Last week I wrote about an important new study showing that three very different groups of species–plants, butterflies, and birds–have all been declining at the same alarming rate for over 40 years in Great Britain. The authors concluded that if the pattern is global, it may mean that we are entering one of the biggest bouts of mass extinctions in the past 500 million years.
Category: Blog
When I ask scientists what’s the biggest misunderstanding people have about their work, they often talk about how they know what they know. People tend to think that a scientist’s job is to gather every single datum about something in nature–a mountain, a species of jellyfish, a neutron star–and then, simply by looking at all that information, see the absolute truth about it in an instant. If science departments were filled with angels, that might be the case. But they’re staffed by humans with finite brains, with tight research budgets, and with only so many years left before retirement or death. In order to tackle vast questions about the fate of the universe, the history of this planet, and the tangled bank of life on Earth, they have to live with uncertainty. To understand something, they can only gather a smattering of information about it, look for patterns within the data and use well-supported theories to come up with hypotheses about them. They can then gather more information in order to test the hypotheses again, and, if need be, alter their explanations to accord with the evidence. Their conclusions can only be tentative, but they can also be powerful. We were not around when the Earth formed, and we can only look at indirect clues in certain rocks and meteorites. And yet scientists have a good idea of when the Earth formed, how quickly the iron core settled to the center of the planet, when oceans began to appear, and so on.
Three weeks ago, I gave a talk at Stanford University about my new book Soul Made Flesh. A wonderful crowd turned out and peppered me with excellent questions afterwards, each of which could have become new talks of their own. CSPAN was there to film it, and they’ll be broadcasting the talk this Saturday, March 20, at 9 am EST on BookTV.
In one of the weirdest attempts to pretend that creationism is a real science, a student at Harvard Law School wrote a favorable review in the Harvard Law Review of a book about Intelligent Design. You’d think that this would be so irrelevant that it would vanish off the cultural radar in a flash. But it has ballooned into something of a blogospheric hurricane, mainly because the National Review Online wants to pretend that criticism of the review is an Inquisition-style persecution. It’s a cute way to distract attention from the basic issue of whether creationism in any of its manifestations has scientific merit, which it doesn’t.
For over two centuries, opponents of evolution have searched for examples of natural complexity that could have only been created by design. Reverend William Paley was fond of the eye, with its lens, retina, and other components all beautifully fine-tuned to work with one another. These days, the Intelligent Design camp tries to invoke blood clotting cascades or the flagella that bacteria use to move around in the same way. (See here for some refutations of these arguments.) Ironically, one of the most successful, intricate examples of complexity in nature is something creationists never mention: a tumor.