Re: [asa] Polkinghorne quote on time required for the evolutionary process

Steve,

Is this the Polkinghorne quote you are looking for?
"Three or four billion years may seem like a pretty long time for the coming to be of life and the formation of its evolved complexity, but incredibly intricate developments have to be fitted into that period. Someone like Richard Dawkins can present persuasive pictures of how the sifting and accumulation of small differences can produce large-scale developments, but, instinctively, a physical scientist would like to see an estimate, however rough, of how many small steps take us from a slightly light-sensitive cell to a fully formed insect eye, and of approximately the number of generations required for the necessary mutations to occur. One is only looking for an order of magnitude answer, comparable in crudity to the back-of-the-envelope calculations of early cosmologists, but our biological friends tell us, without any apparent anxiety, that it just can't be done. So much of evolutionary argument seems to be that 'it's happened and so it must have happened this way".

It is from "The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (The Gifford Lectures for 1993-4)," Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 16.

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Received on Sun Nov 11 20:36:40 2007