A Look Back to Some Good Posts of the Past

For those of you who have only recently started reading this blog, I had some fantastic posts in 2012.

I took a long road trip from Oklahoma to California and back. One of the main purposes of this trip was to take photos and make videos to teach about evolution. I posted a series of “Evotour” essays, with photos. I saw some really interesting and thought-provoking things! The links are below:

• Eclipse of the Sun
• The Southwest Desert
• Parkfield Road, or, Skipping Across Crustal Plates. I visited the San Andreas Fault, where the Pacific Plate rubs up against the North American Plate. There is a bridge over it, labeled with signs, way out in the country!
• The Purisima Hills (with a remnant pine population and big lichens)
• The Transit of Venus, or, Guillame LeGentil Finally Gets Satisfaction. I saw the last Transit of Venus that any of us will ever see.
• Fire and Renewal in the California Mountains
• The Evolution of Christian Science. I visited a Christian Science church and tried to figure out how such a religion could ever have evolved.
• Feeling Small (in the presence of giant sequoias)
• Races of the Human Species: A Visit to Manzanar (a World War Two Japanese American internment camp)
• Among the Ancients (a visit to the oldest trees in the world)

I also posted a series about Religion and Science, The Vast Gulf. Science and religion differ markedly on such issues as:

• How to Find Things Out
• The Heavens (what are they?)
• Dust of the Ground
• You Are What You Eat
• Weather and Climate
• Continents
• Genetics
• Where Babies Come From
• Was the World Made for Man?
• The Future (this one was posted January 2013)

I also had a series of posts from the Oklahoma Evolution Workshop in October 2012. A stimulating experience, not to be forgotten!

I posted numerous free-standing essays, of which my best were:

Why Evolution Looks Like It Has an Overall Direction

Appealing to the Basest Instincts. This was about politicians, and it has suddenly become more relevant than ever!

Reality of Global Warming: The 2012 Phenology Conference.  Includes a part in which two scientists who consider global warming to be a gigantic problem were listed among the “3000 scientists who reject global warming.”

If you have time, take a look at these. I have left out essays which, however interesting, dealt with issues that were mainly relevant in 2012.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Six: Continents

It is with considerable relief when I say, Congratulations to Barack Obama for winning a second term. I was afraid that Mitt Romney would make devastating cuts to science and education, cuts that would actually not reduce the deficit very much. At the same time, almost exactly half of the voters voted against Barack Obama. His next four years may be even harder than his previous four years.

Now back to our series about the many ways in which science differs from traditional religion.

The Biblical view of the Earth is that orderly dry land is surrounded by chaotic oceans; in fact, one of God’s earliest acts of creation was to set a boundary between land and sea. The landlubber Israelites were frankly afraid of being out on the ocean (so am I). The God of orderliness had created dry land as the place for people to live.

But the Israelites had no idea that the continents moved around. Of course, neither did anybody else. The idea of continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in the early twentieth century, and accepted only decades later by geologists. You cannot fault the Bible for omitting continental drift, unless you believe the Bible to be the outline of all scientific truth, in which case you have to reject continental drift.

But it is a little more complicated than this. Creationists believe that God sent a Flood upon the Earth, saving only Noah and his family (which, they imagine, contained black, white, and oriental daughters-in-law) from which all the people of the Earth are descended. This was such a severe disruption to the stable continents that all sedimentary rocks (of which continents largely consist) and all volcanic and metamorphic layers between them were produced at that time. Where did all the land come from? Not from day three of Genesis 1, but from the big piles of mud left over after the Flood of Noah. The problems with this theory could fill a book, and have filled many books.

But it gets even more complicated than this. Genesis 10:25 said that in the days of Peleg (a mysterious patriarch about whom little is known) the Earth was divided. This was after the Flood. Let us consider the tremendous scientific implications of this verse, if we take it literally. This verse literally says the Earth was divided. The word for “earth” is the same Hebrew word that is used for the entire planet (see here for concordance references). The word for “divided” refers to cutting entirely in half (see here for concordance references). To really take this verse literally, we have to say what one creationist (Walter Brown) once said in a public forum at the University of Illinois: this was when God created the Atlantic Ocean, causing the Eurasian and North American plates to diverge. But the word literally means to split into pieces, thus we must go way beyond continental drift and believe that the entire planet was split in two. One of the halves must be the one we are on, and presumably the other half has been lost. This would mean that, even right after the Flood, Earth was a much bigger planet, which would give it stronger gravitation, which would make birds unable to fly and large animals (as they are currently designed) unable to walk… This quickly leads to absurdity. Therefore, creationists such as the people at Answers in Genesis claim that “earth” in this verse refers to the people of the Earth. They refuse to allow this interpretation for the very same word in reference to the whole Earth being covered by the Flood, or to God creating the whole Earth in Genesis 1. Apparently, creationists have appointed themselves as the official “deciders” of which passages are to be taken as scientifically literal statements and which are more figurative.

