- Bill C-384 (pdf)

There are people pro and people con.

Pro…
Most Quebec MDs in favour of legalized euthanasia: survey

In survey of its members released Tuesday, the Quebec Federation of Medical Specialists found that 84 per cent of responders are ready for a public debate on the issue and 74 per cent “would certainly favour or probably be favourable” to euthanasia within a legal framework.

Euthanasia is already being practised, doctor says (in Quebec)

-Dr. Death comes to town this fall

Con…

- Doctor decries euthanasia bill

“We must not abandon these vulnerable people through assisted suicide and euthanasia, but instead embark on a quest to find better ways to maintain their dignity and quality of life”

Quebec doctors urge colleagues to battle euthanasia

- Say “No” to Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide (pdf)

- Innocent would die

- DOSSIER EUTHANASIA — ASSISTED SUICIDE (Declarations and documents to help us in our reflection from the Catholic Church of Montreal)

- Canada’s Catholic Bishops Ask Parliament to Oppose Legalizing Assisted Suicide

- Letter asking Members of Parliament and all the people of Canada to reflect on the possible consequences of Bill C-384

“It is also legitimate for someone to refuse medical procedures that are found to be especially burdensome. But what is never acceptable is the direct and intentional killing of the depressed, handicapped, sick, elderly or dying,” Archbishop Weisgerber says.

And you ?

As Canadians, we have to think about this law and act to defeat it! We should protect the lives of others, the most vulnerable in our society.

Priests for Life of Canada is calling on “all parishes across Canada involved in this effort to defeat this legislation.” How ? Write a personal letter to your federal deputy or to the prime minister of Canada against this law! Post a personal letter as soon as possible !

“No one has survived this cancer. This illness will take you,” said Doctor Walter Chang to Audrey Toguchi in 1997 since, scientifically, there was nothing that could be done for her. (…)

Terminal cancer

In 1996, Audrey Toguchi, native of the Island of Oahu in Hawaii, was 69. “I had no idea I had cancer,” she told ZENIT.

“My husband noticed I had a lump after a fall — I had slipped some days earlier while cleaning the floor of my house. The family doctor said it was a bruise.”

The following year, the bruise had not disappeared, but had grown. After additional exams, a tumor was found in her left thigh. It was malignant cancer.

She underwent surgery a year later, but the cancer had already spread. “It was the surgeon who discovered on removing it that it was a very rare and aggressive terminal cancer,” she explained.

“Other oncologists who studied the case said that nowhere in the world was it recorded that a person survived this type of sickness,” Toguchi continued.

After another examination in September of 1998, the X-rays showed that the cancer had metastasized in her lungs. The doctors gave her three months to live.

Toguchi relates that she felt weak. She did not want any more chemotherapy or medical interventions. But she took up a devotion she had practiced from her childhood, as a good Hawaiian: “I have always loved Father Damien,” Toguchi explained.

“I have prayed to him all my life. That is why I visited Kalawao (where his tomb is located), Molokai and our churches over many years,” she said.

No doubt

In November of 1998, Toguchi began to feel much improved. Medical examinations revealed that the cancer was receding. Six months later, X-rays showed a complete regression of the metastasis, though she had had no therapy. The cancer disappeared entirely.

While for her doctors, there is no explanation — her own doctor, who is not a Catholic, affirms this — for Toguchi there is no doubt that it was the hand of Damien from heaven, interceding before God. Many prayers were said for years, both by her and her relatives, to this blessed apostle.

“When I was completely cured by the Lord’s love and Father Damien’s intercession, I felt very honored and grateful,” she said.

On Oct. 18, 2007, medical experts from the Congregation for Saints’ Causes examined the clinical documents. As is always the case for a canonization, believers and non-believers concluded with moral certitude that the cure was not only exceptional but “extra-natural.”

Then, the Commission of Theologians determined that it was a miracle, obtained by Father Damien’s intercession — an indispensable requisite to receive the title of saint. (source : Zenit)

A movie to see :
“Molokai: The Story of Father Damien”

Synopsis :

Exile to Molokai was the means with which leprosy was dealt with in the Hawaiian Islands during the late 1800s. Molokai was an untamed isle located between the islands of Oahu and Maui. Abandoned for all extents and purposes, the lepers attempted to scrape out a living in their squalor without outside aid or care. Enter the courageous Father Damien. He was the first priest to go to Molokai. And even though his bishop strictly warned him that “he must not touch anyone,” Father Damien risked his life and health to reach out to the suffering.

