CREATION        The truth is transcendent.  When we talk about the truth we are talking about all things as they really are regardless of our ability to fully perceive them.  Yet people often feel a need for certainty and if they become convinced that something is the truth, they will proceed to believe that.  The trouble is that our ability to understand the truth improves over time while beliefs take on a life of their own, held in place as they are by human biases.  Furthermore, believers often differ among themselves, and so in such cases, someone must be wrong, someone must not be telling the truth.   On one level, it may be that the truth is that you believe, but on another level, the truth is that you don’t know--not for sure, anyway.  But rather than exploit whatever margin uncertainty as an escape hatch for your beliefs, it’s more honest to settle—for the time being anyway—on the probable truth.   Let the clear facts fall into place and define the intellectual landscape to which your beliefs should conform rather than trying to force the facts to conform to your beliefs. The search for the truth is often a contest.  Evidence is gathered to support a likely version of events, but oftentimes others will dispute the assertion and offer a differing explanation for the facts.  This could be due to honest disagreement when the facts do not strongly point to one conclusion, or an intellectual exercise in pursuing alternate scenarios.  But frequently, those in dispute have an agenda, and interest in seeing one explanation prevail over another that is motivated by something other than a desire for truth.  An excellent example of a contest with the truth, one which played itself for the general public in all its detail, was the O.J. Simpson case.  The truth lost.                The ex-wife of the former football great and media personality and her friend were found brutally murdered and within days, evidence began to mount suggesting that Simpson was indeed responsible.  O.J. had a history of violent attacks on Nichole, and at her graveside he made the guilty-sounding remark, “I loved you too much”.  Then came the widely-viewed police chase after which he was found with a disguise, a lot of cash, and his passport, and during which he became suicidal once the cops closed in.  At the crime scene and Simpson’s home, investigators found more clues:  Bloody footprints matching a pair of rare and expensive shoes he was shown to have owned-- and in his size--were found near the corpses and also in his Ford Bronco.  Drops of blood that DNA tests showed were probably (very, very probably) O.J.’s were found at the crime scene as well as at his house and the door handle of his bronco.  When questioned the day after the murders, Simpson sported a cut on his finger and explained that he had cut it when he broke a glass upon hearing the alarming news.  When forced to admit that some of the blood at the crime scene was his, he changed is story and said that somehow he had cut himself while visiting his kids at Nichole’s house earlier.  He also changed his story about what he had been doing at the time of the crime.  Was he golfing or sleeping?                There were no eyewitnesses to the actual slaying, but we do we have physical evidence linking Simpson to the crime scene and statements and behavior that are highly suspicious at best.  Each piece of evidence contributed to a sort of multi-dimensional picture puzzle and strengthened one another, having a multiplier effect against the likelihood that coincidence could account for the evidence in any alternate scenario.  What witnesses did see contributed vital pieces to this puzzle.   The limo driver sent to bring O.J. to the airport relates that at first, no one answered the buzzer at the gate, then he saw a figure matching O.J.’s description emerge from the darkness of a far corner and dash across the back yard.  Half a moment later, lights came on in the house and Simpson answered the buzzer, apologizing that he had been asleep.  Was the limo driver lying that he had seen a “large black man” in the yard?  Did some other large black man just happen to hurriedly cut across Simpson’s fenced compound at that exact moment?  Maybe, but consider this:  O.J.’s Bronco was found on the side street around the corner from the gate to his parking area--where there was plenty of room--parked at an “odd angle”.  One can imagine that when O.J. arrived home from an evening’s slashing and saw that his limo had arrived early, he didn’t want the timing of his arrival to be marked and so he backed away around the corner and parked on the side-street (approaching curbside in reverse, one is more likely to wind up misaligned).  One more piece falls into place.                But the most spectacular piece of evidence was the infamous bloody glove.  It was found near the other side of the fence from where the Bronco was parked, behind the row of guest bungalows.   One of these was occupied by the esteemed Kato Kaelin, who testified that he heard a thump, like someone had blundered into the rear wall of his unit (don’t ask why he was living there) at about the same time as the limo driver’s report.  The glove indisputably had the victim’s blood on it, matched one found at the murder scene, and was the exact same style and size as a pair indisputably owned by Simpson (and which were now “missing”).  The murder weapon was never found, along with the murder clothes and murder shoes, but the murder socks were found in O.J.’s bedroom.  There was no way to link the murder underwear back to the crime scene, but the murder stocking cap contained strands of murder hair which showed that the killer was a black male.  