bystander
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作者：bystander 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
I don’t have “On the Origin of Species” on my bookshelf. (I have to confess that I haven’t read Darwin’s work from cover to cover., so I can’t lay claim to authority on related issues.) What follows is a rather neat summary of evolutionist arguments on how the eye evolved:
“In the case of the eye, for example, the first small change was probably a slight increase in the sensitivity to light of a small piece of skin. All skin is slightly sensitive to light anyway, and it is not difficult to imagine that the offspring of one of our eyeless ancestors happened to be born with a bit of skin slightly more sensitive to light than normal. This was just an accident, of course.”
“It also just happened that this particular accident was a lucky accident, because it allowed the mutant baby to detect the shadow of a predator more quickly, and thus escape faster than its eyeless parents and siblings could do.”
“Of course, there were many other accidents that weren’t quite so lucky – many other mutant babies whose unusual features were disadvantageous rather than beneficial. These mutants did not have any offspring.”
“But the lucky mutant was more successful and had lots of offspring. Moreover, it passed the new gene for light-sensitive skin-bits on to its offspring, so the new gene spread through the population and eventually everyone had the light-sensitive skin patches. Later on, there were other mutations, some of which were also beneficial. The light-sensitive skin patches became light-sensitive concave dips, which were then filled in with transparent fluid and finally covered over with a lens. The eye had evolved by a process of natural selection.”
“Natural selection, then, builds adaptations by accumulating many small accidental changes. The British biologist Richard Dawkins has compared natural selection to a ‘blind watchmaker’. It is a watchmaker because it produces complex designs, but it is blind because it doesn’t produce these designs by conscious foresight, but simply by accumulating a series of random accidents.”
The above are passages taken from an introductory textbook. The point I’m trying to make is that when those so-called “Christian scientists” (Or are they simply creationists in clever disguise?) put forward ideas like “intelligent design” and maintain that evolution is/was the work of their God, I wonder whether they really understand what they’re talking about. You just can’t help asking what kind of “science” could that be.
I’m at a loss, however, as far as the question of the origin of life is concerned. I’ve come across books that try to answer that question, but many of those books contain sophisticated computer models or vague notions like “artificial life” which elude me. I’ve heard that some researchers at MIT, for example, are trying to replicate those conditions under which organic life forms emerge from the “primordial soup”; what I don’t know is the extent to which their work is empirical, and the extent to which it is speculative.
Just one last thing you might find interesting. Several years ago when I mentioned to a knowledgeable professor that I was doubtful whether the theory of evolution alone can satisfactorily answer questions like the emergence of organic life forms and the vast diversity of species (many of which are as yet unknown), he just gave me a blank stare and declined to comment on my opinion. Later, it turned out that the professor had mistaken me for a CREATIONIST！Oh dear me!
Which is why I’m getting more and more pessimistic about the possibility of a genuine dialogue between science and religion.
作者：bystander 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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关于进化论的一点疑惑
