Speaking of...

I whined about evolution a lot yesterday, and with fairly good reason. This will be quick, but there's one thing that bothers me. And it has to do with evolution and the environment.

First: we humans (I say "we" loosely, please understand) are constantly worrying about the state of the environment. "Our children will live in a terrible world" we cry, "and in fact, everyone will have to use masks to breathe." "The atmosphere is being burned up by our stupidity, what shall become of us?"

Simple thought, people. We evolved, right? Well, I personally know I didn't evolve, but a lot of people out there sure think I did. So the whole point of evolving (as far as I can understand, though we've just recently proved that I don't understand much about evolution) is that we adapt to our circumstances, right? We grow longer beaks so we can eat those pesky bugs, grow more or less fur depending on whether or not our place of residence is warmer or cooler, and generally fix ourselves to fit in with our climates. Following?

So here's the thing I don't understand. If we're evolving with our environments, then won't we evolve with the global warming and pollution and everything? If I believed in evolution I'd figure, what's the difference? my children will be able to breath gasoline and still survive. Right?

Maybe that doesn't make sense, but best I can figure, the one goes with the other. I'm not exactly suggesting that we go out and burn gasoline just to speed up the "process" or anything, but I'm just saying.

But like I said yesterday, I am so glad I'm created by the Lord! What a lot of trouble it saves me! And as for environmentalism, I'm thankful that the Bible talks about being a good steward. I intend to live for the Lord, taking care of the body He gave me (it being a temple and all, good times), and the place He put me (Earth, in case nobody got where I was going with that).

But I'm not going to make a religion of the whole Earth thing. I'll leave that for those same confused people who think great-great-grandma Harriet looked the way she did because she came straight from a family of apes.

On the same note: has anyone noticed that Ken Ham looks an awful lot like a monkey himself? Sometimes I wonder how he can preach against evolution with a straight face. Though I love his work, regardless of the dubious looks. And for anyone who hasn't been to his Creation Museum, you should really go. It's amazing. Seriously.

Say what?

Sometimes I think I flunked out of Evolution one too many times. Last night at dinner, we were having a lively discussion of evolution (we have lively discussions regarding just about every subject, truth be told) and it turns out, I'm not smart enough to understand evolution after all. It all started when my brother brought up wolves, and how they're getting more dog-like as the years pass (darker fur, I guess), and little ol' me says something about evolution and breeding, and next thing I know, my dad's educating me about evolution, and how it "really" is just a series of complicated breeding patterns, after all.

I'd never really given it much thought, actually, about the process in and of itself. I usually get hung up at the very beginning of this totally nonsensical process, somewhere between the "big bang" and "protein soup" that we somehow all came out of.

But we weren't discussing that. My dad was trying to get through my thick skull the concept of advantages. As I currently understand it, evolution goes something like this: one generation gets the gene capable of creating a mutation, and a following generation gets the actual mutation, and if that sticks, then further generations get the actual change implemented within them.

But where I got hung up was the whole "if it sticks" part. I guess for the mutation to be passed along it has to have an advantage.

Here's where I asked such questions as "How does the body decide if it's an advantage or not? How does it know what to pass on?" And I'm pretty sure my parents decided right then and there that I must have flunked out of comprehensive thinking, as well.

Anyhow, I guess the advantage causes the newly mutated creature to live long enough to pass along their genes to the next generation. Oh. How was I supposed to know?

I guess that doesn't sound like a very big discovery, but it took about an hour and a half for me to understand all of that.

Well, most of our suppers take an hour and a half (eating, talking, and Bible reading all combined), but this one seemed extra long, due to the high level of confusion on my part. The only parts I understood for the first hour or so was our discussion of bacterial flagellum, thanks to some science-y video I saw that was somewhere along the lines of this.

When all was said and done, all I could do was thank the Lord that I know I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I was created by the Lord, and His handiwork is all over me. I'm not the product of some random mutation, I am a work of art.

Now, isn't that a whole lot better?

PS, I'm not saying that mutations don't happen in people (I mean, we've got all those hereditary diseases that the Lord sure didn't program into us), I'm just saying that we're not the product of cells mutating into frogs, and frogs into raccoons, and raccoons to monkeys, and monkeys into humans. I come from a long line (6,000 years or so) of humans. We started out this way, people, and we're messed up only because of sin. We're not upgrading as we go along. Seriously.

Oh, baby

The other day, while driving home from having spent the night with my cousin's children as my cousin's wife had a child, I heard something frightening on SRN News.

And no, saying "SRN News" isn't redundant (uhg, like ATM machine, or PIN number, or ISBN number, to name a few of my least favorites) because SRN stands for Salem Radio Network, not for Something-eR-other News, like I always thought.

Anyhow, on that day they were announcing that apparently they just decided in Sweden that you may abort your child for no other reason than that you don't like the baby's gender. Yeah, some woman wants a boy, so has aborted two babies (both girls, in case you didn't catch on) because, well, she already has two daughters, and doesn't want any more.

This is tragic, obviously, but even more odd to me was that I heard this news while driving home from my cousin's house, where they were rejoicing over the birth of their new daughter, yet anxious, because the coming weeks will show whether or not their child will have Cystic Fibrosis or not. They knew, when they were expecting, that their baby had a very high chance of having CF, but decided to wait until the baby was born to know for sure. It's been tough on them, I know, having this hanging over their heads, but they've decided to trust the Lord, regardless of what happens next.

What a contrast! It just struck me, especially on the heels of some weird stuff I'd personally been going through. Trusting the Lord is so difficult, but, for me, when I hear about the extreme cases--the people who take their circumstances into their own hands and try to cut God out of it completely--I realize how much the Lord knows best. That sounds simple, but in light of the ways He's been working in my life recently, that's about all I can even think to say about it. His wisdom is beyond my understanding, that's for sure.