An Aside About Evolution

By the way, living in Kansas isn't much fun when you're on the losing end of political cartoon equivalent of a Scopes trial.

I've argued heatedly with Jay about ID, aka 'Creationism' versus evolutionary theories. While I don't deny that ID guys like Behe (the guy who turned the trick in my mind) have 'religion' and 'an agenda' (no necessarily the same), I think it's legit to say a reasonable person could come to either conclusion. That means, if you expect schools to teach critical thinking (abhorrent to most of the powers that be), you have to outline the arguments for and against a theory. The 'big bang' theory got a lot of heat for smacking of creationism, and last I heard, one of it's 'discoverers' (Stephen Hawking) has spent more years trying to disprove it for flaws than he spent promoting it. There's an honest intellectual, willing to shoot at his own balloon in a lot of ways.

Lovelock's 'Gaian' hypothesis wafted my way thanks to subscription-spam I get from Oxford. I miss my OED Online subscription, but it's more than I can legitimately afford/justify. When I left, I signed up for this 'fact of the day' thing that's free. You never know what they'll send, could be history, language, science. If Oxford has a 'dictionary of' or a 'guide to' something, it's a potential 'fact of the day.'

Basically, as I understand it (and I've read a bit more than the paragraph in the Fact of the Day), the Gaian theory is that life makes life. That dog will hunt in the specific. Take fermentables like malt sugar or grape juice, and if yeast gets a hold, it will generally make bacteria as welcome as a U.S. Marine in Baghdad.

Not that beer and wine can't be spoiled by bacteria, but whatever microbe gets sufficient majority, it manipulates the environment to exclude its potential competitors (which itself might be a 'hand' argument for the ID side). Yeast will lower pH to where most bacteria can't survive. Bacteria will gobble nutrients the yeast needs and starve it to autolysis.

So if yeast makes an environment yeast likes, and if bacteria makes a home for other yeast, it would stand to reason that, for want of better-than-Chrichton terminology, life will out. Even if avian flu takes most of us away. Well, I guess there's some disagreement among academics about whether a virus is really 'alive.' But most of the people in the argument die of bird-flu in either case, so I guess the last man standing gets his way.

But 'Gaian' theory is, as far as I can tell, at least as pure a sophistry as Intelligent Design. Francis Crick believed life was seeded on earth by aliens, which begs the question: where'd the aliens come from? Are they standing on a turtle? Are we just a crop planted for them to harvest in some 'to serve man' Rod Serling sense?

Sorry, but I'm a rationalist in recover. 'Hi, I'm Chixulub and I'm a rationalist.'

'Hi, Chixulub!' the group intones.

'I remember, I used to think rational thought had no bounds, even when I bought lottery tickets I knew were just a tax on stupidity.'

You know those pictures that look like one thing until you turn them upside down? You can't unring those bells. You can change a mind, but not with the arguments that mind has seen 'from both sides.'