That in itself doesn’ t mean much except to further narrow down the chances that it was someone else. But anyway, a plausible scenario would have Simpson bundling the knife, glove, and shoes up in the clothes-- probably sweats--and scaling the fence with it or tossing it over, with the glove falling out of the bundle in the darkness and O.J. bumping into the back of the guest house.                But the compelling nature of the bloody glove as evidence created a dangerously ironic situation.  In the minds of the public it represented the case against Simpson and eclipsed all the other pieces of evidence.  If something should harm the credibility of the central pillar of the prosecution’s case, it could become a millstone, dragging the case down with it.  And that’s exactly what happened.  The cop who discovered the glove, one Officer Mark Fuhrman, became a household name as the defense demolished his credibility with revelations about his character.   Fuhrman was shown to be something of a racist who perhaps had planted evidence on suspects in the past and was shown to have lied when he denied ever using the “N-word” in the previous 10 years.  The problem, asserted the defense, was not that Officer Fuhrman was a racist (meaning the problem was that he was a racist), but that he was a liar.  But even liars tell the truth most of the time.  It’s one thing to not believe something that a liar says, it’s something else to automatically believe the opposite is true.  A crooked cop cannot conjure up a piece of physical evidence simply by telling a lie, you have to acquire and transport the evidence while remaining undetected and make it fit in with all the other evidence that will come to light.                O.J. was out of town when the investigation began, having flown to Chicago shortly after the murders.  Shortly before the murders he had treated Kato to a bite at McDonald’s; this left about a 45-minute interval during which Simpson had no alibi, and the murders were shown to have occurred during this interval.  How could the police possibly have known this, and that all the subsequent evidence would point to the accused, at such an early stage in the investigation?  The only thing stupider than a famous and recognizable celebrity committing a double homicide is trying to frame someone like that (actually, these turned out to be the third and second stupidest things, respectively).  But if the defense could call into question the believability of the man who found the most important piece of evidence, it could call into question the evidence itself and by blanket implication, all the evidence.                  O.J. Simpson was acquitted, and it was not reasonable doubt that led to that verdict--the doubt was not reasonable. The jury, and many of those watching at home, did not grasp the mutually- supporting quality of the various pieces of evidence.  Remove one and set it aside and there was still plenty of support for the prosecution’s case from all the others.  Instead, each piece of evidence was looked at in a vacuum as though it were the sole piece of evidence.  An implausible yet possible explanation for such a lone piece of evidence would indeed suffice to produce reasonable doubt.   But an O.J.-is-innocent scenario requires a bizarro menagerie of coincidences and conspiracy theories (the explanation for the Bronco chase:  “He knew he couldn’t get a fair trial” despite being a popular celebrity with vast resources and only a 45-minute gap in his alibi.  And so on.)  Yet there was, as is so often the case, an anomaly marring the otherwise straightforward case--trace amounts of a chemical use to preserve blood were found in blood supposedly from the crime scene, suggesting that the samples had come from some other, older source.  Again, if the blood evidence had been the sole evidence, this could be grounds for reasonable doubt.  But not all the crime- scene blood had this stuff in it, and it’s not implausible to suggest that laboratory mishandling resulted in these traces even as it’s too far-fetched to suggest that such mishandling resulted in false DNA matches from top to bottom.         No, it was not intellectually rigorous skepticism which resulted in the not-guilty verdict, it was political allegiance to a group-based identity; all but two of the jurors were black.  Here it must be said that the actual case and it outcome are pretty insignificant--except for the handful of people directly involved.  It is how the issue that this case created played out in the popular culture where the interest lies.  That is were the conspiracy theories flourished; film of students at Howard University leaping for joy upon hearing the verdict demonstrated the view of the mainstream of the African- American community.  One of their own was being attacked, so they had to take his side.  There is a belief among many blacks that a conspiracy exists whose purpose is to “bring down” prominent black men.  Because such a high-profile media event involved the question of a black man’s guilt or innocence in a crime, it was seen in terms of the black community’s overall image to the broader society, an image stereotyped as “criminal”.  So to resist the stereotype of blacks as criminals is to resist the probability that O.J. is guilty--and to be black is to resist stereotypes about blacks.  It’s identity politics vs. truth. An extremely important principle is the willingness to put things in their proper perspective when making judgments.  In fact, the actual verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial is insignificant other than to that handful of people directly involved (although it did have some interesting implications in terms of racial politics).  But when it comes to putting a broad worldview into perspective, the place to start is obviously the origin of this world.  