Religion and Science Do Not Conflict

Many people find the topic of evolution and religion troubling and confusing. Some were raised in very strict churches that preached that evolution is atheistic and that to even think about the evidence of evolution is sinful. Fundamentalists have long tried to drive a wedge between traditional Christians and science, arguing that their interpretation of the Bible is the only one and that anyone who accepts the evidence for evolution is an atheist. But this is not true. The Catholic Church,...

 Summary of the Scope's "Monkey Trial"

The trial itself was originally planned as a publicity stunt by the town fathers of Dayton, Termessee. Anxious to gamer attention and to provide a test case to challenge the re¬ cently passed Tennessee Butler Act, or "monkey laws" that banned the teaching of evolution, the civic leaders recruited a local high school teacher, John T Scopes, to be their guinea pig. Scopes volunteered to take time off from teaching gym to teach biology for one day so that he could test the law, although later h...

 Cosmic Dust Raining on the Earth

Morris is fond of citing figures that indicate that about five million metric tonnes of cosmic dust falls on the earth each year. He calculates that over five billion years, we should have accumulated a layer of dust 55 m (182 feet) thick! But if you do the calculation correctly (which Morris does not), it amounts to only a shoebox full of dust over an entire square kilometer. This is so minuscule it can barely be detected even in the best sedimentary records from deep-sea cores, which are un...

 Darwin and Abraham Lincoln Were Born on the Same Day

Charles Darwin (fig. 4.1) was bom on the same day as Abraham Lincoln—February 12,1809. Like Lincoln, he was a liberating force for humankind, but instead of freeing people from slavery, he freed biology from the bondage of supernaturalism. Philosophers of science have long pointed to Darwinian evolution as the greatest scientific revolution within biology, comparable to the role of Newton's or Einstein's revolutionary ideas in physics or the plate tectonics revolution in geology. Before Dar...

 The Lunar Society

In 1764, the Lunar Society (so named because they met for dinner on the Monday night nearest the full moon; they called themselves the "Lunatics") was formed it in Birmingham and promoted new scientific and technological ideas. The original founders included Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather), William Small (Jefferson's mentor), and the industrialist Matthew Boulton. Soon the "Lunatics" included many of the great minds in Britain (including Benjamin Franklin when he visited). In Sc...

 What It Means to be a Scientist

In reality, scientists are just people like you and me. Most of us don't wear lab coats (I don't) or work with bubbling beakers or sparking van de Graf generators (unless they are chemists or physicists who actually work with that equipment). Most scientists are not geniuses either. It is true that, on average, scientists tend to be better educated than the typical person on the street, but that education is a necessity to learn all the information that allows a scientist to make discoveries....