the evolution pages (ebon musings)

8/14/2019 The Evolution Pages (Ebon Musings)

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Evolution

What Evolution Is and What It Isn't Many arguments against evolution are based on an ignorance of what it really says -- an ignorance often due inpart to creationist organizations who deliberately spread misinformation in an attempt to make it seem lessplausible than it is. This essay clears the air by explaining in plain language what the theory of evolution saysand, at least as importantly, what it doesn't say.

Naturalism In Science Naturalism is one of the fundamental principles of science. However, some creationists attack it and deny itsimportance, claiming it is an unjustifiable assumption or a product of bias. This essay shows why nothing couldbe further from the truth and makes the case that science and naturalism are inseparable.

Atheism, Religion and Evolution Is evolution a religion? Don't you have to be an atheist to accept evolution? Do scientists "believe" in evolution?These questions and more answered.

Has Evolution Been Proven? Laws in some states mandate warning stickers in textbooks labeling evolution a "controversial idea" or an"unproven theory." Are such criticisms accurate, or do they miss the mark entirely? Learn the answers here.

Evolution Is Just a Theory! But is that a point against it? This essay examines the scientific definitions of the terms "theory" and "law" toshow why it is not, countering a commonly heard but badly misguided anti-evolutionary argument.

Why Evolution Isn't Chance One of the most fundamental mistakes made with regards to evolution is to assume that it is a process of purechance or blind luck. This essay clears up that misconception, explaining how nothing could be further from thetruth.

The Tornado in the Junkyard A monotonously common creationist argument is that evolution is about as likely as a tornado blowing througha junkyard and assembling a fully functional jumbo jet. Learn why this argument is faulty.

Creationism

What Is Creationism? For newcomers to this website or people unfamiliar with the creation/evolution debate, this essay explainswhat creationism is, details the differences between different types of creationist, and briefly sketches thegoals of the creationist movement.

Why Creationism? Why should creationism exist at all? In this day and age, how can anyone still favor literal interpretations of
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scripture over science? This essay attempts to explain the motivations of creationists and show what drivesthem.

Why You Should Fight Creationism Many people regard the creationist movement as "not that big a deal" or "someone else's problem." This essaywarns against such complacency and provides compelling reasons to fight against religion masquerading as

science.

Why Creationism Isn't Science While the creationists claim they're doing legitimate science, in reality nothing could be further from the truth.This essay explains why, citing sources to show that even creationists themselves are well aware that what theyadvocate is religion, not science.

Why Creationism Is Harmful to Religion Although many creationist groups claim to be doing God's work in fighting evolution, the truth is that they aredoing far more damage to their own faith than to the solid edifice of evolutionary biology. This essay explainswhy.

On Conspiracies and Mined Quotes

Creationists often present quotes "mined" from scientific literature that seem to cast doubt on whetherevolution occurs. This essay examines this tactic and shows how scientific debate is a sign of the strength, notthe weakness, of a theory.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Enough Already! Creationists often make reference to a physical principle known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, whichthey claim proves that evolution is impossible. This old and outdated argument is refuted thoroughly, showinghow it was wrong from the start and based on nothing more than a misunderstanding of science.

What Good is Half a Wing? Transitional fossils and intermediate structures that show fine-grained change in living things are among themost compelling pieces of evidence in evolution's favor. Creationists are aware of this and often attempt todefine the evidence out of existence, arguing that by definition it could not exist. This essay examines and

counters that claim.

What's Wrong with "Equal Time" Laws Creationists often work through the legislative process, trying to pass "equal time" or "balanced treatment"laws that would set aside classroom time for the teaching of creationism as well as evolution. This essay pointsout why such laws are misguided, unconstitutional and just plain wrong.

The Two Questions There are two fundamental questions that no creationist has ever answered. This essay explains what thosequestions are and shows why this refusal to answer firmly establishes creationism as non-science.

Evolution

What Evolution Is and What It Isn't

What evolution is...

Change in allele frequencies over time Variation in a population's gene pool Struggle for existence/differential reproductive success
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Natural selection/survival of the fittest Random mutation Speciation Common descent Modern interpretations of the theory

...and what it isn't

Abiogenesis or cosmology Random chance Saltation Single-step selection or the "tornado in the junkyard" "Survival of the meanest" New organs A process that occurs to individuals A process with long-term goals A march of progress or a "great chain of being" Monkeys evolving into man

A religion A moral guide "Just a theory"

Many people who argue against evolution do so because they do not understand it. The straw-man caricatures of evolution commonly presented by creationists are indeed illogical, implausible and unscientific. But they are preciselythat - straw men - and do not accurately represent what evolutionary theory really says. When presented in its trueform, the theory of evolution is not only simple and plausible, but the only explanation of biological diversity that isscientific and consistent with the facts.

Unfortunately, creationists work through the political process, not the scientific one. They spread misinformation as towhat evolution is and work to prevent its teaching in public schools so that people do not learn the truth. These peoplethen reject evolution based on their creationist-generated misunderstandings of it, and a vicious cycle is perpetuated.This essay will attempt to clear the air and show how creationist caricatures of evolution are faulty.

So what is evolution? In its simplest sense, evolution can be defined as change over time, and that is what the theory of biological evolution means at the most basic level: a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time. Allelesare different versions of genes that control specific traits. To slightly oversimplify, there is, for example, a gene thatcontrols what color eyes you will have. One version of this gene - one allele - codes for brown eyes, another allele codesfor green eyes, a third allele for blue eyes, and so on. Evolution states that over time in a population of living things,some alleles become more common and eventually dominate, while others become less common and may disappearaltogether.

But of course, there is far more to the theory of evolution than that. It is to the complexities of evolution that this essaywill now turn.

Charles Darwin opened his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species with a common-sense observation: namely, thatgreat diversity exists among life, not just between different species, but among members of the same species as well.From the breathtaking mix of hues in a flower garden to the countless different melodies of songbirds and whales, fromthe millions of different beetles to the vast branching tree of the mammals, from the lowliest of bacteria to the mostbrilliant geniuses of humanity, modern biologists have more than confirmed Darwin's observations on this point byclassifying the enormous diversity of life into a system comprising hundreds of classes and families and millions of
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species, with new ones being discovered constantly. For further proof, one need only witness the dozens of remarkablydissimilar varieties of dogs, cats and other domestic animals that human breeders have brought forth in only a fewhundred years. As modern geneticists now know, the ultimate source of all this variation is a population's gene pool , theentire set of alleles collectively possessed by all the members of that species. With thousands or millions of alleles thatcan be combined in countless ways, the potential for variation among even a small population is almost limitless.

Darwin followed this up with another observation that was both simple and obvious: all life is a struggle for existence.Prey must escape their predators to survive, while predators must catch and kill their prey if they are to keep fromstarving. Plants growing near each other must compete for sunlight, water and nutrients. Bacteria, viruses and parasitescannot reproduce without a host organism, while the host's immune system must constantly work to fend them off. Andeverything must find sufficient food, water and other vital resources, resources which are often scarce. Out of thisconstant struggle, some organisms emerge triumphant, flourishing and reproducing abundantly. Others lose thestruggle, dwindle and die off. This process is readily observable in all things living today, and the fossil record shows thatit occurred in the past as well - the losers (and there are many of them) are preserved in stone. Over 99% of all thespecies that have ever lived are extinct today.

