During the readings on natural selection I was wondering why I was assigned to read it in the first place. It appeared very random compared to what we had just been discussing, which was something like how we perceive the physical world is just our senses making sense of things. At least that’s something I got out of what we’ve been learning. One reason I think we may have been given the readings was to give people a better understanding about evolution in general. It also may have been to show creationist that they can be religious and don’t have to deny evolution. Although I was at the recent Richard Dawkins lecture and he definitely was saying believing in any religion and believing in evolution doesn’t really work out because they contradict each other.
Corbin B.
The reason we had these reading on evolution is that we want to address questions of how humans evolved and to do so it's nice to have some understanding of natural selection. Two of the distinguishing characteristics of humans are our language abilities and our complex moral codes governing social interactions. Both of these have some biological basis. It's good to have the general process down before we tackle the specific cases.
ReplyDeleteDawkins is emphatically anti-religious. While there are some belief systems that are in clear conflict with current science on some issues, most accept the reality of evolution without having to sacrifice their faith.