Word: darwin
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Paul, a graduate student in New York City, and Donna, a financial adviser, are just two in a long, flourishing line of kissin' first cousins. Charles Darwin wed his cousin Emma and spawned 10 children, including four brilliant scientists. Albert Einstein's second wife Elsa was his first cousin. Queen Victoria said "I do" to hers. So have millions worldwide. In parts of Saudi Arabia, 39% of all marriages are between first cousins...
...Darwin anticipated such doubts, and admitted in The Origin of Species that the eye at first seems to imply an intelligent designer. But then he traced a scenario for the step-by-step evolution of a mere "nerve sensitive to light" into a "living optical instrument...
...doubts in new bottles. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, invented the label "irreducibly complex" for structures that could not have arisen incrementally. And rather than dwell on the eyeball, he applies the term to such microscopic entities as the human blood-clotting mechanism. In his book Darwin's Black Box, Behe says this mechanism, involving more than a dozen proteins, could hardly have emerged full-blown in a single mutation. Yet it couldn't have been built one protein at a time, he says, because without any one protein it would be useless...
Behe's claim set Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biologist who is both a Darwinian and a Christian, to thinking. In his book Finding Darwin's God, he argues that if you look at blood clotting in various species you can see how the human version could have evolved one step at a time...
...adherents may be right to say that some sort of divinity got the evolutionary ball rolling, and that principles designed by that divinity keep it rolling. But they're wrong to think they have to attack poor Charles Darwin in order to make this claim...