As I sit here doing homework for my evolution course, I started to think... THIS STUFF IS COOL. If you are a creationist and get easily offended by the truth, you can stop reading now. I'm currently reading the book "Why Evolution is True" by Jerry A. Coyne, and I'm completely mesmerized by the ways that evolution shows itself even now, in the 21st century, at least 7 million years after humans diverged from our primate ancestors (shown above). I'm a scientist at heart, and I have a hard time believing things that aren't obviously apparent through hard evidence. This contradicts completely with the fact that I was raised in a Catholic household and spent the first 14 years of my education in private Catholic schools (plaid skirt included). As Catholics, we are taught that God created the world in seven "days," and that every species on earth is intelligently designed by a Creator. This concept is shown in the media everywhere you look. An easy example can be seen in an episode of The Big Bang Theory I just watched yesterday, where physicist Sheldon Cooper is working on a ball-and-stick model of what he thinks DNA would look like in a silicon-based life form. His Texan, born-again Christian creationist mother interjects, "But designed by an intelligent creator, right?" Sheldon smirks. Just like I do when I hear people who don't "believe" in evolution. Not believing in evolution is like not believing in gravity; both are proven scientific theories. The word "theory" used in this way should not have the connotation of a simple "guess;" scientific theories are intensively researched and proven principles that dictate the way the world works. Evolution happened. There is evidence everywhere you look. An interesting example is the vestigial structure of hind limbs in whales. Anyone who has ever even seen a picture of a whale knows that they don't have any need for back legs, but every whale has the rudiments of a pelvis and small hind legs. They aren't attached to its skeleton anymore, but they're still there. Now, why would an intelligent designer give whales bones that have no purpose at all? A creator didn't do that; evolution did. Believe it or not, whales evolved from mammals that lived on land and had four limbs. An early ancestor of the whale took to the water, and its descendants lost the need for a set of hind legs, but the genes to make hind legs are still there. The bones, even though they're shrunken and dysfunctional, are still developed in every whale that lives in the present day. That's just one example of evolution. I could go on for days, but that's not the point. The point is that people need to educate themselves. My high school biology teacher (in my Catholic high school) was, of course, Catholic, but taught her class that, as Catholics, we can believe both the creation story and evolution. We cannot, however, disregard evolution as untrue, because IT HAPPENED. The Bible can be interpreted in other ways than strictly literal (as it should, but that's another blog post entirely). Maybe the "day" indicated by the Biblical authors represents millions of years, and therefore, the earth and all its inhabitants weren't created in a week, but over a period of billions of years, as evolutionary evidence indicates. Maybe God created the first organisms, and let them do as they may, demonstrated by the clockmaker theory, where the Creator creates the clock, then winds it up and lets it go, without any further inference. Who knows? I believe in God, I believe in Heaven, and I believe that someday I will know the truth. But I also believe in science. And I know that God wouldn't have given humans the ability to learn and expand their minds through exploration and curiosity if He didn't want us to absorb as much information as we can and ask questions. Doubts are normal, but when people can't accept evolution as fact simply because it isn't explicitly stated in the Bible, that's when I get upset. I respect belief in God and everything He teaches, but you can't ignore hard evidence. As you can see, science is my forté, and this is the topic about which I could write a novel. In conclusion, my advice is to educate yourselves. Don't disregard something without researching it, just because you weren't taught it from childhood. I recommend you all to read Coyne's book if you're interested in more examples and evidence of evolution. Be smart, and learn for yourself.
Sincerely,
T
Sincerely,
T