WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2003
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN * 5A
OPINION
= THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2003
TALKTOUS
Kristi Henderson
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Jennie Confort and Jardin Hammons
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When in the Bible it says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, it does not say how. Evolution and religion are not mutually exclusive paradigms, and if you think otherwise, you're closed-minded and ignorant.
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Mmm, Mrs. E's. Tastier than an undefended penguin nest.
I saw a guy from high school today on campus and I thought, mmm, forget milk. College does a body good.
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To the grad student who has the work up in the A&D gallery right now, yeah, it sucks. Like we care about you and your boyfriend and his nipple clamps.
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Hey, the "What Each Fuel Type Does" box in Monday's Kansan is grossly inaccurate. Gasoline engines won't burn fuel to generate heat. Heat is a byproduct of gasoline combustion. Instead, gasoline engines burn gasoline to produce combustion power which is forced down a piston, which powers the engine. Heat is simply a leftover. Get your facts straight.
I think I would support local small businesses in Lawrence a lot more if they would stop making crappy television commercials.
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Is it bad that my roommate likes Missy Elliott because of the 7-year-olds in her video?
Where were all the Young Democrats during the Taco Bell protests? Probably inside working, serving up burrito supremes to the man.
felt the presence of God as I peered through an electron microscope last spring.
I work at Buskin Robbins, and I was calling to let everyone know that we have regular and large. We don't have medium. So when I ask you if you want regular or large, don't say medium, because it's really annoying. Thank you.
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I'm calling all the way from Boston from an all-girls school to say that 1) I miss Kansas and the UDK and the Free for All, and 2) I still love you, Weston.
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I'm calling from Pearson Hall, and the guy today in the Free for All who called about the shrimp cocktail — yeah, we don't claim him.
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And that, boys and girls, is how hobbies reproduce
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To our overbearing roommate with the dog, find some new people to live with next year.
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To my roommate with the serious boyfriend, I'd like to tell you to stop sleeping with your ex-fiance.
Am I crazy or are there colored pancakes in the trees on Wescoe Turrace?
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REALITY CHECK
Jannifir Farad for The University of Dalkey Kansai
Science doesn't have to weaken faith
PERSPECTIVE
COMMENTARY
I was looking at a paramecium. That's a tiny, one-celled animal that lives in pond water. I had seen one before, through a standard light microscope. I remembered that paramecium as looking ghostly and indistinct.
But this one, magnified thousands of times, was not. It seemed tangible, solid and fuzzy as a Muppet. Each of its myriad luxuriant hairs was rooted intricately in its patterned skin.
Rachel Robson opinion@hansan.com
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I wanted to weep. I witnessed the kind of heart-stopping natural beauty that others see as evidence for creationism. I see it as a prime example of evolution, for scientific reasons and as cause for gratitude, for personal religious ones. Because, while creationism and science conflict, religious faith and science do not.
Female parasitic wasps lay their eggs in the living bodies of other insects. The wasps' prey are paralyzed, but not killed.
Nature isn't all sublime beauty. It's also soulless cruelty. Parasitic wasps are just one example.
by a mother wasp's sting. She lays an egg inside her incapacitated victim, which is then, over the span of several months, eaten alive by the developing baby wasp. A new wasp eventually emerges. Aliten-style, from the husk of its tortured prey.
In a probably apocryphal story about the Anglican minister and famous naturalist, Charles Darwin was so troubled by this discovery that he lost his faith in a loving God. Perhaps it was these wasps Darwin was thinking of when he wrote to a friend in 1856, "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature."
Unlike Darwin's, my faith was not shaken by a newfound understanding of the reproductive biology of a few species
of wasps. But I grew up learning evolution and religion side-by-side, where Darwin was raised in a Noah's Ark world. I do not know how such cavalier cruelties of nature could fail to shake a creationist's faith. It's easy to believe that God could create an elegant microbe, like the one I saw last spring.
But I cannot believe that my God would "intelligently design" wasps that must torture other creatures to death for their own species to survive. As an evolutionist, I can see nature's viciousness as a byproduct of natural laws and not as part of a malicious divine plan. My understanding of biology makes my religious faith stronger, not weaker, as evolution opponents argue it should.
