Incipient Speciation in Ensatina Salamanders

[houseisland]

Copyright Charles W. Brown Phd.



http://www.santarosa.edu/lifesciences2/ensatina2.htm


"Fossils! Fossils! Fossils! I win!" Lewis Black

[slgrieb]

Obviously, you're confused. God has just decided this critter could use some Intelligent Re-Design and is improving it because, well... the species needs it. See also: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512

[Green_Eyed]

Copyright Charles W. Brown Phd.



http://www.santarosa.edu/lifesciences2/ensatina2.htm


"Fossils! Fossils! Fossils! I win!" Lewis Black

What I want to know is how you found Santa Rosa Junior College?

[houseisland]

"Obviously, you're confused."

I deny this most strenuously. There is only one and room for only one Confus-ed.

Anyway, I was hoping someone would bite. Thanks Griebster. This forum was getting a little dead.


"What I want to know is how you found Santa Rosa Junior College?"

Actually I didn't find it so much as I found the ensatina salamanders. I have an interest natural history -- fond of amphibians and dragon flies.

"Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams."

Try SP6a.

[El_Squid]

And thus, we come to the conclusion that life and nature are dynamic processes, rather than stagnant absolutes. What amazes me is that the Catholic Church and the Pope were able to accept the concept of Evolution as acceptable and non-threatening to their belief system, while many other Christian Denominations/Sects can not.

[slgrieb]

Should say, houseisland, I find your posts lots of fun, and I think the forum has been more than a little dead lately myself.

El, I'm deep in the heart (well, perhaps a different body part really) of the Bible Belt, and around here there are a couple of statistics at which we really excel: teen pregnancy (just say "No! No! Don't stop!"), and Offering to Punch Out Heretics.

One of my buddies who is a Baptist minister recently held a class in which he discussed the history of the Bible in translation. He traced the history of the Book from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English and showed how biblical scholars had shown that some phrases in the King James version were due to transcription errors. A member of the congregation threatened to hit him because he was "sayin' that the Bible was in error!"

The most interesting experiences I have had as a Christian in a long time have been reading the Didache, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Collectively, these are some of the earliest writings in the Church, and provide real insight into the diversity of early Christianity (and contemporary Judaism). The Gospel of Thomas in particular reads like a string of Zen koans.

[El_Squid]

Ah, the Gnostic Bible, or the Lost Chapters!

I too live in the buckle of the Bible Belt and have in the past been involved in Free Will Baptist, Non-Denominational Fundementalism, the Moonies and several other "Christian" Sects and Denominations. Been a Sunday School teacher for several, for both adults and children. Had the pleasure of hearing a Southern Baptist minister proclaim the space shuttle disasters as God's punishment for trying to go to space, where we don't belong.

And, now I have returned to my cultural roots as a Catholic, where I feel comfortable. I guess I'll have to plow into the Gnostic Verses, if I am to stay current with the latest releases.

[confus-ed]

Should say, houseisland, I find your posts lots of fun, and I think the forum has been more than a little dead lately myself..

It's all this not mixing politics & anything else that we had to resort to due to the last Presidential Elections, makes the place 'less' - I don't like it, but I'm in a minority of one on the 'mod committee' & my suggestions to recombine the lounge & politico's have fallen on deaf ears

[slgrieb]

-ed, I understand how these things work, and I firmly believe there will always be subversive elements who will find ways to work around the formal structure. Always believed you are one of them. Compliment, BTW.

El, Thomas does indeed have strong elements of Gnosticism. but the Gospel of Mary Magadalene and the Didache also speak of a Church which is not concerned with formalism and central control. I'm certainly not the first commentator so say that the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire may have been the worst thing ever to happen to our religion. The essential concept I think, is that the early Church (even among those who knew Jesus) was divided on basic subjects such as whether Christ even had a physical body!

I would rather see Christ as a great Mystery than have Him shoe-horned into the narrow and shallow box that many fundamentalists espouse.

[confus-ed]

-ed .. will always be subversive elements who will find ways to work around the formal structure. Always believed you are one of them. Compliment, BTW..