Darwin's next observation formed the crux of his theory, and yet it too was so amazingly simple that it's almost hard tobelieve no one thought of it before him. As stated above, all living things must struggle for existence, must compete forresources and avoid predators and other hazards. Since the hazards are many and the resources scarce, it is inevitable

that not all organisms will survive. In fact, in every population - every species - more organisms are born than cansurvive. But due to the vast amounts of variation in the gene pool, no two organisms of the same species are exactlyalike. They all differ from each other, even if only in subtle ways. By chance, some of these slight variations will makesome members of a species more adept at competing for survival than others. The lucky few that are more adept - more"fit" - will survive and produce many offspring. Others, which are less fit, will not be as well suited to their environment,will not be as adept at competing in the struggle for existence, and will die off having produced fewer offspring or noneat all. Thus, in time, the traits that make organisms more successful, more fit, will predominate, while the traits thatmake organisms less fit will disappear. This blind process of winnowing is known as natural selection or,alternatively, survival of the fittest . The way in which it interacts with the idea of changing allele frequencies is obvious inthe light of modern genetics. The genes of successful organisms, which carry the traits that make them successful, willtend to be passed on and proliferate. The genes of unsuccessful organisms will tend to vanish from the gene poolbecause less fit organisms reproduce less abundantly or not at all.

Natural selection is not a conscious process; it does not have goals or intent, and it does not "choose" which organismswill survive. It is the result of environmental pressures which eliminate those organisms less suited to survive them andleave alive those that are better suited. To take a concrete example, on the African savanna, the ability to run quicklymight be an indication of fitness in a herd of gazelles. Gazelles that can run faster are better at escaping cheetahs andother predators; thus they survive and produce offspring (they are selected for). Gazelles that can't run as fast are morelikely to be caught and killed (they are selected against), and thus do not reproduce. It is important to note, however,that the cheetahs do not "choose" to attack any specific gazelle; they pursue all of them, and it is the faster and more f itones that escape. Similarly, in a culture of bacteria exposed to an antibiotic, some might have resistance to thatantibiotic. Those ones with resistance will survive and reproduce (they are selected for). Those without resistance will die(they are selected against). Again, the antibiotic does not consciously choose to kill any specific bacterium. It targets allof them, and the ones with resistance survive while the ones without resistance die. That is natural selection at work.

Note, however, that natural selection does not necessarily imply that less fit organisms will die. Organisms that are less

fit (meaning that they produce fewer offspring) may be incapable of reproducing because of injury or disease, or simplybecause they cannot attract a mate. For example, female peacocks tend to favor males with larger, brighter tail feathersas mates. Males with shorter or less brightly colored feathers are selected against, and tend to reproduce lessabundantly or not at all.

But why should some gazelles run faster than others, or some bacteria have resistance to an antibiotic while others donot, or some peacocks have more colorful feathers than others? To put it another way, where does all this variation - allthese different alleles - come from? At the time Darwin proposed his theory, this was its greatest weakness. He could notexplain the mechanism or the source of variation. Of course, that information is now known, and the wealth of


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knowledge provided by modern genetics has been integrated with Darwin's original ideas in the modern theory of evolution known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

Genetics provides for many sources of variation within a population's gene pool. As an example, there is genetic drift, astatistical "sampling error" of the gene pool: alleles may increase or decrease in frequency purely by chance. In speciesthat reproduce sexually, there is also recombination, where the parents' alleles are mixed and matched to produce

offspring. But, as the creationist might object, neither of these produce new information, only swap around alleles thatalready exist. This is correct, which leads to the next major component of evolutionary theory: mutation.

Packed within the nucleus of every cell of your body is a tightly wound double helix. DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, isliterally the instruction manual of life. This intricate, complex molecule contains all your genes, all the alleles that makeyou unique, encoded in a series of nucleotide bases that can be read by the cell's transcription machinery and convertedinto proteins that control the functions of life. Every time a cell in your body divides, the new cells must be provided witha copy of these instructions so that they know how to perform their specific duties. For this to happen, the DNA of theoriginal cell must be replicated. The molecular machinery present in every cell does this job with a degree of fidelity thatwould put any human copyist to shame. Nevertheless, DNA is a long, complex molecule and the replication process is notperfect. Frequently, when DNA is copied, there are small errors, slight changes. A single nucleotide "letter" might bechanged to another, or a segment of DNA might be deleted entirely, flipped end-to-end or added where one did notpreviously exist. These changes are mutations.

Most mutations are silent - that is, they don't do anything at all. Of the non-silent ones, most are deleterious and impairthe fitness of the organism that has them. Natural selection sees to it that these mutations are quickly eliminated fromthe gene pool. Those that remain - a small percentage of all total mutations, but they definitely do exist - are beneficial.In some way, even a small one, they contribute to the fitness of the organism that has them. Since organisms with thisbeneficial mutation have a survival advantage, they are selected for and tend to reproduce more abundantly than thosewithout it. In this way, the mutation spreads throughout the population and eventually becomes "fixated" in the genepool.

It is important to recognize that mutations are changes to the genome, the set of instructions that dictates how anorganism develops. Therefore, every non-silent mutation makes the organism that has it slightly different from everyother member of its species. It may be something as simple as a tiny alteration in the shape of a blood protein, orsomething as complex as a change to the skeletal and muscular structure that determines the body's ultimate shape. The

point, however, is that each mutation makes the organism different in some way, and over thousands or millions of years, these differences add up. Eventually, as mutations spread and accumulate, a population of organisms may evolveto a point where it is considered to be a separate species from the population it descended from. This iscalled speciation or macroevolution , and contrary to creationist claims, it has been observed and documented.See Observed Instances of Speciation and Some More Observed Speciation Events .

It should be noted that in biology, the definition of the word "species" is a little fuzzy; it has several different meanings. Itdoes not necessarily mean that two species will look entirely different or have entirely different body structures (thoughit can); it does not necessarily mean that two separate species will have very distinct genes (though it can). Indeed, twoorganisms from different but closely related species may have virtually identical genes and look so alike that only anexpert observer can tell the difference. The key concept, and the one most commonly used to define what constitutes aspecies, is reproductive isolation; that is, two organisms from different species will not be able to mate and producefertile offspring. Organisms that can mate and produce offspring which are invariably sterile hybrids are considered to be

of separate species.

Although species are not required to be drastically different, over time separate species do tend to become distinct,since mutations acquired by one population cannot spread to the other. Living things today possess enormous variety,but it can be shown that separate but closely related modern species all evolved from a common ancestral species. Forinstance, modern apes and humans both diversified from a primitive line of ancestors called hominids. However, thosecommon ancestors were in turn linked to other organisms by their own common ancestors. If one extrapolatesbackwards far enough, it is possible to show that all organisms alive today have a single ancestor in common, a simple
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unicellular organism that existed between four and five billion years ago, from which all modern life descended anddiversified. This is known as common descent and constitutes the final major component of evolutionary theory.