Gradually, Father Damien was able to gain the trust of the lepers. Additionally, and more importantly, his cries for additional help were heard and heeded by others. The success of his appeals was unbelievably dismaying to superiors who were more interested respect and riches than reaching out to the suffering.

Eventually, as expected Father Damien was also afflicted. This, however, only seemed to provide him with an even greater drive to ameliorate the conditions of his now “fellow” lepers. After collapsing during Mass, he was carried to the very hospital that he himself had established where he died. There is a touching seen when all gather to pray for him at the hospital’s entrance.

Holy father Damien, pray for us!

So as to not lose the momentum, a special static page has been created here on Adventus.org. You can access the page from the link on the right, or simply by using this URL: stewardship.adventus.org

• Presentation of the course
• Course lecture, part 1
• Course lecture, part 2

Enjoy!

UPDATE: The PDF files for the first set of Powerpoint slides are also available.

In his homily at the opening Mass for the synod of bishops dedicated to the Sacred Scriptures, Benedict XVI recalled that from the first proclamation of the Gospel, “Christian communities arose that at first were flourishing, but later disappeared and are now remembered only in the history books.”

And he added:

“Could not the same thing happen in our time? Nations that once were rich in faith and vocations are now losing their identity, under the harmful and destructive influence of a certain modern culture.”

It can be guessed that, among these nations that once were exuberantly Christian but are no longer so, Pope Joseph Ratzinger is thinking of Canada, and more precisely of Québec.

An interesting essay on Faith and Secularism by Cardinal Marc Ouellet follows Magister’s article.

READ THE ARTICLE AND THE CARDINAL’S ESSAY

I could not help but notice that many of you feel somewhat befuddled by the financial crisis that is going on.

You are not alone, of course. Reading other internet blogs, for example, I can sense the rising tide of confusion and anger.

As for myself, before I went into the priesthood I got a degree in international business and finance. I’m often therefore called upon to “translate” economic news and events for my friends into ordinary language.

I’ll be honest: I am extremely worried about the rejection of the recent bailout package by the US House of Representatives. I sense a clash of visions within the American people. Specialists like me see why urgent action is necessary, but ordinary folks don’t, and the trust level is very low. It isn’t that they don’t trust the specialists in their expertise: they don’t trust them as people.

So I’ve decided to put a bit of my priestly credibility on the line. I’m a bit of a specialist – not as advanced as a governor of a central bank, naturally, but I know enough to understand the basic issues at stake. And as a priest, I’m hoping I can be an (admittedly small-time) ambassador for a solution to this crisis, by being a trusted voice.

This is supposed to be a religious and spiritual blog. I therefore hesitate to write posts about supposedly political matters occurring in other countries. The current economic crisis facing the United States, however, is simply too important to let pass by. I get the impression it was rejected by lawmakers because of political fears regarding re-election. Simply put, ordinary voters were widely opposed to the bailout.

So now the US economy, and by extension the economy of the world, teeters on the edge.

I am not kidding.

The problem, I think, is that it has not really been explained to people why this situation is so dangerous. And so, while this post probably can’t do much to help, I still think it is my duty to try and communicate the nature of the problem in the simplest possible terms, to do my bit to help a consensus emerge.

The origins of this economic problem come from institutions making bad loans. To be honest, this happens all the time – every loan is a bit of a crap shoot, after all – and the economy is normally able to absorb bad debt and deal with it as a matter of course. Imagine a scenario where you are seated in a chair and somebody is tossing small marbles one by one at your head. You feel them as they bounce off, but they don’t really hurt you. The person could toss a thousand marbles at you, and it wouldn’t make a huge difference.

But what if those marbles were instead tossed at your head all at the same time? Imagine being hit in the head by a bag of a thousand marbles. At the least, it will give you a concussion or knock you unconscious. It might even crush your skull.

My friends, to put this in the simplest possible terms, each of those bad loans was like a marble. The marbles were packaged together in instruments called “asset-backed commercial paper”. And now the great big bag is being tossed at the head of Uncle Sam. It hasn’t hit yet, but nothing can stop its flight – NOTHING. The bailout package that failed was the equivalent of the USA trying to put on a helmet in time, to mitigate the impact. Congress failed to approve it, or something like it, because people were shouting “it’s only marbles!” Yes, it was only some bad home mortgage loans. And they are now poised to crush the skull of the US economy.

