William Lane Craig (born August 23, 1949[1]) is an American analytic philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist.[2] He works in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of time, and the defense of Christian theism.[3] He revived interest in theKalām cosmological argument[citation needed] with his 1979 publication of The Kalām Cosmological Argument, an argument for the existence of God with origins in medieval Islamic scholasticism.[2][4]
Craig has authored or edited over 30 books, including The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (1980), Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (with Quentin Smith, 1993), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.
Prof. William Lane Craig claims that creationism is an embarrassment, but still insists on all humanity being children of Adam and Eve, to keep his idea of Original Sin.
I believe that many of us are not direct descendants of Adam and Eve, who existed just 6000 years ago and Original Sin was a creation of St. Paul, which has been refuted not only by common ancestry of all life forms but also by principles of heredity.
An easy denial of Craig’s unscientific view would be a recent book on evolution, which closely examines our relationship with Chimpanzees, gorillas and other primates and what it means in terms of science and time frame of different human generations:
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Prof. Richard Dawkins (Sep 2, 2005)
Now, I link some of my writings on this issue and then 2 book reviews of The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, a brief and a more detailed one.
Darwinian Evolution: Islam or Christianity?
Brief Review
The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dawkins’ Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty “rendezvous points” where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims swells into a vast crowd as we join first with other primates, then with other mammals, and so on back to the first primordial organism. Dawkins’ brilliant, inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way. It also lets him shed bright new light on the most compelling aspects of evolutionary history and theory: sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical dispersal, and more. The Ancestor’s Tale is at once a far-reaching survey of the latest, best thinking on biology and a fascinating history of life on Earth. Here Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are, how astonishing our history, and how intimate our relationship with the rest of the living world.
A Detailed Review from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Ancestor’s Tale | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Author(s) | Richard Dawkins |
| Subject(s) | Evolutionary biology |
| Publisher | Boston: Houghton Mifflin |
| Publication date | 2004 |
| Pages | 673 |
| ISBN | 0-618-00583-8 |
| OCLC Number | 56617123 |
| Dewey Decimal | 576.8 22 |
| LC Classification | QH361 .D39 2004 |
| Preceded by | A Devil’s Chaplain |
| Followed by | The God Delusion |
The Ancestor’s Tale (subtitled A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life) is a 2004 popular science book by Richard Dawkins, with contributions from Dawkins’ research assistant Yan Wong. It follows the path of humans backwards through evolutionaryhistory, meeting humanity’s cousins as they converge on common ancestors. The book was nominated for the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books.
Contents[hide] |
Synopsis
Cladogram showing relationship between mammalian species as recounted in the book
The narrative is structured as a pilgrimage, with all modern animals following their own path through history to the origin of life. Humans meet their evolutionary cousins at rendezvous points along the way, the points at which the lineage diverged. At each point Dawkins attempts to infer, from molecular and fossil evidence, the probable form of the most recent common ancestor and describes the modern animals that join humanity’s growing travelling party. This structure is inspired byGeoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales.
The pilgrimage visits a total of 40 “rendezvous points” from rendezvous zero, the most recent common ancestor of all of humanity, to rendezvous 39, eubacteria, the ancestor of all surviving organisms. Though Dawkins is confident of the essential shape of this phylogenetic taxonomy, he enters caveats on a small number of branch points where a compelling weight of evidence had not been assembled at the time of writing.
At each rendezvous point, Dawkins recounts interesting tales concerning the cousin animals which are about to join the band of pilgrims. Every newly recruited species, genus or family has its own peculiar features, often ones that are relevant to human anatomy or otherwise interesting for humans. For instance, Dawkins discusses why the axolotl never needs to grow up, how new species come about, how hard it is to classify animals, and why our fish-like ancestors moved to the land. These peculiar features are studied and analyzed using a newly introduced tool or method from evolutionary biology, carefully woven into a tale to illustrate how the Darwinian theory of evolution explains all diversity in nature.
A highly resolved Tree Of Life, based on completely sequenced genomes.[1][2]
Even though the book is best read sequentially, every chapter can also be read independently as a self-contained tale with an emphasis on a particular aspect of modern biology. As a whole, the book elaborates on all major topics in evolution.
