Feedback for April 2000

Claims that it is the basis of a belief system are due to those whose "scientific" creationism is a belief system. They need to make sure that others think that their nonscience and science are on a par, because everyone agrees creationism is not science.

See the "Metaphysics" part of the Evolution and Philosophy FAQ.

Watch that "only" a scientific theory. All scientific knowledge is theoretical, but we still manage to save millions from death by disease and cancer, send space probes to other planets even if they then crash, and build some impressive objects. Being "just" a theory is a very powerful thing indeed.

Far from being undecomposed cells, what was found were tiny traces of some organic molecules. This is surprising, but it is not impossible. It is a subject of much interest, and it has been discussed in talk.origins. [1], [2], and [3] are articles archived on dejanews on the subject, which contain further references and links.

PS. I hope you do not mind my removing certain unnecessary words from your feedback.

Snelling and Rush's paper also refutes the oft-posted creationist "myth" about the expectation of a thick dust layer during to the Apollo mission. The Apollo mission had been preceded by several unmanned landings -- the Soviet Luna (six landers), American Ranger (five landers) and Surveyor (seven landers). The physical properties of the lunar surface were well-known years before man set foot on it. Even prior to the unmanned landings, Snelling and Rush document that there was no clear consensus in the astronomical community on the depth of dust to expect.

I was trying to make two points at once, which perhaps led to the confusion.

1. Some creationists (and Velikovskiites) often say things such as, "the lunar lander had big pie-plate feet so that it wouldn't sink into the thick layer of dust that was thought to be on the Moon." Snelling and Rush document that -- by the time of the Apollo mission -- there had been several unmanned landers and the physical properties of the lunar surface were well-known. Thus the claim is false.
2. Additionally, those who propose that argument don't even have the excuse that their argument might have been correct some years earlier, before the unmanned landings. Prior to that point, there was not a consensus expectation for a thick dust layer because there was no consensus at all.

I thought the two middle sentences clarified the two different time periods that I was talking about (at the time of the Apollo mission, versus before any unmanned missions). However, I will mark that paragraph for re-wording the next time I update the FAQ.

If the material on this site is as poor as you would like to think, I would hope that you would be able to do a better job of highlighting actual errors. I'd recommend that you start with a single FAQ, for example my Age of the Earth FAQ, and see how much damage you can do to it.

If an abiogenetic event occurred in your back yard, you'd never know, because the results, utilising organic molecules, would immediately end up inside a bacterium.

Of course, it may be that life did have many independent origins, and what we now see is the combined result. We may never know, although I have more confidence in the abilities of science to find out at least something, than that.

The true story is related, for instance, in "The Age of the Earth" by Robert Williams, or "Fresh Lava Dated as 22 Million Years Old?" by Don Lindsay.

There are good resource articles on radioactive dating here in the archive that you should read if you have not, notably "Radiometric Dating and the Geological Time Scale: Circular Reasoning or Reliable Tools?" by Andrew MacRae, and "Isochron dating" by Chris Stassen. Also see my own offsite Radiometric Dating Resource List, which I do believe is the most complete web based collection on this issue.

On the matter of human sizes; bear in mind that average is only an abstraction. Africans include the largest and smallest peoples on Earth. Asians and Europeans also vary in considerably in size. People in the North of China and in Mongolia are generally much larger than people living in the South. Thus we can be pretty sure that size differences of this kind occured long since we diverged from the ape lineages. Differences in ape size have nothing to do with the variation that now exists within the human species.

American Jewish Congress
Episcopal Church, General Convention
Lexington Alliance of Religious Leaders
Lutheran World Federation
Roman Catholic Church
Unitarian-Universalist Association
United Church Board for Homeland Ministries
United Methodist Church
United Presbyterian Church

Voices for Evolution.

Should the progress of scientific knowledge be halted by threats from the religious?