It gets even stranger. Something interesting happened during King Solomon’s coronation parade. “And all the people went up after him [King Solomon], playing on pipes, and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth was split by their noise.” Some translations say that the earth rumbled with their noise, but the actual Hebrew words refer to the Earth itself actually splitting. Most of us would assume this is the figurative equivalent of “ear-splitting,” and some Bible translations take the liberty of translating it, “The earth rumbled with their noise.” But if you base your science on a literal interpretation of the Bible, you have a problem here. Creationists quietly accept the figurative meaning of this verse.

There are whole continents of difference between the ancient religious view of the earth and the modern scientific one.

Evotour, part three. Parkfield Road, or, Skipping Across Crustal Plates

I spent the afternoon of my 55^th birthday driving up a lonely road between expansive cattle pastures in the coastal mountains of California. There were few other vehicles. As I climbed the hill, grasslands gave way to savannas of valley oak (Quercus lobata) interspersed with digger pine (Pinus coulteri). Some of the oaks were massive. My goal was near the town of Parkfield, which is so small that you cannot be sure if you have passed through it. I was looking for a little bridge.

I found the bridge. It spanned over what looked like a little arroyo with cattails and willows (Salix lasiolepis) in the tiny bit of water at the bottom. But it was no ordinary arroyo. It was the San Andreas Fault. According to geological websites, the Parkfield bridge is the only bridge in the world that connects two continental plates. This may or may not be true; several highways, including state routes 46 and 41, must also cross this fault. And the fault has several branches. But this is the only place where a sign proclaims, “San Andreas Fault: entering North American Plate” on the west side, and “entering Pacific Plate” on the east.

This was an irresistible geological and evolutionary pilgrimage, one at which I made one of my Darwin Youtube videos, because continental drift has revolutionized our understanding of the world. Crustal plates constantly move; the Pacific Plate is moving northwest at the pace that fingernails grow. Usually it does not move at all, but as pressure builds up the plate lurches, causing an earthquake. This has not happened recently at Parkfield. Therefore it is not a deep chasm into which you can look and see hell; its recent immobility has allowed sediments to fill it in. The continents, consisting of lighter rock, are thrown around by the crustal plates. Geology has never been the same since the discovery of continental drift. Neither has evolution. We now understand one of many processes that separate an ancestral species into separate populations, allowing them to diversify into new species. The population can be divided as a crustal plate carries part of it away.

There is a story of cultural evolution going on in nearby Cholame, which is just a restaurant on Highway 46. At this location in 1955, James Dean died in a car crash. To many of us, James Dean was not that great of an actor; a friend of mine said he always had a constipated look on his face. But he became a hero in Japan. A Japanese man, Seita Ohnishi, donated money to construct a granite monument around a tree-of-heaven near the restaurant. He compared Dean’s untimely death to the death of cherry blossoms (what else?) at the prime of their beauty. Seita Ohnishi was not speaking just for himself, but for thousands of Japanese. Now, you might guess I will tie this in with evolution somehow. James Dean left a cultural legacy, more so in Japan than in America, which has far exceeded any biological fitness he might ever have had. Culture is not unique to humans, but it is a unique form of human evolutionary fitness.

I found a restaurant in Paso Robles (El Paso de los Robles, Oak Pass), Big Bubba’s Bad BBQ (bad here meaning good, like a retinal afterglow), which offered a free birthday meal. What perfect timing. All I had to do was to allow myself to be regaled by a birthday chant and have my picture taken.

I have now posted the YouTube video of Darwin walking over the San Andreas fault.

Note: Someone posted a comment on a previous entry, but when I click on it, my computer goes into an unresponsive mode. I have not read the comment but I suspect that someone has inserted a virus. Beware!  Update: The problem was apparently a computer glitch caused by Google. The comment was not a virus.