Dawkins also tells personal stories about his childhood and time at university. He talks with fondness about a tiny bushbaby he kept as a child in Malawi (Nyasaland). He described his surprise when he learned that the closest living relatives to thehippos are the whales.
The book was produced in two hardback versions: a British one with extensive colour illustrations (by Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and an American one with a reduced number of black-and-white illustrations (by Houghton Mifflin). Paperback versions and an abridged audio version (narrated by Dawkins and his wife Lalla Ward) have also been published.
The book is dedicated to Dawkins’ friend and mentor, population geneticist John Maynard Smith, who died shortly before the book went to press.
List of rendezvous points
Dawkins uses the term concestor—coined by Nicky Warren—for the most recent common ancestor at each rendezvous point. At each rendezvous point, we meet the concestor of ourselves and the listed species or collection of species. This does not mean that the concestor was much like those creatures; after the “rendezvous”, our fellow “pilgrims” have had as much time to evolve and change as we have. Only creatures alive at the time of the book’s writing join us at each rendezvous point. Except for a few special cases, numerous extinct species and families such as the dinosaurs are excluded from the pilgrimage.
Prologue
| rendezvous point | Time | Significant event | Story |
|---|---|---|---|
| n/a | 0.01 mya | Neolithic Revolution | The Farmer’s Tale describes the Neolithic Revolution |
| n/a | 0.04 mya | Great Leap Forward | The Cro-Magnon’s Tale describes the Great Leap Forward. |
[edit]Primates
| rendezvous point | Time | Joining party | Story |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | All Humankind | The Tasmanian‘s Tale illustrates the identical ancestors point starting from which all living people trace exactly the same set of ancestors back in time. | |
| Eve’s Tale touches upon coalescent theory, Mitochondrial Eve, Y-chromosomal Adam and polymorphism. The story ends with a speculation that the ABO blood group system in humans and chimps are examples of trans-specific polymorphism; a type-B human may actually be more closely related to type-B chimp than type-B human is related to type-A human, from the perspective of the genes (or alleles) responsible for the antigens. | |||
| The Ergast‘s Tale recounts how a mutated form of the FOXP2 gene could have allowed Homo ergaster to acquire language. | |||
| The Handyman’s Tale explains how Homo habilis acquired high ‘brain to body mass ratio‘, at the same time introducing logarithmic scale and scatterplot as tools for scientific studies. | |||
| Little Foot‘s Tale examines how hominid first learned to walk on two legs. | |||
| 1 | 6 mya | Chimpanzees(Pan) | Human pilgrims join their evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos. |
| 2 | 7 mya | Gorillas (Gorilla) | The Gorilla‘s Tale considers human’s changing attitude towards the great apes, ending with a discussion on racism, speciesism and the Great Ape Project. |
| 3 | 14 mya | Orangutans(Pongo) | The Orangutan‘s Tale introduces the principle of parsimony and its use in construction of family tree (cladogram) of species. Orangutan is the last of the great apes to join the pilgrimage. |
| 4 | 18 mya | Gibbons(Hylobatidae) | The Gibbon‘s Tale further elaborates on neighbor-joining, parsimony and textual criticism techniques used to construct cladograms. When simple principle of parsimony proves inadequate to handle ‘long branch attraction‘ problems caused by convergence and reversion, the phylogenetic tree (phylogram) and computational phylogenetic methods such as maximum likelihood analysis are introduced. The tale ends with yet another example of trans-specific polymorphism: sexual dimorphism; the sex-determining SRY has never been in female bodies long since gibbons and humans diverged. This serves to highlight the fact that different phylogenetic trees can be created by tracing different sets of genes; the one mainstream ‘species tree’ is nothing more than a summary of multitude of gene trees, a ‘majority vote’ among gene trees. Gibbon is the last ape to join the pilgrimage. |
| 5 | 25 mya | Old World Monkeys(Cercopithecidae) | Old World monkeys, being in the same Catarrhini clade as apes, are closer cousins to apes than to New World monkeys. Old World monkeys are sometimes called the ‘tailed apes’. |