What follows is an interpretation--in brief--of the conventional scientific view of natural history, were it to be condensed down to a few pages:          Complex systems are based on simple elements which, when combined to interact in a predictable way, can be made to perform a task--a task which makes the system an element in a larger, more complex system and so on.  The task of creating the universe was predicated upon some deceptively simple elements: space, time, and matter it the form a singularity--a point of matter of infinite density--the “cosmic egg”.  It then exploded in a singular, unrestrained emission about 10- 15 billion years ago.  The Big Bang sent matter and energy hurtling through space, interacting in a vast chain reaction capable of producing the complexity we see today (nobody knows what happened before the Big Bang; it is here that we draw the line between a probable truth and the complete unknown). At first, all the matter in the universe was hydrogen, the simplest form of matter, each atom being a single proton orbited by a single electron.  Vast clouds of hydrogen formed into what would become galaxies.  Within these clouds, smaller amounts of gas coalesced into great, dense spheres to form stars.  When sufficient mass was attained, the gravitational pressure ignited a nuclear fusion reaction within each star.  Fusion releases tremendous amounts of energy (E = mc2), giving stars their characteristic light and heat, and it also produces higher stages of matter.   Two hydrogen atoms fuse to form an atom of helium, three helium atoms fuse to form an atom of carbon and so on.  So it is within the heat and pressure of stellar furnaces that all the familiar elements of matter came into existence.  A star lives for a few billion years, then collapses or explodes, finally releasing the new, more complex matter back into space.         Needless to say, there was no life in the universe during this first stellar generation.  There were no planets either, other than gas giants or "brown dwarfs", would-be stars that lacked the mass to ignite the fusion reaction.  There were no rocky worlds like the Earth until such materials became available during subsequent generations of star formation.  So the purpose of the first several billion years of the history of the Universe was to create a diversity of matter from which more complex structures could be formed.  Eventually, a new star was born amid the clouds of gas and dust and meteoroids in the swirling whirlpool that was the forming solar system.  Much of the stuff that was not swept up by the gravitational pull of the new star formed into smaller bodies in orbit around the main center of gravity, major ones becoming planets.  The distance from the star would influence the size of these objects, the mixture of substances in their composition, and the overall conditions which would prevail after their formation was complete (especially the surface tempurature).         Astronomers and biologists are optimistic about the chances of life emerging on worlds with a wide variety of surface conditions.  Perhaps there are strange and wonderful creatures living on planets which are large and gaseous, or very cold and icy, or hot and dry.  Maybe there are extraterrestrials whose biology is based on chemicals we would consider toxic.  Planets with oceans of liquid ammonia or methane have long been considered by astronomers to be prime candidates for developing such alternative ecosystems.  However, when it comes to planetary conditions ideally suited for life, it's tough to beat the kind found on good ol' Planet Earth.  We have plenty of water-- an ideal medium--and we're just the right distance from our star for it to remain liquid most of the time.  We have moderate gravity and a moderately dense atmosphere of inert nitrogen and just the right amount of oxygen.  We also have a strong magnetic field surrounding the planet, which deflects harmful cosmic rays, and a layer of ozone in the atmosphere, which keeps out a lot of the sun's ultraviolet radiation.  It is quite probable that many of the life-bearing planets in the universe do indeed have very Earth-like conditions and a failure to achieve this delicate mix probably results in a dead world.  So the vast majority of stars either have no planets at all or have only dead ones.   The odds of a living planet developing around a given star are billions to one, but there are billions of stars.  It’s as though the vastness of the universe was intended to provide the scale necessary for the forces of randomization to produce a modest number of life-bearing worlds.         Anyway, once the Earth cooled and the oceans formed, living things came into existence.   Somehow.   The study of how living matter might first have arose is called abiogenesis and is distinct from evolution.  Evolution takes the existence of the first living cells as a given and seeks to describe the process of change over time.  All terrestrial life is based on DNA, which is a complex molecule shaped like a twisted ladder.  The DNA ladder "unzips" and both strands of the split attract molecules to form new "rungs" and "siderails", forming two complete strands which then divide in turn.  Each rung is made from any two of four different molecules, called "nucleotides" which provides a four-letter alphabet with which the DNA--as a "gene"--can store information.  The first strand of DNA came into existence about 2.5 billion years ago, but one knows exactly how.  It’s possible that random mixing of chemicals spontaneously produced this self-replicating molecule--it had 2 billion years to do so after all--but there are other possibilities.   Now, in order to sustain a DNA reaction, it must take place in a perfectly stable environment.  Be it in an isolated pool of rain or seawater or moist clay deposits, the mix of chemicals must be perfect.   