Deep Time
- From: "Lance" <lachenicht@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 23 Aug 2005 04:04:18 -0700
New York Times
August 23, 2005
Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found
several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old -
some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far.
Those kinds of numbers are always a little daunting. Ever since I was a
boy in a public elementary school in Iowa, I've been learning to face
the eons and eons that are embedded in the universe around us.
I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean,
in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years
old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils
are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly
modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old.
The truth of these numbers has the same effect on me as watching the
night sky in the high desert. It fills me with a sense of nonspecific
immensity. I don't think I'm alone in this.
One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our
inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial
and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising because our
own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard enough to come to
terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of
comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a
major impediment to understanding evolution.
It's been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first
originated on this planet. That is not an unimaginable number in
itself, if you're thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or
grains of sand. But 3.5 billion years of biological history is
different. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by
one. They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all
the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time.
That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in
which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved. It is time that
has allowed the making of us.
The idea of such quantities of time is extremely new. Humans began to
understand the true scale of geological time in the early 19th century.
The probable depth of cosmological time and the extent of the history
of the human species have come to light only within our own lifetimes.
That is a lot to absorb and, not surprisingly, many people refuse to
absorb it. Nearly every attack on evolution - whether it is called
intelligent design or plain creationism, synonyms for the same
faith-based rejection of evolution - ultimately requires a
foreshortening of cosmological, geological and biological time.
Humans feel much more content imagining a world of more human
proportions, with a shorter time scale and a simple narrative sense of
cause and effect. But what we prefer to believe makes no difference.
The fact that life on Earth has arrived at a point where it is possible
for humans to have beliefs is due to the steady ticking away of eons
and the trial and error of natural selection.
Evolution is a robust theory, in the scientific sense, that has been
tested and confirmed again and again. Intelligent design is not a
theory at all, as scientists understand the word, but a well-financed
political and religious campaign to muddy science. Its basic
proposition - the intervention of a designer, a k a God - cannot be
tested. It has no evidence to offer, and its assumptions that humans
were divinely created are the same as its conclusions. Its objections
to evolution are based on syllogistic reasoning and a highly selective
treatment of the physical evidence.
Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a
personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means
discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some
45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it -
was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past
10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of
education.
The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that
failure. To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a
debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective,
there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry
victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so
many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation.
The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design,
is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in
the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a
destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart
from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the
moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same
right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here.
There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral
origins we share with all of life.
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