Within the scientific community, evolution is as solidly established a fact as gravity, and whether it occurs is no longer amatter of any serious debate. However, there is some debate over how quickly evolution occurs and the relativeimportance of the different mechanisms by which it proceeds. Until fairly recently, the prevailing interpretation

was phyletic gradualism , which holds that evolution occurs constantly at a slow, relatively steady pace. However, in1974, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium , PE for short, which holdsthat life consists of long periods of evolutionary stasis punctuated by brief (on the geologic time scale) intervals of rapiddevelopment and speciation. PE has won fairly general acceptance, though it is important to note that neither of thesemodels precludes the other, as the rate of evolution may be different at different places and times. Other scientists havemade other contributions to the theory as well. For example, Japanese biologist Motoo Kimura proposed the neutral theory of molecular evolution, which holds that genetic drift may play a more important role in the development of some genes than was previously thought. American Lynn Margulis has also contributed the endosymbiotic model of evolution, which holds that certain microscopic structures in the cells of all living things (chloroplasts in plants,mitochondria in animals) were originally separate organisms that colonized host cells and eventually became permanentparts of them. Both of these theories have become more or less accepted additions to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, buthealthy debate is ongoing today; the frontiers of knowledge continue to advance.

With that established, we turn to what evolution is not . Contrary to any creationist claims, what is described above is thewhole of evolutionary theory. Significant departures from it, such as the more commonly heard ones listed below, arestraw-man arguments made up to make it seem ludicrous and improbable.

One of the most common misrepresentations of evolution is to extend it beyond its boundaries, claiming it says morethan it actually does. The theory of evolution says nothing about the origin of the universe, the origin of the earth or eventhe origin of life. Evolution concerns itself only with the subsequent development of life once it already existed. Themanner in which life first came into being is irrelevant to evolutionary theory, though it is covered in a related field,abiogenesis. (If God had miraculously created the first living cell in the primordial soup, evolution could have taken overnormally from there.) The origin of the universe and other cosmological bodies is not biology at all; it is sometimesreferred to as stellar evolution, but it is an unrelated branch of science and has nothing to do with the theory firstproposed by Charles Darwin. Statements such as "Evolution says that hydrogen gas turned into people," "Evolution saysthat particles develop into people" or "Evolution says that life and/or the universe came out of nothing" are all examples

of this faulty type of argument.

Another common misrepresentation is say that evolution proceeds only according to chance, accident, blind luck orrandom behavior. This is completely false. Evolution is anything but random. It is guided by natural selection, a non-random process that follows a fixed, specific set of rules. It is true that mutations, which provide the raw stuff for naturalselection to operate on, are random events, in the sense that they are not predisposed toward increasing fitness.Nevertheless, they are frequent enough for i t to be a certainty that a few beneficial ones will arise, and once they do, theprocess of filtering by natural selection takes over. To say that evolution is a random process would be equivalent toflipping a thousand coins, removing all those that didn't turn up heads, and then saying that the all-heads result cameabout purely by chance. (For more on this, see here .)

In a related vein is the "speciation by mutation" argument, often phrased as "It's impossible that an X could have givenbirth to a Y," such as in, "There's no way a reptile could have laid an egg that hatched into a bird." This is another

argument that demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of evolution. Speciation and other profound changes are notbrought about by many sudden, drastic, simultaneous mutations - in other words, they do not occur by saltation . Rather,they are brought about by tiny, incremental changes gradually accumulating and building on each other over longperiods of time, with natural selection filtering out those that do not improve f itness. Over time, this process can lead toorganisms that are very different from their evolutionary precursors.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle once said that evolution is as likely as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling afully functional Boeing 747. Hoyle, however, was not a biologist, and this statement demonstrates a severemisunderstanding of the subject. A tornado assembling a jetliner would be an example of a saltationary jump owing
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purely to random chance in a process of single-step selection with a predetermined goal. This fails as an analogy toevolution on four counts. As stated above, evolution does not operate by saltation, nor is it guided by random chance,nor does it have goals specified ahead of time. And most especially, it does not operate by a process of single-stepselection, where an end product entirely unlike the beginning product is assembled in one large chance step. As RichardDawkins states in his book The Blind Watchmaker , evolution actually operates by a process of cumulative selection,where large changes are brought about through a gradually accumulating series of small changes guided by selection ateach step. Rather than a tornado assembling a 747 in one step, send the tornado through the junkyard not once, butthousands of times, with each time representing a single generation. Rather than tearing apart its past work each time,assume that, once assembled, collections of parts that could function as part of an airliner will survive. Do this longenough and a 747 may indeed emerge - or, to complete the analogy to evolution, allow the end product to be not just a

jumbo jet, but any functioning piece of machinery. In this way, cumulative selection can achieve in a short time resultsthat would take trillions of years to produce by pure-chance, single-step selection. (For more on this, see The Tornado inthe Junkyard .)

Nor does evolution predict "survival of the meanest" - in other words, it does not predict that every species should be avicious, carnivorous killer bristling with claws, fangs, stingers, spikes, and so on. What evolution does predict is that everyspecies needs a niche, a way to make a living and successfully reproduce, and different species have adapted to differentniches. Some are predators; some are not, instead getting their energy from eating plants, or making their own. In fact, itcould be argued that it is easier to make a living as a plant or an herbivore than a carnivore. Not only is it easier to eatfood that doesn't try to run away, but due to considerations of usable energy, successively higher levels of the food chaincan only support smaller and smaller populations. Thus, it could be said that in terms of reproductive success, the deerand gazelles are more "fit" than the wolves and lions - some of them will certainly be killed by predators, but theircounterstrategy is not to fight back, but to breed so rapidly that enough of them survive to allow the population tocontinue. Evolving strong defensive measures like the ability to f ight back would be a significant drain on their energyand resources which could more profitably be used to reproduce. Some prey species have evolved their own defenseswhere it is cost-effective for them to do so; others have not. They each have their own niches and their own ways of making a living, not all of which involve being the strongest or the meanest.

Another argument is often heard as "Evolution says that we should develop X, but we don't," where X is some significantchange to bodily structure, such as another arm, feathers or new internal organs. However, these statements are wrong.Evolution does not state that our body structures should change drastically. Rather, it builds on what already exists. Acase in point is the basic tetrapod (four-limbed) body form, which has been preserved to some degree in all vertebrate

animals. Even some snakes have small vestigial limbs. A radical change to this well-established body form, such asgrowing a new limb, would not be in keeping with evolutionary theory; nor would the appearance of a new organ, sincethe vertebrate body structure already has all the organs necessary for survival. The basic body plan, including separateorgan systems, evolved at a very early stage of life's history. The chances of drastic changes arising now in a well-established and complex body plan are vir tually nil. Another note: It is absurd to claim "Evolution says I should grow athird arm because I could use one," or something of the like. Mutations are random events and do not favor whatchanges would be best for the organism; it is simply that the ones that do turn out to be useful are the ones that arekept.

A subtle point worth noting is that individual organisms do not evolve , not even if a particular organism is the onepossessing a beneficial mutation that later spreads throughout the population. Populations evolve; individuals do not.This answers the occasional absurd creationist objection that "Evolution can't explain how the first member of a newspecies could find a mate." This is like saying the first speaker of English wouldn't have been able to find anyone to carry

on a conversation with. As follows from the above refutal of the "speciation by mutations" argument, an individualorganism never arises that is an entirely new species from its parents. [1] Populations gradually change over time, andwhile many of the intermediate stages would probably be able to interbreed, the original species and the end productwould not be able to. There is rarely a specific and exactly defined point where speciation occurs; it is a process thatusually happens in slow, incremental steps, one step shading into the next.