Nutrients must be present and toxins must be absent.  Contact with a stray molecule with a strong electro-chemical charge could destroy the DNA strand and end the reaction.  In order to survive in the ocean, a generic strand must surround itself with a membrane with a charge of its own, one which will repel any toxic substances and absorb any beneficial ones, thus preserving that perfect environment surrounding the genetic nucleus.  Now our little creatures can safely reproduce while getting tossed about in the molecular soup of the ocean         So here we have the first cells, and indeed cells are the basic unit of all living organisms.  The basic characteristics of the cell have been preserved even as the size and complexity of creatures progressed out of all recognition.  The fact that the first living things were one-celled brings us back to that simplicity of singularity.  Before more complex multi-celled designs could be attempted, single celled creatures served as test beds to perfect various functions.  Simple creatures developed the ability to move by using whip-like tails or multiple tiny flagella or by pulsating their entire little body to scoot about.  Some learned to recognize different substances they encountered by analyzing the chemical reactions when different chemicals impacted their outer membranes--the forerunner of the senses of taste and smell.  Others had a small amount of the compound chlorophyll that enabled them to convert sunlight to energy.  This of course led to the entire plant kingdom, but some of these one-celled proto-plants had animal characteristics as well.         Occasionally when cell division occurred, they didn't go their separate ways but remained linked.   Whole clusters of cells sometimes formed this way, but if a cell were cut off from nutrients in the water by its siblings, it would die.  Any multi-cellular structure must allow each cell access to nutrients.  One promising direction is for a colony to form itself into a tube shape.  Water could carry nutrients into one end and carry waste chemicals out the other.  This formed the basis for blood and digestive systems.  A sponge remains an example of a cell colony circulating throughout via a complex tube structure, but the straight tube arrangement had potential as well.  A larger front opening could bring larger bits of organic material inside where secreted chemicals could break them down to be absorbed.  Different cells elsewhere, such as on the outer skin, could absorb oxygen from the water.  If organisms could evolve specialized cells and cell structures, then thick layers of tissue could form and new functions could develop, just so long as there are always internal vessels to carry nutrients to every cell in the body.           Specialized cells such as muscle cells, blood cells, various structural cells, nerve cells, and reproductive cells enabled systems such as muscular, digestive, vascular, nervous, reproductive, and sensory to form.  Even a creature as simple as a worm has a complex set of organs and systems.  The emergence of segmented worms provided another breakthrough for these were the first creatures with a central nervous system.  These gave rise to the subkingdom (phylum) of chordates, characterized by having a spinal cord, including lancelets, tunicates (whatever the heck they are), and vertebrates.         Meanwhile, plants, with the ability to convert sunlight to energy, could flourish with simpler designs and spread rapidly across the face of the Earth.  Plants were, of course, the first living things to colonize the land.  This enabled a major planetary transformation to take place.  Plants absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen.  There was little O2 in the atmosphere until the proliferation of plants brought it to the level necessary for the evolution or animals to continue.  It is also worth noting that, although vertebrates were to take center stage in the course of evolution, invertebrates such as mollusks, arthropods (insects and crustaceans) and innumerable microorganisms continued to exist.  They continued to evolve as well, although there was less of the relentless forward progress that vertebrates would display. Indeed, there seems at all times to have been a core group of species whose descendants were destined for greatness while other successful designs were veering off into their niche in the ecosystem, undergoing only minor adaptations as the eons passed.         At times evolution seems to be focused on the radical transformation of a single species into a new and advanced form, at others the proliferation of that new prototype into diverse forms of similar complexity.  Thus, once advanced worms developed into vertebrates and then true fishes, fish types proliferated (first cartilaginous then bony).  Then a few types of fish developed primitive limbs and lungs and evolved into amphibians that, once again, rapidly diversified to fill all the ecological niches the land had to offer.  The same thing happened yet again when some amphibians evolved into reptiles, but here there were a few twists.  An interesting early reptile known as dimetredon, familiar as the "sail backed" lizard, was not in fact a dinosaur as is often assumed.  Dimetredon was another test bed, used for experiments in regulating blood temperature.  The skin surrounding the "sail" contained blood vessels and functioned as a solar panel.  This enabled dimetredon to become active earlier in the day than it's conventional cold blooded counterparts, who therefore provided ample food for the ravenous new lizard.  Having all these sluggish sleepyheads to munch on gave dimetredon what might be considered "investment capital" to develop the internal physiology needed for full-time warm bloodedness.  