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5/4/05 Let There Be Cat! Simmering below the surface of our society is a constant conflict between liberal and conservative, faith and secularism, science and religion. The fault lines are not always predictable. On social issues SoothSeeker falls in the camp with conservatives, people of faith, and religion. But I am also a layperson who believes in science and am agnostic on questions of the supernatural world. Today I was reading Lee Strobel's book The Case for a Creator: A journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence that Points Toward God. One passage caught my attention. Strobel professes to be interviewing Jonathan Wells on the question of the Tree of Life used by Sir Charles Darwin and subsequent scientists to describe the descent of species from some hypothetical common ancestor. Wells' argument on page 46 of the book concedes the possibility that all cats share a common ancestor, and all modern species of cat are descended presumably from a single mated pair (Cat Adam and Cat Eve). But he scoffs at the idea that cats could have descended from non-cats or proto-cats (to say nothing, to be sure, of ThunderCats) sharing as their descendants creatures other than cats. But this raises for me a question. Where did Cat Adam and Cat Eve come from? Obviously they did not come from something other than cats. Since we've ruled out a progression of form (perhaps a common ancestor between civets and hyenas and cats), we can't point to a single group or pair of animals descended from some similar variety that shared a few distinctive traits that gave them the capacity to survive some environmental change that killed most of the rest of the population. Instead we must imagine something else. Perhaps Cat Adam and Cat Eve just arose spontaneously, around the same time that Civet Adam and Eve and Hyena Adam and Eve arose spontaneously. Perhaps God or Prometheus or the Great Spirit formed Cat Adam and Cat Eve out of clay or some other modeling compound and breathed life into them (maybe he sneezed and that's why they now have nine lives each). Other questions arise. Did the first cats have retractable claws, or not? Cheetahs do not, but other cats do. Or is that too great a change to imagine happening within the family (a cat with retractable claws springing from the loins of a cat with fixed claws? Preposterous!), so we have to imagine that there were both Cat Adam Retractable and Cat Eve Retractable and Cat Adam Fixed and Cat Eve Fixed (well, not fixed in the other sense--you know what I mean!)? The only thing wrong with their thinking is that they want people to believe it is scientific. Postulating someone molding cats out of clay or just waving a magic wand and creating them out of thin air is non-scientific. Postulating that the anatomical and genetic similarities between Cats and Civets and Hyenidae are coincidental rather than derived from their common ancestry is non-scientific. Running away from difficult questions and assuming that we'll never find an answer is non-scientific. God and science don't have to be at loggerheads. God could have spontaneously created Cat Adam and Cat Eve, but it is not the place of science to make that argument. God could have created the whole universe yesterday, and made you and me with our memories and the earth with a fossil record and so on, just to give us something to do. But it isn't the place of science to make that argument. Science is about what we can postulate, hypothesize, test, and reproduce. We've shown that there are mechanisms for massive change locked up in our genes. The mechanisms exist and work to produce variations great and small. There is no difference between what creationists call 'macroevolution' and 'microevolution' except that macroevolution takes place on a time scale that is very difficult to measure empirically. But we can observe its effects from afar. Relationships between similar species are intuitively obvious and can often be confirmed by genetic studies. Where they cannot we must revise relationships and focus on different profiles of similarity or difference (there were marsupials that looked like saber-toothed tigers!). But assuming that cats were cats and never had any ancestors that weren't cats is non-scientific and can't be tested. Ahura-Mazda may have waved a magic wand and created cats, but there's good scientific evidence to think they descended from similar creatures that also gave rise to civets, mongooses, and hyenidae. That's what science offers. Modified: 06/03/2005 |
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