In Bob Gibson’s column in today’s Daily Progress, he addresses some of the fallout from President Bush’s recent endorsement of teaching creationism. What I find noteworthy about the column is that he uses a pair of blogs for reference — Brian Wheeler’s excellent new blog and this here blog.
Specifically, Gibson highlights the excellent comment by “NoVA Scout,” in which he reconciles his Christian faith with evolution. Writes Gibson:
A raging debate on intelligent design broke out on Aug. 3 on liberal Charlottesville political activist Waldo Jaquith’s blog, where the blogger personally endorses “logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.”
One Northern Virginian engaging in the public conversation on the Internet made some good observations that Kaine and Kilgore both might agree with while Bush might not.
The blogger called NoVA Scout said, “I’ve never had any trouble reconciling my Christian faith with Darwinian theory. To place the two in stark opposition misunderstands the precepts of both. The President either was playing to the cheap seats with his remarks or he hadn’t thought them through. The difficulty with Intelligent Design is that it is (to date at least) a theological construct. Open the door to it in secular schools and there is no defensible way to hold back a lot of other religious-based theories of the formation of the universe.
“As a conservative Christian,” the blogger continued, “I do not understand why so many of my brothers and sisters want the government meddling with religious doctrine. An article of secular faith is that Government rarely does anything very well.
“Why charge it with religious doctrine? They’ll just muck it up. … Good science is a window on God’s omniscience.”
Amen.
This demonstrates one of the basic symbiotic concepts that I learned about in biology class.
Symbiosis, you’ll likewise recall, is a relationship between two organisms from which at least one of them benefits. In nature, this is generally a result of coevolution. I recently said that the United States is in danger of becoming “a remora nation,” referring to the remora, a fish with a modified dorsal fin that permits it to affix itself to the smooth flesh of whales and sharks. Not only does the remora conserve its energy by rarely having to swim, but its food is taken care of, as it eats the scraps left by its host. This form of symbiosis is commensalism, in which one organism gains nothing (but isn’t harmed), and the other gains a great deal. For long, commensalism would have been the term to describe the blog/media relationship — we scavenged information and research provided by reporters.
Another form of symbiosis is mutualism. This is best illustrated by the relationship between the Egyptian Plover and the crocodile. When the crocodile opens its mouth to cool itself, the plover flies into its maw to eat the chunks of meat stuck in the reptile’s teeth. The plover, tolerated by the crocodile, gets a safe meal; the crocodile gets clean teeth.
The symbiotic relationship between bloggers and the media has historically been commensal, but I argue that a mutual one is both healthier and more productive for bloggers and journalists. Bob Gibson, particularly in the past couple of months, has shown what can come of such a mutual symbiotic relationship. In today’s column, turning to blogs as a source of information about how Virginians feel about a topic of national relevance, Gibson is able to make use of blogs’ occasional ability to cut through posturing and shallow rhetoric to yield the genuine, insightful perspectives of regular folks. In exchange, blogs provide Gibson with traffic to the Daily Progress website, awareness of his work and reputation outside of the paper’s traditional readership (which is good for him come contract-renegotiation time, presumably), and a level of feedback that print media journalists rarely get.
I’ve never bought the idea that blogs and the media ought to be at odds, and Gibson’s recent integration of the Virginia blogosphere into his work only further cements that belief.