Evolution
and Evidence
(March 6, 2005)
The Skeptical Inquirer, a "Magazine
for Science and Reason," has long
been a favorite of mine, and I would like to especially recommend the
current issue (Vol. 29, No. 2: March / April 2005). SI regularly
addresses the Evolution-Creationism "controversy" and this issue has an
excellent article by Dennis R. Trumble, titled: "One Longsome
Argument" (sic, referring to a comment by Darwin). Religion has a long
history of adopting an inimical stance
to scientific discovery, but modern fundamentalist opposition to the
greatest and most influential scientific discovery in history, namely
Darwinian evolution, is virtually unprecedented for its hostility and
tenacity, and the degree of negative impact it has had on the public
mind and the integrity of so much of our educational system. The
anti-evolution movement continues to eat away at the very fabric of
society's intellect, and all the reasoned response in the world
doesn't seem to be making a lot of headway against it. Trumble's
article
gives us, among other things, some insight into why. Here are a few
excerpts, after which I
will make a few further comments. I
would urge everyone to get a copy of this issue, one with several other
excellent features on related and other topics.
....By any objective measure, the
evolution of species ranks among the most successful scientific
theories ever. So why is the message not getting through?
....Despite all evidence to the contrary, a large portion of the
world's population continues to cling to the belief that human beings
are fundamentally different from all other life forms and that our
origins are unique. It's a lovely sentiment to be sure, but how is it
that so many people continue to be drawn to this thoroughly discredited
notion?
Like most mystic mindsets, creationist beliefs are
normally
instilled at an early age, nurtured by well-meaning parents and
sustained by religious organizations whose vested leaders are
traditionally loath to amend church doctrine in the face of emergent
scientific facts. Though seemingly antithetic to the inquisitive nature
of our species, the rote acceptance of received wisdom has been a
hallmark of human culture almost from the get-go, arising initially as
a benign behavioral adaptation geared to promote the rapid transfer of
communal survival skills to our young homind forebears. It was only
with the advent of modern civilization that this age-old habit finally
began to outline its usefulness and yield serious negative consequences—most
notably by granting gratuitous momentum to all kinds of ill-conceived
nations about how the world is "supposed" to work....
Problem is, most folks—including
many of the more learned among us—don't
understand the basic workings of science well enough to appreciate how
feeble the arguments against evolution really are. If they did, they
would realize that the scientific process is not about gathering data
to prove a favored hypothesis but instead involves the testing of ideas
against the totality of real-world observations. Creationists turned
amateur scientists almost always fail to grasp this essential
scientific precept and so unwittingly launch from false premises all
kinds of pseudoscientific arguments in support of special creation. In
fact, if there's one reason why creationists critiques are so
consistently misguided it's that adherents generally presuppose that
special creation is true and then sift the evidence for clues to
support that supposition—a
recipe for self-deception that stands in stark contrast to the
scientific method, which mandates that fresh hypotheses by derived from
all available evidence....
Because no physical body of evidence exists to
document the
beginning of life on Earth, this information gap has proven to be a
wildly popular (albeit wholly inappropriate) foil for those seeking to
discredit evolutionary theory. In truth, the origin of life is an issue
entirely separate from the origin of species, rendering this otherwise
important question utterly irrelevant as far as the veracity of natural
selection is concerned. Whether the first primitive life form arose
from known physical processes or was somehow willed into being through
means beyond our understanding, evidence that all life on Earth
descended from simple primordial beings remains just as compelling, and
the myth of independent creation just as untenable.
But even this slender refuge for creationist
sentiment has now
begun to evaporate under the light of modern scientific scrutiny, for
although Earth's original life forms left no physical evidence for
scientists to examine, credible hypotheses regarding the spontaneous
formation and assembly of self-replicating molecules have been proposed
and tested nonetheless. Laboratory experiments and astronomic
observations suggest that key organic compounds were present in
abundance shortly following Earth's formation and that natural chemical
affinities and mineral scaffolds may have acted in concert to produce
the simplest of biochemical copying machines....
....Based on these and other findings, biochemists have proposed
several plausible mechanisms by which these compounds may have
coalesced of their own accord into the precursors of life....
