I shall follow the debate on molecular clocks with interest. However, in the pantheon of the ad hominem and generally offensive, Dr. Trivers' political and personal observations have already earned a special place in my heart.
As a new listmember, I find the posts on this list thought provoking and, at times, educational. However, reading over posts containing scriptural references interwoven with scientific data leads me to ponder the following:
Does not an attempt to "scientifically prove" scripture open scripture itself up to the same methodologies by which all data should be tested? I have observed that -- rather than being a repository of proto-memory or a wealth of allegorical moral teaching -- scriptural statements, usually tendered in translation, are simply offered as facts without the high degree of perspicacity called for in scientific data.
When science works as it should (and too often it does not), the qualities of observability, testability and general agreement on scientific data frees subsequent theoretical development from the errors of homoioteleuton, dittography, confusions in transmitting or translation, deliberate fraud and alteration that are found in scripture.
Essentially, because the tests of "truth" are fundamentally different in theology and science, their "data" are not interchangeable.
It seems to me a fundamental (pardon the gentle pun) unfairness to rightly subject scientific data and theory to close scrutiny while, at the same time, protecting from such scrutiny their own provincially held scriptural "data" as non-relativistic truth.
As a personal aside, I confess that as a scientist and person of faith, I observe the general result to be a tawdry fusion of bad theology and bad science.
Your good thoughts on this matter will be of interest.
Best Regards,
K. Lee Lerner