www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Trilobite - 450 mya

Organic Evolution 3.8 Billion years of it! Dictionary Definition: "The doctrine that all forms of life have been derived by   gradual changes from simpler forms or from a single cell."

"Well, evolution is theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."

"All complex life on earth has developed from simpler life-forms over billions of years. This is a fact that no longer admits of intelligent dispute. If you doubt that human beings evolved from prior species, you may as well doubt that the sun is a star. Granted, the sun doesn't seem like an ordinary star, but we know that it is a star that just happens to be relatively close to the earth. Imagine your potential for embarrassment if your religious faith rested on the presumption that the sun was not a star at all. Imagine millions of Christians in the United States spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to battle the godless astronomers and astrophysicists on this point. Imagine them working passionately to get their unfounded notions about the sun taught in our nation's schools. This is exactly the situation you are now in with respect to evolution."

"Every wild species, even the lowly ant, is a masterpiece of evolution, as intricate and beautiful in its way as a bird of paradise, whale, or towering Douglas-fir." - Edward O. Wilson
A Grassroots Jungle in a Vacant Lot
Wings (Essays on Invertebrate Conservation)
Spring 2007 pp. 17-18 (Originally Published in the Fall 1993 Issue)

Click Here for my page on Life...

Click Here for my page on Biology...

"The fundamental evoluionary event is a change in the frequency of genes and chromosome configurations in a population. If a population of butterflies shifts through time from 40 percent blue individuals to 60 percent blue individuals, and if the color blue is hereditary, evoltuion of a simple kins has occurred. Larger transformations are accomplished by a great many such statistical changes in combination. Shifts can occur purely in the genes, with no effect on wing color or any other outward trait. But whatever their nature or magnitude, the changes in progress are always expressed in percentages of individuals within or among populations. Evolution is absolutely a phenomenon of populations. Individuals and their immediate descendants do not evolve. Populations evolve, in the sense that the proportions of carriers of different genes change through time. Theis conception of evolution at the population level follows ineluctably fromt hee idea of natural selection, which is the core of Darwinism. There are other causes of evolution, but natural selection is overwhelmingly dominant."

Charles Darwin

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20, 2002 from a metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung (lung cancer). Dr. Gould was the nation's preeminent evolutionary biologist and certainly doesn't need accolades or descriptions on my web page. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed many of his books and writings (Wonderful Life, Bully for Brontosaurus, The Flamingo's Smile, An Urchin in the Storm, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, Ever Since Darwin, and others...) and also had the distinct privilege of corresponding with him once. It was sometime around 1990 that I wrote Dr. Gould asking what he thought of the current rate of extinctions due to human activity/interference. Much to my delight he wrote back expressing his sadness with the situation. I'm still looking through my files, for that letter, and will post it here once I find it again! - Roger J. Wendell summer, 2006

"Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design. When we look at the natural world, we see extraordinary complexity, but we do not see optimal design. We see redundancy, regressions, and unnecessary complications; we see bewildering inefficiencies that result in suffering and death. We see flightless birds and snakes with pelvises. We see species of fish, salamanders, and crustaceans that have nonfunctional eyes, because they continued to evolve in darkness for millions of years. We see whales that produce teeth during fetal development, only to reabsorb them as adults. Such features of our world are utterly mysterious if God created all species of life on earth 'intelligently'; none of them are perplexing in light of evolution."

"The biologist J.B.S. Haldane is reported to have said that, if there is a God, He has 'an inordinate fondness for beetles.' One would have hoped that an observation this devastating would have closed the book on creationism for all time. The truth is that, while there are now around three hundred and fifty thousand known species of beetles, God appears to have an even greater fondness for viruses. Biologists estimate that there are at least ten strains of virus for every species of animal on earth. Many viruses are benign, of course, and some ancient virus may have played an important role in the emergence of complex organisms. But viruses tend to use organisms like you and me as their borrowed genitalia. Many of them invade our cells only to destroy them, destroying us in the process - horribly, mercilessly, relentlessly. Viruses like HIV, as well as a wide range of harmful bacteria, can be seen evolving right under our noses, developing reistance to antiviral and antibiotic drugs to the detriment of everyone. Evolution both predicts and explains this phenomenon; the book of of Genesis does not. How can you imagine that religious faith offers the best account of these realities, or that they suggest some deeper, compassionate purpose of an omniscient being?"