Many of the "scientific" arguments for intelligent
design, for
instance, invoke common misconceptions about how the physical world
really works, as in the classic "watchmaker" argument wherein nature is
assumed to act randomly and possess no organizational tendences. Given
this false premise, it is a simple matter to show that complex
molecular structures could never have formed by chance alone any more
than a factory whirlwind could assemble a Mercedes Benz from its
component parts. But anyone with a basic understanding of chemistry
knows full well that such analogies do not apply to atoms and
molecules. If the physical sciences have taught us nothing else, it's
that the world of the very small is surprisingly counterintuitive.
Processes in the realm of the microscopic simply do not behave as one
might expect based on our experience living on the macroscopic plane.
Electric charges, energy barriers, and nuclear forces all dominate the
realm of the minuscule and compel individual atoms to form stable
chemical bonds with neighboring elements, blindly building molecular
structures of every possible type and complexity that the laws of
physical chemistry will allow.
Objects large enough to arouse our naked senses, on
the other hand,
behave quite differently. Because they exhibit no special affinity for
one another, the scattered components of a disassembled watch will
never coalesce of their own accord—the
odds against such haphazard assemblies are simply too long. Nature,
however, does not act without organizational tendences nor are living
organisms randomly assembled. There is now ample reason to believe that
simple unicellular life forms arose through processes endemic to the
life-friendly universe we occupy and that more sophisticated beings
slowly emerged from these modest beginnings. Indeed, all complex
organisms on Earth (including humans) begin life as single cells that
multiply, differentiate, and ultimately mature to assume the form of
its parent—all
in strict accordance with the natural laws of biochemistry....
There is a
lot more to this
finely-written article, and I think it illustrates a number of things.
First, is that objections in the realm of religion to rational
scientific and historical paradigms are often more easily dealt with
than one might think. Once simple principles are stated—which,
unfortunately, few laypersons are familiar with, and not a little
because our media and educational systems are woefully set up to
counter established religious dogma and interests—those
objections simply dissolve (like a disintegrating vampire at the thrust
of Buffy's wooden stake). How many times, for example, have we
heard
it claimed that life could never have spontaneously formed in the
primordial soup, with odds against such a thing calculated to a huge
number of zeros? As Trumble points out, and as in so many such cases,
this
objection is based on a false or incomplete premise. Once the missing
factor is introduced, that nature at the molecular level possesses
innate organizational propensities, all those zeros simply evaporate.
I encounter these kinds of objections and
missing premises in
historical Jesus and apologetic research all the time. One of the
biggest guns in the evangelical arsenal is the so-called fulfillment of
prophecy. Dozens of alleged prophecies in the Old Testament were
supposedly fulfilled by Jesus in the New, and the odds against that
degree of correspondence happening to occur in a random life lived by a
simple human man would involve an astronomical number of zeros; ergo:
Jesus was divine and the bible is a book of prophecy about him,
inspired from heaven. But all those zeros crash to earth and roll
off
into the sunset when one offers the simple and demonstrable principle
that the story of Jesus as found in the Gospels is not historical, but
was in fact put together out of those passages from the Jewish bible.
Scripture was not the prophecy of
Jesus, it was the source-text.
Few people are scientists or biblical scholars
conversant in what
is often technical or esoteric material, but becoming conversant with
the simpler principles is often sufficient to prick the fundamentalist
balloon (even if the resulting pop goes unheeded by many). It
should
be incumbent on all of us in the rational community to try to become
familiar with basic counter-arguments—especially
in the evolution-creation controversy. The religious right has invested
a lot in its support of creationism and its campaign to discredit
evolution, and the threat to education in particular and intellectual
enlightenment in general is profound. But it is precisely here that
they are in fact vulnerable. It's one thing for the rational mind to
try to argue against some theological position, or the existence of
angels, or the acceptability of a divine blood sacrifice for sin, and
so on; but
the creationist case is based on alleged physical and deductive
evidence on earth, or the supposed failings of such on the evolution
side, and can thus be countered on that very ground.
Earl Doherty
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