If Evolution's Dangerous, Geology's Not Far Behind -- Courant.com - The Diigo Meta page

• 27 Feb 09
  

  Clay Burell

  evolution creationism webroundup

  • accepting natural selection takes intellectual courage, as well as intellectual ability.
    
    For the moment, nonbelievers have lost their legal fight to have creationist ideas taught in public school classrooms. But over the long haul, they've been overwhelmingly successful in delaying its teaching until later grades and watering the subject down in biology curriculums and textbooks. From my point of view, however, their most important success has been the virtual elimination of physical geology from the competitive high school track, and of historical geology from the non-college track. These subjects figured very prominently in Darwin's most famous work, "The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection."
  • The deep time of geology is the world's second-most dangerous idea because it gave rise to the world first-most dangerous idea, natural selection. In the conclusion to the "Origin," Darwin wrote: "The chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to another and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting great changes of which we do not see the steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when [pioneering geologist Sir Charles] Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the agencies which we still see at work. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years."
    
    Darwin took the deep time of geology and applied it not to the incremental transformation of a valley, but to the incremental transformation of living organisms, most famously to the finches of the Galapagos Islands.
    
    The threat to creationism posed by deep time explains why the most hard-core nonbelievers are "young Earth creationists." They insist that Earth is no more than about 6,000 years old, and spend their days trying to fit the mythos of Genesis into the logos of Earth system history, now 4.6 billion years in the making.

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