Related to the last point, it is also important to mention that evolution, although it is not a chance process, does nothave long-term goals or targets either. Natural selection has only one immediate short-term goal - to increase the fitnessof organisms - and it does not care how that goal is achieved. It cannot traverse a "valley" of temporary decreased fitnessto reach a "peak" of increased fitness. A river might be a helpful analogy. The water of the river has a goal, namely, to
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seek the lowest point - to flow downhill. As long as it is on a level downward slope, the river's behavior is predictable. If itpasses onto a flat plain, the direction it will take can be influenced by many different features of the terrain, causingbends and meanders, and thus is no longer entirely predictable. Nevertheless, the river will continue to follow thegeneral law of always seeking the lowest point. It cannot flow up the side of a mountain - not even if, by doing so, itwould be able to get over the top and flow down the other side to a much lower level than it was at before. Likeevolution, the river's goal is only in the immediate short term. Likewise, although the modern vertebrate eye is whatexists now, this does not mean that natural selection "intended" to produce it. The modern eye is the result of a longseries of chance mutations, guided by natural selection, operating on the original eyespot; different mutations at variouspoints along the line could have produced a completely different result, as long as every intermediate step conferred asurvival advantage. Natural selection does not look ahead, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the blindwatchmaker; it is a blind natural process without long-term goals.

Another all too frequent misconception is that evolution is a steady march of progress, an increase in complexity or anupward climb towards perfection. This is not the case. This popular but erroneous idea is based on a nineteenth-centuryteleological concept called the "great chain of being" which has since been discredited. Natural selection guidesorganisms only in the direction of increased fitness; depending on the circumstances, this can entail either an increase ora decrease in complexity. (An example of the latter would be some types of parasitic intestinal worms which have losttheir digestive systems; they no longer need them, since they can directly absorb food from their hosts through theirskin.) Nor is there any ultimate standard of perfection toward which evolution builds, as f itness is a strictly regionalcharacteristic determined by local environmental factors. Organisms only adapt to their own environment, by definition,but an organism that is extremely well adapted to one environment may be at a severe disadvantage in another. Forexample, penguins are well suited for life in arctic climates, but at the equator they would not survive long. Likewise,humans are primarily tropical creatures. It is only technology that has made us able to survive at colder latitudes, but thisdoes not mean that we are more perfect or even more highly evolved than any other living thing on earth. Every speciesalive today, from bacteria to monkeys to man, is the result of four and a half billion years of evolution - theirs has simplytaken different paths than ours.

And as such, it is also worth noting that man did not evolve from monkeys, or frogs, or slime molds, or bacteria. Thismisunderstanding is very common, perhaps one of the most commonly heard among creationists, but it is wrong.Humans are not directly descended from any species that is alive today; instead, we share common ancestors with them.Humans and apes both descended from an original common ancestor, a variety of hominid, that is now extinct. Likewise,humans and frogs both descended from an common ancestor, albeit one much more distant than the common ancestor

of humans and monkeys. The same is true of insects, plants, slime molds and bacteria, though the common ancestor isprogressively farther back in each case. The common ancestor of humans and insects dates back to the originalemergence of animal life, while the common ancestor of humans and plants or humans and bacteria was not evenmulticellular. But in every case, these common ancestors are now extinct; they either died out or evolved into an entirelynew species themselves. No extant species is evolving into any other extant species, which answers the occasionallyheard objection that "if evolution is true, why don't we see monkeys still evolving into humans?" The answer is thatmonkeys' evolution has taken a different path than ours, and the odds against the two paths ever converging again arenext to nil. Evolution has a virtually infinite number of possible pathways, and i t is extremely unlikely, to put it mildly,that humans would evolve again - that it would take the exact same path - i f, so to speak, the tape were replayed. (Theclaim that monkeys should be evolving into humans also partakes of the erroneous concept of the "great chain of being",debunked above. Humans are not the ultimate goal of evolution - the evolutionary path of every species has gone itsown way, each adapting to different niches.)

Some creationists have claimed that evolution is a religion, but this claim too is false. Evolution is well supported byevidence, and all its basic mechanisms can be observed to operate today; unlike religion, it does not require faith. Inaddition, no one claims evolution is an inerrant doctrine - like all branches of science, it is being constantly tested andrefined, and it could be falsified and rejected if the right evidence turned up. No one prays to evolution. Also like allsciences, evolution is theologically neutral. It says nothing, one way or the other, about the existence of God or thesupernatural; it does not require divine intervention, but nor does it forbid it. Atheists can accept evolution withoutbelieving there is anything more, while theists can accept evolution and believe that their god controls it. Any god can begiven credit for using evolution as the method of creation, and indeed, theists of all denominations accept it -click here for a partial list, or see here for more on atheism, religion and evolution.
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In addition to not being a religion, evolution is also not, nor does it pretend to be, a moral guide. Creationists sometimescharge that "if we're descended from animals, we should act like animals," but this is an example of a classic logicalblunder - the naturalistic or "is implies ought" fallacy. Just because things are some way does not mean thatthey should be that way, or that it is right that they be that way. It is true that, in nature, there is much pain, sufferingand death, even things that seem needlessly cruel. Natural selection can be a harsh and uncaring process, if we insist onsubjecting an unintelligent force of nature to a human value judgment. But this does not mean it is right to be cruel anduncaring, just as the theory of gravity does not mean we should push people off tall buildings, or the germ theory of disease does not mean we should not treat sick people. Like all sciences, evolution is descriptive and not prescriptive. Itis merely a statement of the way things are, not a statement of the way they should be. And for what it is worth, forevery example of cruelty in nature, there is at least one counterexample of love, kindness, or cooperation. Many animalsare monogamous, care for their offspring and defend them with their lives. Symbiosis, or reciprocal generosity, hasproven to be a very effective survival strategy. Some of our closest relatives among the apes even care for and feed thewounded, sick or crippled among their numbers, displaying an almost human compassion. This is not meant to alleviatethe cruelties and violences nature often also displays - it is merely meant to illustrate the uselessness of trying to derivemoral rules from scientific theories.

The final creationist distortion is to charge that evolution is "just a theory," as if this were a point against it. In truth ,however, to label it "just a theory" is to support it, not denigrate it. In scientific parlance, "theory" does not mean "wildguess" or "hunch," but rather describes a scientific idea that is strongly supported and has stood the test of time.Furthermore, evolution is more than just a theory. It has also been directly observed to occur, and thus, in addition tobeing a theory, it is also a simple fact, as undeniable as the sphericity of the Earth. (For more on this, see here .)

When the distractions of creationist straw men are removed, evolution is a process that, at its core, is both simple andplausible. Knowing what it truly says, and just as important, what it does not say, is a boon both to proponents of evolution who must defend their science against religious attacks, and also to creationists who wish to argue againstevolution. While no one is denying them the right to do this, arguing against a faulty caricature of the theory based onmisunderstanding, rather than against the theory itself, will earn them only ridicule.