Yes, the origin of this crisis comes from bad loans, but the reason for the severity of this crisis is that all these loans are coming apart at the same time. The sudden collapse of a huge mountain of debt is causing a shrinking of the money supply, otherwise known as a “liquidity crisis”. Let me explain this idea of a money supply a bit more.

We live in a money economy, not a barter economy. In other words, we don’t trade real goods for real goods. Instead, we use a virtual good, called money, as a medium of exchange. Money, in itself, has no intrinsic value. If you were on a deserted island and had a choice between a dollar and an apple, you’d pick the apple. Money has value only because we, as a society, say it does.

We use money as a medium of exchange because it simplifies transactions. This simplification provides value to the economy, and everyone benefits as a result. Money, however, is subject to a particular danger that real goods are not: the problem of counterfeiting. This is why, for most of human history, we’ve actually used metals like gold and silver as the basis of our monetary system. Metal coins are hard to counterfeit, especially when you know how much they are supposed to weigh.

The problem with using metal, however, is that the size of the money supply depends on how much metal has literally been dug out of the ground. Sudden discoveries of new deposits can boost the money supply, like what happened in the Gold Rush period, but all that new money injected into the economy is usually accompanied by a sudden rise in inflation. It is great to have all that new money, but the economy can’t swallow it all at once, so it starts to choke.

The switch to paper money was the next logical step. At first, paper bills were really just coupons which could be exchanged for metal coins. What happened, however, is that people started exchanging the paper bills with each other instead of the coins, knowing the coins were “backing” the paper in a vault somewhere. Eventually the government mandated that stores and other vendors HAD to accept the paper instead of the precious metals if it was offered – the paper became “legal tender”. Thanks to this, the use of precious metals as currency dropped dramatically and basically became limited to certain specialized transactions between the central banks that issued the paper currencies.

We learned a few hard lessons with paper currency, however. Just as too much gold at once can cause a gold rush with its accompanying inflation, too much paper at once can create inflationary scenarios that can ruin an economy. How many times have we heard of countries experiencing hyper-inflation, with people carrying around wheelbarrows full of paper money? Flooding the market with more money should, in theory, encourage people to produce more to earn that money, but if this increase in money supply is exaggerated people will just take the easy way out and raise the price of the goods and services they are already producing anyway. Money, after all, doesn’t have any intrinsic value of its own.

The reverse situation is also true: the money supply can shrink, bringing with it the opposite scenario known as deflation. Prices drop, which sounds good, but so do wages. Because of this, as bad as inflation can be for an economy, deflation is far, far worse. Remember these simple equations:

• A collapse in the money suppley = deflation.
• Deflation = unemployment.

Why does deflation lead to unemployment? Quite frankly, it is because of human psychology. The same $100 can be used to buy things from any store in the mall: it can be converted to groceries, clothes, video games, whatever. Money has value because it gives us the power to acquire, and so we naturally want more of it. What we forget, however, is that money only has relative value.

In an inflationary scenario, where prices rise (say) 5%, a company can raise wages for every employee by 5% to compensate. No one minds this. Imagine, however, a deflationary scenario, where prices drop 5%. The same company now needs to lower its cost of wages by 5%. It can do so by one of two ways: it could lower wages by 5% across the board, or it can lay off 5% of its workers. Which of the two will it do? Or, more to the point, which of these two scenarios will the workers themselves accept? In theory, the employees should not mind the 5% wage drop, because after all prices also dropped by 5%. In practice, however, companies hardly ever implement across-the-board wage cuts, in large part because employees themselves will not accept them. It is easier to lay people off. Deflation leads to unemployment. The bigger the collapse of the money supply, the worse it gets.

But even worse, deflation is also a phenomenon that feeds on itself. Consider a typical bank deposit: you deposit $100 now, and with a promise to receive (say) $105 a year from now: a 5% return. If inflation suddenly rises, rates of return on new loans have to rise to keep pace, or else people will stop investing: after all, who would invest for a 5% return if inflation is running at 15%? Interest rates therefore match inflation rates, plus a little bit. But now consider interest rates in a deflationary scenario: inflation is actually NEGATIVE, and if it is negative by enough the bank can’t offer a positive rate of return at all. If inflation is running at 15% (very high) you might still invest if the promised rate of return was 20%. But if inflation was running at -15% (i.e. deflation), would you still invest in a bank if the promised rate of return was -10%? Of course not. You’d take your money out of the bank and stuff it in your mattress, awaiting the day when interest rates became positive again. In doing so, however, you are taking your money (literally) out of the money supply, thus making the problem worse. That bank now has less money to lend, and with less money circulating in the system due to deflation, the virtuous cycle of borrowing and lending for investment in our future grinds to a halt. Bye bye economy.

