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 advance the argument that God planted fossil evidence of evolution in the rocks to deceive people.

To which I reply:

"If - as you are claiming - God is a lying deceiver, what on Earth makes you think your Bible is not just more of the same?"

The goal of these articles is not to outright insult creationists - a useless undertaking at best - but to point out the obviousness of evolution in the course of life on Earth both from the fossil record and the obvious fact that the characteristics of plants and animals can change dramatically under natural selection and selection by humans (who would have believed that both Great Danes and Chihuahuas could be descended from the same ancestral wolves?)

Creationists advance arguments which superficially SOUND logical, but which on closer examination are definitely not.

One argument is: "If humans are descended from apes, why are there still apes?"

The first counterargument is: "Is your shirt made of cotton? If your shirt is made of cotton, then why is there still cotton?"

This isn't as flip an answer as it may seem. The cotton in your clothing represents a small portion of the cotton in the world at the time when some of it was subjected to conditions different from that of other contemporary cotton. Namely, it was sent to a factory in which it was processed into fibers and woven into cloth. That didn't happen to all the cotton in the world.

Similarly, evolution - simply change - occurs when mutations happen. These may die out (even favorable mutations can still be lost to sheer bad luck in the original organisms in which they occur). A mutation which is useful, or at least not harmful, may begin to spread out through the population. But not every descendant of the entire population of organisms will get the new gene. Not all humans have the genes for blond hair or blood type O. If groups of a species are isolated so no gene flow occurs between them, more mutations will happen and also be confined to their respective groups. Now, mutations are, to a first approximation, random events. A mutation which happens in one population of a species may not happen in another. And further mutations will occur. Some mutations in one group of protohorses may set them on the road to becoming modern horses. Another group, once identical, may start to move toward being zebras. Or donkeys. Every farmer who tries to establish a new variety of beet or chicken understands how this works. As the different groups become more different, it becomes harder to interbreed. African Cichlids which have only recently begun to explosively diversify can mostly still be interbred. Horses and donkeys have diverged to the point where interbreeding can produce viable embryos (mules) but are too different for mules to be reproductively competent. Likewise, lions and tigers can still be crossbred to produce "ligers". Further apart, and genetic mechanisms are too different even for functional embryos to form

Just me putting out some observations about scientific and technical matters which profoundly affect our lives and our futures but which most people aren't concerned about.

To kick off, one hears all manner of creationist nonsense about so-called objections to the theory of evolution (all of which have been thoroughly and repeatedly refuted, for all the good THAT does). Anyway, it may happen that one gets accosted with some of this tired old nonsense and is not at the moment prepared for a long argument. Here is the first of some brief replys.

"How do you know evolution is real? - YOU weren't there!"

Short reply:

"No, I wasn't there. And neither were you. And neither were the ancient Jewish priests who wrote the Old Testament.

But what WAS there were the rocks of the Earth, the spectra in starlight, and the earliest forms of the biochemistry we have today. All of these things may be observed today and the clues pieced together."