Thus arose the line of mammal-like reptiles or "proto-mammals" and some of them were quite ferocious.         But they weren't dinosaurs.  All this was taking place during the Triassic period, and by the time the proto-mammals had evolved into true mammals the dinosaurs themselves had emerged.  This raises some interesting questions.  Why did dinosaurs take over when mammals were so clearly superior?   Dinosaurs evolved rapidly from a particular strain of reptiles, increasing in size as well as diversifying into a multitude of species.  Plant eating dinosaurs led the size race--bulking up to more easily digest tropical forests--while carnivorous followed with the size needed to prey on the big herbivores.  The early mammals were carnivorous as well, but their physiology must have been too complex to evolve rapid size increases.  As a result they could not compete in the daylight monster battles and were pushed in the opposite direction, becoming small and nocturnal.  But if we are to continue supposing that a higher intelligence was guiding the course of evolution we will need to speculate wildly to explain events.  After all, dinosaurs utterly dominated the land for 140 million years, while the supposedly favored mammals remained in the shadows, developing in subtle ways while biding their time.         Natural selection remains in force at all times.  Designs that are successful become the basis for further radical change. Competition for ecological niches was real and vigorous, but during the Jurassic period, a major design breakthrough occurred.  A certain species of small dinosaur (they didn't all get huge) that most likely made it's living climbing up trees or rocks and leaping after flying insects, discovered aerodynamic lift.  Scales on its forelimbs and tail were gradually becoming elongated and spiny, and may have had an effect on body temperature as the species evolved warm-bloodedness, but it also enhanced its jumping-after-bugs performance.  But it was only when its scales had become delicate and specialized indeed was the apparent goal of the project become realized:  Feathers.  Flight.  The first birds.  There were already flying reptiles as we all know (technically they were not true dinosaurs) but the limits on their performance had been reached.   However they may have provided a lot of test data in aerodynamics for the bird project.  Even so, plenty of testing must have gone on, the prototypes probably remaining a small, localized population, before the first "production model" went out and began colonizing.  Archaeopteryx and its descendants proved extremely successful and spread across the planet, diversifying greatly.  But despite being a major advance capable of opening up whole new environments, their potential to become truly dominant and/or intelligent was severely limited by the over-specialization of flight anatomy.  They could not grow large brains and their forelimbs became useless for anything but flying and sometimes lost even that. Still, the world is greatly enriched by the creation of birds, their benign presence being much more appealing than that of its monstrous relatives.  For the dinosaurs, being bulky or ferocious didn't lend itself to the development of intelligence, but they hindered the potential of mammals as well as other reptiles.  It was as though the world was overrun by demons.  Thus it seem particularly miraculous that around 60 million years ago an asteroid came and wiped the dinosaurs out.   Evidence is piling up that such a impact occurred at about that time on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and this kicked up enough dust to darken the sun, causing one of the greatest mass extinctions--not just for the dinosaurs--in Earth’s history.  Perhaps God did shoot the Earth with an asteroid to kill the dinosaurs and clear the way for the evolution of mammals.  That’s a pretty blunt object.  Then again, maybe God did not want the disaster to happen but was powerless to stop it!  The laws of conservation of matter and conservation of angular momentum and gravitational motion makes it very problematic for even a supreme being to create a complex object out of nothing or divert one from its gravitational trajectory.  The sheer volume of impacts over the long term as evidenced by the extensive cratering of the other rocky worlds in the Solar System would indicate that the Cretaceous impact was most likely a random event. But if supernatural intervention is unnecessary and contrary to what is apparent in governing the behavior of large bodies, the same cannot perhaps not be said of the changes in the genetic code that produce the mutations which drive evolutionary change.  Perhaps God or whatever higher being you would have has been programming the incremental upgrades in the DNA of localized test populations before their being released for mass production, so to speak.  Research and development.  The realm in which the smallest particles of matter operate is mysterious enough that it is there where we can find room to postulate that a dimension-spanning higher intelligence in engaged in direct manipulation.  Divine intervention on a sub-atomic level, is all it elegant minutiae.   On a macro scale, maybe the creation of the Cosmic Egg and the instigation of the Big Bang way by this same higher power, or maybe this was a power that exists on a completely different “level” as the one(s) programming the evolutionary process.  At any rate, this is called “God of the Gaps” thinking and is frowned upon in science.  It”s important to respect the commitment to strict naturalism in formal scientific inquiry, but the layman is free to speculate.  If God exists and is operating within the Universe, the gaps are the only place where He might be found.         There is a movement gaining ground lately whose advocates promote the possibility of intelligent design in the creation of life.  