Footnotes

[1] The experienced reader will note that this is an oversimplification. In cases of speciation by polyploidy, it is indeedpossible that a new organism that also constitutes an entirely new species will arise in a single step. However, in the

majority of speciation events morphological diversification occurs first, eventually followed by reproductive isolation.

Recommended Links:

Understanding Evolution The Talk.Origins Archive: Intro to Evolutionary Biology The Talk.Origins Archive: Five Major Misconceptions About Evolution

Naturalism in Science

A frequent creationist tactic is to attack, not just evolution, but the very underpinnings of science itself. Specifically,some creationists - especially advocates of intelligent design - claim that a basic guiding principle of science knownas naturalism is a product of bias and an unnecessary restriction, which if removed would allow scientists to reachconclusions to which they had previously blinded themselves.

The short answer to such claims is that this cannot be done. Naturalism is neither the product of bias nor unnecessary - itis a fundamental principle of science, not for philosophical but for sound practical reasons. If it were removed, scienceitself would be impossible. To explain why this is the case, some background information must first be provided.
http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/evotheory.htmlhttp://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/evotheory.htmlhttp://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/evotheory.htmlhttp://evolution.berkeley.edu/http://evolution.berkeley.edu/http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.htmlhttp://www.talkdesign.org/http://www.talkdesign.org/http://www.talkdesign.org/http://www.talkdesign.org/http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.htmlhttp://evolution.berkeley.edu/http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/evotheory.html


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As already stated, naturalism is one of the basic guiding principles of science. It requires that supernatural causes andagents must be ruled out as scientific explanations for natural phenomena; all proposed scientific explanations must betestable and repeatable, must be based on evidence and must obey physical laws. To put it another way, this scientistis not using naturalism:

This restriction to natural causes for natural events is what gives science its explanatory power. Scientists cannot, asscientists , explain an event by invoking divine intervention. They cannot say that thunder and lightning is caused by theanger of Zeus, or that schizophrenia is caused by demonic possession, or that angels push the planets around in theirorbits, or that epidemic disease is a punishment for sin. And, of course, they also cannot say that every species on Earth

was created by a separate, miraculous action of God. Such a statement would be unscientific - not necessarily false, justunscientific. If supernatural events do occur, science cannot study or explain them.

It is easy to see why creationists feel excluded by naturalism. Many of their beliefs explicitly include miracles, which areforbidden in the arena of science. As a result, creationists often respond by crying bias and making accusations of foulplay. They complain that naturalism is an unjustifiable metaphysical assumption that rules out entire classes of perfectlyvalid explanations, a ploy by atheist scientists who assume at the outset that God does not exist and tailor theirinvestigations accordingly.

To show why this is false, a distinction must be drawn between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism.The former is what science employs: the belief that natural events have natural causes and that there are physical lawswhich we can discover and understand. The latter is the belief that there is nothing beyond those natural causes andphysical laws, in other words, that the supernatural does not exist. This is a personal belief that some scientists hold, butthat science in general does not require. Science must assume that all events it can observe and study are natural inorigin, but it does not claim that the supernatural does not exist; nor does it claim that it does exist . That is simply not atopic which it can speak to, and to make a statement either way would be beyond the bounds of science.

Creationists attempt to blur the distinction between these two, but the difference is not hard to grasp. Methodologicalnaturalism is a statement about how we study the world; metaphysical naturalism is a statement about what exists. It isnot necessary to be an atheist (a metaphysical naturalist) to do science. One can believe in God and still be amethodological naturalist, and there are many scientists who are. For example, one of evolution's best-known and mostarticulate defenders today is Dr. Kenneth Miller , a Christian and author of the book Finding Darwin's God . In fact, as the
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creationists never tire of pointing out, many of history's great scientists were religious. A religious scientist is absolutelyfree to believe that miracles do occur but are beyond scientific study, or that God usually works through naturalmechanisms rather than suspending the laws of nature to accomplish his will. There is nothing about scientificnaturalism that denies the existence of God, but there are real reasons why it is an absolute must for science, to whichthis essay will now turn.

Naturalism is an absolutely essential part of science for the clear reason that naturalism is the only thing that givesscience any explanatory power at all. With naturalism in place, scientists are restricted to testable answers supported byevidence. Without naturalism, there would be no such requirement, and scientists would be quite literally free to makeup absolutely any answers they want, postulating unseen supernatural beings and untestable miracles as explanationsfor any phenomena. How did life come into being? God did it! Why does Planck's constant have the value it does? Godmade it that way! Why is the universe expanding? Because God wants it to, of course! Without naturalism, there's noreason to study how abiogenesis might have occurred, no need to formulate a grand unified theory of physics, and nopoint in trying to determine the nature of dark energy, because God explains it all.

Without a need to come up with evidence-based explanations that obey physical laws, there is no reason to do research,because there is no way to truly understand anything, no way to learn . The creationists who reject naturalism's role inscience are proposing that the growth of human understanding and science itself be brought to a halt. After all, once onehas concluded a supernatural event occurred, there is nothing more to do, no further conclusions to draw. Supernatural

influence, by definition, is not testable, obeys no laws that we can know, and does not l eave any evidence at all. If thesethings were not the case, it would no longer be supernatural, but natural.

Naturalism is what allows science to progress. Whenever we see some event that appears to violate physical laws, usingour assumption of naturalism we can conclude that this is not actually what has happened, that our understanding of thelaws is faulty or incomplete, and so we must search for a new and better set of laws that takes this phenomenon intoaccount. If we instead conclude that a supernatural event has occurred, there is nothing more that can be done, as thesupernatural by definition does not defy our understanding of the laws, but the laws themselves.

This regularity is crucial if science is to be possible. If there existed an omnipotent, undetectable God who intervened inthe world at unpredictable times in unpredictable ways, it would be impossible to do science, because we could not becertain that our past experience will be a reliable guide to the future. We could never know if an experiment succeededwhere it should have failed or failed where it should have succeeded because of a miraculous and undetectable nudge

from God; there would be no reason to believe that the results of an experiment yesterday would have any bearing onthe theory it was designed to test.

Nor would the concept of evidence be meaningful in the absence of naturalism. Without this principle, neither theabsence of supporting evidence nor the presence of contradictory evidence would be strikes against a hypothesis,because this could always be explained by supernatural intervention. A researcher could propose literally anyhypothesis, and explain away the absence of evidence by saying God erased it and substituted new evidence as a test of faith. (It is notable that some creationists do offer exactly this defense - usually called the Omphalos or "appearance of age" argument - which claims that the Earth was created recently with only the appearance of a longer history, completewith tree rings recording years that never happened, fossils of creatures that never actually lived, and rocks whoseradioactive decay "clocks" have all been set to the same spurious age.)

Finally, it is naturalism that gives science its predictive power. As already stated, the regularity and inviolability of physical law allows us to predict future events with confidence, but it goes beyond that. A theory's predictive powercomes also from its ability to rule out many possibilities. For example, the theory of evolution predicts that we shouldnever find a mammal with feathers, because that adaptation appeared in the bird lineage, where it cannot betransmitted horizontally across the tree of descent to mammals, and such a complex structure is unlikely to evolve inexactly the same way twice. But creationism and other non-naturalistic alternatives do not predict this, and in fact, donot predict anything at all. If mammals were found that had feathers, or six legs, or any other adaptation, creationismcould accommodate this or any other scenario with equal ease. Whatever we find, that was the way God wanted it, butwe can never know in advance what God will want. Unlike evolution, creationism cannot exclude any scenario - it can


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never tell us what we should not expect to find - and therefore it is powerless to predict the future. If science were thisway, it would be useless.