| 6 | 40 mya | New World Monkeys(Platyrrhini) | The Howler Monkey‘s Tale calls attention to the critical role of gene duplication in evolution. While our remote vertebrate ancestors possessed trichromatic vision, our nocturnal, warm-blooded, mammalianancestors lost one of three cones in the retina at the time of dinosaurs. This is why fish, reptiles and birds are trichromatic while all mammals with the exception of apes and New World monkeys are strictly handicapped dichromats. Because color vision is of paramount importance to diurnal animals that eat ripe fruits, apes and New World monkeys regained tri-color vision independently via chromosomal translocation. In apes, trichromacy resulted from true duplication of the opsin gene. New World monkeys first achieved trichromacy in its female population by producing two alleles (green and red) for the same locus for the opsin gene on the X-chromosome, an example of polymorphism. Its males, with only one copy of the X-chromosome, remained dichromats with either a green or a red opsin, an example of heterozygote advantage. Howler monkeys, a type of New World monkey, took this one step further and achieved trichromacy for both sexes when its X-chromosome gained two loci to house both the green allele and the red allele. New World monkeys are the last simians (also known as ‘higher primates‘ or anthropoids) to join the pilgrimage. |
| 7 | 58 mya | Tarsiers (Tarsius) | Tarsier is the last haplorrhine to join the pilgrimage. A nocturnal animal, the tarsier has two enormous eyes each as large as its brain. Unlike other nocturnal mammals, however, tarsier eyes do not containtapetum lucidum which reflects light from the back of the eye for a second exposure on the retina to maximize light capture. From this we can infer that the common ancestor of all haplorrhine must have been a diurnal animal which shed the tapetum lucidum to eliminate blurry images caused by reflected light. When the tarsier became a nocturnal animal, it enlarged its eyes to compensate for the lack of tapetum lucidum. |
| 8 | 63 mya | Lemurs,Bushbabies and their kin (Strepsirrhini) | The pilgrimage meets with the rest of the prosimian cousins: the lemurs, pottos, bushbabies, and lorises. The Aye-Aye‘s Tale showcases the strange lemurs which are only found on the island ofMadagascar. Madagascar was originally part of the Gondwana supercontinent which included present Africa continent and Indian subcontinent. Gondwana broke off into drifting blocks of land, some of which became Africa, India and Madagascar. As an estranged island, Madagascar became a speciation hotbed. For instance a small founding population of strepsirrhine primates (possibly rafted in from neighboring continent) flourished and diversified into all niches of the ecosystem, in the absence of monkeys. The story reminds us how Madagascar, with a land mass 1/1000 of Earth‘s total land area, ends up housing unique species that account for 4% of all species of animals and plants. Lemurs and their kin are the last of the primates to join the pilgrimage. |
Read further in Wikipedia
Editions
- (2004) US hardcover ISBN 0-618-00583-8
- (2004) UK hardcover ISBN 0-297-82503-8
- (2005) US paperback ISBN 0-618-61916-X
- (2005) UK paperback ISBN 0-7538-1996-1
- (2005) UK Audio ISBN 0-7528-7321-0
Translations
- Czech translation: Příběh předka
- Dutch translation: Het verhaal van onze voorouders
- French translation: Il était une fois nos ancêtres
- German translation: Geschichten vom Ursprung des Lebens
- Hungarian translation: Az Ős meséje – Zarándoklat az élet hajnalához
- Italian translation: Il racconto dell’antenato
- Korean translation: 조상 이야기
- Portuguese translation: A grande história da evolução
- Spanish translation: El cuento del antepasado
- Turkish translation: Ataların hikâyesi
See also
References
- ^ Letunic, I; Bork, P (2007). “Interactive Tree Of Life (iTOL): an online tool for phylogenetic tree display and annotation”. Bioinformatics (Pubmed) 23 (1): 127–8. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btl529. PMID 17050570.
- ^ Ciccarelli, FD; Doerks, T; Von Mering, C; Creevey, CJ; Snel, B; Bork, P (2006). “Toward automatic reconstruction of a highly resolved tree of life”. Science (Pubmed) 311 (5765): 1283–7. Bibcode:2006Sci…311.1283C. doi:10.1126/science.1123061. PMID 16513982.
External links
- Video introduction by Richard Dawkins
- Richard Dawkins talks to Ira Flatow on “Science Friday”
- Family and kid’s experiential programs based on Ancestors Tale
Categories: Evolution
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