April 27, 2009
MANN TALK: The Dinky Insect That Helps Demonstrate Darwin's Theory
By Perry Mann
“Two centuries after Charles Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of his landmark work, The Origin of Species, we are now witnesses to a social paradox: after a century and a half of energetic research in all aspects of evolution, virtually all scientists, as well as most well educated people, understand that Darwin gave us the key to understanding our real origins and development. And yet half of Americans tell pollsters that they don’t ‘believe in’ evolution.” (From an editorial in “The Age of
Reason.”)
In spite of what scientists have discovered since Darwin, half of Americans apparently believe that humans and all else were created by a Hebrew God in six days some 8,000 years ago. And that the Ark housed a handful of the millions of species that called earth home eight millennia ago. The earth, say scientists, is four billion years old, not 8000 years. Some difference! The space in time reflects the span of separation of creationists and evolutionists.
The sequencing of the human genome, which contains the complete set of genes in a cell, is “evolution laid out for all to see.” And it has revealed the close relationship of humans and other animals especially with other primates. When a human stares at a chimpanzee in a zoo, he is looking at a cousin with a genetic identity that is 98 percent the same as his and with a cousin that has intelligence and a culture.
The dinky insect that has helped demonstrate Darwin’s theory is the fruit fly or drosophila, its scientific name. It is an insect that in ten days can copulate and propagate 200 of its kind. I can attest to the extraordinary proliferation of progeny of the insect. In spring and summer and fall I gather vegetables from my garden and gather fruit from my orchards and in my kitchen I cook and can. The residue of my cooking and canning goes into a garbage can wherein fruit flies pair and produce their kind with the intensity of a boiling pot.
Last summer I found that in the morning when reading the newspaper the fruit flies were so sailing around my head and between my eyes and the print that I had to stop and grab a cloth and whip the air around me. It worked for a minute and then the fog of them returned. In the kitchen they roosted everywhere waiting their turn for a trip to the garbage pail.
I countered with this strategy: I put the garbage can on the back porch and I never let lie in the kitchen for any length of time banana skins, apple peelings or any other item fruit flies flew to. By fall of this year I could read the paper without a squadron of jets using my head as an earth to circumnavigate.
But I now have a new regard for the flies and an appreciation of how they have helped to prove and support Darwin’s theory of evolution. I have long been aware that their short life span and their multi-generational production within it were helpful to scientists in their work to understand the ways of evolution. But I learned more of their help recently in an article titled “Fruit flies earn no respect, except among scientists.”
In the article there is a magnified photo of a match stick with two flies attached. The flies have a three-sectioned body and all the appendages, it appears, that honeybees have and they are colorful. The photo is a revelation. Even when one is roosting in the kitchen a foot away they are so tiny that all I see is a speck. Now this speck has done the following for Darwin.
The study of the fly established the basic principle of genetics and revealed the nature of the gene, “how genes are linked to one another along the chromosome and how chromosomes can recombine with one another.”
“Despite their enormous differences, fruit flies and humans descended from a distant common ancestor and share many genes that control similar biological functions. Seventy percent of human and drosophila genes are conserved, meaning the genes resemble each other in structure and still carry out a related or identical function. The same genes build the fly eye and the human eye. It is much easier to understand gene function in drosophila than in humans. No other organism has contributed more to our understanding of evolutionary and population biology then drosophila.”
One of those half of Americans who do not believe in evolution and do in Biblical creation, in a letter to the editor, argues: “One could only imagine the odds of a single protein being generated by solar energy to become a single cell, then that cell deciding to become a fish, then that fish to become an amphibian, then the amphibian deciding to stand on legs, and that animal eventually evolving into an intelligent, thinking, emotional human being.”
First, no cell or any combination of cells ever decided to do anything, including Homo sapiens. Cells and combinations of them reacted to an environment and those that reacted in a manner that was propitious to their future survived and propagated, but those who did not do so eventually became extinct. So, it has been the history of those descendants of that single cell generated by solar energy.
Second, what are the odds that around 8,000 years ago, a god, settled somewhere out there in the void, decided to create a universe of stars and suns in which a part thereof would be an earth on which he would populate with all the creatures, both animal and plant, that have and do exist. And that he did all this is six days and survived to rest on a seventh day?
The believers’ god took six days to do what Darwin’s theory of mutation and natural selection took four billion years to do. Who can believe that even a god could do in six days what scientists says it took nature to do over a stretch of time that the mind cannot comprehend?
The evidence that all life, plants and animals, humans and fruit flies, evolved from a common ancestor by mutation and natural selection is beyond theory. It is a fact. Anyone who takes the time to read the evidence with an open mind will join scientists and the well-educated.
* * *
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.
