Evolution

by Sean Quinn

Popular belief used to be that the world that we live on was flat. This theory was supported by the church and we now laugh at the ignorance of the people from back then because we now know that the world is round. Another popular belief is that God created man and the church also supports this belief. As the old saying goes, "History tends to repeat itself". So maybe the creationism theory is wrong. There are many holes in it, so we might need a new theory. This new theory is evolution. According to the Holy Bible "On the sixth day God created man" (Bible 7). One may find it very hard to believe that god created life on this Earth. Instead one can believe in the theory of evolution and the purpose here is to show you why you should not believe that God created man, but instead believe that we came into being through the process of evolution because there is proof to back it up.

One of the main reasons that you should believe in evolution is that there are way too many holes in the Bible. The first hole one can see is the exodus. "If they spent 40 years wandering the desert after fleeing Egypt, the Israelites should have left at least a few traces... nothing suggests that the Israelites were ever there (the desert)" (Lemonick 55). If no evidence has yet been found that the Israelites wandered the desert for forty years, how can we believe in it? The second hole you can find is Moses. "Apart from the Bible, there is no evidence that a man (Moses) ever existed" (Lemonick 55). Again if there is no evidence outside of a single ancient scripture, how are we supposed to believe in it? Another hole is the story of Jericho and how a horn blew it's walls down. "The walls of this Canaanite city (Jericho) did come tumbling down, say most historians, but centuries before Mose's protege could have arrived. When Israelites took over the Promised Land, the conquest was slow and mostly quite peaceful" (Lemonick 55). If the taking over of the Promised Land was peaceful and if the walls fell centuries before "Moses's" time, how are we supposed to believe that this story is true? A fourth hole is the man called Abraham. "He (Abraham) was the father of Judaism, the man who was willing to kill his son Isaac just because God told him to. But years of searching have convinced all but the most conservative experts that Abraham, and the of the Patriarchs, were inventions of the Bible's authors" (Lemonick 55). The Bible is trying to convince us that God had Abraham kill his son and thereby break the commandment though shall not kill. That in itself is hard to believe but also the fact that no evidence of his existence has been found leads me to believe that he and Moses were both fiction. The biggest hole in the Bible is that it does not speak about the dinosaurs. "The Bible makes no mention of dinosaurs. They aren't even in the Old Testament descriptions of the earliest days of creation" (Hirsley 1). It is pretty weird that the Bible would forget to mention something as big as the dinosaurs. "David Noel Freedman, professor of Hebrew and biblical studies at the University of California at San Diego said, 'There is no clear evidence in the Bible for recognition of dinosaurs'" (Hirsley 1). If an expert on the Bible can not find evidence that it speaks about the dinosaurs, who can? To cover up for this large error in the bible "Some biblical fundamentalists have insisted that dinosaurs never existed and that bones cited as evidence to the contrary were just planted be God to test human's faith" (Hirsley 1). They will say that but they will not say that it is even possible that the Bible is wrong. If you were to tell them that, they would call you a Satan worshiper or an atheist just because you said something bad about the Bible. "Rev. Bruce Metzger said that accounts of creation in Genesis 'leave room for the possibility of dinosaurs. Of course, they also leave open the possibility that there were television sets'" (Hirsley 1). Rev. Metzger's quote shows that the Bible leaves way to much to the imagination. Alot of creationists have said, "You shouldn't take the Bible literally." Think about that quote. Doesn't it just destroy the entire theory of creation. If we are not supposed to take the Bible literally, and if the Bible teaches creationism, are we supposed to not take creation literally. All of these holes, the exodus, Moses, Jericho, Abraham, and the fact that the Bible doesn't speak of the existence of the dinosaurs, make it almost impossible to believe in the Bible and the theory of creation. That means we need a new theory on how life on this planet came into being. That new theory is the theory of evolution.