But it really depends on what you mean when you refer to "the theory of evolution". In the How to be Anti-Darwinian FAQ I outline many of the core theses of Darwinism, and as far as I can tell there is a remarkable unanimity about them even between opposing factions in evolutionary biology. As Kissinger once said, academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Yet even here, nobody doubts that related species share common ancestors, that adaptation is due to natural or sexual selection, that species change their makeup over time at least occasionally, and so forth.

To get an idea of what the issues are, there is really no other way than to read the primary literature. Popular books do not generally do these debates justice.

Scientific theories are developed to account for evidence, and as new evidence comes in, there are debates. They aren't divine revelation or eternal truth, they are humanly acquired hard-won knowledge, and sometimes things are more complex than we at first knew.

If I am descended from the Irish, why are there still Irish?

Apparently you have failed to consider the possibility that the word under consideration may have more than one definition. Multiple definitions of "evolution" (for example, common ancestry vs mechanisms for change) are discussed in the opening paragraph of the Evolution is a Fact and a Theory FAQ, the document to which you are responding.

I take the liberty of quoting the answer here:

"How do I know the contents of this archive are reliable?"

Visitors to the archive should be aware that essays and FAQs appearing in the archive have generally not undergone a rigorous peer review procedure by scientific experts. Rather, they have been commented on and critiqued by the readership of the talk.origins newsgroup. While many of the participants in talk.origins are well regarded scientists, this informal procedure is not as demanding as the process a scientist goes through to publish a paper in a scientific journal. It is important to keep this fact in mind when reading the contents of this archive. Because most of the essays have not undergone rigorous peer review, some of them may contain errors or misstatements of fact. Any errors you identify should be reported to the authors or to the editor.

As a general rule, you should never rely too heavily on anything you read on the Internet. Read the primary, reviewed literature before making up your mind on any topic. Most of the archive's essays provide references to primary sources to make it easier for you to do this.

1. Darwin did not say that evolution of the eye was mere folly. He said it seemed absurd, and then went on to explain why this appearance was deceptive. Darwin's comments on the eye is one of the most dramatic examples of creationist misrepresentation, in which a quote is removed from its context to suggest the very opposite of what was intended. Check out what Darwin really thought at Quote: Charles Darwin About The Eye (off-site). I do not expect you agree with Darwin, but I do expect you to represent him more accurately.
2. Your quote on the Neandertals is taken from our page on Images of Neandertals , and serves as a good description of their status. Unfortunately, your quote omits without indication the final part of the sentence which reads: (which does not necessarily mean that they belonged to the same species as modern humans). This remains an interesting open question, and in our Fossil Hominid pages you'll find consideration of the most recent evidence, which suggests that the Neandertals were a distinct but very closely related species. You'll also read about many other more distant species.
3. Evolution certainly can at last answer the old conundrum of the chicken and the egg! The egg came first, by a considerable margin.
4. The evolution of sex is lost in the mists of time, and it is true we don't know a great deal about it. I disagree that it is a simple question, but I agree we can't answer it. There are some interesting and detailed proposals but the nature of the evidence is such that a definitive answer may not be possible.
5. Science can map and duplicate DNA just fine. See DNA computing, describing how scientists at USC synthesized some DNA specifically to solve computing problems.
6. We certainly don't propose origins by mere chance. We rather look for the natural processes involved. See our Evolution and Chance FAQs. The origins of DNA itself are uncertain, but most likely it came sometime after the origins of RNA.
7. The first and the second laws of thermodynamics have never been a problem for evolution. However, many people are confused about what the laws of thermodynamics actually imply. See our FAQs on Thermodynamics, Evolution and Creationism.

I have noticed that some creationists have begun to assert that all mutations involve a loss of information of some kind. This is untrue. Mutations can lead to increases or decreases in information, in complexity, in functionality, or any other similar measure.

You may like to look at the FAQ on mutation. I also recommend The Evolution of Improved Fitness by Random Mutation plus Selection, because this FAQ directly addresses this odd notion that there is no known way to add genetic information.

