Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...board--that large-scale evolution must be dubious because the process has not been directly observed--smacks of absurdity and only reveals ignorance about the nature of science. Good science integrates observation with inference. No process that unfolds over such long stretches of time (mostly, in this case, before humans appeared), or at an infinitude beneath our powers of direct visualization (subatomic particles, for example), can be seen directly. If justification required eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time--no geology, no ancient human history either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard bony evidence...
...only is a new human species next to impossible, but technology has essentially eliminated natural selection as well. During prehistory, only the fittest individuals and species survived to reproduce. Now strong and weak alike have access to medicine, food and shelter of unprecedented quality and abundance. "Poor peasants in the Third World," says University of Michigan anthropologist Milford Wolpoff, "are better off than the Emperor of China was 1,000 years...
...natural world won't necessarily have evolutionary consequences. Argues Wolpoff: "We're not going to [adapt to] the next ice age by changing our physical form. We'll set off an atom bomb or set up a space mirror or whatever [to control climate]." Manipulation of the human genome, meanwhile, will eventually let us change the basic characteristics of our species to order. Evolution by natural selection could be replaced, perhaps chillingly, with evolution by human intervention...
...their allies to restrict or eliminate the teaching of evolution in public schools--a misguided effort that our courts have quashed at each stage, and that saddens both scientists and most theologians. No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion--for these two great tools of human understanding operate in complementary (not contrary) fashion in their totally separate realms: science as an inquiry about the factual state of the natural world, religion as a search for spiritual meaning and ethical values...
...purpose" of our lives). These last two questions--and what more important inquiries could we make?--lie firmly in the domains of religion, philosophy and humanistic study. Science and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different...