Thanks for taking the time to transcribe that section, Rich. I found that playback over the web was a little jerky, but the show is also available as a podcast, which should play a little more smoothly. I'll look forward to hearing it. From my point of view--a non-religious viewpoint--the whole kerfuffle over evolution is quite troubling. Some religious people thump on their Bibles and claim evolution is a dangerous lie. Some other claim evolution as proof of an elegant God. An unfortunate number of my co-nonreligionists (Richard Dawkins comes to mind) claim dismissively that evolution is proof that there is no God. I'm distressed that the whole lovely mechanism of evolution is used as some sort of club to beat up people that other people don't agree with. I'm quite happy to appreciate evolution in and of itself. The science is compelling and carries no other agenda than to force a deeper appreciation of the universe we live in. The attachment of that process to either a religious or non-religious world view is a deeply personal choice. There ought to be plenty of room in the world for that. On Aug 1, 2006, at 5:38 PM, Richard Tenney wrote:
For those not interested in the subject of evolution, feel free to skip the rest of this and hit your delete buttons now. OT means off-topic, so you've had fair warning if you proceed.
With Kansas back in today's news, I was reminded of a fascinating interview last week on NPR's Diane Rehm show, whose guest was Francis Collins, the longtime director of the Human Genome project, a leading researcher in medical genetics, and a self-professed Evangelical Christian. You can hear the archived program here: http://www.wamu.org/audio/dr/06/07/r2060725-10891.asx
I've taken the trouble to transcribe one part of the interview that I found especially interesting, which follows:
"The evidence for evolution is absolutely overwhelming. Those who would deny that should sit with me some day and go through the DNA evidence of our relatedness to other species.
"If I look at our genome, and compare it with that of the chimpanzee, they are 98.8% the same. Now some might argue "well, God simply used some good ideas in a slightly different way over and over again in multiple acts of special creation", but the data doesn't support that. For instance, chimpanzees have two more chromosomes than humans do. When you look closely to see what's going on there, those two chromosomes have fused together to make one of ours, and when you look at the DNA sequence at that fusion point, it has a remarkable character; it has the type of sequence that one sees at what's called the telomere, the tip of the chromosome; no other chromosome has that in the middle. It's clearly the signature of two chromosomes having come together, and when you look at the chimp and you look at the human, it's inescapable to conclude that we are descended from a common primate ancestor.
"We humans have pseudo-genes; genes that have lost their function. They've acquired some sort of major flaw, and in some instances those are genes which are located in the same place in the chimpanzee, or even in the dog or in the horse, yet in us they have stopped working.
"What's going on? Would God have put those there just to confuse us or mislead us, when in fact we are completely different, special acts of creation? That sounds like a trickster god, not the God I worship.
"So, I don't think by the study of DNA, or for that matter the fossil record, one can any longer deny the reality of evolution. But that's not a problem for me as a believer. If God decided to use that mechanism of creation, that's incredibly elegant; that's incredibly awe-inspiring."
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