I've been trying to learn more about natural history, especially deep time, and I've been trying to read general books on the subject. I have a pretty decent grasp of the time scales now - that took awhile to grasp, since we're not great at really understanding the difference between 5 million, 50 million, and 500 million years, not to mention 5 billion. I also read a couple pretty good general popular science books on the subject.

I took a lot of science in high school but although the curriculum very good, we never did cover biological classification, taxonomy, etc. So I tried to find textbooks about cladistics, specifically. I am so interested in this reconstruction of the tree of life - and staggered at how much I don't know (and frankly what the field doesn't know) about the species that populate it. Even leaving aside most the tree, which is bacteria and archaea, where I know almost nothing, even the animal branch is very very full of things I still know nothing about, even when considering phylum level classifications. Cnidaria, I know they're sea dwelling and often jelly, but what are the defining characteristics? My god there are so many worm phyla! (At least I recognize Annelida). I think I've confused brachiopods and bryozoa. I can't deal with the number of species described in Arthropoda - it dwarfs every other animal phyla. And phylum is one step down from kingdom. On the tiniest branch! There is just so much detail that you could drown in.

I don't have access to an academic library anymore - I could get an alumni pass by paying money but I don't even live in the same country anymore - so I turned to ILL, which is one of the best things in the world. The site's kinda finicky to use so I just sorta guessed and ordered a few books. I ended up with Biogeography: an Ecological and Evolutionary Approach by Cox, and Species & Speciation in the Fossil Record edited by Allmon & Yacobucci. Unfortunately I ran out of time to actually read cover to cover but I did enormously enjoy both. I mentioned to someone at work how much I enjoy reading them, and it made me think of the difference in difficulty. Work isn't difficult. There is definitely work to be done, there can be challenges in figuring out how best to do it with the resources available, how we can optimize our processes, and of course lots and lots of detail to absorb, the firm handles billions in assets so risk & control etc blah blah blah, but it's certainly not a challenge in the same intellectual way that thinking about these problems are.

( It was so interesting to read. )

I'd still like to get a good general grasp of the tree of life, as neither of these books actually had a good list. I kind of fear that a real list would just be too much information unconnected to anything - despite all of this, I'm not into this in order to memorize hundreds of phylum names or anything, that's not the point. But they were very interesting reading.

Back to ILL!

For this website: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0042.html

You're trying to refute the idea that the fossil record does not support Darwinian evolution. That's good. Science is full of conflict, one person telling the other that this isn't quite right, and discovering where we're right and we're wrong. With multiple points of view, logical fallacies, errors in methodology, and all that other stuff is cleared out. The philosophers of the eighteenth century are right in the fact that we have only the evidence our senses provide to get a bearing on our world: fine, we need to make sure it's accurate.

But I have objections to your website. Firstly, if you haven't noticed...the Origin of Species was published one hundred and fifty years ago. Actually, 151 years, now. Last year was the 150th anniversary, so to speak, of publication. You can bet that there's a whole lot more that scientists have discovered, refuted, or added to the concept of population ecology and evolution. Why are you talking only about Darwin's work? Why are the more recent discoveries and additions to this theory not mentioned at all? The Origin of Species does not represent the summation of what scientists and others know about how species change over time. I'd respect you a whole lot more if you would read up on what has been discovered since 1859 and refuted that.

Second issue: I assume you're trying to convince not just "the laymen" but also the scientific, by interviewing a doctor. Then I scroll down and discover that, hey, number one, this is a medical doctor. Not an evolutionary biologist, or even a biologist, who would be my first choice to interview, to be the most credible. He graduated with his first degree in British History--an absolutely fascinating topic (even for people overseas, like me) but just about irrelevant to evolution. He sounds like a very accomplished man, but the last paragraph about his credentials touched off this rant: he's the chairman of a Catholic commission for parents. He co-hosts a Catholic radio show. He is part of a Catholic Educator Center.

Being Catholic is not evil--far from it. But this is bias. If you presented work on evolution with this kind of background, there are red flags, neon signage, waving yellow-and-black warnings that there is bias in this. Major, major bias. By no means does this assume someone's "fudged data", but this is clearly identifiable bias. Even studies that are funded by a corporation, for example, are not as reputable as those funded from the more-or-less neutral government grants.

Thirdly, get your facts straight. "Survival of the fittest" was not something Darwin said--it is a simplification of natural selection. You don't have to die for natural selection to occur, though death does influence it.

In short: get some credible sources, straight facts, and please do stop using a 150+ year old theory as your opponent. Thanks.