What happens in the real world, therefore, is that central banks are constantly monitoring and managing the overall money supply to keep inflation from running away while at the same time avoiding deflation. This has been the money supply goal of the post-Depression, post-World War II bargain of the liberal democracies. Deflationary scenarios, as well as excessive inflationary scenarios, can only really be managed by authoritarian regimes, who avoid civil unrest simply by curtailing people’s rights by fiat. It should be no surprise then, too, that people living these scenarios are either ruled by dictators, or tend to turn to dictators for salvation.

My friends, the USA is facing a massive collapse of its money supply. The collapse of stocks on Wall Street is not really the problem, but is instead a symptom is a greater problem. You see, because stocks are traded very freely, their prices can inflate or deflate quickly and easily. But Wall Street acts like a thermometer for the temperature of the economy: a collapse in world stock prices must eventually be followed by a collapse in the prices of other real goods, and eventually a collapse in wages. It is like ripples in a pond. Who exactly will lose their job, and how long it will take to lose it, we cannot say. But we should not imagine it won’t happen, and the consequences will affect us all.

This is why the $700-billion bailout package was (and still is) necessary. The package will have the effect of injecting a huge amount of money into the money supply, thereby staving off the deflationary scenario. This extra money will act like “grease” in the “motor” of the economy, giving banks and other financial institutions time to reorganize their portfolios. Again, it is like the marbles. The banks will still get hit in the head by the marbles, but those marbles will at least be spread over time rather than coming in all at once. The financial system will be stung but at least will survive.

Let me add that this $700 billion package is only a temporary measure. Once things stabilize, the $700 billion will need to come back out of the economy, or else massive inflation can start. It will get paid back, and probably with a decent rate of return to boot. If I had $700 billion handy, I’d invest it in this way.

The bottom line, my American friends, is this: you cannot afford to be overly individualistic. I know you pride yourselves on the virtue of self-reliance, but when it comes to the monetary system this simply isn’t possible. You may have lots of dollars in your bank account or even in your mattress, but those dollars only have value because you are part of a greater society that says they do. Like it or not, this problem has been thrust upon you and you are part of it. It isn’t just about homeowners in Florida. It isn’t just about fat cats on Wall Street. It’s about the interest rate on your home mortgage starting to spike. It’s about your pension fund or your annuity drying up. It’s about your company having to lay people off. It’s about your life saving losing value.

Like it or not, its about you, the average individual American. Be angry if you want at the poor decisions others have made in the past. I understand how, in a culture that prides itself on self-reliance, the orientation is strong to not let others “off the hook”. I understand the importance of letting them suffer the consequences of those choices. Their suffering, however, will also become yours, because we are all connected by the financial and monetary system. It will become the suffering of every person who uses US dollars as a medium of exchange, which is just about everybody.

A bailout package, in whatever form it will eventually take, is not designed the prevent the pain, just to keep it from spreading to the innocent. Or, if you prefer, the less guilty.

It isn’t “them” that you are being asked to rescue. Ultimately, it is yourselves. Indeed, it is everyone, both rich and poor.

There is an amazing variety of living creatures on this planet. These creatures, however, can typically be classified into broad groups which share common characteristics. Plants are different from animals, for example. Among animals, vertebrates are different from invertebrates. Among vertebrates, mammals are different from birds. The family of mammals can itself be broken down into its own subdivisions (the cat-like mammals being different from the ape-like mammals, and so on). Eventually we get to a special level known as a species, and this is where the fun begins.

The levels of biological subdivision above that of the species are usually known as a genus, a term that is related to English words like “generic” and “general”. A genus is a category of species that possess certain common traits, such as having a backbone (vertebrates) or having feathers (birds). The word “species”, on the other hand, is related to English words like “special” and “specific”. This word also describes a biological subdivision, but a biological subdivision with a special feature for creatures that reproduce sexually: its members are able to interbreed and produce non-sterile offspring. The capacity to reproduce is what makes individual animals members of the same species. A chicken is a vertebrate; so is a monkey. But a chicken and a monkey, despite both being vertebrates, cannot reproduce together. They may be part of of the same genus, but they are of two different species.

