The Lone Ranger

The level of science writing in the popular press is pretty abysmal, in my opinion. Sometimes, it's not the writer's fault, though.

I wrote occasional columns for a local newspaper for awhile. I wrote on various subjects, and my columns were alway printed exactly as I had submitted them, without editing or typographical errors -- unless I happened to be writing on the subject of evolution.

Every time I wrote a column on the subject of evolution, what was printed in the paper was a butchery of what I had written. It would have typographical errors, and would often be "edited" in such a way as to make it seem as if I was writing something entirely different from what I was actually saying. Sometimes, it was so blatant as omitting a "not" from a sentence, so as to make it say exactly the opposite of what I had originally written.

I complained, of course, but the editor swore repeatedly that it was just a coincidence, that accidents will happen from time to time, and that I shouldn't get so upset about it. Eventually, however, I grew so disgusted with the butchery of my columns that I quit.

Interestingly, the editor left the paper just a few weeks later -- to enter the seminary. Coincidence? Somehow, I doubt it.

Cheers,

Michael

KeithHarwood

The is a big difference between the creationist text and that of the Discover article. The creationist version implicitly assumes that human beings are the goal of evolution, so that increasing the rate of mutation will produce (future tense) human beings more quickly. The discovery article talks about mutations which did produce (past tense) human beings. Both are wrong in assuming that the mutation rate is the limiting factor of evolution; it isn't. Experiments suggest that the natural mutation rate is of order a hundred times more than needed to account for observed evolutionary rates. It's the natural selection acting on the variations in the species that determines the evolution rate, not the rate at which the variation arrives.

Quetzal

I'd like to add my two cents to what Keith posted. The creationist argument presented in the OP ignores a couple of salient facts.

1. Since mutations are the primary source of novel variation, anything that increases the mutation rate will increase the variety available for natural selection to operate on. (Lederberg?) nuked fruit flies in order to speed up the normal rates so that results could be observed in the lab, for example.

2. There is no direction in evolution. There is absolutely nothing that indicates that even hypermutation will ever produce a human - again ('cause RM&NS obviously pulled off the trick once). Exposing bacteria to high doses of ionizing radiation for a couple million generations will probably produce SOMETHING, assuming it doesn't just cause extinction, but it is very unlikely that it would be anything we'd recognize. The almost incalculable number of historical accidents and environmental factors that effected the lineage that ultimately led to humans is probably functionally impossible to replicate.

Note: The Discovery article cited doesn't appear to refute the "evolutionist" response. Reading it, all it seems to be is a speculation that supernovae could have increased the ionizing radiation striking the Earth. It doesn't say it had to have happened for human evolution. It also certainly doesn't say it did happen. Without seeing the whole article, I'm not sure what everyone's problem with it is.

KeithHarwood

Robert L Forward in `Dragon's Egg' speculated (it's a science fiction story) that a nearby supernova did have a direct effect on the evolution of humans. However, it wasn't the radiation that did it, it was the fact that for several months of the year the nights were very bright and normally diurnal predators remained active at night. It was the increased predation of the hominids that forced the evolution. (Or am I thinking of another book entirely? Whatever, `Dragon's Egg' is a pretty decent read anyway and much of the story is directly relevant to the subject of this forum.)