OK, so now we know a little bit more about what evolution theory
says. But we also need to know about what evolution does not
say, especially since evolution may be the single most widely
misrepresented idea in all of science. In debating, these kinds of
misrepresentations are known as the "strawman fallacy",
or more popularly, "putting words in your mouth". Here
are a few of the most common misconceptions about what evolution
theory says:
"Humans are the most highly
evolved species". This misconception assumes that
evolution has some kind of plan, and that we are its ultimate
product. This is completely wrong (not to mention egotistical). The
imperfect nature of biological reproduction generates diversity,
and the resulting diverse animal populations must struggle to
survive and reproduce. In the African savannah, this process
allowed our ancestors to thrive, resulting in us. In the caves of
Venezuela, deadly foot-long armoured centipedes sit atop the food
chain. In a Japanese waste-water facility, this diversity resulted
in a mutated form of bacteria that lives on man-made nylon.
Creationists tend to assume a plan for evolution because they
project their own mindset onto it, and because they want to believe
that everything leads to humans. However, from a biological
standpoint, we are simply not that special.
"Evolution is an attack on
religious beliefs." Evolution is an attack on
certain beliefs, but not on all religion. In fact, many
ancient religions describe humans and animals as related.
Aboriginal religions in particular often depict mankind being
related to the animals, or having been produced from parts of
animals. Buddhism actually teaches that we are so indistinguishable
from the animals that we can be reincarnated as animals, and they
can be reincarnated as us. Judaism, along with its offshoots, is
actually rather unusual in assigning some special status to
mankind, and it is this egotism which leads them to reject
evolution so forcefully. As many adherents to the Abrahamic
religions have put it, "I refuse to believe that I am related
to an ape". People like this actually find the idea of human
kinship with animals to be offensive and inherently hostile to
spirituality, despite the fact that it is a common belief in many
ancient cultures.
"Evolution is a controversial
theory, which many scientists are starting to seriously
question." Evolution is controversial among
politicians, but not among scientists. The "Institute
for Creation Research" (ICR) claims that "thousands"
of scientists support creationism (although nowhere near this many
actually submitted their names to ICR's list), while the
National Center for Science Education (NCSE) claims far more
support for evolution. But what is the real ratio? It may be
instructive to look at "Project Steve", in which the NCSE
compiled a list of scientists who wanted to voice their support for
evolution, but included only those whose first name is Steve
in order to limit its size. If you cut down ICR's list[1] using
the same method, only 3 names remain. And how many names does
Project Steve[2] have? 774. In other words, if this is an even
vaguely representative sample, not even 1% of scientists support
creationism. This firmly places creationism in the
"crackpot" category, right alongside 9/11 conspiracy
theories and alien abduction stories. In short, it is quite simply
an outright lie to claim that scientists seriously doubt
evolution.
"Microevolution has been
tested, but macroevolution has not." One of the things
that people don't understand about science is that it tests
mechanisms, not histories. It is the mechanism of a theory
which you must use in order to generate predictions, and it is
those predictions that you test. The mechanisms of microevolution
and macroevolution are identical, so by testing microevolution, we
have tested macroevolution. Moreover, even if people insist
on seeing observed speciation events, scientists have produced
those in the laboratory as well. Creationists have now taken to
demanding that scientists produce examples of speciation events in
the wild, knowing full well that most natural speciation events
would take a very long time and that every other criterion has
already been met.
"Evolution says that we are
the product of random chance." Evolution, like organic
chemistry, is not based on random chance. There are rules,
and certain combinations are more likely than others. Environments
favour certain traits, and therefore, so do evolutionary processes.
It has often been said that evolution can be compared to monkeys
working on typewriters to produce Shakespeare, but if you had a
system which preferentially picked out the best pieces of text
rather than expecting an individual monkey to randomly type out
Romeo & Juliet, it would work much more quickly. Computer
simulations have been done, but of course, creationists reject them
because they are artificial (I suppose they want us to use real
monkeys).
"Evolution cannot produce new
species, it can only change existing ones." If
microevolution continued for long enough, macroevolution would be
inevitable (the difference between "micro" and
"macro" is merely one of scale, after all). The real
question when it comes to speciation is: why would the process of
microevolution suddenly stop at some mysterious boundary? We know
it works, so what's this mechanism for limiting its travel? Do
we arbitrarily assume that Newton's third law suddenly stops
working once we reach a certain distance from Earth? But aside from
this logical concern, this argument is quite specious since we have
observed evolutionary speciation. In one documented example[3],
speciation occurred due to the mutation of a single gene.
"Darwinism is
immoral." People often think this because "survival
of the fittest" is considered a very callous social policy.
However, Darwinian evolution is not a social policy! It is a
scientific theory, and it has nothing to do with morality one way
or another. It does not recommend "survival of the
fittest" as a moral ideal or a social policy; it merely states
that it happens in nature. One could just as easily say that the
law of gravity is "immoral" because of all the falling
deaths every year.
"Darwinism is a worldview
which promotes ..." There are many variations of this
argument, but they all employ the same tactic of assuming that
Darwinism is a "worldview", just like their religion.
However, nothing could be further from the truth. Darwinism is a
scientific theory; nothing more and nothing less. It does
not tell you what you can or cannnot eat, it does not tell you what
you can or cannot wear, it does not saddle you with guilt for
watching certain movies or listening to certain music, and it does
not tell you who to love or who to hate. In short, evolution
theory does not tell you how to live your life. It is
not a "worldview". All it does is solve a
scientific problem, and those who believe otherwise are simply
lacking comprehension of the nature of scientific theories.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to pretend that
evolution theory is something that it is not. Hopefully, you
won't fall for one of them.
Notes
Taken from their website's "Creation Scientists"
link as of 2007/03/05
Taken from their website's "Project Steve" link
as of 2007/03/05
Evolution: Single-gene
speciation by left-right reversal, Rei Ueshima and Takahiro
Asami, Nature 425, 679 (16 October 2003)
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