Understanding science hasn't weakened the faith of countless other scientists, either. In the past several decades, the percentage of Americans as a whole who describe themselves as religious believers has steadily decreased, many polls have shown. But the 40 percent of practicing scientists who describe themselves as religious has remained constant since the early 20th century, a study by James Leuba in 1916 that was replicated by Edward Larson and Larry Witham in
1997 found. During the same time, the number of scientists convinced of evolutionary theory grew dramatically, with no apparent increase in apostasy.
For many of my peers, science and faith have a symbiotic relationship, each one bolstering the other. Renowned geneticist, evolutionist and confessed "serious Christian" Francis Collins once described his feelings about scientific discovery: "I experience a feeling of awe at the realization that humanity now knows something that only God knew before. It is a deeply moving sensation that helps me appreciate the spiritual side of life and also makes the practice of science more rewarding."
PERSPECTIVEI
Feeling the tug of its beauty on my soul, I did what many evolutionary scientists would do.
I have believed that through science, we can better understand our world. A year ago, I used the technological miracle of electron microscopy to see the evolved beauty of a paramecium.
Ethnocentrism forsakes morality
I prayed.
COMMENTARY
Anthropology is not my cup of tea. I've taken one anthropology course in my time at the University of Kansas and I'm still enrolled in it, but my experience with the course tells me that the discipline is not suited for me.
The instructor warned us in the first few days of class not to come into the course with notions of measuring the African nations that we would study against our own because comparisons were meaningless.
Matthew Dunavan opinion@kansan.com
I realized that Anthropology had moved away from its traditional status of chronicling the details of other cultures, to having some sort of ethical fervor behind it. Moral language was used to describe other cultures, and the phrase 'It's right for them,' was heard on occasion. It is now not only a standard of the field not to criticize other cultures, but a tenet that it is morally wrong to do so.
This is a common view in contemporary American society. Traumatized by accusations that we are cultural imperialists, many academics have embraced the idea that all other cultures are immune to critique and put moral weight behind the idea that each social grouping was just as good as another. The Kansan was even accused of ethnocentrism in a "Tongue in Beak" article recently, for which it apologized.
Underlying the claim that we should not criticize other belief structures is a fundamental world view that all systems
If we accept that all cultures are equally valid, we are committed to positions that I'd be afraid to see people support. German anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s, including Hitler's "Final Solution," are merely expressions of a different, and yet equally valid, moral code. Some African cultures whose reliance on spirits and witchcraft to heal disease, while rejecting the biological basis of health, result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and that's OK. We could even posit a society that smiles on the practice of serial infant-raping, and we'd be unable to argue against it.
of belief are equally valid. This is fallacious reasoning, and it must be rejected. We must reserve the right to use any means, even one as volatile as humor, to critique other cultures.
This form of cultural relativism doesn't allow us to criticize others. It also denies us the ability to criticize ourselves.
When we act as though all beliefs are of equal validity, then we lose the concept of progress. If we cannot compare two contemporaneous societies against each other, then why can we compare over time? The elimination of slavery on the basis of race becomes simply dry and dusty description, rather than moral progress.
Ethnocentrism is a bad thing. We shouldn't assume that our own culture is somehow better than another. Argument will be required to show that certain aspects are better if, indeed, they are, and that's questionable. This position doesn't entail, though, that we are forbidden to examine the practices of others.
Some people would accuse me of being a cultural imperialist, but note that there have been no claims that American culture is the best in all regards. We had N'Sync, The Bachelor television series and so much advertising that, according to National Geographic Magazine, young children can name more brands of beer than they can U.S. presidents. And that's not to mention the state-sponsored terrorism we carry out regularly.
Just because we are all fallible doesn't mean we are all right.
Robson is a Baldwin City graduate student in pathology at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
At some point, people need to realize that no one's beliefs are 100 percent correct, and that everyone, including this author, are fair game for criticism.
Dunevan is a Topeka senior in political science and philosophy
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