Rather than learning with books, some people prefer poking with sticks.  The Science Dude (TSD) has taught science classes to religious high school students many times in the past, and he can now infer good reasons for this kind of behavior.  As Figure A below illustrates, poking with sticks can be an effective learning method for non-secular sea urchins.

TSD has chosen the sea urchin to represent the theist or true believer, because sea urchins are resolute… nay, catatonic creatures who dwell mostly in shallow pools, clinging faithfully to their Rocks of Ages, and are capable of delivering nasty, pointed barbs to more recently evolved mammals who venture too close to their squishy cores.  Sea urchins also make excellent sushi, but only after they are pried up from their positions and filleted with a Ginsu knife sharpened on the whetstone of Science.

The sea urchin learning strategy has utility, however.  By poking out their many barbs – yet remaining underwater in large colonies, their embarrassing ignorance of affairs taking place above the surface is alleviated by safety in numbers, and the security of having like-minded associates.  Political status in the colony is also preserved, because even if a particular urchin’s barbs are dull-witted and miss their target completely, there is still bound to be laughter and applause from its immediate friends and neighbors.  Sea urchins don’t need to ask informed questions; they just poke with their sticks and hope an unwary scientist will trip over them.  In this manner the urchins expend very little energy in the learning process, and can often reap considerable rewards from a teacher who, after crying out in pain and astonishment, provides them with focused, individual attention.

Evolution itself (!) was assaulted recently by a prominent member of the sea urchin species, and TSD would like to offer a scientific tutorial in response, after rubbing his tender foot for a few moments.  The barbs were numerous and pointed, but two in particular “stuck out” and are abstracted (extracted?) below:

Ш  Now, here is a sticking point ignored by evolutionists but crucial to our discussion: Why would an early life form develop eyes (or some other, more primitive way of sensing light) when (without such sensors) it could not know there was light to be sensed? Why would it develop a means of hearing when it did not know there was sound?

Ш  It gets worse.  (TSD says “true that”). To believe this stuff, to believe an amoeba (or something less) evolved into man, you must also believe there were (over time) billions of amoeba making trillions of choices, most of which failed, until there was left only one clear line stretching back from now to then.

TSD is tempted to answer the first question with a question of his own, but that wouldn’t be very scientific.  (i.e. Why would people develop incredibly detailed religious fairy tales when they couldn’t possibly know there was a God?)  A better answer is provided by the camera phones sitting on the shelf at Wal-Mart.  How do the all those little camera pixels know what color to be?  They don’t know.  They don’t know anything, as a matter of fact.  Each pixel is tied to photo-sensitive capacitors,  arrays of which exist in any charge-coupled device (CCD).  When light impinges on these capacitors, which are thin-film structures produced by the same technology that makes computer chips, they respond by generating small electric charges.  Voila.  Lights… cameras… action.  Did electric charges perform any important functions in early life forms?  You bet your sweet bippy they did, because those early one-celled creatures (bacteria) still exist, and are still being studied today – a point which will be elaborated on in response to the second barb.

The earliest creatures on planet Earth didn’t know squat, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out when to get out of the sun, especially if you’re getting all charged up about it.  Many common bio-chemicals are sensitive to light, and when our little bacterium friends got sick and tired of frying to death every afternoon over millions of years, a beneficial genetic mutation finally produced some of these chemicals and caused one of them to say “Dudes… DUDES!  Over here!  There is SHADE over here!  I can just feel it.”  But alas, it was too late.  All his sunbathing bacterial fraternity brothers had perished, and only the one or two having light-sensitive molecules in their cellular goo (protoplasm) survived and reproduced like rabbits.  (Coppertone was invented a few billion years later, as a matter of fact, by the Malibu Beach descendants of those same little rascals.)

In all seriousness, the evolution of the eye is a fascinating saga, and The Science Dude will now direct your gaze to Steven Pinker, and his award-winning book How the Mind Works.  Besides having an entire section devoted to a discussion of the eye’s evolution, Pinker’s book reports the following scientific triumph:

The computer scientists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger simulated a three-layer slab of virtual skin resembling a light-sensitive spot on a primitive organism.  It was a simple sandwich made up of a layer of pigmented cells on the bottom, a layer of light-sensitive cells above it, and a layer of translucent cells forming a protective cover.  All the cells could undergo small mutations affecting their size and thickness.  In the simulation, the cells in the slab were allowed to mutate randomly, and after each round of mutation the program calculated the spatial resolution of an image projected onto the slab by a nearby object.  If a bout of mutations improved the resolution, the mutations were retained as the starting point for the next bout, as if the slab belonged to a lineage of organisms whose survival depended on reacting to (the shadows of) looming predators.

Satisfyingly, the model evolved into a complex eye right on the computer screen.  The slab indented and then deepened into a cup; the transparent layer thickened to fill the cup and bulged out to form a cornea.  Inside the clear filling, a spherical lens with a higher refractive index emerged in just the right place, resembling in many subtle details the excellent optical design of a fish’s eye.  The entire sequence in which flat skin became a complex eye took only four hundred thousand generations – a geological instant.

So much for sea urchin barb #1.  Sea urchin barb #2 claims that billions of amoebas are making trillions of choices – when the truth is, the only choices being made are by Nature itself, via Natural Selection.  One doesn’t choose, for example, to feel pain or have cancer, or be affected by the sun’s rays, or to be in an earthquake, or in the path of a hurricane.  Barb #2 also refers to a “clear line” stretching back in time.  There are no clear lines in evolution, only trees, and their associated branches.  Steven Pinker puts it thusly:

The religious doctrine was called the Great Chain of Being – amoeba to monkey to man – and even today many scientists thoughtlessly use words like “higher” and “lower” life forms and the evolutionary “scale” and “ladder.”  The parade of primates, from gangly-armed gibbon through stoop-shouldered caveman to upright modern man, has become an icon of pop culture, and we all understand what someone means when she says she turned down a date because the guy is not very evolved.

When an organism moves to a new environment, its lineage adapts accordingly, but the organisms who stayed behind in the original environment can prosper unchanged.  Life is a densely branching bush, not a scale or a ladder, and living organisms are at the tips of the branches, not on lower rungs.  Every organism alive today has had the same amount of time to evolve since the origin of life – the amoeba, the platypus, the rhesus macaque, and yes, Larry on the answering machine asking for another date.

No, TSD isn’t writing Pinker’s material, although it may sound like it.  Thanks for noticing.  And in conclusion, to any sea urchin skeptics in the audience:  keep poking with those sticks, because The Science Dude likes uni.

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