Time travel is a fun way to learn about evolutionary biology!

The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to The Dawn of Life– Richard Dawkins (2004)

           

Richard Dawkins is someone who riles up all the right people.  He is seen as a threat to many that wish to force everyone to follow their dogmatic belief systems based on highly suspect ancient texts.  He does not argue peacefully, as he is an enraged individual forced to live among a horde of willfully ignorant sheep.  Because of this, he is attacked both by those that oppose reason and science, and by those who think he is too harsh in his stance against pseudoscience and theological oversight of scientific matters.

One of the main sticking points for people who like easy answers to everything is the theory of evolution through natural selection.  Like most religiously dogmatic fundamentalists, they oppose evolution on the grounds that it is a lie.  They claim the truth is to be found in the pages of a Bible, or a Torah, or a Quran, or some other man-made fairy tale.  I always wonder why they are so vehemently against science and reason and logic.  If they truly hold their beliefs honestly, then no amount of opposition should bring them any upset, since their beliefs are their own and unchanging.  Therein lies the LIE, because they would not attack science or reason or evolution or biology if they did not feel their worldview threatened!  What morons!  It is like arguing with a 3 year old child.  Nothing you can say or do will change their belief that there is a monster in the closet, and he will only become more agitated the more you try to refute this “fact.” 

The fact that there is a monster in the mirror is irrefutable.

In this book, Mr. Dawkins takes us on a trip through time.  We travel through 40 different “convergence” points, from our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, all the way back to the earliest known common ancestor of all current life, a specific type of bacterium.  Along the way we see the development of 4 limbs, the rise of spinal cords, the evolution of multi-cellular life, etc.  It makes for an awesome mental trip, condensed from a 5 Billion year story.  It is an excellent primer into biology and it’s infinity of form.

           The best thing about this book is that it allows one’s mind to expand through the billions of years, opening up our reality tunnels to an existence that far, far exceeds the history of humans on Earth, not to mention the pitifully few decades afforded to an individual human life.  I feel that books such as this one would aid a young student in understanding natural selection a lot more than the dry data provided in school textbooks.

Fighting the good fight against the Ignorant

Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins (1996)

 

            This book seeks to do something that seems near impossible, to show the lie behind “intelligent design” and to provide the actual science behind the theory of natural selection and the evolution of life.  So many people have a vested interest in keeping humans ignorant and subservient. Part of that is making sure that humans never forget that they are here on the whim of an omniscient creator.  Because so many adhere to this idea, they seek to poke holes in the theory of natural selection anytime they can.  They find one unexplained object/animal part and use it to try and destroy all that biologists, chemists, botanists and other life scientists have discovered and understood about the natural world around us.  Richard Dawkins spends this book showing how what seems to us to be physically impossible, doable only by a supernatural entity of some sort, is purely a result of our ignorance about how nature works.

            One of the basic misconceptions that opponents of natural selection have is their idea of time scales.  A human life is lucky to last 100 years.  Most countries last barely 200 years, if that.  Human written history is barely 7,000-8,000 years old.  Our current species Homo sapiens sapiens, has trod upon the Earth for around 100,000 years.  Homo sapiens in some form has been around for over 500,000 years.  Most of the dinosaurs died out about 65.5 million years ago.  That is an insane number of years.  Even that is a tiny speck of sand when compared to the vast beach of time.  Life on Earth was solely composed of single-celled organisms for over 2.5 BILLION years.  BILLION!  It’s an inconceivable amount of time.  When people, ignorant AF and proud of it, state that there is no way natural selection could end up with a structure as complex as an eye, they betray their ignorance of time, not to mention biology.

These losers would have us remain scared of the monsters that live in our nostrils!

            There are many types of “eyes” in the animal kingdom.  From individual cells that detect photons, allowing a creature in the ocean to know what direction is up (sunlight) and what is down (darkness), to eyes composed of a patch of skin containing multiple sensor cells, able to detect shadowy shapes, to compound eyes composed of dozens of individual lenses, to the magnificent eye of an eagle, able to see miles away with telescopic vision, every type of eye exists on the Earth currently.  All are a result of natural selection over millions and billions of years.  Those who wish to refute this are willfully ignorant and therefore completely discredited in their worries.

            The sad part is that our educational system does not provide these kinds of answers to our children, leaving whole generations ignorant, knowing just enough to understand very little except the vague, uneducated tripe they are fed by evangelists who believe the world was created 6,000 years ago and that all fossils are tricks planted by “god” to fool and test us stupid humans.  “A little education is a dangerous thing,” is a quote I read a long time ago and did not fully understand until I began to think about why people hold on to ignorance instead of seeking more and more knowledge.  Knowing just a little fools people into thinking they know enough to pass judgment.  I support Mr. Dawkins in his fight against the happily ignorant, who choose to force their ignorance upon the rest of us.

(This book can be read online here: http://www.evolbiol.ru/mount/index.html )