The ugliest newsmaker of the month so far is Tiktaalik roseae, a fossil dating back 375 million years.
Creative reconstructions of the beast show it with a broad head and snout, like a crocodile, with eyes on top rather than the sides, a sort of a neck and “fins” that had “wrists,” or at least the beginnings of hand bones. Several of the things were found in the Canadian Arctic. They were 4 to 9 feet long.
The scientists who found them said this was clearly a “missing link” between fish and four-legged land-dwellers.
In other words, it was an example of the very thing that creationists say is not just missing but nonexistent, and whose absence at several points, most notably between ape and man, proves the fallibilities of Darwinian evolution.
Like most things in today’s contentious world, this debate has political implications. On one side are those whose certitude, often religious, rejects evidence that contradicts their world view. On the other are those who are so willing to accept new information that they bobble about like rubber ducks in a Jacuzzi of uncertainty.
Informed commentary said discovery of this “fishapod” was a blow to the creationists and the more sophisticated “intelligent design” advocates, who argue that life on Earth is too complicated to have happened by accident. Someone – Some One – must have had a Plan.
This debate, between certitude and skepticism, is at the heart of the culture war that defines politics today. Each side has sought to recruit science. But science is not so black and white.
Consider the nature of the Creator. Why do we presume that the highest expression of reason and intelligence is an entity that resembles Homo sapiens? Infinitely older and wiser, of course, but essentially a smart guy with a beard.
Many years ago, in Scientific American, there was a thoughtful piece that explored the nature of God from a mathematical perspective. It went something like this:
Consider the essence of anything. A rock, a tree, water, air, snails, germs, eyeballs, whales – whatever, including the human being.
Each can be separated into chemicals, and chemicals into molecules. One can actually see large molecules in some fantastic electronic microscopes. Molecules consist of atoms, which cannot be seen, but merely detected and surmised by the mathematical patterns they create.
And atoms can be further reduced into protons and bosons and mesons, oh my. These particles are not like grains of sand that can be rubbed between the fingers. Those tiny grains of sand themselves consist of untold numbers of molecules and atoms and their constituent particles.
So what are those particles? That’s where the whole sense of reality begins to break down. They’re best described as points in time, oscillating.
And at each point in that ephemeral oscillation, there’s a chance that there is another place where the oscillating thing exists simultaneously – or oscillates off in a different direction. So among the countless billions of insubstantial things vibrating in time, there are many times that number of choices for things to be, places to go, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.
If you break things down to the very smallest thing imaginable – or, as far as most people are concerned, unimaginable – there’s really nothing there at all. And there are unimaginable numbers of nothingness things possible.
Yet something keeps us all on the same page, rooted in the same reality instead of scattered among billions upon billions of separate realities. Perhaps, concluded this long-ago essay in Scientific American, that something could be described as God.
There is much in science that is harder to comprehend than the beliefs underlying religion. When it goes beyond hard evidence – such as missing links and chemical reactions – to the world of pure logic and advanced mathematics, it starts to get away from us. It requires a certain amount of faith, and it makes it seem that the more we find out, the less we really know.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
