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02-08-2005, 08:06 PM #11
Senior Member
evolution or creationism?
heh, actually I had already typed some exerpts from the article in a topic a while back, I managed to find it:
Exerpts from National Geographic:
Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamilia with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Einstein is "just" a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun and not vice-versa, offered by Compernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomimc theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observationand experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally--taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.
[...]
Orchids, wondrously adapted for controlling their pollination by insects, intrigued Darwin. The parts of their strangely modified flowers, he saw, correspond to the flower parts on simpler plants, suggesting evolutionary change. One species that caught his eye was the Madagascar orchid Angraecum sesquipedale, with its 11-inch-long nectar receptacle. He predicted that somewhere in Madagascar, a place he never visited, must live a moth with a proboscis 11 inches long, adapted to harvest the orchid's nectar. Forty years later two entomologists revealed the Madagascan sphinx moth Xanthopan morganii praedicta, confirming Darwin's forecast. Such mutual adaptation--the moth to the flower, the flower to the moth--is called coevolution.
[...]
Nightmarish illnesses caused by microbes include both the infectious sort (AIDS, Ebola, SARS) that spread directly from person to person and the sort (malaria, West Nile Fever) delivered to us by biting insects or other intermediaries. The capacity for quick change among disease-causing microbes is what makes them so dangerous to large numbers of people and so difficult and expensive to treat. They leap from wildlife or domestice animals into humans, adapting to new circumstances as they go. Their inherent variability allows them to find new ways of evading and defeating human immune systems. By natural selection, they acquire resistance to drugs that should kill them. They evolve. There's no better or more immediate evidence supporting the Darwinian theory than this process of forced transformation among our inimical germs.Peter: [writing letter] Dear MacGuyver, Enclosed is a rubber band, a paper clip, and a drinking straw. Please save my dog.
:stoned:
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