Evolution

This is the fourth in our traditional year-end series of commissioned poems based on recent Inquirer headlines. The article headlined "A theory's evolution: The Franklin Institute's exhibition on Charles Darwin shows the person behind one of the most revolutionary ideas in science" appeared Oct. 16 on Page E1. The exhibit "Darwin" at the Franklin Institute closes Dec. 31. The Theory of Flawed Design is not a scientifically proven ...

IN RESPONSE to federal Judge John Jones' recent decision against teaching "intelligent design" in schools: Evolution is a myth. There are two creation stories in Genesis and they're different. In Genesis 1:27, God creates mankind on the sixth day. In Genesis 2:5-7, God creates the man Adam on the third day. The link that makes sense of these two different accounts is the discovery of the Neanderthal people. It makes sense that on the sixth day, when God created Eve, God would also create a separate race called "mankind" (the Neanderthal people)

On Easter, Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against both creationism and evolution, or so it looked anyway. About the biblical account of Genesis, he said, "It is not information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man himself came into being. " So much for literal creationism. But then he seemed to take a swipe at science, proposing that mankind cannot be just another product of evolution. "It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it. " Many biologists beg to differ: Evolution isn't completely random, they say, and neither is it geared to produce humans.

Setting new guidelines expected to have a strong impact on the way the origin of life is taught in the United States, the state Board of Education approved a textbook guideline yesterday requiring that evolution be taught as the only theory of life's origin. A board committee Wednesday adopted a statement saying that evolution should be taught as fact, but the final wording of the 190-page curriculum outline adopted by the full board said that evolution would be taught as theory.

Can God and evolution coexist? For many evangelical Christians, the debate over teaching evolution in public schools touches a vital spiritual nerve. Some see evolution as a path to perdition, while others see it as a crowning example of God's handiwork. A legal battle in Dover, Pa., over the teaching of evolution and "intelligent design" has focused new attention on the issue, as have recent proposals in Kansas to change how evolution is taught there. For David Wilcox, a biology professor at Eastern University, an evangelical college in St. Davids, the challenge is to teach students that it's possible to embrace evolution "without intellectual schizophrenia.

'I'm curious: Is there anybody on the stage that does not . . . believe in evolution?" That was the question put to the 10 GOP presidential hopefuls during a May 3 Republican presidential debate on MSNBC. Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) already had said he did. But when the rest were asked the same question, three hands went up: those of Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Ah, the flood of facile jokes!: Those Luddite Republicans!

It's hard to imagine a more innocuous statement than the one the Cobb County, Ga., school board recently ordered pasted into their biology textbooks: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. " Yet this disclaimer is the subject of a nationally publicized lawsuit, in which the plaintiff alleges that the wording violates the separation of church and state.

Famed Harvard biologist and evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould came to Bryn Mawr College this week and discussed one of his favorite evolutionary analogues - the evolution of Mickey Mouse. When Mickey appeared in his first cartoon feature, "Steamboat Willie" in 1928, Gould explained, he had a long snout, spindly limbs, a small cranium and looked more like an adult rat than America's favorite mouse. Over the years, however, Disney artists shortened his snout, thickened his limbs and increased his head size to give him a more appealing, childlike appearance.

Darwinism is more often associated with the liberal left than the conservative right, but it's moved a long way across the political spectrum from Darwin's day, when it was embraced by advocates of free-market economics, colonialism, and similar ideas today associated with the right. Apparently, Darwinism is still sometimes invoked in arguments for economic conservatism. It's reflected in a recent e-mail I received from a reader: "Maybe you should write about the current reversing of evolution by humans, using technology.

The public statement on the Dover Area School District Web site is both ambiguous and defensive. The district "is in the process of forming a fair and balanced science curriculum. We are not teaching religion," it says. More information will be issued shortly. This is what happens when a small south-central Pennsylvania community defies scientific tradition to become what appears to be the only district in the nation to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolution in high school biology.

There are two ways to defend gay marriage. Argument A is empathy: One is influenced by gay friends in committed relationships yearning for the fulfillment and acceptance that marriage conveys upon heterosexuals. That's essentially the case President Obama made when he first announced his change of views. No talk about rights, just human fellow feeling. Such an argument is attractive because it can be compelling without being compulsory. Many people, feeling the weight of this longing among their gay friends, are willing to redefine marriage for the sake of simple human sympathy.