Since these mechanisms are never seen, and genes can and do change radically, the objection fails. However, there is more than that. "Macroevolution" as the FAQs observes, means speciation or above. We have seen speciation occur; the Observed Instances of Speciation FAQ gives details, and the Some More Observed Instances of Speciation FAQ even more.

Generally, what antievolutionists mean by "macroevolution" is something more essentialistic - the "dog kind" has an essence and it can't be changed into the "cat kind", which is not what evolutionary theory says happens.

Moreover, each species has a vast range of diverse DNA in its members, and mutations increase this diversity in each organism (though it doesn't necessarily enter the gene pool). If mutations generate changes that can work, then they can accrue until the progeny of that lineage are no longer in the original species but a new one. I recommend learning some genetics - books are freely available that can help you understand how this works.

1. It is important to know where we came from and where everything else came from, for curiosity's sake.

2. It is important to understand how living systems behave over the longer term if we are to avoid massive extinction.

3. It is important to understand how things - not necessarily living things - change over time, so we can use these techniques in various fields. Lessons learned from the study of evolution have been used effectively in engineering, pharmaceuticals, and traffic mamangement, to name only a few.

4. It is important that science be taught as science, and not non-science. (Creationism is non-science, and to teach it as science would damage the educational system of the country of your choice).

5. It is important to be honest. Making history support your favorite ideas is called "revisionism", and attacks on Darwin or other sceintists, if they are not supported by the facts, are dishonest.

Many others will have their own reasons. These are mine.

Asexual taxa (a taxon is a neutral term for "organism type", of which species is one kind) are called "agamospecies" or "clonal species", although not all agamospecies are clonal. There are also descendants of sexually reproducing species that are "secondarily" asexual - these are called parthenogens in animals and apomictic taxa in plants. Some taxonomists (classifiers of taxa) like to restrict the word "species" to sexual species, but I think that its prior use (the word comes from Latin translations of Plato and Aristotle, who used the Greek "eidos") allows that it should be applied to the non-sexual ones also.

At last count I found some 22 definitions of species in the literature, although really only about 12 are in use. Most of these are either to do with reproductive isolation, and so apply only to sexual organisms (note that asexual organisms such as protists and ciliates exchange genes in several ways, but not at every reproductive event), and the rest are either ecological or morphological concepts (with a small remainder).

Asexual single celled organisms and viruses are defined in terms of their ecological "niche" (eg, what food they eat or what hosts they infect), and in terms of their "morphology" (ie, their shape or form, which includes the shape of their molecular coating and even their genetic structure). Manfred Eigen, who is working on the origins of life, developed a notion for viruses he called "quasi-species", which was detailed in a Scientific American article (Eigen, M. "Viral quasispecies." Scientific American July 1993, no. 32-39 (1993)). In this he shows that asexual organisms and quasiorganisms like viruses will tend to cluster around a morphology or ecological niche irrespective of the fact that they do not share genes, because there is stabilising selection for that form or niche. In pure clones, selection will tend to keep types distinct. However, as I said, most organisms share genes occasionally or frequently in evolutionary terms.

You can find details at Kent Hovind's Challenge to Evolutionists and Creationist Frauds Exposed: "Dr." Kent Hovind.

We are evolving now, but evolution of humans is slow. Two thousand years ago is a geological eye blink; as far as human evolution is concerned anything two thousand years ago is pretty much the same as the present.

Look at the Fossil Hominids FAQ. In particular, look at the Hominid Species page, and right down the bottom you will find Homo sapiens. Note that they (we) first appeared about 120,000 years ago. The FAQ notes that we have apparently changed physically in the last several thousand years, with slight changes in human teeth and jaws even as recent as 10,000 years ago. So we are apparently still evolving.

I see no reason to think our mental ability has increased as an evolutionary change in recent times. (Recent being several thousand years.) Mental ability of ancient humans or hominids is hard to measure. There is no reason to think that our mental ability has improved over the ancient Egyptians. We've learned more over time, but learning is not an evolutionary change.

