About some ideas and topics, our culture has what might be called a “lazy mind’s eye” or perhaps “mental myopia.” What I mean is that there are certain ideas that get communicated and repeated so consistently that most people just accept them as facts, without critical examination.
Some of these ideas are stereotypes repeated so often we just roll with them. Oil tycoons are corrupt. Teenagers are out of control. Republicans are mean and hypocritical. Democrats are over-sexed socialists. These ideas are perpetuated in movies and commentary and most people buy in without thinking much.
Some ideas have assumed the stature of history, though they really are not true at all. Just about everyone believes Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but he didn’t. Edison made it more durable and commercially viable, but the invention was around for decades earlier. The phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution as most believe. It comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association.
Mental myopia has nothing to do with intellect or education. Post-graduates are as likely to be dumb as posts on some things. As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time” (though, of course, Lincoln never actually said that).
A most prominent concept that is swallowed hook, line and sinker by apparently intelligent people is the idea that all life owes its existence to evolution. Every creature, every plant, every microbe survives only because its strengths were favored by evolutionary forces. This idea is certainly an easy way to explain existence, but does it withstand critical examination?
Here is a classic example of what I mean. Last week I was listening to my favorite NPR station when a reporter interviewed Dr. Jim McClintock, an ecologist from the University of Alabama Birmingham. Dr. McClintock is involved in exciting cancer research focused on an interesting compound extracted from the sea squirt.
Apparently the sea squirt is a basketball-sized bag of goo found on the cold ocean floor of Antarctica. The potential drug comes from a poison the sea squirt excretes to ward off predators.
To quote the reporter, “Dr. McClintock says the theory is that the sea squirt has had millions of years to evolve chemicals to use in defense of predators.” Then Dr. McClintock himself added, “If you are a sea squirt, you can’t get up and run away from something, you don’t have a shell to hide within, so what you do is you produce these toxic distasteful chemicals to protect yourself.”
I am not a professor of polar and marine biology, but I am logician enough to challenge the good doctor’s theory. The idea that any organism, much less an unintelligent one like a sea squirt, can will itself a new and essential attribute seems silly on its face. I’ve been willing myself the ability to dunk a basketball since I was 10 years old, but so far my ability is going in the opposite direction.
Let’s consider the fate of the very first sea squirt, eaten millions of years ago by, oh let’s just say, a prehistoric version of Sponge Bob Square Pants. The non-toxic sea squirt tastes yummy, so Dinosaur Sponge Bob eats more of them, and invites his entire Sponge Bob family over for sea squirt dinners.
As I picture it, the sea squirt, once consumed, is quite dead and therefore no longer able to engage in sea squirt sex and pass his O-M-G-I’m-about-to-be-eaten genetic mutation on to sea squirt progeny.
Since they can’t run—and Dr. McClintock said they could not—those early, tasty sea squirts would not have been able to send out anything like a Paul Revere sea squirt to warn the others that the Sponge Bobs were coming.
Further, since sea squirts are not very good talkers either, they would not have been able to cry out to their sea squirt neighbors, warning them to get toxic before they too become Sponge Bob’s lunch.
So how did these sea squirts succeed in changing themselves? I think believing the millions of years answer requires a bit of blind faith.
The big hole in the evolutionist theory of the sea squirt is this. If the creature really did, over millions of years, gradually with each millennium grow a little more toxic, then why didn’t the squirt’s predators, over the same millions of years, develop a resistance to the toxin?
The millions-of-years idea is a cheap and easy answer to a lot of precious and deep questions. It gets used every day in classrooms, books, magazines, reality TV and cartoons. It is a one-size-fits-all cop-out that merits thoughtful, vigilant challenge.
It also requires faith to believe in a Creator God, which I do. But it does not require deaf-dumb-and-blind faith. The people of God need to sharpen their wits and not be afraid to debate. The word of God is strong enough to withstand the challenge.
Some of these ideas are stereotypes repeated so often we just roll with them. Oil tycoons are corrupt. Teenagers are out of control. Republicans are mean and hypocritical. Democrats are over-sexed socialists. These ideas are perpetuated in movies and commentary and most people buy in without thinking much.
Some ideas have assumed the stature of history, though they really are not true at all. Just about everyone believes Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but he didn’t. Edison made it more durable and commercially viable, but the invention was around for decades earlier. The phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution as most believe. It comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association.
Mental myopia has nothing to do with intellect or education. Post-graduates are as likely to be dumb as posts on some things. As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time” (though, of course, Lincoln never actually said that).
A most prominent concept that is swallowed hook, line and sinker by apparently intelligent people is the idea that all life owes its existence to evolution. Every creature, every plant, every microbe survives only because its strengths were favored by evolutionary forces. This idea is certainly an easy way to explain existence, but does it withstand critical examination?
Here is a classic example of what I mean. Last week I was listening to my favorite NPR station when a reporter interviewed Dr. Jim McClintock, an ecologist from the University of Alabama Birmingham. Dr. McClintock is involved in exciting cancer research focused on an interesting compound extracted from the sea squirt.
Apparently the sea squirt is a basketball-sized bag of goo found on the cold ocean floor of Antarctica. The potential drug comes from a poison the sea squirt excretes to ward off predators.
To quote the reporter, “Dr. McClintock says the theory is that the sea squirt has had millions of years to evolve chemicals to use in defense of predators.” Then Dr. McClintock himself added, “If you are a sea squirt, you can’t get up and run away from something, you don’t have a shell to hide within, so what you do is you produce these toxic distasteful chemicals to protect yourself.”
I am not a professor of polar and marine biology, but I am logician enough to challenge the good doctor’s theory. The idea that any organism, much less an unintelligent one like a sea squirt, can will itself a new and essential attribute seems silly on its face. I’ve been willing myself the ability to dunk a basketball since I was 10 years old, but so far my ability is going in the opposite direction.
Let’s consider the fate of the very first sea squirt, eaten millions of years ago by, oh let’s just say, a prehistoric version of Sponge Bob Square Pants. The non-toxic sea squirt tastes yummy, so Dinosaur Sponge Bob eats more of them, and invites his entire Sponge Bob family over for sea squirt dinners.
As I picture it, the sea squirt, once consumed, is quite dead and therefore no longer able to engage in sea squirt sex and pass his O-M-G-I’m-about-to-be-eaten genetic mutation on to sea squirt progeny.
Since they can’t run—and Dr. McClintock said they could not—those early, tasty sea squirts would not have been able to send out anything like a Paul Revere sea squirt to warn the others that the Sponge Bobs were coming.
Further, since sea squirts are not very good talkers either, they would not have been able to cry out to their sea squirt neighbors, warning them to get toxic before they too become Sponge Bob’s lunch.
So how did these sea squirts succeed in changing themselves? I think believing the millions of years answer requires a bit of blind faith.
The big hole in the evolutionist theory of the sea squirt is this. If the creature really did, over millions of years, gradually with each millennium grow a little more toxic, then why didn’t the squirt’s predators, over the same millions of years, develop a resistance to the toxin?
The millions-of-years idea is a cheap and easy answer to a lot of precious and deep questions. It gets used every day in classrooms, books, magazines, reality TV and cartoons. It is a one-size-fits-all cop-out that merits thoughtful, vigilant challenge.
It also requires faith to believe in a Creator God, which I do. But it does not require deaf-dumb-and-blind faith. The people of God need to sharpen their wits and not be afraid to debate. The word of God is strong enough to withstand the challenge.
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