Scientists, by dating old rocks, have established that Earth is 4.3 billion years old. The earliest fossils, those being photosynthetic bacteria, trace the beginning of life on the planet to about 3.5 billion years ago. About 600 million years ago, multicelled organisms appeared, for instance, worms and jellyfish. Then came terrestrial plants and four-legged animals, about 400 million years ago. Mammals did not show up until 250 million years ago, and birds can be found in fossil form dating from 50 million years ago.
Coyne writes, "Humans are newcomers on the scene -- our lineage branches off from that of other primates only about 7 million years ago, the merest sliver of evolutionary time." Then just over four decades ago, Barack Obama was born, and just over six decades ago, Newt Gingrich.
Coyne and other evolutionary biologists have had their theories fortified by the ability, starting three decades back, to sequence the genomes of various species and discover genes shared by related species, some that still work, some that do not, thus allowing us to go on our merry way from, say, our relative the chimpanzee. The key to this process, scientists say, is natural selection. There are good genes, which help us survive, and not-so-good genes, which deny those who carry them the possibility of survival.
Now, creationists find all this highly dubious, but for me, the information has come as a great relief. The good news is that human beings adapt. We have survived, according to my reading of Coyne, for about 60,000 years, adapting to all sorts of challenges, climate changes, dietary changes, plagues and other such unwelcome happenstances. The present hullabaloo over global warming is much ado about nothing. Let the climate change; the species Homo sapiens has survived 60 millenniums. There is no reason for the Obama administration to tamper with the automobile market. We can survive carbon in the atmosphere and have since the last weak-gened member of Homo erectus wobbled off. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the automobile industry can survive politicians' designing our cars, taxing our gasoline, and supplying us with tiny vehicles that few Americans want to buy.