Stupidity in Nevada

[elfs]

I don't normally think of "masonry contractor" when I want someone to educate me on the finer points of biology, but a masonry contractor from Nevada is so concerned with what he sees as the "problems" with evolutionary theory that he doesn't want them debated: he wants the state constitution amended so that teachers would be required to tell students that "some scientists believe it is mathematically impossible that life could have emerged from naturalistic forces," that "nowhere in the fossil record is there found anything that could be described as a transitional fossil," and that "the origin of sex is so unlikely that biologists do not believe an adequate explanation for it will ever emerge."

All three of these are, basically, wrong. Yes, there are a few people with PhDs in economics, or engineering, or mathematics, who have stated that they don't believe that biological processes can emerge from purely chemical ones: suffice it to say that there's nothing biologists or chemists can point to that would agree with them. It is a failure of the imagination that these men suffer from: it seems so complicated they can't imagine how it happened. Well, biologists can.

There are thousands of transitional fossils. You and I are "transitional forms" between our ancestors and our progeny, and if we go far back enough our ancestors are shaped vastly different from ourselves; likewise, our progeny many generations down the line will be different from our current forms. The term "transitional fossil" is a creationist canard, not a term of biology.

The evolution of sex has long been one of contention, but that doesn't mean that it's so mysterious we can't make progress toward understanding it. A paper that appears in last week's issue of Science shows that in species with both asexual and sexual reproductive strategies, those populations where individuals mostly favored the asexual strategy tended to accumulate deleterious mutations faster than those that had sex. Sex, it turns out, is useful because the mixing and matching of genomes shuffles deleterious genes out of the gene pool faster-- fast enough to make the biochemical investment in sexual reproduction worthwhile to the population as a whole.

But Steve Brown doesn't care, and doesn't want to read "hard" science books. He wants his ignorance enshrined in the state constitution. And he wants Nevada's children to share that ignorance with him.

Comments

[pteryxx.livejournal.com]

There's also a strong theory that sexual reproduction exists not because of advantages on a species-evolutionary scale, but on the scale of single generations through resistance to disease. The parents have survived diseases and parasites to reproduce, but during their lifetimes the diseases themselves have gone through hundreds of generations of adaptation to their hosts. Sexual reproduction insures that the offspring have proven genes, yes, but different combinations than either parent had. Thus they'll have an advantage against disease, until the diseases adapt again. This is generally called the Red Queen hypothesis - because we have to run as fast as we can to stay in the same place, to maintain the status quo.