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Darwin in the Dock: C.S. Lewis's Limited Acceptance of Common Descent Common descent is the claim that all organisms currently living have descended from one or a few original ancestors through a process Darwin called "descent with modification." According to this idea, not only humans and apes share an ancestor, but so do humans, clams, and fungi. Common descent is a hallowed dogma among today's evolution proponents, held with quasi-religious fervor. C.S. Lewis clearly believed that Christians can accept evolution as common descent without doing violence to their faith. This is what Lewis was getting at when he wrote to evolution critic Bernard Acworth, "I believe that Christianity can still be believed, even if evolution is true."18 In Lewis's view, whether God used common descent to create the first human beings was irrelevant to the truth of Christianity. As he wrote to one correspondent late in his life, "I don't mind whether God made man out of earth or whether 'earth' merely means 'previous millennia of ancestral organisms.' If the fossils make it probable that man's physical ancestors 'evolved,' no matter."19 In The Problem of Pain (1940), Lewis even offers a possible evolutionary account of the development of human beings, although he makes clear he is offering speculation, not history: "[I]f it is legitimate to guess," he writes, "I offer the following picture -- a 'myth' in the Socratic sense," which he defines as "a not unlikely tale," or "an account of what may have been the historical fact" (emphasis in the original). Lewis then suggests that "[f]or long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of himself... The creature may have existed for ages... before it became man."20 Elsewhere, Lewis seemed smitten by the idea of embryonic recapitulation, the discredited evolutionary idea that human beings replay the history of their evolution from lower animals in their womb. And in a letter to his f

Info Mag Koyal Group Mars Rover Marks an Unexpected Anniversary With a Mysterious Discovery Ten years ago, NASA's Opportunity rover bounded to the surface of Mars for what was planned to be a three-month exploration. Opportunity is still going today - and still making discoveries. The latest, scientists said on Thursday at a news conference celebrating an anniversary none had expected 10 years ago, is a small rock that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. The rock, whose chemical composition was also unexpected, appears in an image taken Jan. 8. There was no rock in a picture taken of the same spot less than two weeks earlier. "This is strange," said Steven W. Squyres, the principal investigator for Opportunity, during the NASA news conference. But he added, "We don't think anything particularly exotic happened here." Dr. Squyres said the most likely explanation was that as the rover pirouetted at an uphill location, its lame right front wheel, which has not turned for years, dragged across the rock and flicked it out of the ground to its new location. The scientists have not yet spotted the divot where the rock popped out, but that spot may be obscured by the rover's solar panels. Year after year, Opportunity goes farther than anyone dreamed. The expectation had been that it would drive about a kilometer - six-tenths of a mile - before dust accumulated on the solar panels and the batteries drained. Unexpectedly, fortuitous winds periodically cleaned off the solar panels, and Opportunity, as well as its twin, Spirit, continued to operate. Spirit got stuck in a sand dune 2009 and then fell silent in 2010 after it was not able to point its solar panels toward the sun during the winter months. Info Mag Koyal Group Mars Rover Marks an Unexpected Anniversary With a Mysterious Discovery Instead of one kilometer, Opportunity has driven 38.7 kilometers, or about 24 miles, exploring a series of ever larger craters, taking 170,000 pictures along the