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>> And that's all it is... theory... if anyone wants to know the truth about
>> life and how it all got started just start reading Genesis chapter 1
verse 1.

> That's a common response, but it's unfortunately not true.
Both are explanations of why and how things are the way they are. While they
may have little else in common, they have that much. They also have in
common a peculiar ability to excite passions. Were I to post that gravity is
nothing other than the hand of the divine, holding all things together, I
would expect that to generate a very small controversy, or perhaps none at
all. The nature of gravity tends not to excite passions. Whereas Wirt's
provocative post has started a thread of sixteen posts in not quite two
hours (although some are more humorous than passionate). Most all belief
systems have a creation story of some sort, because they all need one, to
answer these fundamental questions. Where did everything come from? Why are
things the way they are? From what does a thing derive its basic nature?

> All unifying ideas
> in science are theories, nothing is taken on faith, but as a theory, we
have
> vastly more evidence and understand far more fully the processes and
nature
> of evolution than we do for gravity.
Perhaps this is meant to be understood solely within the context of the
unifying ideas, but I find it impossible to proceed without givens,
presuppositions. Even Euclid's geometry has its first principles which are
just taken as true, and are not proven, nor can they be. There are
breathtaking differences between biology and physics, apart from what they
assumably share by virtue of both being sciences, which they would also
share with chemistry. While certain fundamentals of gravity have eluded our
understanding since the earliest Greek "scientists", each one of us observes
it. I believe that most every child who has ridden in a car has wondered
why, when they drop something, it falls down, instead of back (so did
Galileo's opponents, by the way). But we do not appeal to long ago fallen
trees to derive the notion of gravity. I dare say that most of us could not
demonstrate macro-evolution, nor site a well-known demonstration, and would
only follow most such demonstrations with difficulty. That said, I fully
expect Wirt to be able, with ease, to site no less than one counterexample
to this statement.

> The human genome project, whose data for the two competing groups is being
> published in the two premiere journals this Friday, is being fairly
compared,
> I believe, to the Copernican revolution
Thomas Kuhn popularized this idea of the Copernican model as revolutionary,
as causing a "paradigm shift". As a dissenter to the prevailing belief
system, I would compare it instead to Bohr's model of the atom (for which he
won the Nobel prize), or even Ptolemy's model of the cosmos. Both are
incredibly useful without actually being true. Instead, they model true
relationships, and one can make it through three years of high school
chemistry without the newer Schrodinger model of the atom, and correctly
understand much of modern chemistry with an ultimately failed and flawed
model from which to work. Likewise, using Ptolemy's cosmos, you can tell
where Mars was or will be on your fortieth birthday, or on any other date
you care to pick. To quote a long forgotten post from another list member,
"in the end, we explain nothing". So I want my children to understand modern
evolutionary biology, to read Darwin and Gould and Dawkins, but hope that
they will not find in them their explanation for why things are they way
they are. And I welcome whatever insights we will enjoy from genomics,
expecting that most of them will be beneficial (I do worry about the privacy
of my genomic information).

I would be concerned mainly that if current evolutionary theory is mistaken,
in part or in whole, that some insights from genomics will be later in
coming than it might otherwise be, since by definition, some of the data
will not fit the current model. Like the unfortunate occupants of
Procrustus' bed, the data has more than once been stretched or "shortened"
to fits a desired frame.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com