Lest we diverge from the evolution party line
The Feb. 15 issue of Nature (445/7129) has an interesting article on the plants native to South Africa's Cape region. There are more than 9,000 plant species, 6,000 found in no other country in the world, and most of those are in the western region. Compare this to the entire area of the British Isles which is home to about 1500 plant species.There seems to be some fear by the author that a person might conclude such fantastic variety, beauty and diversity were designed by a mind larger and more complex than ours rather than just happening by accident over a few million years. The terms "evolutionary approach," "evolutionary isolation," "evolutionary tree linking," and "bouts of evolution," appeared once; "evolutionary heritage," "evolutionary radiations," "evolutionary tree," and "evolutionary diversity," appeared twice; but the phrase "evolutionary divergence," (which reminds me of idiopathic, meaning "we don't know why this happened") appears 10 times in the article. And it isn't even a very long article!
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4 comments:
Norma, it seems you and your family have been an unchanging island in a sea of evolution for millions of years.
I'd beg you to never change, but that would be redundant.
Bar gal, if you want to believe you evolved from the sea ooze, be my guest. I know better. At least I think that's what you meant. If you believe that's where you come from, I think you'd better add a B or T to that -illion of years.
If the presence of gorgeous biodiversity was in fact indicative of the will of God, why would he reserve said biodiversity for a small corner of the planet? Why would he deem Southern Africa more worthy of such beauty than the British Isles?
It seems more likely instead that high levels of biodiversity occur in such areas only by coincidence -- an unexpected combination of isolation, availabilty of nutrients, lack of large-scale industrial disturbance for a relatively long period of time (compared to the cold, nutrient-poor, extensively altered environment of Northern Europe) etc.
And you can't simply say "Who can discern God's will?" Because that would be, should we say, idiopathic?
--Matt
Who's to say that more biodiversity didn't used to be everywhere and instead of becoming more complex through evolution the world is becoming less so through devolution. You seem to have more faith in coincidence than most Christians have in God. Or is that your God?
It's far more likely, that since Nature is a British magazine, the authors were simply giving a point of reference. Besides, with climate change going on constantly, who knows what lurks in the bogs of Britain.
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