fills me with a sense of nonspecific
immensity. I don't think I'm alone in this.
One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our
inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of
terrestrial and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising
because our own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard
enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the
difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I
think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.
It's been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first
originated on this planet. That is not an unimaginable number in
itself, if you're thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or
grains of sand. But 3.5 billion years of biological history is
different. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one
by one. They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing
all the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that
time. That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility
in which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved. It is time
that has allowed the making of us. The idea of such quantities of time
is extremely new. Humans began to understand the true scale of
geological time in the early 19th century. The probable depth of
cosmological time and the extent of the history of the human species
have come to light only within our own lifetimes.
That is a lot to absorb and, not surprisingly, many people refuse to
absorb it. Nearly every attack on evolution - whether it is called
intelligent design or plain creationism, synonyms for the same
faith-based rejection of evolution - ultimately requires a
foreshortening of cosmological, geological and biological time.
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 life.
Reference:
 Verlyn Klinkenborg, Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution. The New York Times; Published Aug 23rd, 2005.
Retrieved from the internet @ http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/opinion/23tue3.html (August, 2005).
For another related article, read columnist Richard Cohen on his article of:
Backward Evolution or the link below
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45303-2005Apr11.html
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