The changes you mention, like feathers or an extra limb, are changes that we can confidently assert will not occur in our future evolution. As I said last time, evolution does not lead to these kinds of changes. The dinosaurs which evolved feathers did so over many millions of years. Furthermore, they had scales, a structure which could be adapted into feathers. We have no scales, and so there is no way feathers could get started. Our evolutionary changes over the past several millions years have apparently been in part a reduction in body hair; it is thought some dinosaurs may have have developed feathers as an form of insulation, which is change in the opposite direction. Evolution is not able to borrow structures from one lineage and apply them to another, and it is not able to develop new structures based on a long term view of what benefits those structures might convey in the future. This distinguishes evolutionary change from designed change.

A new limb is a radical change in body plan which is no longer possible. Humans are tetrapods, as are birds, dinosaurs, mammals, reptiles, etc. These are all pretty much committed to a four limb body plan. Even whales and snakes still have the basic tetrapod structure.

As for intelligence: this is not really a thing which can be given by aliens or anything else. It is not easily measured, though in vague terms we observe that apparently some individuals are more (or less) intelligent than others, without it being given to them from outside.

Intelligence is a quality that humans have to an unusual degree, but other organisms are not entirely without it. We happen to be the organisms who have developed it to the greatest extent. There is probably a high cost associated with intelligence. Our large brains make for a difficult birth, and our need for learning means an lengthy period of dependency on parents; this most likely is the reason why such exceptional intelligence is so unusual.

The reasons why this occurred are all pretty much speculative, but the evolutionary development of a large brain in hominid species over millions of years is clear.

The primary references for the theory of punctuated equilibria are

Eldredge, N., & Gould, S. J. 1972. Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In: Models In Paleobiology (Ed. by T. J. M. Schopf).

Gould, S. J., & Eldredge, N. 1977. Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered. Paleobiology, 3, 115-151.

The data includes detailed study of lineages of snails and of trilobites where very finely grained but localized transitions can be seen in the fossil record. This is indicative of punctuated equilibria, but is inconsistent with saltation.

It is true that the phrase "Separation of church and state" does not appear in the constitution; but neither do "separation of powers," "interstate commerce," "right to privacy," and other phrases describing well-established constitutional principles. The judicial system has enterpreted the "Establishment Clause" to mean:

"The establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion."
Justice Hugo Black, Majority opinion, Everson v Board of Education

This means that no one religious denomination has the right to force its particular beliefs about the origins of life into the public school system. This is how the issue relates to evolution

The claim that the "Wall of Separation" is a 'one-way' wall is a myth propagated by Christian revisionist David Barton. The U.S. Constitution is a secular document. It begins, "We the people," and contains no mention of "God", "Jesus" or "Christianity." Its only references to religion are exclusionary, such as, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust" (Art. VI), and "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" (First Amendment). The presidential oath of office, the only oath detailed in the Constitution, does not contain the phrase "so help me God" or any requirement to swear on a bible (Art. II, Sec. 7), but in fact says the opposite: "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." (Article 6, section 3)

If we are a Christian nation, why doesn't our Constitution say so? In 1797 America made a treaty with Tripoli, declaring that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." This reassurance to Islam was written under Washington's presidency, and approved by the Senate under John Adams.

Thomas Jefferson, like most of the key founders of this country, was not a Christian. He was a deist, and expressed views that were quite unsympathetic to Christianity.

When Jefferson made statements like "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose." it is clear that he intended the Wall of Separation to be a 2-way protection, keeping government out of religion, but also keeping religion out of government. A good list of such quotes from our founding fathers can be found at Our Founding Fathers Were Not Christians.

Our government has no right to promulgate religion or to interfere with private beliefs. This country is clearly founded on secular laws.

The Supreme Court has forged a three-part "Lemon test" (Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971) to determine if a law is permissible under the First-Amendment religion clauses.

