The Evolution Debate

[ltrwritr@moscow.com (Mark Rounds)]

Will you look what happens when you let real life interfere with your
internet habit ;-)  This may be late but it is a series of points I think
were salient to that discussion and I personally wanted to make and thought
should be made.  

1.      I'll say this again.  There is no Cabal of Darwinists trying to
foist lies on an unsuspecting public.  The method in which science works is
far too complex and there are way too many people involved for a conspiracy
of that magnitude to be kept secret for long.  There are young turks in
every field that can and do publish claims just to make the old guard squirm
and rethink their standpoints.  When you do publish anything that is at all
controversial, halh a dozen other labs start on the same work to see if they
were wrong or if you were.  Sometimes they get it wrong, the emphasis put on
the Bohr atom and the concept of wavicles are examples.  In each case
though, it was torn down and replaced with something that was closer to the
truth.  The same has occured in the field of Evolutionary Biology.  Claims
have been made and either proven or torn down.  The system works.  There are
flaws, for example the extreme competitiveness has led some to try and
falsify data but every time it happens, its the ruination of a career as
everyone tries to duplicate results and the truth comes out.

2.      The point was made if evolution is still going on, won't there be,
at some point some uberman and unterman (Nazi terms chosen to keep this in
context)?  The answer is no, not really.  Here is why.  For a species to
branch off there have to be three things occur.  The first is that there has
to be a small gene pool that is isolated from the rest of the population
with very little cross breeding with the main population.  The second is
that this small population has to be put under environmental stress.  THis
can come from dwindling food sources, climatic change, competition, etc.....
and finally, these pressure have to be strong enough to stress the gene pool
without flat killing it off and have to remain in place for a long period of
time.  This period is not tens of years, hundreds of years or even thousands
of years, but in the category of hundreds of thousands of years.  Consider
domesticated animals, the oldest domesticated animal can be argued to be the
dog.  THey have certainly been hanging around eating from are garbage piles
for just about as long as we can actually find garbage piles and yet they
still interbreed quite handlily with wolves.

For humans, we just move around too much for these populations to remain
isolated long enough  for them to become separated.  In the hunter gather
stage of culture ( what we have been for most all of human history) the
family groupings wander, merge and split up very often.  Also vision quests
are a staple of all primative cultures and while most of the young people
who wander off, eventually come back home, some find greener pastures and
settle far from home.  In may take tens of generations for a genetic
characteristic to progress out of in area and into another but that is
lighten fast in evolutionary terms.

Secondly, humans, when stressed tend to change their environment rather than
suffer.  We build huts and houses and fires to stay warm.  We plant crops,
try new foods or just plain move when an area stresses us a great deal.
With the exception of the very bottom of our societies, most humans (even in
India, Bangladesh and Africa) are not stressed to a high enough degree to
evolve quickly and they interbreed with the rest of the population so any
edge they might get  transfers rapidly.

We probably won't break off branches of our tree until we can get humans
separated and not remixing for hundreds thousand years.  If the speed of
light really is the speed limit of the universe (Dr. Forward and others
think differently but that is another story) we might have enough distance
in interstellar space to break off distinct gene pools.  MY personal opinion
is that we will figure out a faster way to get around and that won't even
work.  

3.      I also mentioned in my last post it might be that Evolution is God's
way.  Now, I don't propose to be the source of all wisdom but in my readings
of the bible (several versions), it could very easily be that they are
compatible.  Personally, I do believe that.  I think the purposes are many,
some of which I can't fathom but an important one is to keep us humble.  One
of mandkinds greatest strengths and our greatest failings in pride.  It
allows us to tackle impossible projects and achieve them but when it grows
out of that to hubris, it drives abominations like the Nazi's and their
fellow travellers thoughout history.

4.      My last point and then I'll shut up.  A tactic used in too much of
this discussion is the labeling of different factions with labels and then
impuning certain beliefs or stands to them that may or may not be true.
Back off and grow up!  If you don't like what I say, by all means, discuss
it or poke holes in it.  That is how real intellectual synthesis takes
place.  But please don't tell me to which group I belong and then say I
believe things because of it.  That tends to make me crabby ;-)  It is also
how real discrimination starts.  

Mark Rounds

PS.  Daniel, in the old days of the internet we used to have .! parties.  .!
was one of the first places where you could post things and carry on debates
like this.  They were great fun.  This was before the tactics of the flame
war though.

PSS.  Ms. Joan Opyr, While I don't agree with everything you say, I
certainly like the way you say it.  If we every do have the pot luck Daniel
has suggested, may I buy you the first drink?  My wife has consented ;-)