They have presented mathematical models and other research that casts doubt on the idea that life arose and evolved into all its present forms completely spontaneously and randomly.  They are suggesting—as I sort of am—that that an intelligent power may be behind all the complexity that makes up living things.  But the trouble with ID as it’s being presented is that it’s totally vague.  Proponents say that students should be exposed to “alternate theories” to evolution, but even if we cut them a lot of slack on the scientific definition of a “theory”, they’re still not telling us enough about what it is and where it fits in with the rest of science.  There are proposals before a number of state and local school boards to insert a 1-paragraph disclaimer in the biology curriculum suggesting intelligent design, but without any broader natural history context, that amounts to giving students a lank check or a wild card to disregard whatever they please and to fill in the blanks in accordance with their own beliefs.  I can think of a number of possible scenarios that ID proponents should clarify their position on before going any further: The Earth is 6,000 to 10,000 years old and all species were specially created at that time. A smaller number of “proto-species” were specially created 6,000 years ago and those that survived Noah’s Ark “micro-evolved” over the last 4-5,000 years to their present forms. The Earth is billions of years old, but each species (or proto-species) was created separately over the course of that time-frame. The Earth is billions of years old, and all living things evolved except humans, who were specially created 6-10,000 years ago, and remains of human ancestors are either advanced apes or descendants of Adam and Eve. All life evolved, but the first bit of DNA and the incremental genetic mutations were intelligently designed.           ID either mainly concurs with conventional science, and merely quibbles within a narrow, murky area, as do I, or it radically and dogmatically dismisses a great many of the robust conclusions of science.  This vagueness as to where their point fits in with the rest of science stands science on its head, and yet ID proponents want it taught in schools as science.  To do science you start by making the simple observations and answering the easy questions, then proceed to tackle the more difficult ones, building a base of knowledge and eliminating false impressions as you go.  To do politics, you start with a policy goal and proceed to strengthen its support by broadening its appeal, even if that requires being vague, manipulative, and two-faced.  (I’m doing politics.)                                                                The knowable universe is like a foundation for a building.  It’s unalterably real, with an absolutely precise size and shape.  Spiritual beliefs are like designs for the building to go atop the foundation.  What constitutes the proper windows and spires and cornices and other cosmetic details is open to interpretation--our house of faith, so to speak.  But at its very base it must fit the foundation exactly; any blueprint--any belief system—that does not is quite simply invalid.  Now then, science is the process of measuring and describing that foundation; it is not perfect since the foundation is so elaborate in all its detail, but it’s close and getting closer a little bit every day.  As knowledge of the facts changes, what you believe must change along with it.        The ancients believed that the Earth was flat and didn’t extend much more than a thousand miles in any direction.  When a story made the rounds that long ago a flood covered the world and killed everything except a particular man’s family and all the animals they could gather onto a great boat, from which all living today are descended, there was nothing apparent that made the story unbelievable.  But later we discovered that the world was round and consisted of a number of continents with varied populations scattered across wide oceans.  After the flood, how did the animals manage to distribute themselves across the globe, for example the warm-climate creatures of South America?  Of course, there are millions of species, so they couldn’t possibly have all fit onto Noah’s Ark and been kept fed.  Perhaps a small number of species were on the Ark and their descendants rapidly evolved into the present diversity, right?  Same deal with the human populations.  But there’s ample archaeological evidence that various ancient civilizations were in existence at the time Noah’s flood supposedly took place, about 3000 B.C.  The Egyptians, for example, were building the pyramids at about this time.           So the biblical story of Noah’s Ark couldn’t be true.  So what?  We shouldn’t have to belabor the point.  Archeological evidence also suggests that the story is based on similar, older tales from ancient Sumeria.  It’s possible that a great flood did devastate that region long ago and a man managed to float his family and livestock to safety (others have postulated that it was the sudden expansion of the Black Sea around xxxx BCE).   Who knows, maybe he did indeed have a psychic premonition of the coming disaster, which would give the story it’s spiritual dimension.  But it’s one thing to postulate a real-life basis for what, upon centuries of re-telling, became a tall tale, and quite another to insist that said tall tale is a completely true and reliable account of the origin of our World.  Another claim made in the story of Noah’s Ark is that the rainbow appeared for the first time, symbolizing God’s promise not to bring about such a disaster again.  