Royte manages to paint a very human portrait of the biologists who engage every day in backbreaking tedium.  Reading about them through Royte, these biologists aren’t too different than you and I.  They like a stiff drink, they make fart jokes, they are, well, quite human.  But Royte also manages to paint a picture of the cutting edge of biology – how these Smithsonian jungle labs are crucial in the race to understand what the world may very well lose forever.

Royte describes the Barro Colorado facility this way,

The laboratory on the island’s northeastern shore has operated continuously since 1923, its backyard the most-studied tropical rain forest in the world.  Barro Colorado is both a monument of nature and, perhaps tellingly, a monument to nature – off-limits to the general public, virtually stateless.  Sitting between two continents, it is populated by field researchers from around the world and administered by the Smithsonian Institution, which acts as a diplomatic mission to science.

All the greenhouses I see here in Gamboa are botanical laboratories.  And many of the buildings are quarters for biologists conducting research in Soberania National Park.  Yesterday, while walking on the famously wildlife-teeming Pipeline Road, I noticed so many of the trees and plants along the roadside were labeled.  Lines of flags and colored tubes and spots of paint were everywhere.  These are countless experiments in progress. 

At one point while walking on Pipeline Road, two men on a four-wheeler passed by.  They were carrying transmission equipment.  They were Panamanian biologists, tracking tagged harpy eagles.  

So much of this research is critical to what is quickly becoming the great moral issue of our age: man-made environmental problems threaten the world's species, and surely, with that the habitats and resources we rely on. Much of that diversity is concentrated in these jungles. Saving species is largely reliant on evolutionary biology.

Think about that for a moment, Pastor. Then, let me repeat what you wrote.  You said, “the theory of evolution, which I believe to be poor science and a theory in crisis…”