A law must have a secular purpose.
It must have a primary effect which neither advances nor inhibits religion.
It must avoid excessive entanglement of church and state.
The separation of church and state is a wonderful American principle supported not only by minorities, such as Jews, Moslems, and unbelievers, but applauded by most Protestant churches that recognize that it has allowed religion to flourish in this nation. It keeps the majority from pressuring the minority.

The words, "under God," did not appear in the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954, when Congress, under the shadow of McCarthyism, inserted them. Likewise, "In God We Trust" was absent from paper currency before 1956. It appeared on some coins earlier, as did other sundry phrases, such as "Mind Your Business." The original U.S. motto, chosen by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, is E Pluribus Unum ("Of Many, One"), celebrating plurality, not theocracy. These violations of the separation of church and state have been, and will continue to be, contested in the courts. See the Pledge of Allegiance Restoration Act

You may be confusing mocking of God with disagreement on the appropriate understanding of the bible, or with the using exclusively empirical arguments with no mention of God at all to refute propositions others may hold for religious reasons.

It's not wrong to suppose things like this. What you should bear in mind is that assertions like this require some form of physical evidence to support them.

If such a flood happened, we know of no such effect that could shorten human lifespans by that much, or cause the other effects you mentioned.

Now, the important thing is to reconsider the assumptions you made in your question. Is it possible that any human could have lived 600 years. It is an extrordiary claim, and must be supported by solid evidence to be seriously considered. Is it possible to cover the earth's mountains in water? There is not nearly enough water on the earth to do such a thing. And if there was, where did all the water go? And we have found no physical evidence that the whole world was at one time covered with a flood, so we really can't go with that assumption.

That's the answer to the best of my ability.

Please check out the Flood FAQS for further information.

See also Andrew MacRae's "circularity" discussion in his Radiometric Dating and the Geological Time Scale FAQ. Andrew generously allows that the mistaken appearance of "circularity" comes from detailed refinement of the geological time scale. But even that does not excuse those who push the false "circularity" claim. Their problem is with the entire geologic time-scale -- but its ordering was largely complete before both radiometric dating and acceptance of evolution in the geological community. Thus, "circularity" is simply not possible, as far as the parts that young-Earthers really wish to refute. The "circularity" claim is in my opinion fundamentally dishonest, for that reason.

The analogy of copying at the office is a bad analogy. That presupposes a master copy, and the quality of copies is measured against the master copy. Living things, however, are highly varied. (Look around your school, or office, or club. The people there do not look like a collection of copies from some master blueprint!)

The reason copies in your office get worse is not because information is lost, but because information is added which you do not want to be added. The copies contain extra information about fingerprints and dust on the plate, and information about defects in the copy drum. Don't make the mistake of limiting information to what exists on the master!

To get a better analogy, forget about just trying to reproduce a master. Copy a blank piece of paper many times, and pass out the copies to twenty friends. Get them to copy the papers which they like the most. Every now and again, let them give up with their paper and take someone else's paper if they like it better. You should get some interesting patterns after a while.

This is still just an analogy, of course, intended to illustrate the difference between copying with a master copy, and without a master. Ultimately you need to look at evolution itself, and not just some analogy. For example, look at The Evolution of Improved Fitness by random mutation plus selection in our archive.

The claim that is usually made by creationists is that a more complex lifeform could not evolve from a less-complex one. It is not clear to me why you believe that trees are an unacceptable example merely because they are alive: the theory of evolution only applies to living things.

As for snowflakes, the point is that some creationists have a badly incorrect view of the second law of thermodynamics, saying things such as "order cannot rise from disorder". Snowflakes are a commonly-available low-cost example of order which does arise from disorder. By the frequently-presented Creationist version of the 2nd LoT, snowflakes are impossible.

It is true that our FAQ list is not a complete treatise of every topic it mentions. It is more of an index into other essays, because combining them all into one file would make the result far too long. Also, you should understand that the FAQ exists in the contest of arguments which are frequently presented by creationists. We do not claim that a snowflake is proof of evolution: but in the context of a situation where one's opponents have given a badly incorrect summary of the 2nd LoT, snowflakes do serve to show up the defects in their argument.