But we all know that rainbows are caused by the refraction of sunlight through masses of water droplets in the lower atmosphere. So in order for this one small biblical passage to be true, a massive alteration in the physics of light would had to have occurred just 5000 years ago.  Astronomers place a great deal of stock in the behavior of light spectrums, using them to determine the chemical composition of stars as well as using the “red shift” to calculate the speed at which distant bodies recede. But to defend a literal interpretation of the Bible, some have claimed that the light we see from any star more than 6000 light years away was created artificially by God and so isn’t really from that star.           This is part of the “appearance of age” school of Young Earth Creationism, which argues that God created the Earth and the Universe to look like they were billions of years old, to test our faith in the Bible or something.  Another school of YEC is “anti-uniformitarianism”, which holds that the speed of light along with things like the rate of geologic erosion and continental drift were once much, much faster than today, so that billions of years of changes took only a couple thousand.  In other words, they reject the notion that such scientific constants have remained uniform throughout history.  Yet another school is “catastrophism”, which holds that all rock strata and geologic formations resulted from the tumults of Noah’s Flood (but this ignores the astronomical distance problem; after all the Universe didn’t flood).  Then you get hybrid arguments like Old Earth Creationism, which accepts that the Earth is very ancient and--according to one brand anyway--animals did evolve as read, but still Adam and Eve were created while other hominids—including Neanderthals--are extinct apes.   Biblical literacy’s escape hatch here is the claim that the six “days” in Genesis were not 24-hour days but periods of time whose length is unknown but conveniently just the right length for seven of them to span whatever the age of the Universe turns out to be.  Come on.  Why would a word that has only one understood meaning as a time measurement be used in a radically different sense that is understood by no one?  Counting from the Big Bang, a biblical “day” would have to be close to 2 billion years, so God created Adam and Eve more than that long ago and then did nothing for one full “day”?  You’d think they’d get their story straight; it is very telling that there is little debate between these radically different creationist models.  They’re not really interested in getting at the sole truth.   Science is not about providing people with a variety of explanations so they can select one that conforms to their beliefs.  Science weeds out the explanations which are contradicted by the evidence, leaving behind those which are not.  Needless to say, space does not permit a thorough presentation of all the evidence refuting the various claims of creationism, but it’s available in limitless quantity from the world of science in any level of detail you would require in challenging it.  (I’ m not going to recommend a lot of websites in this book, but TalkOrigins.com is your one-stop shop for all things evolution.)  There are truly scads of evidence that the Earth is more than 6000 years old.  One small but vivid example is found in ice core samples drilled from the icecap of Greenland.   Each thin layer represents an annual cycle of snowfall and melt, with a slight accumulation of dust thrown in.  Layers corresponding with certain years show distinct layers dust which came from certain volcanic eruptions, many in nearby Iceland, but the layer from 79 A.D. clearly shows dust from the eruption of faraway Mt. Vesuvius.  The dust from the Icelandic eruptions can be matched to layers of ash deposits sandwiched between normal soil accumulations.  Excavations show these going back tens of thousands of years, with the ash deposits from the last thousand years being further corroborated by accounts of volcanoes in the island’s historical chronicles.  So we have 3- way reinforcement of the accuracy of our yardstick, which shows ice layers going back 120,000 years with uninterrupted uniformity--no time compression scenario is possible.  That’s well outside the bounds of Young Earth Creationism, but just a few ticks of the clock in geologic time, because of course ice strata does not stick around forever, unlike rock strata.   It is in the vast scope of the rocks of the Earth’s crust and the story they tell that we find the most compelling case for and Old Earth and evolution.  The oldest and deepest layers naturally are igneous rocks from when the planet’s molten surface first cooled.  Above that you’ll find layers of sedimentary rock, which began as accumulations of surface dust or ocean sediment and turned to stone after a million or more years of pressure from the stuff piled on top.  Once exposed, the rocks can tell geologists a great deal about the environment that existed when they were laid down, be it ocean floor, desert, forest, or whatever.  Coal, as we know, is left over from a period of dense vegetation in certain swampy areas.  If a layer of strata is capped by a layer of completely different sedimentary rock, we know that the environment there had changed radically--the sea floor lifted above the surface, a desert invaded a forest, an area was flooded by a lake.  The composition and consistency of the rock matrix are determined by the environment conditions, but so are the fossils found therein.  “Flood Geology” tries to argue that the sedimentary strata were all laid down during the Noachian Flood and the differing layers are the result of “hydrological sorting”, but this is quite impossible.  For one thing, it takes more than a few thousand years to turn mud into rock or bones into fossils, for another, there are in many places alternating layers of sedimentary and igneous rock, and mud obviously cannot penetrate solid layer of igneous rock.  