[Oe List ...] NY Times: Time and evolution

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Forwarded by Jann McGuire

August 23, 2005

Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG


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 all of life.



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