The theory of evolution is the theory that all life on Earth evolved from single-celled organisms. This theory first arose in the 1860's when Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, was sent on a trip to map the coasts of South America. He traveled to South America in the Beagle, a ship. Darwin was not a very healthy man and therefore he got seasick quite easily and very often, so when he arrived in South America he spent most of his time on land. While on land, Darwin started to collect animals and write them all down in his journal. One day he collected more than fifty different types of beetles. Such diversity in a single species of insect is what first set Darwin thinking. About a year later, the Beagle arrived in the Galapagos Islands. While a shore on the some twenty different islands, Darwin discovered that each island had the same types of animals but that they were all different from each other in some shape or form. The animal that he found this in the most was the finch. Darwin started to think that it was the habitat that these finches lived in that had made them all different. This is when he came up with his theory of evolution. When he returned to England he published his journal as a book on the theory of evolution. It is called On The Origin Of Species. This book is to evolution as the Bible is to creationism except that what is inside can actually be observed and there is actual proof to back it up. That is how the theory of evolution came to be.

This is how it all started. "The origins of life can now be traced all the way back to the Big Bang, the explosive birth of the universe that scientists believe occurred some 15 billion years ago" (Gorner 16). As billions of years past, matter slowly began to collect into stars and planets and comets and so on. Our Earth is believed to have been created some four and a half billion years ago. The Earth's surface was believed to be a rocky landscape that was covered in water. There was no atmosphere, so the only place where life could form and survive would be in the water. "In 1953, University of Chicago scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey stunned the scientific world when they mixed methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water-the so-called primordial soup-and fired sparks through it to simulate lightning. To their surprise they found in the brownish goo traces of amino acids, the chemical building blocks of proteins" (Gorner 16). The chemicals in the above quote are the ones that are believed to have been on the Earth when life first started. This experiment shows that life could have been created without the preexistence of life. "As millions of years passed, the concentrations of these (organic) substances increased and the molecules began to interact with one another to form even more complex compounds, like DNA" (Attenborough 19). The first life is believed to have been plant life that used the sun's rays to create food for themselves. These plants gave off oxygen which eventually formed our atmosphere. This is how life on our planet evolved in the beginning, "simple organic molecules, amino acids, sugars, DNA, life, autotrophs (plant life), mitosis (the division of cells to reproduce), tissues/organs" (NSF Mosaic Reader 12). Mutations in DNA are what causes species to change over time. Single celled organisms lived on reefs in the oceans and there they were eventually able to evolve into multi-cellular organisms. "The increase in oxygen enabled sluggish Precambrian animals to behave more energetically and thus evolve more quickly. This is why there was such an explosion of evolution during the Cambrian Era" (Gore 8). The multi-cellular organisms began to evolve into more complex creatures with bones and brains and so on. "The Pikala, the oldest known representative of our phylum, is the first known creature to have an incipient spinal column" (Gore 8). From this we are able to tell that we are related to the Pikala because it is the first creature with a spinal column and it is believed that all other creatures with a spinal column evolved from it. During the time that aquatic life was still forming the atmosphere too was still forming. This atmosphere would protect creatures from the suns harsh ultra-violet rays, therefore allowing creatures to move from the seas onto the land. Creatures that live part of their life in the water and part on land are called amphibians and the first one is called Hynerpeton. "The Hynerpeton looks like a cross between a fish and a miniature crocodile. It had lungs not gills and it used it's powerful forelimbs to both crawl (on land) and to paddle (in water)" (Gura 4). The Hynerpeton is a descendant of the Pikala. "This (Hynerpeton) is the earliest known creature to invade land- the link between fish and all other back-boned animals. It is related to the common dinosaurs, birds, reptiles, and mammals-even humans" (Gura 4). Eventually amphibians evolved into dinosaurs, birds, reptiles, and mammals, but this process took millions and millions of years to complete. Our closest living relative is chimpanzee. "We and our closest relative, the chimpanzee, share 99% of the same genetic material. We are not alike because their genes are regulated differently. Even though the genes are the same, they can be turned on to perform different tasks, just as bricks can be used to build a cottage or a cathedral. Such flexibility gives us a bigger brain than a chimpanzee's, among other anatomical differences" (Gorner 16). The chimpanzee evolved into A.Afarensis. "A.Afarensis had a brain size of 400-500ml and was the first fully upright walking creature" (Begley 56). A.Afarenis evolved into "A.Africanus which had a brain size of 400-500ml and had longer arms and a lighter build" (Begley 57). A.Africanus evolved into "A.Robustus which had a brain size of 530ml" (Begley 57). A.Robustus evolved into "Homohabilis which had a brain size of 600-800ml and is believed to be the first tool user" (Begley 57). Homohabilis evolved into "Homoerectus which had a brain size of 750-1,250ml and was the first species to move away from Africa" (Begley 57). Homoerectus evolved into "Homosaipen have a brain size of 1,200- 1,700ml and Homosaipen ponders it's origins and evolution" (Begley 57). We are Homosaipens, but we weren't the only ones. It is believed that Homoerectus evolved into both Neanderthal Man and Cro-Magnon Man. Some how the Neanderthals died out but we do not know how. Although the popular belief is that Cro-Magnon Man and Neanderthal Man were enemies and that Cro-Magnon Man killed off the Neanderthal Man. We are still evolving today both physically and technologically and evolution will continue to evolve as long as there is life in this universe because the theory of evolution doesn't just explain how life on our planet came into being, but it can also explain how life could come into being on other planets.