As an aside, I should point out that there are types animals that are so closely related that they can produce offspring, despite being members of two different species. A donkey and a horse, for example, can mate and produce the animal we know as a “mule” (or in rarer cases, produce a “hinny”). A tiger and a lion can also mate, believe it or not, and their offspring are known as “ligers” and “tigons”. A key feature of these inter-species hybrids, however, is that the offspring are either sterile or can only mate with a member of a parent species. As such, they do not consitute a new species of their own.

I should also point out that biologists also identify groups below the level of species, known as a sub-species. Again, these are animals which share particular characteristics, and so are grouped accordingly; however, they are still able to inter-breed freely within the larger species, and so cannot be considered separate species of their own. One of the most visible examples of this principle can actually be found within our own species, Homo sapiens. People from sub-Saharan Africa tend to have dark brown skin; people from northern Europe often have blue eyes or blonde hair; and people from eastern Asia tend to have upper eyelids without a visible crease. These distinctions mean nothing, however, when it comes to the capacity to reproduce, such that we humans really are part of one overall species.

Where did all these different species come from? The question is particularly compelling when we examine the fossil record, where we discover the remains of countless creatures that simply don’t exist anymore. One of the most common fossil types is the trilobite, and yet they disappear from the fossil record at a distant point in Earth’s past; it would seem that trilobites have been extinct for at least 250 million years. If species after species can be shown to have gone extinct, why are any species alive now at all, and with such amazing diversity? While trilobites disappear after a certain point, however, what is really interesting is how evidence of certain types of creatures cannot be found before a certain point. One of the best documented cases of this is that of the modern horse.

Evidence for the existence of modern horses can only be found starting from about 1 million years ago. However, prior to that point there is evidence of another creature, called “pliohippus”, whose remains closely resemble that of a modern horse while not being exactly the same (it is significantly smaller with differently-shaped bones). Remains of pliohippus, however, can only be traced back to approximately 10 million years ago. Prior to pliohippus, we discover the remains of a similar-but-different creature called “merychippus”. Merychippus cannot be found prior to 30 million years ago, but “mesohippus” (another similar creature) can, which in turn cannot be found prior to 40 million years ago. The earliest horse-like creature we can find in the fossil record is “esohippus”, which was approximately the size of a dog and had toes. If we were to put a modern horse and an esohippus beside each other we might have trouble believing that they were related creatures at all, but that is without the evidence of the intervening years. It is like putting a picture of a person at age 1 and another picture of the same person at age 100 next to each other — the two look very different, and yet there may very well be a strangely compelling similarity between them at the same time. If we were to “fill in the blanks” with other pictures from intervening years, though, the similarity would be even more striking, until a true continuity could be found. We would realise that all the photos were actually of the same person!

While individual human beings certainly do change (dare we say evolve?) during their lifetimes, however, the case of the modern horse is an example of what “evolution” really means: that a species taken as a whole can change over time.

Human beings have long recognized that children inherit certain characteristics from their parents, and not only among our own kind: after all, we have been breeding dogs for centuries, selecting parent dogs with particular traits so that those traits might appear in a concentrated form in the offspring. We have typically bred dogs for their utility in certain environments: huskies, for example, are excellent cold-weather animals, while Newfoundland dogs have webbed feet and an amazing capacity to swim. These dog breeds are another example of sub-species, in that while the different breeds might be quite different from each other they can still mutually reproduce. But what would happen if specialized breeding eventually meant that each breed became so different from the other that they couldn’t make babies with each other anymore? They would then be considered two different species, and an “evolutionary leap” called speciation would be considered to have taken place.

Speciation is difficult to observe in practice, because it is assumed to be a gradual process that takes place over many generations — generations which, taken together, add up to a longer period of time than the lifetime of the observer! Despite this, we do know that the human breeding of animals has indeed resulted in speciation. Domestic sheep are the result of centuries of the breeding of what were originally wild sheep, including the mouflon. But while the mouflon still exist as an independent species, domestic sheep and mouflon can no longer produce viable offspring together.

So what is evolution? In short, it is the theory that speciation does not only occur as the result of human intervention and breeding programs, but is also a naturally-occurring phenomenon. A particular species may give rise to sub-species, which in turn eventually become their own separate species, and so on, eventually contributing to the amazing diversity of life on this planet as we know it.