He-he-he, there's definate reasons why you should 'push the envelope' with rules & main among those for me, is the notion that rules are written by idiots for idiots to keep all the idiots from being idiots ! So I'll have to stay 'subversive' thank you very much

Oh btw as I'm confus-ed, which topic are we actually wanting to talk about, evolution or 'church control' ?

[Platypus]

adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire may have been the worst thing ever to happen to our religion.

I think it probably was, although it doesn't seem that much of genuine Christianity was actually adopted - Roman religion was veneered over with a christian appearance, but underneath it was just the Roman State...

[El_Squid]

As with all things, once Christianity became "formalized" into a "religion", the spirit of the whole concept began to get lost. As far as I am concerned the key points made by Christ are rather simple and elegant: Love your God and Love your neighbor. The second point is the hardest and the one which would solve all of our problems, if we could just pull it off.

As for "organized religions", I agree with one of my High School math professors, "My preference of Church is red brick."

[edball]

As with all things, once Christianity became "formalized" into a "religion", the spirit of the whole concept began to get lost. As far as I am concerned the key points made by Christ are rather simple and elegant: Love your God and Love your neighbor. The second point is the hardest and the one which would solve all of our problems, if we could just pull it off.

As for "organized religions", I agree with one of my High School math professors, "My preference of Church is red brick."

I prefer white marble.

[houseisland]

Oh btw as I'm confus-ed, which topic are we actually wanting to talk about, evolution or 'church control' ?

My reason for posting the link to Chuck Brown’s nice little ensatina page was to provoke some interesting discussion here.

Dr. Brown pulls together a lot of research on the ensatina complex and summarizes it in a fairly simple and non-patronizing manner that is accessible to almost anyone.

In North America the issues of evolution (and a whole lot of other topics) and church control are becoming inseparable, as there are elements of society who seek to end the separation of church and state and further seek to impose a Taliban-like theocracy upon society at large. So the discussion of church and codicology (and Christian textual scholarship and epistemology in general) is not entirely off topic.

To me, evolution is an indisputable fact. I have on my desk a fossil of a 70 million-year-old or so ammonite, which I myself extracted from the earth. Ammonites no longer exist. Life and nature are not static. Things change.

Darwin’s theory of evolution seems problematic, however. Like all scientific theories, it is tested against evidence, and increasingly it seems to be full of holes. The problem is that there is probably not a single mechanism of evolution. I do not believe that Darwin is wrong, but neither do I believe that his theory explains all aspects of evolution. There is possibly some evidence that with very simple organisms, Lamark’s theory of the inheritance of environmentally acquired characteristics may have some validity. In fossil beds where there is good unbroken stratigraphy, as with mollusk fossil beds, we often do not see the gradual change or speciation that Darwin’s theory would predict; what we see instead is a sudden and apocalyptic (sudden and apocalyptic only in the sense of geological time and not in the sense of the human experience of time or in the sense of Old Testament time) disappearance of species and their replacement with new species. The neat text book illustrations of the “advancement” of the horse from primitive ancestors to the modern horse are complete rubbish – the path of evolution is not that simple and some of the more modern-looking fossils are actually older than some of the more primitive-looking ones. There is a German paleontologist, whose name I forget now, who has done a lot of work with antelope fossils in Africa. Her work questions the “survival of the fittest” concept (You know the one that is so important to right wing social-Darwinists -- sorry, I couldn’t resist the aside here). Her work suggests that the fittest are the first to perish in times of environmental upheaval since they are so specialized and that the generalists are the long-run survivors since they can exist in the margins of any environment. All these holes in Darwin’s theory discount his theory only as a monolithic-one-theory-fits-all explanation of the process. I do not, however, believe that the holes open the door to another blinkered monolithic “theory.”

[confus-ed]

.. All these holes in Darwin’s theory discount his theory only as a monolithic-one-theory-fits-all explanation of the process. ...

Have you actually read Darwin's work or are you relying on some summary ? It must be 20 odd years ago when I did, but I seem to think that, either in the Origin of Species or some other work by him, he acknowledges 'accident of event' when considering why certain species hadn't evolved at all, but become extinct..

But he-he-he, I really do like the comparison between certain bits of 'the bible belt' in the US with the taliban, most apt, & no doubt absolutely lost on 'em !!