More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 6 - January 8, 2022
Have you heard of Mary Anning? Probably not. But I’m sure you’ve heard this: She sells seashells on the seashore, The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure, For if she sells seashells on the seashore, Then I’m sure she sells seashore shells. This children’s tongue twister was written about Mary Anning!
Did not know that the origin of this tongue twister was based on this early 19th fossil hunter and finder.
When the brilliant (yet notably crabby) twentieth-century evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane was asked what evidence would disprove evolution, he famously retorted “fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.”3 Haldane’s snarky response makes a valid point: the fossil record tells a story, and that story is predictable.
If all humans descended from one man and one woman in the last six to ten thousand years, what kinds of things would we expect to see? Blood donations would be simple—no need for cross-matching. Organ transplants? Piece of cake. No need to match donors with recipients, and no need for anti-rejection drugs. If all humans descend from a population of two, humans would be so genetically identical any sort of transplant would be a breeze.
In studies tackling this math problem from several different angles, the answer is always the same: modern humans descend from an ancestral population of about ten thousand individuals who lived around 150,000 years ago.21
Evolution is elegant. Evolution is creative. Evolution produced a creation that continues to create. Evolution is not inherently godless. Evolution does not diminish God as creator and sustainer of all there is. Nothing about evolution excludes God as the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.”22
