Creationism
Well I’ll be a monkeys uncle…
I’m sure the caption phrase has more meaning for evolutionists than creationists, but I recently read an interesting story that may have serious repercussions for the argument of evolution:
Never mind that TV show that asks if you’re smarter than a fifth-grader. Is your memory better than a young chimp’s? Maybe not. Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in two tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won. – [Yahoo/AP]
As if that weren’t enough, researchers at Duke University made a similarly in truguing discovery:
Chimps performed about as well as college students at mental addition, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a finding that suggests non-verbal math skills are not unique to humans. – [Yahoo/Reuters]
LOL, not only are these young chips memories better than humans, they are now on par with us in arithmetic?! HA! Evolution rears its speculative head at last! Are chimps finally evolving into more intelligent creatures? Or are humans devolving? I have to admit, given some of the events of the last few centuries, I find the latter more likely…
Perhaps believing in creation isn’t such a bad idea after all. 
Young chimp beats college students – [Yahoo/AP]
Chimps and college students as good at mental math – [Yahoo/Reuters]
Creationist vs. Scientist…
I ran into a very interesting post about Billy Grahams stance on creationism and science. I won’t repeat the entire text because the salient parts are included the the blog at the link below, but I found it interesting that we both have a similar tack on creation, science and man. I am, as I have professed on a couple of occaisions, a theistic scientist. I don’t believe that science and faith must be mutually exclusive. I find that there are often interesting parallels between the two.
And while one has a supposedly more “methodical” approach, I still see a lot of what looks a whole lot like “faith” involved in the scientific process, and a lot of practical “science” in faith. So they may not be as anathema to each other as many people think. I’ll grant that I may not share Billy Grahams views and beliefs on everything, or even practice my “faith” like everyone else, but I thought it interesting that it was still possible to come to similar conclusions even from a purely religious standpoint…
Billy Graham on Young-Earth/Old-Earth – [Careful Thought]
The Fermi Paradox rears it’s ugly head…
The Fermi Paradox refers to the apparent lack of evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life, when all other probabilistic scientific determinations would indicate that the alternative should be true, and there should be intelligent life out there.
In other words, if we assume that the way life developed on earth is stereotypical of the development of life in general, and that given the same conditions, life should developed again in the same way, then given the high probability of similar conditions existing on other planets in the universe, having existed far longer than the earth has, why have we not seen any evidence this extraterrestrial life?
At first people thought that we simply lacked the technology to detect the signs of this life, but recent scientific advancements have suggested that this may not be the case. It is an interesting dilemma. What I find equally interesting is that in spite of this paradox, the possibility that we were created, as opposed to simply springing out of some prehistoric primordial soup does not seem to have been honestly considered.
I’ve always thought this argument an interesting one, and being that I consider myself both a theist (of sorts) as well as a firm believer in science, I would offer this thought. Maybe we are still not advanced enough to detect extra terrestrial life. Or maybe theists are right, and we were all created. The absence of evidence can never be the evidence of absence, so as a scientist, in my own humble opinion, all I can honestly say is that we simply do not have enough data to rule anything out. Nor should we assume that the two are mutually exclusive…
Just a thought…
The Fermi Paradox is Back – [Slashdot]
The Fermi Paradox: Back with a vengeance – [Sentient Developments]
Unscientific Science.
Yet another interesting article from the “scientific” community. Apparently there are some who have taken the altruistic actions of some chimpanzees as “scientific” evidence to support the idea of human evolution:
new experimental evidence that chimpanzees act altruistically toward genetically unrelated members of the same species suggests that this psychological trait may not be unique to humans. – [Gizmag]
Apparently there is the belief that this may support the idea of the similar evolutionary roots between chimps and man. I dunno about all that. They seem to have conveniently ignored the altruistic actions of many other creatures in nature, or that of nature in general. Ants will throw themselves into a pool until it’s full in order to allow the rest to cross. Dogs have been known to pull people out of burning buildings and frozen lakes without regard to their own safety.
Examples of this kind abound in nature, not just in chimps and humans, so as far as I can tell, this neither proves nor disproves either evolution or creationism. Sometimes I think scientists often get blinded by their need to have their findings fit into whatever big picture they are working with, and start looking for fact to fit their theories, rather than the changing their theories to fit the facts. That is not good science. True science is objective, systematic and thorough. But being the humans that we are, we often find a way to introduce our flaws into the process.
Helpful Chimpanzees Shed Light on Human Evolution – [Gizmag]
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