IT FEELS LIKE it took fish less time to grow legs and walk on land than it took for President Obama's position on gay marriage to finally "evolve" to supporting it. Leave it to the ever-cautious "No Drama Obama" to take an epic moment in the slow forward march of civil rights for all Americans and to leave supporters to wonder if they should be shouting, "You've come a long way, baby!" or asking the president, "Jeez, what took you so long?" I have to confess that my original reaction was the latter, to focus on the politics, when I heard that Obama had finally announced his personal support for gay marriage in the all-too-calculated format of an ABC News interview that the White House had hurriedly set up (usually it's the other way around — a news outlet spends months begging for a presidential one-on-one)

If Vice President Biden continues to appear in public during this campaign, White House press secretary Jay Carney should be offered a membership in the janitors' union. As things stand, the spokesman does not have the supplies to clean up the mess Biden made Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. Biden gave his full support to same-sex marriage, a position conspicuously at odds with the public stance of President Obama, who is widely assumed to share Biden's view but says his thinking is "evolving.

Our highly social species has been behaving strangely of late, and this has been noted in a flurry of recent hand-wringing articles wondering whether technology is changing our nature. The cover of the Atlantic asks whether Facebook is making us lonely, and the New York Times bemoans "The Flight From Conversation. " The authors observe what many of us have experienced: Friends invite us to get together only to spend the time texting other friends or tweeting. Everywhere, people are ignoring those in their physical vicinity so they can hold court with acquaintances farther away.

Blurring the lines between life and inanimate matter, biologists announced Friday that they'd created six different chemical alternatives to DNA and coaxed them to undergo evolution. A description of these code-carrying molecules, called XNAs, was published in the journal Science. The work bolsters a prevailing hypothesis that life as we know it evolved from simpler life forms, no longer here, and those evolved from something simpler. There may be no moment when the first life emerged, but instead an evolutionary process by which chemicals that most of us would consider non-life gradually gave rise to living cells through natural selection.

Cheney released with new heart WASHINGTON - Former Vice President Dick Cheney was released from the hospital Tuesday, 10 days after getting a new heart, his office said. Cheney, 71, received the organ March 24 from an unknown donor at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va. "As he leaves the hospital, the former vice president and his family want to again express their deep gratitude to the donor and the donor's family for this remarkable gift," aide Kara Ahern said in a statement.

It was the time of P.T. Barnum, when people would line up to see a whitewashed elephant or a carefully faked petrified giant. But in 1868, a display in Philadelphia proved that reality could be far stranger than fiction. That year, the Academy of Natural Sciences showed the world its first glimpse of a real dinosaur skeleton - a 15-foot-tall Godzilla pulled from a pit in Haddonfield. The creature threatened to obliterate the traditional picture of the universe. Along with Darwin's theory and a revolution in geology, dinosaur fossils were opening the human imagination to lost worlds on our own planet, separated by vast epochs of time.

When Rush Limbaugh called law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" last week, it caused an uproar and raised a scientific question - why is it so hard to imagine using the same word to insult a man? The epithet slut can be devastating to a woman's reputation in our society, but a man's reputation might even be enhanced by having many sexual partners. He might be called "a player" instead. This bit of sexual inequality is observed in diverse cultures, said Todd Shackelford, an evolutionary psychologist at Oakland University in Michigan.

Election seasons can serve as a reminder of just how deeply mysterious the human mind remains. Particularly puzzling is the fact that people are heavily influenced by political advertising on television. Our rational sides tell us that these ads are unlikely to serve as unbiased sources of information. And yet, in states where the bulk of negative ads focused on Mitt Romney's rivals, Romney won. In states where Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich ran the most negative ads, they surged.

The Barnes Foundation, whose renowned collection of early modernist art will open in May on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway after moving from Merion, plans to install a soaring sculpture by contemporary master Ellsworth Kelly near the entrance to its new building. The Barnes Totem , a slender, stepped blade rising 40 feet into the air, is a gift from the Neubauer Family Foundation, Barnes officials said. Joseph Neubauer, vice chair of the Barnes board of trustees, characterized the bead-blasted stainless-steel work as a gift for the city, a welcoming statement to gallery visitors and passersby alike.