And the Oscar goes to...

I wrote this essay on February 15, 2007. I post today it in view of the statuette awarded last night to Algore's "An Inconvenient Truth".

Moths on icecaps turning white? No, that’s not it. Polar bears hiding in trees? No, that doesn’t seem right. Could it be moths turning gray on polluted tree bark and polar bears forgetting how to swim when ice melts?

Which is it? It’s none of the above.

The dead, painted moths glued to trees are no different from the polar bears “trapped on a melting-before-our-very-eyes iceberg” in the fact that both are fiction.

The moth deception has come and gone. But, like nature, science abhors a vacuum. So, while one story was manufactured to “prove” evolution, the more recent was crafted to “prove” global warming. Oddly enough, the new story leaves evolution lying dead by the side of the road.

You see, they say it got warmer so the polar bears are smaller and more lean than before. But, they also say this is a bad thing. It seems to me, the bears are simply adapting to environmental changes. However, instead of taking the “I-told-you-so” opportunity that this provided, science sounded the global warming alarm by showing us these “helpless” little bears stranded on a melting iceberg. The fact is, the bears were playing on an ice floe, shaped by the waves of the Artic Ocean. Less than stranded, these playful (and apparently healthy) bears had swum a fair distance to reach the photo op.

After all these years of science’s failure to create the long-promised working model of evolution in the laboratory, one would think scientists the world over would welcome “massive climate change” as an opportunity to finally put evolutionary theory to the test. After all these years of despotic scientific proclamations that refused to hear any voice but their own, they have a golden opportunity to be vindicated. But, instead, they toss their once proud god of evolution by the way side to drink from a more intoxicating fount: global warming.

Or, I guess it could be that science has moved into pantheism. Can they really cast off evolution so quickly or completely? After all, it’s been a good god. Dictating everything yet saying nothing (so as not to confirm or deny its own existence). Evolution is the kind of god most people are looking for. It has been the great, galactic sugar daddy, providing everything and demanding nothing—except rigid lockstep.

I wonder what will come of it, this pantheistic battle between a god that has served science so well and the newer, younger model. The global warming bells and wringing hands tell me evolution may be in its final melt down. Or, maybe (if they are linear at all) when it comes to global warming, nothing adapts. Maybe everything in nature is as fat and lazy as the average mid-day TV watcher. Or, perhaps, deep inside, they know none of us are “the fittest”…

At the end of another record-low February day, the only thing about all of this science that I know for sure, is that none of it is scientific.