Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Evolution as a ladder

The entire evolution vs special creation debate as I have researched it, has been completely hijacked by people who refer indirectly to evolution as a ladder with amoebas (or whatever) at the bottom and humans at the top. Creationists arguments often centre on there being "missing links" (on the chain from bottom to top) , that the transformation from random jumbles of molecules to sentient beings breaks fundamental laws of entropy in a natural process. On the other side of the argument, David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" show moved episode by episode up the ladder. Even Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" (ok. these are 80's shows but I haven't seen much change) had one episode where they were calculating the approximate probability of life on other planets - by calculating the probability of life moving up the ladder of creation to sentient beings.

1 comment:

Dr Clam said...

If it has been completely hijacked by these mysterious ladder people, they have come from the special creation side, NOT the science side. The 'ladder' picture of popular science is just pandering to the whims of producers and such like blind guides for which all stories must have a 'plot'.

The most correct material object metaphor for evolution, as I convincingly argue in my forthcoming book, "The Coming Age of the Gherkin", is a gherkin.