Darwin

I’ve finally sat down to read Origin of Species by good ol’ Darwin. I was scared off of it by a professor who said it was dry as a bone, but since I’m trying for a PhD in Evolutionary Biology, I figured I should give it a shot. It turns out that I really really like it! It’s amazing what they knew back then, and how they had many of the same problems we have now with people who really really don’t like the idea of God working through natural laws to create things. It’s also very interesting to read what a very intelligent scientist has to say about inheritance when they didn’t even know what DNA was – Darwin didn’t know about Mendel’s work at all, so mostly people were just kinda shooting around in the dark when it came to inheritance. They knew things were inherited, but had no idea why some things were inherited and some things weren’t, and why some would show up in grandchildren but not in children – what an amazing puzzle! Completely weird. It’s wonderful what we’ve been figuring out now, what with DNA and epigenetics and all that. Pretty cool.

Darwin starts out talking mostly about agriculture. It turns out he has the same audience in mind as many of my Biology 100 students. People who are intelligent but who feel very deeply that the Creation must have been a single (or septimal?) miraculous event. Darwin’s a wonderful writer. He talks about how man has wrought pretty amazing changes in animals, so much so that different strains of an animal can appear completely completely different, and he gives many examples of them. Did you know that Darwin raised pigeons? I didn’t. And it turns out there are lots of different, some pretty weird-looking, pigeons, and most of the varieties, especially the wacko ones, were selected by man. You could go so far as to say they were created by man, because he would have seen some weird-looking pigeon, one with a rather large crop, for example, and started to breed for that trait. After many generations of selecting for a big crop, he ends up with a bird that has, whoa, such a big crop that it looks quite different than the other pigeons.

No need to be upset about this, we all know that agricultural crops look really different than wild ones. Cultivated strawberries? 20x bigger than the wild ones. Do you think the ancient Egyptians had tangelos? No, because we invented them. And wild watermelons are not red at all. And beefalos? Come on.

So once Darwin establishes that man can really change things, he sets up natural selection as being similar to man’s selection, in that things will change in order to be better adapted to where they are, simply because the ones that are best adapted to their environment will have more offspring than ones that are not adapted well.

He also spends quite a bit of time on how the whole species concept is fraught with difficulties. It is VERY difficult to determine what a species is.

I’m having a fun time reading it. Love this guy! Though I can see how a person who thinks anything other than a 7-day bazillion-species-at-once creation is blasphemous would put Darwin in the dust-bin pronto, probably burning it too. Ah well.

I’ll just say again that – just because we can explain parts of something doesn’t mean it wasn’t miraculous. If I’m having a miserable day and my husband comes home with flowers for me and we manage to fit in a 2-hr conversation, I’ll pray and thank Heavenly Father for such a wonderful miracle. As I did yesterday. I find no problems with learning a little bit about the wonderful methods Heavenly Father harnesses to accomplish His designs. Knowledge is… Beauty.

cross-reference http://miekesmusings.blogspot.com/2008/09/omni-say-what.html