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MANN TALK: The Dinky Insect That Helps Demonstrate Darwin's Theory
By Perry Mann
“Two centuries after Charles Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of his landmark work, The Origin of Species, we are now witnesses to a social paradox: after a century and a half of energetic research in all aspects of evolution, virtually all scientists, as well as most well educated people, understand that Darwin gave us the key to understanding our real origins and development. And yet half of Americans tell pollsters that they don’t ‘believe in’ evolution.” (From an editorial in “The Age of
Reason.”)
In spite of what scientists have discovered since Darwin, half of Americans apparently believe that humans and all else were created by a Hebrew God in six days some 8,000 years ago. And that the Ark housed a handful of the millions of species that called earth home eight millennia ago. The earth, say scientists, is four billion years old, not 8000 years. Some difference! The space in time reflects the span of separation of creationists and evolutionists.
The sequencing of the human genome, which contains the complete set of genes in a cell, is “evolution laid out for all to see.” And it has revealed the close relationship of humans and other animals especially with other primates. When a human stares at a chimpanzee in a zoo, he is looking at a cousin with a genetic identity that is 98 percent the same as his and with a cousin that has intelligence and a culture.
The dinky insect that has helped demonstrate Darwin’s theory is the fruit fly or drosophila, its scientific name. It is an insect that in ten days can copulate and propagate 200 of its kind. I can attest to the extraordinary proliferation of progeny of the insect. In spring and summer and fall I gather vegetables from my garden and gather fruit from my orchards and in my kitchen I cook and can. The residue of my cooking and canning goes into a garbage can wherein fruit flies pair and produce their kind with the intensity of a boiling pot.
Last summer I found that in the morning when reading the newspaper the fruit flies were so sailing around my head and between my eyes and the print that I had to stop and grab a cloth and whip the air around me. It worked for a minute and then the fog of them returned. In the kitchen they roosted everywhere waiting their turn for a trip to the garbage pail.
I countered with this strategy: I put the garbage can on the back porch and I never let lie in the kitchen for any length of time banana skins, apple peelings or any other item fruit flies flew to. By fall of this year I could read the paper without a squadron of jets using my head as an earth to circumnavigate.
But I now have a new regard for the flies and an appreciation of how they have helped to prove and support Darwin’s theory of evolution. I have long been aware that their short life span and their multi-generational production within it were helpful to scientists in their work to understand the ways of evolution. But I learned more of their help recently in an article titled “Fruit flies earn no respect, except among scientists.”
In the article there is a magnified photo of a match stick with two flies attached. The flies have a three-sectioned body and all the appendages, it appears, that honeybees have and they are colorful. The photo is a revelation. Even when one is roosting in the kitchen a foot away they are so tiny that all I see is a speck. Now this speck has done the following for Darwin.
The study of the fly established the basic principle of genetics and revealed the nature of the gene, “how genes are linked to one another along the chromosome and how chromosomes can recombine with one another.”
“Despite their enormous differences, fruit flies and humans descended from a distant common ancestor and share many genes that control similar biological functions. Seventy percent of human and drosophila genes are conserved, meaning the genes resemble each other in structure and still carry out a related or identical function. The same genes build the fly eye and the human eye. It is much easier to understand gene function in drosophila than in humans. No other organism has contributed more to our understanding of evolutionary and population biology then drosophila.”
One of those half of Americans who do not believe in evolution and do in Biblical creation, in a letter to the editor, argues: “One could only imagine the odds of a single protein being generated by solar energy to become a single cell, then that cell deciding to become a fish, then that fish to become an amphibian, then the amphibian deciding to stand on legs, and that animal eventually evolving into an intelligent, thinking, emotional human being.”
First, no cell or any combination of cells ever decided to do anything, including Homo sapiens. Cells and combinations of them reacted to an environment and those that reacted in a manner that was propitious to their future survived and propagated, but those who did not do so eventually became extinct. So, it has been the history of those descendants of that single cell generated by solar energy.
Second, what are the odds that around 8,000 years ago, a god, settled somewhere out there in the void, decided to create a universe of stars and suns in which a part thereof would be an earth on which he would populate with all the creatures, both animal and plant, that have and do exist. And that he did all this is six days and survived to rest on a seventh day?
The believers’ god took six days to do what Darwin’s theory of mutation and natural selection took four billion years to do. Who can believe that even a god could do in six days what scientists says it took nature to do over a stretch of time that the mind cannot comprehend?
The evidence that all life, plants and animals, humans and fruit flies, evolved from a common ancestor by mutation and natural selection is beyond theory. It is a fact. Anyone who takes the time to read the evidence with an open mind will join scientists and the well-educated.
* * *
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.
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Make HNN Your Homepage (IE Users Only)
