Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Everytime our president talks about his god -- I get irked.

Entropy and evolution not in conflict
(by Peter Schmidt, Durango Herald Letter to the editor, October 19, 2009)

I’m responding to the part of Dick Carmack’s letter (Herald, Oct. 7) about evolution contradicting the second law of thermodynamics, bringing increased complexity and order to Earth’s life instead of the increase in entropy (disorder) predicted by the second law.

This law refers to the use of energy in a closed system and means there’s no such thing as a perpetual machine that eventually won’t run down. It also can be expressed as order eventually degenerating into disorder " a trend evolution seems to reverse as it produces complexity from simpler forms. But there’s no contradiction with the law for several reasons.

Life on Earth isn’t a closed system as long as the sun shines energy onto it that’s converted to food. That eventually will end, though, when the sun’s finite supply of nuclear fuel burns up and the whole solar system runs down. Also, the complexity produced by evolution doesn’t come free and clear; it’s paid for by destruction going with it.

Evolutionary change occurs through chance mutations that become successful after passing the test of natural selection. For every one of these successful mutations, there are thousands of harmful ones that get nowhere and can cause death. The rise of a new, successful animal also usually means the extinction of competing creatures, even of its parent stock.

The evolution leading to modern life has been accompanied by lots of this carnage, offsetting the decrease in entropy represented by the survivors. It’s easy to be unaware of what it’s taken to get us here.

The rest of Carmack’s letter doesn’t apply to evolution, which only deals with what happened after life on Earth was established, not its origin.

What’s behind it all is in the realm of religion. There’s no contradiction there either, and I doubt if there ever will be.

The theory of evolution involves chemistry, physics and biology, and is an inseparable part of science. None of this should be mixed with religion in our schools any more than classes in religion should teach quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Scientists on the BBC's Horizon Show demonstrated tonight that we don't have free will

Cavalli-Sforza’s “The History and Geography of Human Genes”, written with Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza (Princeton University Press, 1994), is still considered the best overview of genetic diversity in humans. Cavalli-Sforza demolished the idea of there being different species of human being. No more Homo afer, asiaticus, europaeus, americanus and monstrous. Race, says Cavalli-Sforza, has hardly any useful biological meaning at all. It is about adaptation. Grain-eaters between the Baltic and Black Sea got pale skin, pale eyes and pale hair because they were under selective pressure to process more Vitamin D from limited sunlight. Lewontin, Wells’s other mentor, posited that if a nuclear war struck and only the Kenyan Kikuyu survived, they would still have 85% of the genetic variation of mankind; with a similar history and conditions, they too would turn blond and blue-eyed under the northern sun.