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Wednesday, September 15

Darwin made monkeys of us

Commenting on recent evidence that Darwin's theories on competition drove the survival of species may be wrong, Jesuit scholar, Fr. Robert Spitzer, also argued that the new evidence is nore compatable with the biblical account of creation than classical evolution theories.

News channels have been awash with new evidence by a PHD research group from Bristol University, that the drive for living space – not competition, as Darwin believed – drove the survival of species.


Working with fossils, to study evolutionary patterns over 400 million years of history, they found that the biggest evolutionary changes happened when animals moved into empty, not crowded or competitive areas.

That is at odds with Darwin's widely held views about survival of the fittest. Indeed, a survival of the fittest model would have resulted in entropy or devolution to fewer, dominant species limited to a smaller, more favorable habitat – consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.

I have often wondered how the same architect could design a very ugly, brutal lizard species and later design the diverse and pleasant to the eye species we now have on earth. It seems contradictory, but not so if one follows the new patterns of thinking.

Lizards are leather-skinned, still able in this age to withstand extremely hostile environments: scorching deserts and remote islands. They do not cope with very cold conditions. In the ages of lizards, conditions on earth were hot and humid. The fact that Eden was watered by a mist confirms the point. In those conditions, lizards thrived.

Alongside them lived large herbivores which, by virtue of size and diet, yearned for space. The lizards would have pushed them towards open spaces, to open up and seed new biospheres. Like bulldozers, the giants cleared and cultivated new ground so that the earth could be populated by diverse species.

When their work was done, God sent an ice-age to replace the prevailing species with new species, which were better suited to coexistence with other species and, more importantly, with man.

The ice-ages were arguably triggered by the development of biospheres, which would have changed the gas composition of the atmosphere and accelerated condensation of suspended water vapor, which in turn probably accounts for the great flood.

So, the instinct to seek space and shift away from threats rather than compete against the meat-eating lizards, if that is what has been observed in the study referred to above, would have served the will of the creator rather than the whim of random evolution. It reveals a more deliberate approach to the evolution of our world, driven by deeper, God-given instincts, not by the crudeness of mere one-upmanship.

The result is a model that is far more consistent with the bible and the Genesis account of the discrete phases or epochs of creation.


(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net

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