When confronted with arguments such as this and accused of wanting to rob science of all i ts explanatory and predictivepower, creationists typically claim they have been misconstrued. They usually claim that they do not want to throw outnaturalism in all branches of science, but stop short before the implicit conclusion: "only in those branches where we

disagree with the results". They would be happy to allow all other fields of science to proceed as normal, as long as theyare allowed to wedge their version of God into those theories that would otherwise make them uncomfortable.

However, no creationist has ever explained why non-naturalistic explanations should be restricted to those areaswhere they feel conventional science is inadequate. Indeed, they have never explained how to make that distinction.How do we tell the difference between things we do not know yet, for which a naturalistic explanation will presumablybe discovered in due time, and things we will never know, for which a supernatural explanation is required? This is a veryimportant question, but they have never even attempted to answer it. Are the opponents of naturalism claiming thathuman knowledge has reached its apex, that we will never learn anything more than what we know right now, and sothe scientists should stand back and let them spackle in the remaining gaps with God? This is obviously false; we aremaking new discoveries every day. Or are they claiming every other branch of science should be allowed to proceed asnormal, but they want to step in and impose their supernatural explanations on evolution? But why only evolution?Surely if God intervenes there, he may have intervened in other areas as well. How do we reliably detect supernatural

influence?

That the creationists have no answer to these questions shows how poorly thought-out their arguments truly are. Theyhave carried their attempts to defeat evolution to such an extent that they would willingly undermine all of science toachieve this goal. In the end, the motivation of those who attack naturalism's role in science turns out to be the samemotivation driving all creationists: unable to bear the thought that science might not support their interpretation of theirreligion, they set out to force i t to be so, regardless of the truth.

Recommended Links:

TalkDesign: A Philosophical Premise of "Naturalism"?

Atheism, Religion and Evolution

Evolution is a science, and thus deals only in what can be known. It restricts itself to empirical facts and consistent,logical theories about the world derived from those facts. It is not a philosophy, nor a belief system, nor a religion;nevertheless, it does touch upon matters which, to some people, fall under the scope of those things. Creationists haveseized upon this inevitable confusion and used it to defend themselves against the undeniable proof that creationism isreligion and not science by claiming that evolution is a religion as well. However, as will be shown, this claim iscompletely false.

There are some specific qualifications that are usually required for a religion, and evolution fails all of them. It has noprophets. It has no scriptures. It has no temples and no priesthood. It sets no rules for behavior; evolution does notpromise me a reward if I adhere to it, nor does it threaten me with punishment if I deny it. It provides nothing toworship; no one prays to evolution. It is silent on the topics of life after death or the existence of the soul. It says nothingabout the existence of a god or lack thereof - i t can be seamlessly incorporated into any belief system, from the mostardent atheism to all but the most literal fundamentalist theism, with any deity or other supernatural entity of choicegiven credit for using evolution as the mechanism by which life was caused to diversify. And most importantly, evolutionis a science and does not require religious faith of any sort.

Of course, some creationists would dispute some of the above claims. Some would no doubt make the claim thatevolution does have both a prophet and scriptures - Charles Darwin and his book On the Origin of Species . However, thisclaim is ridiculous on its face. While Darwin was an intelligent and perceptive scientist, no one has ever claimed that his
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writings were divine revelations, nor that he possessed any special perception or faculty not available to the rest of humanity. His central insight of natural selection was born of much education, study and meticulous observation. Inprinciple, anyone could have come up with it (and someone else did - English naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace proposedthe idea independently, at nearly the same time). Nor is it claimed that Darwin's writings are inerrant - much theopposite, in fact. It is widely recognized that his work, though amazingly insightful and indisputably correct in mostplaces, was wrong or incomplete in several areas, such as his speculations on the mechanism of inheritance, which wereonly poorly understood in his day and which he could not have been expected to know the truth about. While evolutiondoes incorporate many of Darwin's original ideas, it has also changed and grown beyond him. His principle of naturalselection has been merged with the more recent sciences of genetics and molecular biology to form the present-daytheory of evolution known as the modern synthesis.

Other creationists might also make the claim that there is a penalty for opposing evolution - censure, ridicule and exilefrom the scientific mainstream, with corresponding denial of job offers and tenure. However, the history of scienceshows that this claim is mistaken. There are many now-successful ideas that were first considered wrong or unlikely,such as plate tectonics, symbiosis as the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts, or the hypothesis that ulcers are causedby bacteria and not by stress. But the advocates of these ideas were not excluded from the scientific community.Instead, they continued to collect evidence and publish papers, and when their arguments were sufficiently well-supported, many scientists accepted these ideas and they became part of the scientific mainstream, often winning theirauthors glory, fame and recognition. That the creationists have not been able to do likewise - either because their ideaswere so easily debunked that they could not survive peer review, or more commonly, because they made no attempt toeven participate in the process - is not proof of inherent bias in science, but the griping of sore losers. If at any futuretime they want to present new evidence and participate, they are more than welcome to do so.

But none of these are the main reasons why creationists wrongly insist that evolution is a religion. There are two of these.

The first is the claim, made by countless creationists, that evolution is inherently atheistic, or that it denies the existenceof God. However, this is not true. It is true that evolution stands in opposition to a narrowly literal reading of a smallportion of a particular religion's scripture, but this is a far cry from the sweeping accusations made by its detractors.Contradicting one possible interpretation of one chapter of one holy book is hardly the same as denying the verypossibility of God's existence.

The fact is that evolution, like all scientific theories, is naturalistic ; that is to say, it confines itself to what can beempirically measured, tested and explained. All supernatural phenomena - God, angels, devils, miracles, and so on - arenon-naturalistic and thus fall beyond the scope of science. Evolution does not say God exists; neither does it say God doesnot exist. Such a question simply cannot be considered by science. It is, instead, one for theology or philosophy. Whatevolution does do is provide a consistent scientific explanation for the development of life that does not require directdivine intervention - it does not require miracles, but neither does it forbid them. If there is a God, evolution tells us howhe caused life to develop and diversify. If there is no God, evolution tells us how life developed and diversified in hisabsence. But the theory itself does not say either of these things; it merely says what happened, making no metaphysicalclaims one way or the other. If evolution is atheistic because it does not require miracles, then so is all the rest of science.

Additionally, in rebuttal to the creationists' accusations of atheism, one could make the very relevant point that themajority of the world's religious people find no conflict between evolution and their faith. As recently as 1996, the Pope,

the spiritual leader of one billion Christians around the world, reaffirmed that there was "no opposition" betweenevolution and the Bible. A great number of other religious organizations accept the truth of evolution as well; some of them are listed in the "Voices for Evolution " section of the National Center for Science Education 's site. Finally, there isthe Clergy Letter Project , which has gathered over 10,000 signatures from Christian clergy of various denominationsaffirming that evolution does not conflict with religious belief.

