National Geographic Flunks Evolution 101

I recommend that everyone on the staff of National Geographic read a book entitled "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin. In this book Darwin speaks of extinction more than one hundred times. Darwin knew that environmental change, and the resulting extinction of species, was essential to his theory of evolution.

As Charles Darwin himself stated: "As natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable modifications, each new form will tend in a fully-stocked country to take the place of, and finally to exterminate, its own less improved parent or other less-favoured forms with which it comes into competition. Thus extinction and natural selection will, as we have seen, go hand in hand. Hence, if we look at each species as descended from some other unknown form, both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of formation and perfection of the new form."

Save the whales. Save the turtles. Save something. Saving species from extinction smacks of Biblical creationism. What would have happened if someone had saved the dinosaurs from extinction 65 million years ago? Where would we be? Well, we probably wouldn't be because as mammals we may have never evolved.

Darwin knew that extinctions, including mass extinctions, are one of the pillars of evolutionary biology. I feel that if Darwin were alive today he would hang his head in shame at our poor understanding of his theory. It is too bad that those who claim to be evolutionists seem unwilling to accept either its causes or its consequences.