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

[Isobel & Jim Bishop]

Hello Jann,
Thank you very much for this article. Jim and I found it very 
informative,and helpful.
It is about to be Spring here in Sydney, so the blossoms are beginning to 
burst forth!
peace is yours,
Isobel Bishop.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <LAURELCG at aol.com>
To: <Dialogue at wedgeblade.net>; <OE at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 12:48 PM
Subject: [Oe List ...] NY Times: Time and evolution


> 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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