Life cannot evolve until it exists. When I recently made that point during a series of questions I asked in another post, Dr. Benoit Leblanc responded by writing, Your fourth question is the least contentious one, because it deals with matters that lie outside of evolutionary biology. “Until life exists, how can it evolve?” The answer is, of course, “it can’t”. Evolutionary theory is not concerned with abiogenesis, although its principles do apply to the evolution of increasingly-efficient unliving replicators (such as self-replicating nucleic acids) that may, in time, acquire characteristics that we associate with living creatures. Such is the power of the natural selection concept: in a population of replicators that can accumulate mutations, the replicators that gain a replicative advantage will, by definition, replicate better. To his credit, Dr. Leblanc made the effort to respond, though he conceded my point while simultaneously suggesting he and his colleagues don't care that the spontaneous origin of life was a wildly improbable anomaly, at best With all due respect and while I’m sure Dr. Leblanc is considerably more knowledgeable about evolutionary biology than me, I cannot begin to fathom how he could possibly make the statement that evolution theorists could be completely unconcerned about the hypothesis called abiogenesis while simultaneously agreeing with Dr. Coyne's assertion that evolution theory is true, beyond any question or reproach. Quid est veritas? What is the purpose of studying science? Is it to cherry-pick from the evidence that … [Read more...]
A brief glimpse of the Big Picture
The problem with PETA
PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk rather famously once said, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”, but she was absolutely wrong. The truth is that a rat is vermin, and a pig could be dinner. A dog might be a boy’s best friend, but they are obviously different species, rather easy to tell apart. Don't get me wrong...I love my dogs, very much. They are my furry babies. Truthfully, I wouldn’t even think twice about risking my own life by running into traffic to save one of them from an oncoming car. In fact, there’s precedent for my saying so. Not long ago I foolishly ran onto a major highway near my house and nearly got myself killed, trying to save someone else’s dog that had escaped from under their fence. The story had a happy ending that day. They don’t always end that way. We both were lucky, the dog and me. I was acting purely on altruistic instinct, a natural reaction that a guy like Jerry Coyne might mistake for goodness. Nevertheless, if the choice is between saving either a dog or a child, the human life comes first in my mind. That’s also an instinctive decision, a no-brainer. In my world, God gave mankind dominion over all other animals. That means we have a tremendous responsibility to act as good stewards. In the world I prefer, it’s okay to kill a cow or chicken--as long as you eat it. It’s even okay to make clothing from the animal’s hide, so nothing is wasted. While doing so, we should most certainly give thanks to its Creator for the sacrifice of the animal for food and clothing, for the life we used to help sustain ours. However, in … [Read more...]