The FAQ file is necessarily terse; if you want to see a further discussion of topics mentioned, you should really follow the links.

• We don't think complexity came from pure chance. See the Evolution and Chance FAQ, and also the Chance from a theistic perspective FAQ.
• We don't sweep the question of design under the carpet. We have here a transcript of a Debate on Design between two talk.origins participants, one of whom is a creationist. Both have their own independent concluding remarks, with the creationist conclusion actually concluding the entire file.
• We are happy to examine areas where creationists think design is evident, and argue that design is not actually the appropriate explanation. See our Bombardier Beetles and the Arguement of Design FAQ, and Irreducible Complexity and Michael Behe.
• We don't propose no room for God, and show a range of ways that believers fit God into the picture. See God and Evolution.
• God is mentioned in a number of places in the archive (two quoted above). We also have the entire text of Genesis on-line at this site. Nowhere in the site is atheism actively promoted, and the people who contribute include atheists, Christians and undeclared.
• We do slam the ideas of creation "science", but with detail and actual arguments rather than blanket dismissal. On this feedback page in particular we direct people to places where they can continue to investigate our perspective, as I have done here for you. We try to treat people with substantially more grace and respect than we receive, which is not difficult.
• We encourage and welcome comparison of the material in this archive with contrasting opinions. The pages to which I am directing you link extensively to other sites with a range of supporting and conflicting views, and we also maintain a huge links page.
• We certainly do not expect you to believe that we are the first sentient life form to evolve. I have no idea where you got such an idea. The truth is that whether other sentient life forms have existed in the universe now or in the past is unknown. No FAQs here, to my knowledge, even bother to consider the matter.

As an alternative to the means discussed on the page, I believe that "Deja.Com" now supports posting to moderated newsgroups. Go to My Deja.Com and from there you can sign up to read and post to newsgroups.

This sort of statement is merely a ploy by creationists to get evolution removed from public schools on the grounds that it is a religion, and not science. Many people of of all different faiths accept evolution. It is NOT an atheistic conspiracy. Many of the scientists working on evolution are Christians. Of Americans who accept evolution, the vast majority of them are Christians.

I have been busy doing various projects, including the upkeep of my own websites. My apologies to all my fans.

As far as your question, you should ask your professor: "Why do you consider that a problem?" That which is not yet explanined is not the same thing as that which is unexplainable. We have seen many issues labeled as "problems" by creationists that have been resolved with the discovery of new information. It is true that soft tissue does not normally fossilize, and certainly we wish we had examples of transitional lungs.

One thing to bear in mind-- I hope your professor wasn't talking about a transition between "modern reptile" lungs and "modern bird" lungs. Because there would be of course no such thing... he should know better than that. He must have meant a transition between dinosaurs (which we believe to have been warm blooded), and the earliest known birds, such as Archaeopteryx, with their long bony reptilian tails and their reptilian skulls full of teeth. As anyone who has looked at the dinosaur/bird transitionals, you can see the transition is a real one. The overwhelming evidence of bird/dinosaur transitionals will hardly be overthrown by the fact that soft tissue does not fossilize. Bones do, and they reveal transitionals quite clearly. They rest can be inferred. Bird lungs do not jeopardize the theory of evolution, sorry.

There are several reasons why not all tree-dwelling animals have developed gliding: one, they may not have had the requisite mutations; two, the "niche" may have been already inhabited; three, there may be developmental barriers to a given organism developing the skin flaps; and four, it may conflict with other ecological needs of the organism (so that flaps would get in the way, eg, if they were burrowers, etc.).

You can get plenty of information on the Flood from a scientific point of view from the Flood FAQs. As well as a web page I constructed illustrating that none of the evidence that would be present if the Flood happened has ever been found: What Would We Expect to Find if the World had Flooded?

If by "the rest of us" you mean Christians who believe that God is creator without denying the findings of science concerning the world, then you should be aware that there are a number of Christians who contribute to this site and who answer feedback. We are all well aware that creationism is not the same as belief in a creator.