This theory of evolution has amazing explanatory power, but it raises a serious question: how does speciation occur in nature? It took centuries for domestic sheep to become a distinct species from the mouflon, and that was with direct human intervention. Given the time scales involved, therefore, we should not be surprised to discover that natural speciation has never been directly observed.

Going beyond the “how” is the “why”: why should speciation occur in the natural world? After all, if particular species are already well-enough adapted to their environments to be able to maintain relatively stable populations, why change?

Enter Charles Darwin, whose book The Origin of Species is considered the ground-breaking book in this area. Darwin not only proposed that new species arise from old, but also offered an explanation of the “how” and the “why”. In short, while each species is in harmony with its environment, that harmony is itself unstable. A major change in climate, for example, can have far greater deleterious effects on one species than on another, causing a major shift in population balance. Beyond this, a change to one of the species that is part of this “balance of nature” can itself upset the current balance. We know that predatory behaviour exists, with nature being “red in tooth and claw”; there is even competition for simpler resources like sunlight, where the tallest trees have the advantage. The potential hostility that exists in nature means that only the fittest creatures survive to pass on their successful traits to their offspring. Why, therefore, do new species arise and achieve a significant level of population? It is because the unstable and changing circumstances of the balance of nature require that creatures be able to adapt to those circumstances, and those adaptations would be heightened by the “survival of the fittest” mechanism which would tend to reduce the availability of mating partners to those creatures that did, in fact, survive.

While the “survival of the fittest” mechanism does tend to explain how one species might replace another, it does not however explain how a new species arises from another. After all, why should we observe new species as a result of a change in climate? Why not just simply a redistribution of the species that currently exist? A second “how” mechanism is therefore required, called mutation. In essence, mutation proposes that changes frequently occur in a species from one generation to the next. Many, perhaps even most of these mutations are actually defects, i.e. they make survival more difficult, and so they are eliminated by the survival of the fittest mechanism. Others may be relatively innocuous, but some confer a marked survival advantage, an advantage that is often most apparent when the balance of nature undergoes a shock (like a climate change). Again, the survival of the fittest mechanism would select for these traits, and the species as a whole would eventually be transformed as the new characteristic spread through the population. It is not really that a new species arises and kills off the old, but that the new species *is* the old one, only improved. Think of the primitive horses mentioned earlier: if this theory of mutation is correct, the modern horse did not “replace” the esohippus, the modern horse *IS* the esohippus after millenia of gradual changes, changes including the development of longer legs and hooves.

The mutation argument alone is not sufficient, however, to explain the rise of new species, because it can only explain the evolution of a single species within its own population. For mutation to result in speciation, therefore, something else is required, such as geographic isolation, or the instinct to only mate with members of the same species.

Think about it. Suppose an animal is born with the ability to better camouflage itself against predators. That animal could then pass this trait on to its offspring, who will tend to survive better and therefore pass that trait on to more offspring, and so on, such that the trait on that one individual becomes a trait of the species. Suppose this same original species also sees the rise of an individual that has an improved ability to catch food. It too could then pass this trait on to its offspring, who will tend to survive better and therefore pass that trait on to more offspring, and so on. One could say that two new sub-species have arisen within the original species thanks to these mutations, but one *cannot* say that speciation has taken place, as the two groups can still interbreed. Indeed, given the “survival of the fittest” mechanism, the best individuals would be those that possess both mutations, such that the two branches would tend to merge over time back into a single species branch (albeit one that has “evolved”). For mutation to result in speciation, therefore, either single mutations must be sufficiently “large” as to result in incompatible breeding populations right away, or there has to be a way for two populations of the same species to remain distinct long enough for the many small mutations to add up to a breeding incompatibility.

The theory of “large” mutations has not tended to be favoured, simply because it would require that several individuals arise simultaneously with the same mutation; otherwise, the new individual would be (in effect) a species with a population of 1, and would go extinct as soon as that one individual died (as the breeding incompatibility would mean it could never pass on its traits to fertile offspring). Typical evolutionary theory proposes that mutations occur randomly, and so mutations that result in speciation (no matter how successful for the individual) simply do not happen. On the other hand, if it were possible to propose an evolutionary theory that allows for simultaneous “large” mutations, it would go a long way to explaining speciation.