"Mr. Scopes, the jury has found you guilty under this indictment, charging you with having taught in the schools of Rhea county, in violation of what is commonly known as the anti- evolution statute, which makes it unlawful for any teacher to teach in any of the public schools of the state, supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the state, any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man, and teach instead thereof that man has descended from a lower order of animals. The jury have found you guilty."

"Nowadays, in thrall to constituencies of unreason, zealots of all stripes are chipping away at evolutionary science. In our own country, 'creationism' and 'intelligent design' are now considered suitable topics for instruction in science, as if these notions were as testable as the perfect gas laws of Boyle (pV = nRT) or the Hardy-Weinberg equation (p2 + 2pq + q2 = 1) of population genetics." p. 10

"Of course, evolutionary theory may be only one of several explanations for life on our planet, but it's the only theory that has held up against disproof. And however much we think we know of evolution today, it must be a minute faction of what remains to be discovered tomorrow. Finally, I'd argue that the facts of evolution impose a kind of necessity on the chance of our imagination, they cut short many a tall tale. Experimental science is our defense - perhaps our best def3ense - against humbug and the Endarkenment." p. 12

   Religion and Science

"I can tell you, I'm getting a PhD in Neuroscience, there's no point in the training to become a scientist where somebody sits you down and says, okay, all of these dogmas you're holding onto, that are religious, need to be talked about and subjected to the same tests of credulity that we're going to subject all of your other scientific beliefs to. I mean it's just not a conversation that gets had, it's taboo."

"In the Christian West you can get a PhD in biochemistry and not believe in Evolution and that's a problem of discourse, it really is a massive problem of conversations not being had."

- Sam Harris interviewd by Michelle Martin on NPR's Talk of the Nation
about his new book, Letter to a Christian and keeping religion out of public policy.
Broadcast on Monday, October 02, 2006 and transcribed by Roger J. Wendell

Human Evolution

"The apes are our closest living relatives. The bigger species - chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans - are referred to as great apes. Within the great apes, chimpanzees are most closely related to humans, and gorillas slightly more distant from us. Darwin recognised the close relationship of humans to African apes and predicted that the earliest human fossils would be found in Africa. He was right. "Because great apes are closely related to us, they are usually classified within the human family. Hominidae. This book focuses on a narrower group, Hominini, which means specifically the fossil species that are more closely related to us than chimpanzees are. (In other places, you may see the name 'hominid' used in the same narrow sense that this book uses 'hominin - the difference is just the names and reflects an older taxonomy in which apes were excluded from the human family.)

"It is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the apes are a uniform group, when in reality great difference exist among them. Chimpanzees are fascinating to us because of their complex social relationships and their tendency to show many 'human' behaviours. Gorillas are much bigger in size, and they eat leaves more frequently than the other apes, who mostly eat fruit. Orangutans and gibbons (gibbons are so-called 'lesser apes') each have their own unique ways of moving around through trees, and have exceptionally long arms.

"Despite differences like these, apes share a variety of features - for example, all apes lack tails, and so do humans. Apes also have relatively larger brains than most other primates. They have projecting faces and long canine teeth as well, but in these respects they are like many other primates.

"How, then, do we think of the earliest hominins - the earliest human ancestors? Early hominins are often described as 'bipedal apes' because they were ape-like in the general appearance of their skulls and their relative brain size. At some point in human evolution, we cross a threshold where we begin to think of our ancestors as more like us, showing more of the distinctive features that arise during human evolution. It is worth keeping in mind that this is a subjective decision - what is ape, and what is human? There is no definite line between these categories, and as we go through the variety of hominin species, the question becomes more and more difficult to answer." p. 19

"The name Paranthropus means roughly 'equal to' or 'like' humans, and the name robustus conveys the impression of large teeth and chewing muscles that has lasted as a general description of this group. The name in this case conveys a real meaning. The species P. robustus is not one of our direct ancestors but is simply near us in the evolutionary tree. In many ways, this makes species such as P. robustus more interesting, because it shows that human evolution was not a single path towards modern humans, but instead a more complicated and diverse array of forms. There is more than one way to be a hominin." pp. 48-50

"Paranthropus aethiopicus is one of those species that illustrates the patter of 'mosaic' evolution. This term is used to describe a pattern when features evolve independently and evolve multiple times. A broader example is the separation of human bipedalism and human brains size. We may think of humans as large-brained, bipedal primates, but we became bipeds long before brains reached anything like the size they are now. Human evolution displayed a mosaic pattern instead of a simple progression from one thing to the next." p. 57

Click Here for my page on Creation Theories...

