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Clay
14 years ago
Picking up again on a series of very short comments on the processes of evolution (which occur throughout the Universe and human society at all levels).
Creationists argue that the Bible states that the first human being was made of clay. However, human beings are NOT made of clay. Clay is composed of tiny grains of minerals, mostly aluminum, silicon and oxygen. There is very little silicon and essentially no aluminum in the human body (aluminum is extremely toxic and we have efficient mechanisms in our digestive tracts to resist absorbing it). And humans are not composed of microscopic grains of rock. Humans are composed of exactly the same chemicals as all other Earthly life - amino acids, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates, etc - arranged in exactly the same patterns (simple repeating molecules polymerized into chains).
Take a handful of clay and put it on the ground. Wait days and weeks. Not much happens. It doesn't go away.
Put a human body on the ground and wait days or weeks. The flesh is consumed by microorganisms and quickly disperses. Not the same stuff at all.
Now, some thinkers have pointed out that clay minerals can act as sites for catalyzing some of the above-mentioned polymerizations. Seeking to preserve the Biblical account, they suggest that such processes may be the basis for God creating living things, as a more technical description of what the Deity was doing given in Genesis. Maybe, but frankly I find that stretching things. Early Prebiotic reactions were doubtless VERY complex, with reactions occurring in open water, in layers of precipitated organic sludge on shallow seabeds, in the sunshine on damp beaches, in the lightning-shocked atmosphere (and precipitating in rain) and on the slopes of hydrothermal vents. In that constant turnover of material over the whole world, with clumps of molecules from all these sources ceaselessly mixed together, with seas increasingly enriched in those combinations of molecules which happened to be more stable than others, life arose almost inevitably.
As an aside, I have read accounts fundamentalists who demanded we believe that men have one less rib than women because Genesis says that man made woman from a rib (bone marrow sample) from Adam. In spite of the fact that ribs can be counted. To that, I would reply that if God molded you out of clay, shouldn't you be covered with giant fingerprints?
Creationists argue that the Bible states that the first human being was made of clay. However, human beings are NOT made of clay. Clay is composed of tiny grains of minerals, mostly aluminum, silicon and oxygen. There is very little silicon and essentially no aluminum in the human body (aluminum is extremely toxic and we have efficient mechanisms in our digestive tracts to resist absorbing it). And humans are not composed of microscopic grains of rock. Humans are composed of exactly the same chemicals as all other Earthly life - amino acids, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates, etc - arranged in exactly the same patterns (simple repeating molecules polymerized into chains).
Take a handful of clay and put it on the ground. Wait days and weeks. Not much happens. It doesn't go away.
Put a human body on the ground and wait days or weeks. The flesh is consumed by microorganisms and quickly disperses. Not the same stuff at all.
Now, some thinkers have pointed out that clay minerals can act as sites for catalyzing some of the above-mentioned polymerizations. Seeking to preserve the Biblical account, they suggest that such processes may be the basis for God creating living things, as a more technical description of what the Deity was doing given in Genesis. Maybe, but frankly I find that stretching things. Early Prebiotic reactions were doubtless VERY complex, with reactions occurring in open water, in layers of precipitated organic sludge on shallow seabeds, in the sunshine on damp beaches, in the lightning-shocked atmosphere (and precipitating in rain) and on the slopes of hydrothermal vents. In that constant turnover of material over the whole world, with clumps of molecules from all these sources ceaselessly mixed together, with seas increasingly enriched in those combinations of molecules which happened to be more stable than others, life arose almost inevitably.
As an aside, I have read accounts fundamentalists who demanded we believe that men have one less rib than women because Genesis says that man made woman from a rib (bone marrow sample) from Adam. In spite of the fact that ribs can be counted. To that, I would reply that if God molded you out of clay, shouldn't you be covered with giant fingerprints?
Now we have genetic engeneering and are doing nothing with it. Unless we can, for example, walk into the local pharmacy and get a shot that will remove the dna command to grow wisdom teeth that will continue to be my default opinion.
As for creationism I expect that it's a miscommunication over
"Where did we come from?" "I dunno. (points) Over there?" Our grade school students know more then most of the grown adults up to the end of the dark ages. Sure, there were advanced tradesmen who knew how to make glue out of geese or how to create sailing ships out of a few logs and a deer skeleton, but they believed in brownies/spirits just the same as the previously mentioned schoolkids believe in the easter bunny.
When people first began to be curious about things, they were not born with any innate sense of abstract logic or any tools for analytic thought. To the early thinkers, it was obvious that the world must have been made by somebody - didn't huts and spears and pots exist because someone made them? by analogy, if there were stars and trees and animals, somebody must have made them. Weren't tribal units built around families? Then whomever made the mountains and rivers must be a family as well, so invariably the earliest pantheons of gods were families. When loved ones died, it was natural for the survivors to dream about them. They had no concept of REM sleep or dreamwork or theories of memory-consolidation. If they saw the dead in their dreams, then the dead must, they reasoned, still be alive. Above all, the first gods were scaled-up people. As such, they had people's interests and wants. They wanted sacrifices of food and goods which they could use, like earthly leaders, they wanted respect and obeisance.
That's where the snakes came in. It didn't take con men long to realize that they could claim to have some special relationship with the gods. And, sadly, humans seem especially gullible to this con. From then on, anyone who could establish themselves as seemingly working for the gods - and it's scary how little persuasion that seems to take - they could exercise their control-freakery to its maximum. By the crudest appeal to the basest emotions, priests of every stripe have made themselves dictators over others.