For “small” mutations to result in speciation, therefore, some other mechanism is required. Geographical isolation is a commonly proposed explanation, the idea being that two populations that are sufficiently isolated will develop independent sets of minor mutations, the cumulative effect of which will be populations so distinct that they can no longer interbreed (i.e. they will have become separate species). Again, while speciation has never been observed in nature, we do nevertheless see a tantalizing hint of the speciation mechanism in the Larus gulls that live around the North pole. These birds have a very broad geographic range, and gulls that live on one extreme of the range cannot breed any longer with gulls that live on the opposite extreme. These populations are different species to each other.

Another mechanism to explain how populations become isolated does not depend on geography but on the instinctual mechanisms for selecting mating partners. The basic idea is that “like attracts like”. How do cats know to only mate with other cats, and not with dogs? On some level they grasp their own “catness”, and they are drawn to mate only with other cats. The same effect may occur when a mutation happens: mutants may be drawn to mate only with similar mutants, while original members of the species might tend to reject mating with mutants in favour of their own kind. At first glance it might appear that this approach would require the appearance of several mutants at once, and therefore this theory would suffer the same problems as the “large mutation” approach already seen, but this is not necessarily the case. A new mutant would be at a disadvantage, of course, but because its mutation is not “large” it can still breed with the dominant population. It the mutation truly did confer a major survival advantage, such that this advantage meant that it could “force” its traits onto the population at large, eventually a small mutant population would develop, and the “like attracts like” mechanism could take place within those different populations. New mutations would accumulate within those populations, until they speciated. They two groups may not be separated by distance, but they nevertheless do not mix until eventually they cannot. This “like attracts like” mechanism has been observed experiments with multiple generations of fruit flies, where the descendants of these multiple generations show they prefer to associate with (and mate with) fruit flies that share similar characteristics.

The problem with both of these arguments is that while individual populations may be out of direct contact with each other, they are rarely without some sort of mediated contact. For the gulls, the “extreme end” populations may be species to each other, but they are considered sub-species with relation to the population in the middle of the range, as both populations can breed with the population found in the middle. The case of the Larus gulls certainly appears to be an example of sub-species become species in their own right; on the other hand, it is also possible that the reverse is occurring, and that the two previously incompatible branches will actually collapse into a single branch thanks to the presence of this “intermediate population”. In other words, while evolution as described could result in the rise of divergent species, it could also result in the merging of previously incompatible species thanks to new “bridge” species emerging (i.e. evolution could also be “convergent”). Nevertheless, if dependent on random mutations, evolution is likely a largely divergent process, as more specific mutations would be needed for the creation of reproductive compatibility than reproductive incompatibility.

Despite the incomplete nature of these explanations, and the practical impossibility of directly observing a speciation event, it is still possible to demonstrate the likelihood of evolutionary speciation in an indirect way. If new multiple new species truly can arise from a single parent species, these new species can be said to have a common ancestor. If the existence of a common ancestor can be demonstrated, then the fact of speciation can be affirmed even if it cannot be entirely explained. Much of the sifting through the fossil record has been an attempt to find such common ancestors in the distant past. Unfortunately, because resemblance does not necessarily demonstrate descent, this is essentially impossible to prove. For example, one would expect that a common ancestor of birds and reptiles would share features of both, but the discovery of a fossil that resembles a bird in some ways and a reptile in others does not necessarily mean that this fossil is that common ancestor. After all, perhaps they resemble each other because each independently evolved to be well adapted to a similar environment (such as the resemblence between dolphins and ichthyosaurs). Simply put, the fossil record cannot provide direct evidence of common ancestors.

The recent discovery of the importance of DNA in living organisms, on the other hand, has changed this situation. “DNA” is the short form for deoxyribonucleic acid, a chemical common to all living organisms that contains the “blueprints” for how that organism is to be structured (mostly by coding for the development of the proteins used in the various chemical processes of the body). The various amino acids found in DNA act as letters of the genetic alphabet, and their collective set is called the genome. The slightest change in the sequence of amino acids in a gene can have a major outcome: the origin of the deadly disease cystic fibrosis, for example, can be traced to changes in a single gene.

