My buddy the Article Primate wrote about the spread of the human race from Adam (what archeo-biologist call the first male) and asked, quote:

Being able to trace the evolution and, dare I say, the Earth's infestation by the human race is truely one of the great accomplishments of genetics.

Does anyone else have mixed feelings about this, though?

However, I mis-read that as:

The Earth's infestation by the human race is truely one of the great accomplishments of genetics. Does anyone else have mixed feelings about this, though?

To answer the question he didn't ask, there are some people (not sure if "environmentalists" is the correct term for this group of people) who don't consider the Earth's infestation by the human race such a great thing. I'm not one of those people. I always find it strange that people tend to place the line between natural and artificial around where humans lie. Indeed, one definition of artificial is "made by humans". Such a division is... well... artificial. I mean, is the human species also not a result of a natural process (evolution)? And is the human tendency to build tools not a result of a natural phenomenon (Darwinian survival)? So these tools too are the result of a natural phenomenon. In fact, whatever we feel the urge to do must be natural, because we're responding to our urges to do it. And if one of our urges is to restrain or put moderation upon other urges, that must be natural too.

It might seem that under this definition, everything is natural, thus eliminating the need for the word "natural", however this is not the case. Another definition of "artificial", one more closer to the root of the word, is "contrived by art, rather than nature". This means anything that was designed not because the designer needed it, but because he or she had some free time. Essentially, art is artificial, and nothing else is. And as far as I know, only humans engage in creating art. I've never heard stories of, for example, monkeys painting on their own free will (though they may have been trained to paint, in exchange for food, and thus this is no longer art but an acquire survival skill). I've never heard of monkeys reorganizing something (perhaps rocks) merely for aesthetic purposes either. Maybe it isn't so crazy to think that only humans make artificial things.

Some might argue for the definition of artificial to mean "humans imitating something which already exists in nature", but if we remove the human-centric part of this definition, e.g. have the definition be "imitating something which already exists in nature", lots of things that most people would call natural would be considered artificial under this new definition.

Take whales and dolphins, for example. Fishes moved from the sea to land, where they eventually evolved into mammals (via amphibians, reptiles and birds). Then, for whatever reason, these mammals moved back to the sea, and evolved into whales. Whales are mammals imitating fish, something which already existed in nature. It doesn't seem correct to call this artificial to me though.

Speaking of evolution, scientists have found a way to ressurect "dead eggs", bringing back from extinction ancient forms of plankton. This is a completely new field which they are considering calling "resurrection ecology". From these plankton, the scientist can actually view a live showing of evolution in process. Some hope that this will convince creationist that evolution really does occur.

Like most reasonable scientists, I'm willing to concede that we don't know for sure that evolution really occured to create humans. But that's like we don't know for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that gravity will still apply in the next microsecond, or that the universe wasn't created 5 minutes ago (perhaps all your memories of events that supposedly occured earlier than 5 minutes ago are just the result of the way your brain was assembled when the universe was create 5 minutes ago). We don't know for sure, but we're pretty confident.

So if I were a professor at a school or university, I wouldn't mind conceding that we're not sure about evolution, but I don't like how some creationist use the term "not sure" to mean "wrong". I think if someone were "sure" that intelligent design had occured, for example, that person should not be taken very seriously, because obvious he or she is unable (or unwilling) to accept the idea that he or she might be wrong. If he thought intelligent design was what happened, but wasn't sure about it (just like how most scientists feel about evolution), they'd probably get more respect from the scientific (and thus the academic) community.