Evolution can be proven by looking at fossils in the ground. The best place to do this is at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. If you dig through the top soil you will find the remains of creatures that are in existence now. "The first rocks you pass (on your way to the bottom of Grand Canyon) are some 200 million years old. There are no remains of mammals or birds in them, but there are traces of reptiles" (Attenborough 15). So that shows that there were no mammals of birds alive 200 million years ago. "Halfway down the Canyon, you come to 400 million year old limestone. There are no reptiles to be found here, but there are the bones of strange armoured fish" (Attenborough 18). This means that birds, mammals, reptiles weren't around 400 million years ago. ".....the rocks contain no sign of back boned animals of any kind. There are a few shells and worms that have left behind a tracery of trails in what was the muddy sea floor." (Attenborough 18). This shows that the most complex organisms were not even as complex as fish. "Three- quarters of the way down, you are still descending through layers of limestone, but now there is no sign of life whatever" (Attenborough 18). To find the first life forms you have to go to the shores of Lake Superior. "Preserved in the chert (name given to rocks the surrounding Lake Superior) are the shapes of simple organisms each no more than one or two hundredths of a millimetre across. Some resembled filaments of algae others, while they were unmistakably organic, had no parallels with living organisms; and some looked to be identical with the simplest form of life existing today, bacteria" (Attenborough 18). The fossil record shows solid evidence, no pun intended, that evolution did take place on this Earth.

Then we can also prove evolution through genetics. "By comparing genes of living species, molecular evolutionists can trace the time in history when their ancestors divided and went their separate ways" (Gorner 16). This is just one of the ways genetics can be used to prove evolution. The other way is that "Every human has genes that can be found in some form in every animal and plant alive today and they date to the first living things" (Gorner 16). Why would God have made genes and genetics? There is no reason why he would need to.

Because the evidence that evolution occurred is so overwhelming and the evidence for creationism is so weak, it is almost a fact that we evolved from single celled organisms. "The process of evolution is based upon factual observation of nature by scientists in fields such as biology, geology, paleontology, physics, and chemistry, which continually advance Darwin's magnificent deductions. Conversely, religion is based upon faith, usually derived from ancient writings, not from observation" (Miller 14). This quote sums it all up. Evolution did take place on Earth. And this brings us a large question. If God didn't create man, did man create God? But that is a whole other story.

Attenborough, David: Life On Earth, Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1979

Begley, Sharon: Out of Africa a Missing Link, Newsweek, October 3, 1994

Darwin, Charles: On The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, Random House, Inc. New York, 1973

Gore, Rick: Digs Find World's 1st Monsters, Chicago Tribune, March 17, 1994

Gorner, Peter and Katulak, Ronald: Genetic 'Library' Reveals The Story of Life From Day 1, Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1990

Gura, Trisha: Scientists Find Missing Link In Pennsylvania: First Amphibian, Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1994

Hirsley, Michael: Holy Behemoth! The Bible's Bare-Bones Chronicle of History Overlooks Dinosaurs, Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1993

Lemonick, Michael D.: Are The Bible Stories True?. Time, Dec. 18 1995

Miller, Charles R.: Evolution A Fact, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 24, 1994

NSF Mosaic Reader: Evolution: New Perspectives, Avery Publishing Group Inc., Wayne, New Jersey, 1983

The Holy Bible, Catholic Book Publishing Company, New York, 1954