Because DNA patterns are transmitted from one generation to the next, common DNA patterns can be used to identify members of the same family — or even the same species. What research has also discovered, however, is that there are often large portions of DNA that are common across species boundaries. These portions are apparently inactive, so their presence cannot be explained by the same kind of independent-but-convergent process of natural selection that produced dolphins and ichthyosaurs. Instead, it is far more likely that these portions of DNA are simply the “fossil remains” of DNA that was once part of the genome of an ancestor and that is still passed down. But because these portions of DNA can be common across certain species boundaries (depending on the organisms under discussion), their presence points to the existence of a common ancestor. It is not direct proof, but it certainly is compelling evidence, such that the study of these similarities and differences in DNA patterns is provoking the revision of our current classification of species. Before, we used to classify the relatedness of species based on similar external characteristics; now this data is being completely reviewed, using the internal evidence of DNA.

So what is evolution? It is a scientific theory that states that the characteristics of a given species can change over the course of generations, and that these changes can result in reproductive incompatibility such that a new species can be said to have resulted. While the process of speciation has never been directly observed in the natural world, certain DNA evidence certainly points to the existence of common ancestors for reproductively divergent species. Evolution, therefore, is more than a mere hypothesis: there is serious evidence that it has actually occurred. How evolution works, however, is still open for discussion. The most common explanations involve minor random mutations accumulating over time, with defects being weeded out by a “survival of the fittest” mechanism, but as we do not know enough of how a genome “works” there are still plenty of questions to answer.

Where does the Catholic Church stand on all of this? Pope John Paul II made international headlines in 1996 when, in an October 22 speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he spoke of evolution as “more than an hypothesis”. Some were shocked, while others applauded, with both groups believing that such a statement represented a change in attitude of the Catholic Church on the question. Those aware of the issues, however, simply shrugged, as the Catholic Church has never had a real difficulty with evolution as such. Pope Pius XII, for example, wrote an encyclical letter in 1950 entitled Humani Generis, in which he expressly authorized research into evolution:

The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. (HG, no. 36)

At the time Humani Generis was written, evolution was little more than a theoretical framework — a compelling one, no doubt, but lacking evidence. By the time Pope John Paul II spoke 46 years later, however, evidence (particularly DNA evidence) was now present. His statement, therefore, that evolution was more than a mere hypothesis was simply recognizing the current scientific state of affairs.

The theory of evolution has, however, tended to get hijacked. Because its explanatory structure is very compelling, evolutionary explanations have also arisen regarding the structure of societies and cultures, and even the structure of human ideas (such as the theory of memes). These evolution-like paradigms often become actual ideologies, with recommendations for how human behaviour should adapt (social Darwinism being one of the first examples). Some even propose theological conclusions from the evolutionary paradigm, implying that evolution is a closed system that needs no intervention from God (a position that completely ignores the philosophical distinction between primary and secondary causes, I might add). The Catholic Church, therefore, has tended to be cautious when it comes to voicing support for evolution — not because it is suspicious of the physical theory, but because the word “evolution” is also often associated with a package of ideas and conclusions that fall well outside the bounds of the merely physical theory.

As for myself, I am firmly in agreement with Pope John Paul II. The biological theory of evolution, which modestly states that speciation has occurred in the natural world, certainly seems to possess sufficient evidence to go beyond the stage of a mere hypothesis, although much more work remains to be done. But I also agree with the modesty of John Paul II (and Pius XII before him), when they caution against potentially misapplying the explanatory structure of the theory of evolution, particularly when that explanatory structure is still in need of fine-tuning regarding how speciation actually occurs. I accept evolution, but that does not mean I accept the package of secondary ideas that have become associated with what is otherwise a merely biological theory.

So why can’t we use this explanatory structure in other ways? Because doing so rests on the hidden assumption that man is merely a biological entity. The explanatory structure of the evolutionary paradigm is compelling thanks to its elegant simplicity, and so I suppose people can hardly be blamed for using it in the development of other theories, ideologies, and even theologies (or anti-theologies, as the case may be). But what if human beings also have spiritual souls? The evolutionary paradigm is not built to account for possibilities such as this, and therefore the application of that paradigm, as though it were complete in itself, to realities that it might not be able to explain fully could have monstrous consequences: the full reality of human nature would not be respected, and the resulting ideological recommendations for action would actually be dehumanizing and destructive to happiness.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that Pope Pius XII mentioned the concept of the spiritual soul as a boundary between evolution as a biological theory and evolution as an ideological package. And it should equally be of no surprise that part 2 of this series on human origins will be on the human soul.

(Thanks to Valérie for the link!)