And besides, the sediment and fossils are not distributed in the strata in a densest-to-least-dense pattern--they are distributed in a pattern that reflects an Old Earth and evolution.  The deepest layers contain fossils of only the most primitive forms of life, while subsequent layers include fossils of species that came along later.   Of course, fossils of different living things in the same layer would be consistent with those you would expect to find in a particular type of environment.           And yes, there are transitional fossils, those that clearly mark an evolutionary halfway point between two radically different kinds of life forms.  One of most famous being archaeopteryx, the fossil of which has bones that are identical to a known type of dinosaur but which shows distinct impressions of feather, indicating that it was a bird and could fly--and that birds are evolved from dinosaurs.  Also well known is the succession of skeletons from extinct North American horses-- which went from smallish five-toed creatures to large one-hoofed ones with intermediate species having outer toes which dangled  uselessly. And the evolution of whales is well-documented in the fossil record as well, there being no large gaps in the progression from bearlike land mammal to ocean going creature with hindlimbs becoming increasingly vestigial, but never disappearing completely.  Vestigial bones are present in many other animals, from snakes to flightless birds to humans with our tailbone. (The human appendix and tendency to have a bad back are also left over from evolution.)                 Indeed, for all their tremendous variation in size and shape, all mammals have the same number of bones in their bodies.  Apparently, it is easier for evolution to change bones’ the size and shape than to make them appear and disappear.  This fact helps question the highly questionable creationist argument that there may have been “microevolution” but that there is no such thing as “macroevolution”.  This is a concession that evolution may have occurred within the various unspecified “kinds” of living things, while still denying that one “kind” of life can evolve into another.   No competent biologist accepts this distinction, and the uniform number of bones among mammals (along with all the other similarities) indicates that on one level they--we--are all the same “kind”.   Besides, under the Young Earth model, post-Noah’s Ark “micro” evolution would had to have occurred at a much faster rate than paleontologists, archaeologists, or anthropologists would agree to.  The considerable variation of racial features among homo sapiens as we’re distributed across the globe is by no means the most significant given that whole species within genus are held to have emerged within that time frame.           Archaeological remains of modern humans dating back at least tens of thousands of years have been found all over the World.  We know this because researchers can measure the density of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in organic material such as bone or wood and compare it with the known amount from when the specimen was alive.  It deteriorates at a specific rate called the half-life and this acts as a clock which allows us to measure the age of these kinds of artifacts.  But some people have decided that complicated kinds of evidence like this can be disregarded at will.   Likewise, it would seem, for the most compelling kind of evidence for evolution, which is that obtained through DNA mapping.  Researchers can tell how closely related any two living things-- including a lot of extinct ones--are to each other.  The resulting pattern largely parallels the familiar “tree of life” derived from comparative anatomy--with a few inevitable surprises.  Just for starters we can see how closely related humans are to chimpanzees (95%), gorillas,  and all the other primates as well as various extinct hominids including homo erectus and homo neandertalensis, i.e. Neanderthals.  The latter in particular can in no way be considered a large ape in that they left behind evidence of a fairly sophisticated culture, and the DNA evidence shows they split off from modern humans about 600,000 years ago.  Just as interesting is the recent finding by paleoanthropologists studying “mitochondrial’ DNA that all modern humans are apparently descended from a single female who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Some religious leaders were quick to seize on that (even as they are just as quick to dismiss DNA evidence they don’t agree with) and to suggest that this was Eve.  It was indeed dubbed the “Eve Hypothesis” by its supporters, but make no mistake:  There were certainly plenty of other humans living at that time, which is   It’s just that the progeny of this proto-Eve were completely successful in supplanting or interbreeding with other groups of humans as they spread across the globe.           One final piece of evidence comes from certain American Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest.   Some of their traditional lore dates back to the Ice Age, when the sea levels were lower, which would be about 12,000 years ago.  A particular island off the coast is spoken of as a hill, and so on.  There’ s little room for the Ice Age in Biblical creationism, but get this:  Many of these Native American cultures deny that their ancestors came to North America across the Bering Strait land bridge and instead insist that they were created separately in place on the continent.  Are we to therefore accept as true a hodge-podge of differing creation myths?  That would amount to cultural relativism and we’re not into cultural relativism around here.  We’re into truth.