One more point remains to be made with regard to this argument. Creationists, in their arrogance, insist that they havediscovered the true meaning of their holy text - that they know with certainty exactly how it is meant to be read andinterpreted - and that anyone who disagrees with them is either sadly deceived or not really a member of their religion
http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/naturalism.htmlhttp://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/naturalism.htmlhttp://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/naturalism.htmlhttp://www.newadvent.org/docs/jp02tc.htmhttp://www.newadvent.org/docs/jp02tc.htmhttp://www.newadvent.org/docs/jp02tc.htmhttp://www.natcenscied.org/article.asp?category=2http://www.natcenscied.org/article.asp?category=2http://www.natcenscied.org/article.asp?category=2http://www.natcenscied.org/http://www.natcenscied.org/http://www.natcenscied.org/http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/clergy_project.htmhttp://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/clergy_project.htmhttp://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/clergy_project.htmhttp://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/clergy_project.htmhttp://www.natcenscied.org/http://www.natcenscied.org/article.asp?category=2http://www.newadvent.org/docs/jp02tc.htmhttp://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/naturalism.html


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at all. [1] (This is the usual defense against theistic evolution.) But as the creationists' own Bible warns them, "pridegoeth... before a fall" [2], and few things could be imagined as more prideful than their unbending insistence that theyhave once and for all discovered what scripture really means. In other words, how can the creationists be so surethat this time they've got it right, when so many times in the past people who attempted to extract scientific data fromthe Bible were mistaken?

To name the most obvious example, there was once a time when a straightforwardly literal reading of the Bible ledpeople to the conclusion that the Sun orbited the Earth. This conclusion was not only taken as following naturally fromthe plain meaning of the text, it was held that to doubt it was to deny that the Bible had any meaning at all. As CardinalBellarmine wrote in 1615 about Galileo's heliocentric theory, "But to want to affirm ... that the earth is situated in thethird sphere and revolves with great speed around the sun, is a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all thephilosophers and scholastic theologians, but also by injuring our holy faith and rendering the Holy Scriptures false." [3] The similarities to the creationists' arguments against theistic evolution are instructive. To deny geocentrism, the churchauthorities said, was to deny that the Bible was inspired by God and free of error; to admit heliocentrism would bringChristianity crashing down. Yet today, heliocentrism is universally acknowledged, even among creationist groups (thoughthere are a few holdouts [4]), and Christianity has not come to an end. In fact, most people are wondering why anyoneever thought there was a conflict in the first place. The reader is invited to find parallels with the current debate overevolution.

The second major reason creationists often label evolution a religion is this. To believe in evolution takes faith, they say,because no one has ever seen it happen. They argue that to accept evolution requires a leap of faith that is at least asgreat as the leap of faith required to accept God!

Leave aside for the moment the question of what this says about the creationists' views on religion. (Surely they approveof it? Why do they think calling evolution a religion is an attack on it? As some have noted, it's as if they're saying, "Hey,you guys are just as irrational as we are!") The fact remains that this accusation, like all the others, is untrue. Evolution isa science, and as such, it is based on and accepted by empirical evidence - not faith.

By definition, faith is belief in something for which there is no objective evidence. In the case of evolution, nothing couldbe further from the truth. Evolution is one of the best-supported theories in all of science, upheld by numerous lines of evidence from many different fields that all converge on the same conclusion. For instance, there are many transitionalseries showing the large-scale change of life over time, and nested hierarchies of genetic similarity that corroborate

these fossils and allow us to chart the tree of evolutionary relationships. Nor is our evidence of evolution limited toreconstructing what happened in the past. Indeed, we can directly observe all the components of evolution workingaround us today - genetic mutations, increased or decreased by drift and acted upon by selection, to produce new genesand new morphology conferring differential reproductive success and increased fitness on a wide range of livingorganisms. No faith is necessary, because acceptance of evolution does not require one to accept any process thatcannot be observed today and that is not supported by evidence to prove its occurrence in the past. The creationistclaim that evolution requires faith in unobserved processes is flatly false.

To accept evolution, or any scientific theory, it is absolutely unnecessary to make a leap of faith - it wouldn't be ascientific theory otherwise. All that is required is a willingness to accept evidence, conclusions drawn from that evidence,and theories logically based on those conclusions. Unlike the fundamentalist religion of creationism, evolution can befreely questioned, scrutinized in detail and refined to fit the evidence, and indeed, even its most dedicated defenders areconstantly doing this. Just like general relativity, the heliocentric solar system, or the germ theory of disease, the theory

of evolution can be taken on the basis of the evidence alone. It is not accepted or rejected by, and does not depend on,people's faith.

Footnotes

[1] See, for example, what the Institute for Creation Research has to say about theistic evolution here (sample: "There isno harmonizing or fence-straddling here; one must make a choice between holding to theistic evolution or believing theplain statements in the Bible"). Answers in Genesis says similar things here .
http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note1http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note1http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note1http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note2http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note2http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note2http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note3http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note3http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note3http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note4http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note4http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note4http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-081.htmhttp://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-081.htmhttp://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-081.htmhttp://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1305.asphttp://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1305.asphttp://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1305.asphttp://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1305.asphttp://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-081.htmhttp://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note4http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note3http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note2http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/atheistevo.html#note1


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[2] Proverbs 16:18.

[3] Robert Bellarmine: Letter on Galileo's Theories, 1615. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.html .

[4] For an example of one such, see The Earth Is Not Moving .

Recommended Links:

Do You Believe in Evolution?

Has Evolution Been Proven?

No, it has not been.

Many creationists would be content to end this essay there, but in reality, the situation is not so simple. To argue againstthe theory of evolution by saying that it "hasn't been proven" is to demonstrate a severe misunderstanding of the natureof science, which this essay will endeavor to correct.

It is true that the theory of evolution has not been proven - if, by that term, one means established beyond any furtherpossibility of doubt or refutation. On the other hand, neither has atomic theory, the theory of relativity, quantum theory,or indeed any other theory in science. The reason for this is that science does not deal in absolute proof, only in thebalance of the evidence.

To see why this is and must be true, imagine that we are scientists seeking to explain some feature of the natural world.Based on the evidence available to us, we can construct a hypothesis - an educated guess - which we offer as thatexplanation. If more evidence turns up that supports our hypothesis, if our hypothesis is testable and falsifiable, and if our hypothesis can be used to make predictions which turn out to be correct - if all these things are true, then ourhypothesis graduates to the status of a theory and, in time, becomes accepted scientific wisdom.

But how do we really know the original hypothesis is true ? What if it completely misses the mark, but gives the rightanswers just by coincidence? Or what if it is just an approximation, giving generally correct answers while failing tocapture the true reality of what is going on? How can we ever be sure that these things are not the case?

The answer is, of course, that we cannot know this. This is why no scientific theory, including evolution, is everconsidered to be proven. The more evidence that accumulates to support a theory, the more our confidence in it grows.Eventually, a point may be reached where the quantity of evidence supporting the theory is so vast, so overwhelming,that further attempts to deny or question it would be futile and unfounded. This is the case with the theory of evolution,as it is the case with the other theories, such as the atomic theory of matter or the theory of plate tectonics, that formthe pillars of modern science. But this is not absolute proof. Not even the best-supported, most thoroughly verifiedtheories of science are put on a pedestal and considered infallible, since at any time, some shocking new piece of evidence might turn up that completely contradicts accepted knowledge. We have no way of knowing that this will not

happen in the future.