Denver Museum of Nature and Science
(www.dmns.org)

We joined my brother and his friend on a visit to Denver's Museum of Nature and Science on September 2nd, 2006. Their evolution and pre-history displays are simply fantastic! Also interesting, but unfortunate, I learned that certain Christian groups make repeated visits and challenge the volunteer presenters about the museum's interpretation of natural history. Luckily these folks are much more calm and controlled than I would be and simply stand there and take it with a smile. Anyway, whether you have a chip on your shoulder or not, I highly recommend Denver's Museum and provide these few snapshots of their display as both an incentive to visit and a rough explanation of evolution:

Recipe for Life	Origin of Life	Cell DNA	First Nucleus	Ocean Life
Natural Selection	Peppered Moths	First Flowers	Fossil Flowers	Primates

Replicating Life in a Lab...

Stanley Miller was a doctoral student working with Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, researching possible environments of early Earth. In 1953 he reproduced the early atmosphere of Earth by creating a chamber with only hydrogen, water, methane, and ammonia. Miller used an electric discharge to simulate lightning and, after just a week, had a residue Organic compounds settled in the system.

Most notable of these compounds were the amino acids, the "building blocks of life," that had formed in Miller's system. Amino acids are necessary for the formation of proteins which form the structure of cells. Miller found glycine, alanine, aspartic, glutamic acid, and other amino acids in the sytem. Fifteen percent of the carbon from the methane had been combined into organic compounds. As amazing as his discovery of amino acids was, it was even more astonishing how easily they had been formed in the system!

Miller's work showed that compounds necessary for life could have been formed in an environment without free oxygen - similar to Earth's early atmosphere. The creation of amino acids from Earth's raw materials may been the begining of evolution. Miller's results also suggests the possibility that similar amino acids could have formed elsewhere, in the Universe, since the Earth's early atmosphere was based on proportions of elements in the Universe...

Life, living systems, and evolution are fascinating to me. Admittedly, these are huge subjects that can be hard to understand at times. Nevertheless, the beauty of our natural world is more wonderful and special than anything our little human institutions could ever invent or imagine. So, I'll be adding bits and pieces to this page about that strangely beautiful dance of organic evolution that's been gracing our planet for the last 3.8 billion years! Sadly, of course, I'm writing this during one of the darker periods of American history. Our government and society has been taken over by a destructive form of fundamentalism that not only mocks scientific effort, but has no respect for beauty and the natural world. So, hopefully, my little web page will help reverse this damaging aspect of our collective psyche so that nature and the real world can heal a bit and continue on as the arena for evolution.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) adenine thymine guanine cytosine

In the early 2000s, when I was creating these pages, "Intelligent Design" seemed to be growing in popularity, especially among the religious right. I'm not sure what it's all about but hope to report, here, what I learn. Initially I'm very skeptical because this particular little "theory" seems to be an attempt to reinforce religious beliefs while thumbing its nose at thought, reason, and scientific inquiry in general. Hopefully the government, or anyone else, won't attempt to force the idea of "Intelligent Design" on the rest of us but stranger things have happened... - Roger J. Wendell

Miscellaneous Definitions:

I've got mail!
(you can also check out my Guest Book for
thoughts and notes from other visitors...)

Here's a little note I received from the Institute for Creation Research on April 13, 2007. In defense of Mr. Sherwin, my immediate response was that we'd need to revisit the idea a few months later as I was preoccupied with follow-up medical visits for a previous diagnosis of bladder cancer. Well, those few months passed and I telephoned (a couple of times!) the Institute for Creation Research to tell 'em I was ready to "chat" about evolution in a public forum right here in Colorado. I suggested that my radio show might be the best venue. Funny, I never heard back from them...

Hi Roger -

I read your website and I'd like you to support your position in a formal, public debate with me. It has to be somewhere in Colorado.

Please contact CONNIE Pxxxx at the Institute for Creation Research: 619) 448-xxxx and tell her I contacted you regarding a debate. She'll tell you what nights I'm free.

Looking forward to it!

- frank sherwin

Frank,

Whenever you're ready we can give the discussion a try on
my part-time radio show - it's up to you!

Looking forward,

Roger

Links:

Back to Roger J. Wendell's Home Page...

Abbey | About | Blog | Contacting Me | Copyright | Disclaimer | Donate | Guest Book | Home | Site Index | Solutions | Terms, Conditions and Fair Use
Copyright © 1955 -