Believing In What We Teach

My Biology professor (who shall remain anonymous) has been teaching us about the adaptive power of evolution since early August, sometimes even going out of his way to critique the ideas of Intelligent Design and Creationism...but that's a rant that I feel will ultimately not accomplish anything, so I will leave it alone for now.

Anyway, it came as a bit of a surprise to find my Biology professor wrapping up the year with a series of lectures on global problems and their long-term solutions. Right now I say that the following argument is promoted for the sake of discussion and not because I actually believe what I write.

With four months of Evolution under the class's collective belt, the professor then began to talk about how humans were causing the earth to slowly come undone: Acid rain, overfertilization of water sources that lead to anoxic "dead" zones, ozone depletion, etc. During these lectures it struck me that, for a person who believes so firmly in the power evolution, the professor doesn't put a lot of faith in it when it comes to adapting to current changes in the environment.

I mean, think about it: Evolution has supposedly caused a random collection of elements to become everything we see today. Yes, it took a long time, but that doesn't make it any less incredible. But my professor doesn't think that Evolution will step in when the earth's climate is changing right now. Instead we are told to clean up our phosphates and drive our cars less. Why should we worry if this powerful changing force that has been at our heels for 4.6 billion years is still there? Won't we just develop nodes in our lungs that can deal with carboxyl by-products? Won't we evolve cellulite coatings on our skin that help convert the extra ultra-violet radiation into energy though minute photosynthetic organelles?

I think my professor's reaction to the world's problems is only human. One can look back on the evidence that we have gathered for something happening in the past and say "it will surely happen in the future," but when it comes to the time when it's supposed to be happening and we can't see anything going on, we tend to give up hope in what we've predicted and rely on ourselves.

Arguably, the process of Evolution takes hundreds or thousands of years for even small changes, and problems on the earth are developing much faster, but that shouldn't scare the dedicated scientist, because perhaps the process of evolving will speed itself up. The whole point is that something survives, right?

Having said all that, I have to say that I agree with my professor, but for different reasons. The earth is currently experiencing some trouble, and a lot of it is man-made. While my professor wants to clean things up before the ecosystem collapses and all kinds of species (including maybe humans) go extinct, I want to clean things up because humans are charged by God with maintaining the earth (Genesis 2:15) and also because humans are more powerful than any other species and therefore have a duty to tidy things up after themselves.

There are a zillion other things I could talk about, but at risk of becoming even more non sequitur than I already am. So I will sign out.