This is not to imply that the theory of evolution is in any way tentative or uncertain. On the contrary, it is extremelyrobust, backed by over a hundred years of research, experiment and observation. In all that time, not a single piece of evidence that seriously contradicts any part of it has ever turned up. Within the scientific community, evolution is not atall controversial and is no longer questioned; it is considered to be a fact, as simple and indisputable as gravity. While itcan never be absolutely proven, it has come as close to attaining this status as it is possible for any scientific theory tobe. To attack evolution by labeling it an "unproven theory" misses the point entirely. There is a saying in some scientificcircles: "Proof is for mathematics and alcohol."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.htmlhttp://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.htmlhttp://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.htmlhttp://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.htmlhttp://www.fixedearth.com/http://www.fixedearth.com/http://www.fixedearth.com/http://members.aol.com/darrwin/believe.htmhttp://members.aol.com/darrwin/believe.htmhttp://members.aol.com/darrwin/believe.htmhttp://www.fixedearth.com/http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.htmlhttp://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.html


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Recommended Links:

Proof in Science The Talk.Origins Archive: Scientific Proof?

Evolution Is Just a Theory! (Or Is It?)

Anyone who has spent some time reading or debating creationists is almost certain to hear the argument that "evolutionis just a theory". This is usually stated as if it were a blow against evolution, but in reality, nothing could be further fromthe truth. Though this statement is technically correct - evolution is indeed a theory - people who do not understand theimplications of that word as it is used in science often think it is saying something different from what it actually means.

The important thing to keep in mind is that the everyday definition of the word "theory" is different from its scientificdefinition. In common usage, theory often means something like "guess" or "hunch". However, in scientific circles, this isnot the case. To scientists, a theory is an explanation of some feature of the world that meets three requirements: itis supported by evidence , is testable and falsifiable , and can be used to make predictions .

As the first requirement shows, "theory" in scientific use does not mean "guess" or anything similar. In fact, for ascientific explanation to be called a theory, it must be well-supported by evidence. When a scientist wishes to explain thecause of some object or event, they make an educated guess, usually called a hypothesis. This hypothesis is then testedby experiment and observation, and graduates to the status of theory if and only if enough evidence is found to supportit and it repeatedly passes the tests it is subjected to. This is a standard the theory of evolution passes with flying colors:in a hundred and fif ty years of scientific study of the natural world, evolution has never failed any crucial test, and anoverwhelming amount of evidence has been found which supports it.

A scientific theory must also be, at least in principle, testable and falsifiable. If there is no imaginable test that could beperformed to check a hypothesis, or if there is no evidence that could possibly prove it wrong, it can never become atheory. Evolution likewise meets both these requirements. To name some obvious examples, every discovery of a newfossil or a new species is a test of evolution. If a newly discovered species does not fit into the nested tree pattern usedto classify all living things, or if a fossil is found in rock strata dramatically different from those where it should be, the

theory of evolution would have to be drastically changed or discarded altogether.

The last requirement is whether a theory can be used to predict new discoveries we should make in the future. Anyonecan patch together a hypothesis that explains a set of facts; the real test is whether we can take the organizing principlesof that hypothesis and use them to deduce the existence of new evidence or phenomena not yet known. If suchpredictions cannot be made, or if they are made and then shown to be false, then the hypothesis fails to meet thequalifications for a theory and must be rejected. Evolution possesses great predictive power - not in the sense of predicting exactly how life will evolve in the future, because that depends on many chance factors too subtle for us tomeasure, but in the sense of predicting how new discoveries will fit into life's established family tree. For example, if wepossess part of a fossil series, we can reliably predict when in the rock record other members of that series will be found.See the Talk.Origins January 1997 Post of the Month for an example predicting where the ancestors of modern antswould be found. See here for a list of other verified predictions.

It is also important to point out the difference between a theory and a law. In science, a law is a description of somefeature of the natural world. A theory is an explanation of that feature. In other words, laws say what happens, whiletheories explain why it happens. For example, Newton's law of gravity states that two objects attract each other with aforce proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance betweenthem. It says what happens, but not why; it does not explain what gravity is or how it works. A theory of gravity, such asAlbert Einstein's theory of general relativity, explains why this happens. In astronomy, Hubble's law states that theobserved redshift of light coming from astronomical objects is proportional to their distance from the Earth; the theoryof the Big Bang explains this observation by stating that the universe is expanding. In biology, Mendel's laws of inheritance describe certain patterns in how traits are passed from parents to offspring, while theories of molecular
http://www.carlton.paschools.pa.sk.ca/chemical/Proof/default.htmhttp://www.carlton.paschools.pa.sk.ca/chemical/Proof/default.htmhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/sciproof.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/sciproof.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/jan97.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/jan97.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/jan97.htmlhttp://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/evo_science.htmlhttp://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/evo_science.htmlhttp://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/evo_science.htmlhttp://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/evo_science.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/jan97.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/sciproof.htmlhttp://www.carlton.paschools.pa.sk.ca/chemical/Proof/default.htm


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genetics explain these observations by referring to the structure of chromosomes, genes and DNA. Theories do not change into laws as evidence accumulates to support them. Rather, theories are the "highest" one can get, and comingup with theories is the goal of every branch of science. If science consisted of nothing but discovering laws, it would bethe activity sometimes derogatorily referred to as "stamp collecting": listing natural phenomena without making anyeffort to explain them.

Though it is not usually phrased in these terms by biologists, it could be said that the "law of evolution" is that livingthings change over time. This is observable both in the fossil record and in the present day from one generation to thenext. The theory of evolution explains this general pattern, as well as the specific details, by saying that living thingsexperience differential reproductive success due to random mutation and natural selection. However, the evidencesupporting evolution is so strong that biologists also generally, and correctly, consider it to be a fact, as obvious andunquestionable as heliocentrism or gravity. Therefore, evolution is both a theory and a fact.

An explanation of some feature of the world that is well-supported by evidence, that has passed every test it has beensubjected to, and that has been used to make a great number of verified predictions - this is an accurate description of the status of evolution. To call it "just a theory" is not an argument against it, but an argument for it. Only the mostpowerful, best-tested scientific ideas ever earn this designation.

One final point should be raised. As this essay has shown, to call evolution "just a theory" is not a valid objection to it,

but a compelling point in its favor. But another rapid rebuttal to anyone who makes that claim is this: Creationism is noteven a theory! It has not been verified by observation and experiment, and in fact, the experiments thatscientists have performed have disproved all of its central claims. It is neither testable nor falsifiable, because it isultimately dependent on divine intervention and no test could disprove the idea of a miracle. In the few instances whereit has been used to make predictions, those predictions have been shown to be wrong. And lastly, it does not trulyexplain any aspect of the natural world, because to say "God did it" explains nothing; it produces no genuine increase inour knowledge. Indeed, it closes the book on explanations altogether, because miracles are incomprehensible bydefinition, and once we decide that one has happened, no further conclusions can be drawn. Not only is creationism nota theory, it probably does not even qualify as a hypothesis. It is to creationism, not evolution, that the ordinary def

the evolution pages (ebon musings)

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