August 06, 2003
62% of Scarborough Country viewers support creationism
This is what we get for a locally funded and locally run public school system. Way too many people get diplomas with little understanding of basic science.
Transcript from Monday's episode of Scarborough Country on MSNBC:
SCARBOROUGH: Welcome back to SCARBOROUGH COUNTRY. How you doing?Now, earlier in the show, we asked you if you thought creationism should be included in school science curriculum, and here’s what you had to say.
Sixty-two percent said creationism should be taught in schools, 38 percent said it should not be taught in schools. Which-that was actually 62 to 38 percent was my exact vote the first year I got elected to Congress. Sounds about right.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould is probably the best book out there on evolution to date. To over-simplify greatly, it describes how the debate has moved well past creationism versus evolution.
Click here to read some reviews of the book.
In short, it explains how volumes of accumulated scientific research over the last twenty years have shown:
1-Natural selection happens on many different levels, from the allele to the individual to the species. Not just "survival of the fittest."
In other words, group survival often trumps so-called selfish genes.
2-Punctuated equilibrium, with long periods of stability and short periods of rapid change after significant environmental changes may explain things better than gradual steady change. The most common example of this is the extinction of the dinosaurs.
3-Evolution proceeds by a variety of mechanisms, not just natural selection. Structural limitations of form, genetic drift, and random variation explain a great deal as well. Adaptation is not absolute. For instance, the physical properties of an elbow are constrained as much by physics as competition.
He also makes the point that the complex life forms we have here on Earth are more a function of the great diversity and abundance of life, not a directional movement toward more complex organisms.
In fact, the data suggests no such advantage for complex beings. Bacteria are still 80% or more of the bio mass on Earth, with anything bigger than an insect under 1%, mammals less, and humans? Barely a speck.
He compares it to piling sand against a wall. The barrier here is the barrier of basic cellular life. You can not have something less than a cell, so the more cells you have piled up against this wall, constantly mutating over billions of years (imagine jumping beans not sand) the further out on the complexity scale things get, purely by chance. We are basically all freaks of nature, not an inevitability. I think if more people realized this, we could make this a better world. All we have is each other.