dy156

At the end of life, all stored endorphins (chemicals that make you feel good) are released. This is true for humans suffering from hypothermia, starving rats, antelope getting eaten on the plains of Africa, etc... There is no evolutionary benefit to this phenomenon. Those that are happy right before they die are no more likely to reproduce offspring that share this trait than those that do not. How did lightning strike some elements that somehow developed life? How come the dinosaurs didn't build the pyramids or go to the moon? How come there's only one planet that is the right distance to have abundant liquid H2O? How did the first not-quite-cellular organisms develop DNA or mitochondria? Sexual reproduction? isn't there a far more efficient way to reproduce? If lightning struck the elements and created the first organism, why did that organism even need to reproduce?

I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, nor am I a philosopher or scientist, but I've read almost all of Carl Sagan's writings, in addition to several other books on this topic, and so called "hard science" cannot explain everything. I don't think the world was created in a matter of days, or that the dinosaurs were destroyed in the great flood that spared Noah, or even that Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, but scientists have not figured out everything, and I think it's perfectly alright for teachers to teach to children that one theory is that the watch proves the watchmaker, and some scientists think that there must have been some intelligence that designed the universe. I'm not denying that evolution is valid, just that evolution explains everything.

(My personal opinion is that neither science nor the Bible can explain everything. If science has determined that humans evolved from apes in Africa, how come humans, unlike the other great apes, have a reflex to hold our breath under water, have less hair, populated far-flung islands before we supposedly had the technology to reach them hundreds or thousands of years after they were first populated with humans, require more water intake than any other mammal, spend our vacations at the beach and buy swimming pools, have a great flood myth or legend among almost all independent civilizations, and have noses with nostrils facing downward, as if evolved for diving head first? If mankind came across the land-bridge in Alaska to populate America, why are these archeological finds showing up in South America from way before that should have happened? (don't want to thread-jack, just pointing out that science hasn't explained everything yet.))

Maybe not in Chemistry, and maybe not in Physics, but wherever evolution is taught, I do not have a problem with teaching something along these lines, or asking these questions.