Highly Recommended: Peter Wood on Evolution

Peter Wood's article in NRO is one of the most balanced and articulate summaries on Evolution, evolution and Creationism I've ever read. Especially interesting to me is the admission that portions of big-E Evolution are just as speculative, ultimately unprovable and doctrinaire as any part of Creationism.

For the record, I believe that the portion of Genesis wherein it is written that God molded Adam from clay is metaphor--indicating, perhaps that He imbued a creature made of meat with a spirit after his image. I believe in dinosaurs, even if they weren't mentioned in the Bible. I certainly believe without a doubt that finch's beaks change from age to age--small-e evolution in action.

What I do not believe is that a finch ever becomes anything other than a little-bit-different looking finch, and not say, a raptor when times are really tough, and there just aren't any seeds to crack with the old beak style, and a softer, meatier source of food just becomes too tempting to ignore.

Bully for you if you believe that--or something very like it--but take a read of Peter Wood's article and see if you can't admit that it is indeed just a belief.

UPDATE: I picked up at least one reader from another site linking this one. The article states that Wood's concept of big-E Evolution is a strawman constructed by Wood. I'm not so sure about that. While I'll certainly agree that biological scientists may not hold a view like "Big-E" Evolution, it is widely held in America. Indeed it is the orthodox "scientific!" view. Any heretic that would contradict that view is held up for ridicule (see: Kansas Board of Education, labeling textbooks).