Fire and Knowledge

Without humans to plant it every spring, corn would have disappeared from the earth in a matter of a few years. The novel cob-and-husk arrangement that makes corn such a convenient grain for us renders the plant utterly dependent for its survival on an animal in possession of the opposable thumb needed to remove the husk, separate the seeds, and plant them.

Plant a whole corncob and watch what happens: If any of the kernels manage to germinate, and then work their way free of the smothering husk, they will invariably crowd themselves to death before their second set of leaves has emerged. More than most domesticated plants (a few of whose offspring will usually find a way to grow unassisted), corn completely threw its lot in with humanity when it evolved its peculiar husked ear. Several human societies have seen fit to worship corn, but perhaps it should be the other way around: For corn, we humans are the contingent beings. So far, this reckless-seeming act of evolutionary faith in us has been richly rewarded.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), pp. 26-27

The quest to eradicate pests with DDT and similar poisons has been a colossal failure. Each year more than 2 million tons of pesticides are used in the United States alone. Americans use 20 times more pesticides today than they did in 1945, even though the newest pesticides are up to 100 times more toxic. And yet the fraction of crops lost to insects has risen from 7 percent to 13 percent—thanks in large part to the resistance insects have evolved.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 202

Though we insist on speaking of the “invention” of agriculture as if it were our idea, like double-entry bookkeeping or the lightbulb, in fact it makes just as much sense to regard agriculture as a brilliant (if unconscious) evolutionary strategy on part of the plants and animals involved to get us to advance their interests. By evolving certain traits we happen to regard as desirable, these species got themselves noticed by the one mammal in a position not only to spread their genes around the world, but to remake vast swaths of the world in the image of the plants’ preferred habitat.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), pp. 23-24

Corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 23

The distinctions that we conventionally use to divide the species into races—skin color, hair, and the shape of faces—are controlled only by a few genes. The vast majority of variable genes do not respect so-called racial boundaries. There is far more variation within any given population of humans than between populations. If all the humans on earth were wiped out except a single tribe in a remote New Guinea valley, the survivors would still preserve 85 percent of the genetic variability of our entire species.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, pp. 81-82

Mutations are catapults with no sense of aim.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 79

A common claim, stated often enough to merit the label of “urban legend,” holds that no such transitional forms exist and that the paleontologists, dogmatically committed to evolution, have either withheld this information from the public or have claimed that the fossil record is too imperfect to preserve the intermediates that must once have existed.

In fact, although the fossil record is indeed spotty (a problem with nearly all historical documents, after all), the assiduous work of paleontologists have revealed numerous elegant examples of sequences of intermediary forms (not just single “in between” specimens) joining ancestors in proper temporal order to very different descendants—as in the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammalian ancestors through several intermediate stages, including Ambulocetus (literally, the walking whale), the evolution of birds from small running dinosaurs, of mammals from reptilian ancestors, and a threefold increase in brain size during the last 4 million years of human evolution.

–Stephen Jay Gould in Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. x

If God is outside of nature, then He is outside of space and time. In that context, God could in the moment of creation of the universe also know every detail of the future. That could include the formation of the stars, planets, and galaxies, all of the chemistry, physics, geology, and biology that led to the formation of life on earth, and the evolution of humans, right to the moment of your reading this book—and beyond. In that context, evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified. Thus, God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process.

–Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), p. 205