I was thinking the other day about how hard it is to make a fossil. First, your organism has to die someplace where it won't just be eaten immediately -- either by a predator, a scavenger or by the myriad bugs, bacteria and fungi that specialize in returning plants and animals to the biomass. Then it has to lie undisturbed for somewhere between 100,000 and a million years while just the right amount of water, suffused with just the right amounts of the right chemicals, leaches away the remaining organic structure and deposits durable (well, reasonably durable) minerals in its place.
At any time during those millennia, a protofossil can be destroyed by some animal burrowing through it, by a flood that washes it away and crumbles it to bits, by a trickle of the wrong kind of water, by any living thing that finds it and can use it as food or roughage. As a result, the best fossil records are typically found in places that were least hospitable to life back in the eon. If something died where other creatures lived, it got eaten by those creatures, large or small. End of story.
The only places where fossils had a chance of forming were deserts of one kind or another -- sandy, rocky places, toxic mudflats, ponds or lakes full of anoxic or poisonous water, tar pits, far ocean depths not yet colonized by life. Some unlucky creature wanders out into the waste (or falls there or is dragged or blown by current or storm) and dies out of ken of the great web of recycled life. In the Gobi Desert, for example paleontologists found the skeletons of dinosaurs engulfed by sandstorms even as they were trying to kill each other.
There are also fragmentary fossils, of course -- sometimes a few bones or a tooth make it out of the eating zone before they're destroyed. But in general, it's a miracle that fossils form at all. Which is why my blood boils every time I hear about some creationist blowhard going on about how the fossil record doesn't prove anything because it's incomplete. It's like watching someone try to argue that the New York Times isn't a daily newspaper because you can't go out to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and dig up a copy of every single edition since 1894.
Such creationists put me in mind of sleazy lawyers cross-examining witnesses and trying to get them to recant identifications of a perpetrator's face because they can't also say what color socks the perp was wearing. Instead of reverence for the confluence of natural processes that bring fossils to us, they promote some kind of bizarre notion that all the preserved bones and bodies of ancient creatures were put in the ground as some kind of test to see just how far human beings can go to deny the evidence of their senses and the logical conclusions of their minds.
Which brings me to the Intelligent Design folks, the most recent of the conspiracies to prevent the teaching of evolution. All of their arguments about how improbable it is that evolution could have come up with some configuration of body parts or some particular protein seem to boil down to "I can't understand how this works, so God must have done it directly."
And that's just wrong. Not just factually wrong (which it is, according to every bit of evidence and logic that many thousands of people have been able to cajole out of the world around them for the past couple of centuries) but wrong because it reeks of hubris, aka the sin of Pride. A few not-very-bright people set themselve up as arbiters of exactly how the almighty (assuming one exists) must have accomplished the current state of the world, all because they have neither the intellectual understanding nor the faith to believe that the task could have been done in some other way that they can't comprehend.
Jesuit scientists (the Vatican has a fine astronomical observatory, for example) believe the the world is a great book, and that one way to live their faith is to read that book and understand, as far as they are able, the marvelous works of its author. Even if you don't agree with their attribution of the text, you can share their awe at the volume itself -- the universe really is an amazing place. And the degree to which human beings have been able to comprehend it, working from what little information filters down to this tiny dust mote in the middle of infinity, is perhaps even more amazing.
But the "Intelligent Design" folks, having barely skimmed the first few pages of the book that is the universe, think they know how it all comes out. It's too hard for them -- for whatever reason-- to follow the langage and the argument that have actually been written, so they substitute their own version and slam the book shut. Their creator gave humanity this truly remarkable universe to explore, and the intelligence and creativity needed to explore it, and instead of approaching it with the reverence and determination it demands, they just spit on the gift and toss it on the ground like the Duke of Gloucester. "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Jehovah?"
Words fail me.
Posted by wallich at July 5, 2004 06:38 PM