- Included in the Stephen Hawking Posts List.
- I have gotten a little further into my Stephen Hawking book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions; and I have more to say about science and religion.
(Part IV)
I have gotten a little further into my Stephen Hawking book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions; and I have some more things to say about science and religion, if you will bear with me. I wasn’t initially expecting to put up another three posts here, I can tell you that!
As many of you might have gathered from my other Facebook posts over the years, I firmly believe in science and, in particular, evolution as the most likely explanation for the incredible diversity of animals and other lifeforms, not to mention human beings.
In other words, to my way of thinking, God did create the Earth and everything else; but evolution is the mechanism that spread life over the Earth, in part due to the momentous changes that have taken place here – Ice Ages, tectonic rearrangements of the continents, extreme volcanic events, etc. Some of the latter are relatively recent; from Wikipedia:
“The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.7°–1.0° F. Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest on record between the years of 1766–2000. This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.
“Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (known today as Indonesia). This eruption was the largest in at least 1,300 years (after the hypothesized eruption causing the volcanic winter of 536), and was perhaps exacerbated by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines.”
One obvious difficulty in fully understanding life is that we know of only one example: Earth. Even though there are spectacular differences in the various environments of our planet, at their base everything apparently has the same biology. That is true of the fairly recent discovery of teeming life near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, most famously giant tube worms that are sometimes nearly 10 feet in length. The energy necessary for these lifeforms to thrive comes not from the Sun, but from “black smokers” and other sources of heat and chemicals from volcanically active regions in the deep oceans.
Now, several moons in our Solar System are also believed to have hydrothermal vents, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. If life were to be found on one of those moons, that biology would presumably be very different from what is found on Earth.
I do have some quibbles about evolution though. Much has been made of the billions of years that life has been on Planet Earth, most famously by Carl Sagan. However, as I pointed out in Part I of these posts, the earliest animals – i.e., protozoa – date back 750 million years, or ¾ billion years.
Thus, I think it is reasonable to ask science: Without there being some outside intervention periodically, how likely is it that several hundred million years – not “billions and billions of years”, as Carl Sagan never actually said – are sufficient time for evolution to yield the extraordinary changes in animal life that we see around us? And, the same goes for the development of the giant leap that human life represents, over just a few million years? Are there sufficient examples of “artificial selection” that occurred as a result of human activity which might help quantify this, as opposed to “natural selection” that drives evolution?
Early in the second episode of the original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series on PBS that was masterminded and hosted by Carl Sagan in 1980-1981, he gives an example of artificial selection, also known as selective breeding, though Sagan’s example is unintended selective breeding. The Heike crab is native to Japan, and the carapace has the appearance of a human face, specifically an angry Samurai warrior; as a result, the crab also has a nickname of the Samurai crab.
After a scene is shown of Heike crabs being harvested from the sea, Carl Sagan asks how this could be – that the more or less random bumps and ridges on the back of a crab could resemble a Samurai so compellingly. His explanation is that, many years ago, someone saw what appeared to be a human face on a Heike crab and threw it back. Over the centuries, crabs with similar markings were also put back in the sea until the carapaces of the surviving crabs not only have the appearance of a face, but the face of a Samurai warrior.
Besides its appearance in Cosmos, the Heike crab example was first discussed by evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley in 1952; and the well-known biologist Richard Dawkins also discussed Heike crabs in his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009). This notion is not without some controversy, however, in that most Japanese do not eat Heike crabs, although they are edible; thus, the artificial pressure to change the patterns on the carapace to resemble a Samurai warrior might not be present.
On the other hand, as noted in Wikipedia: “It is believed that these crabs are reincarnations of the Heike warriors defeated at the naval Battle of Dan-no-ura, as told in The Tale of the Heike”. As a result, the relatively recent reluctance to eat Heike crabs is certainly understandable, and I would question that the eating patterns in the dawn of the Samurai age a thousand years ago are entirely comprehended.
As I pointed out in Part I of these posts, all life on Earth was bacteria for nearly two billion years; and there is no particular reason that life wouldn’t still be all bacteria. In fact, the earliest form of eukaryotic life is called cyanobacteria, alternately known as blue-green algae. As I also mentioned in Part I, eukaryotic cells have a nucleus and include all animal life and all plant life.
When I took junior high biology nearly 60 years ago, there were two Kingdoms: plants and animals. Animals are essentially the life that moves around, while everything else was put in the plant Kingdom. Today, there are six Kingdoms, at least in North America. Fungi are grouped in one of these Kingdoms and are now recognized as not being plants at all; genetically, fungi are actually more like animals than plants. There are also two bacteria Kingdoms, Archaea/Archaebacteria and Bacteria/Eubacteria; plus, a sixth Kingdom called Protista, covering eukaryotic life that falls outside of the other categories. Non-cellular “life”, such as viruses, are not a part of any of these Kingdoms.
One way to view the relationship of God with life on Earth is to imagine God having to give the Planet a nudge now and then when there is trouble – analogous to the monoliths that show up in the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). There have been several upsurges of new lifeforms more or less out of the blue, which are often triggered by extraordinary events; one example is the Cambrian Explosion, also known as the Biological Big Bang.
The most famous of these is described this way in a post on Space.com: “When a 6-mile (10-kilometer) asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, causing the demise of the dinosaurs as part of the largest mass extinction event in the last 100 million years, it took life on the planet at least 30,000 years to bounce back.”
To my way of thinking, 30,000 years represent a tiny period of time on geological scales. It is easy to talk about mammals and other animals taking over the niches formerly occupied by various forms of dinosaurs, but trying to figure out how and why that actually happened is difficult in the extreme. Expecting things to just work out after such a catastrophic event seems like a stretch to say the least; and I feel the same way about the arrival of human beings 250,000 years ago. IMHO, you can only carry the idea of random chance so far before the probabilities beggar belief.
Closer to home, I do not think it a coincidence or mere happenstance that no major storms have struck Coastal Mississippi – or New Orleans either for that matter – since Hurricane Katrina in August 2005; that’s nearly 18 years ago now. I have thought from the beginning that God is giving us a breather in this part of the country; though of course, another major hurricane here is inevitable. Hurricane Katrina is one of the strongest and most destructive storms in history; with another landmark storm in Coastal Mississippi, Hurricane Camille in 1969 also ranking high on that list.