I am probably not the best person to answer your questions, but I'll take a stab at it!

(1) No, evolution is certainly not used interchangeably with adaption.

(2) Biston betularia will be better known to our readers as "peppered moth". The traditional story has come in for some criticism in recent times, and has been the subject of discussion in the newsgroup talk.origins. Jonathan Wells wrote a critique of the traditional story, but this contains many falsehoods. Don Frack supplied a response to Wells in [1] [2] [3] [4] parts at the Calvin College evolution discussion archive. Bruce Grant has an on-line review article on the matter. Our mutations FAQ deals with some of the issues in a form that may be easier to read.

In brief, the moth is not fallacious as an example of natural selection.

(3) I looked up the book "Evolution of Living Organisms" by Pierre-Paul Grasse (Academic Press 1977) and I can confirm that in his view, evolution is indeed a well established fact. I quote from page 3.

Zoologists and botanists are nearly unanimous in considering evolution as a fact and not a hypothesis. I agree with this position and base it primarily on documents provided by paleontonlogy, i.e., the history of the living world.

We do discuss biologists at this site who disagree with the Darwinian paradigm. See our FAQ How to be Anti-Darwinian.

(4) My view on the notion of seeding of life from Mars is that this is very much a wild speculation. I do not think you are correct in thinking of the search for life on Mars as a search for an origin of life that subsequently seeded life on Earth.

There is some serious speculation on the role that cometary impacts may have had in seeding Earth with simple organic molecules and the role this might have in the origins of life on Earth. I think you will find that the search for life on Mars is better described as an investigation into the possibility that life may be more sidespread in the universe than previously thought.

On the assumption that you don't want to be closed-minded, I'll try and help explain it a bit.

First, evolution is not something that occurs from nothing, nor is it a case of stuff just miraculously coming together. The actual processes involved in evolution are very briefly introduced in our Introduction to Evolutionary Biology FAQ, and I will not comment further on them here. Instead, I'll talk about how your body grows.

You spoke of our very very complex brain. Specifically, think of your very complex brain. It is a wonderful organ, and its workings are a mystery. And yet it developed along with the rest of your body from a single fertilized cell. This is indeed miraculous! So also is much of the working of the natural world.

We do know a little bit about the processes involved in the growth of your body and its brain. Science can only explore the natural processes involved. The way DNA codes for proteins. The way different genes become activated at different times and in different cells. Differentiation into types of cells. Myelination of nerve cells in the brain. None of this corresponds to a rejection of God, because many scientists do believe that God is intimately involved in all the workings of the natural world.

When we look a your brain, of course we do not think it was just nerve cells that miraculously came together. If you believe in God as your own personal creator, you may indeed call it miraculous, but this is not a denial of the natural processes involved. We do not think the brain was formed as if by a Leonardo Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa, nor do we think it is just an accident. It is the end result of some very subtle natural processes, which shows just how amazing the natural world is.

Should we dismiss as insane the idea that your brain could form from nothing, or even develop from a single cell? Of course not. This is exactly what it does.

Evolution, like embryological development, is a very subtle natural process, which we observe and study in the natural world. We do not know all there is to know about it, but we do know a bit about how it works, and we know a lot about its effects. Neither evolution nor embryology simply says that stuff can just miraculously comes together. This does not mean God is uninvolved, unless you think God is uninvolved in natural processes. I do not think you believe that.

Seriously, we are gratified that you find our site both civil and clear, for we strive — though sometimes fail — to achieve both those goals. We hope that you will continue to find this site helpful and informative, and that you will come to learn how many Christians — including some who contribute to this site — reconcile their faith with evolution. (See, for instance, the God and Evolution FAQ.) Even if you do not, we appreciate the intellectual honesty of people who carefully examine arguments they disagree with. We hope to do no less ourselves.

Most of all, do not just take our word for it. We encourage all our readers to examine the other sites we link to and, more importantly, the primary literature referenced in our articles.