Earlier today (and, in fact, yesterday too – but ‘today’ gives the whole episode a pleasing unity, so I’ll stick with it), I had an exchange with someone on Twitter about evolution. Their viewpoint could be summed up as, broadly speaking, religious. Here’s a little of the exchange which led up to this post what you’re reading now.
@revivalcebu2013: Anyone who thinks evolution is a fact, then it’s a fact that you have been fooled! Evolution is the biggest lie ever told!
@shngrdnr: MT @revivalcebu2013: Anyone who thinks evolution is a fact it’s a fact you have been fooled!
<True. Evolution, as a theory, *explains* facts@revivalcebu2013: unfortionately those facts are faked, read neutral papers please, not ones done by evolutionists, they lie! do your research
@shngrdnr: I’m guessing any paper that disagrees with your views is non-neutral, right?
@revivalcebu2013: do your own research and read the nonsense they write in evolution articles
@shngrdnr: Since you seem happy to be ignorant of what evolution actually asserts & discard as ‘fake’ all that disgrees, I’ll pass.
@revivalcebu2013: in other words: you have no answers to evolution how it works! let me give you theanswer: it does not work
So I wrote a good long post for revivalcebu2013. I posted it on twitlonger. I haven’t received a response yet, but I thought I’d post my semi-rant here – it’s been a while since I’ve added anything on the blog. Illness, both of my own person and my pc, has seen to that – I thought a short bit about evolution might be a nice way to get back in the saddle. I’ve added a few subtitles and links, but it’s pretty much as it was ranted. (If anyone notices anywhere I’ve gone wrong, let me know.)
Dear Revival
Revival, I hope you’ll forgive the long post. I also hope you’ll read it through – I’m not trying to insult you or patronise you. I simply want to give you a bit of an outline on evolution, and give you my take on your approach to the world it deals with.
You’re denouncing evolutionary theory from a position of ignorance. This is fine – you’re within your rights doing that. But disagreeing with something on the basis of ignorance is the weakest way of disagreeing; it’s akin to la-la-laing with your fingers in your ears. You’d be better placed to state your case with some knowledge of what it is you’re criticising.
For example, you asked me to show you a transitional fossil between ‘humans and apes’, presumably because you believe that evolution asserts that mankind evolved from apes.
It doesn’t. Evolutionary theory asserts that human and modern apes both evolved from a shared ancestor. A fossil skeleton, found in 2004, has been identified as the likely last shared ancestor, and has been called Pierolapithecus catalaunicus.
Fakery flakery
Revival, I imagine you’re going to say that the skeleton of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus is faked. I don’t believe so. If you believe that the scientists who found the fossil would participate in such a forgery without being found out by the body of international scientists who would scrutinize both the evidence and their findings then I feel you’re deluding yourself.
To be sure, scientific forgeries have happened. But we know they’ve happened because scientific papers are peer reviewed. You wouldn’t be able to cry forgery without the efforts of the very community you’re decrying as fakers, Revival (see the Chinese fossil entry under the year 1997 at the page linked above for an example). In crying ‘fake’ you’re also not meeting the argument square-on – in a sense, you’re acknowledging that you can’t meet the argument of the evidence, but can only discount the evidence (and this discounting itself on the basis of no evidence – it’s your word versus cold stone).
Another example. There is a list of transitional forms in the fossil record available on Wikipedia; I linked it earlier. There are example of transitional species alive today – a lizard in Australia has been found, members of which living at high altitudes have begun giving birth to live young, rather than hatching eggs. Snakes and reptiles have transited from egg birth to live birth in the past; this is another example of that happening now.
Evolution doesn’t merely assert that such changes happen, as you seem to believe – no more than a lawyer in court asserts that a murder has happened. The lawyer responds to the murder – which is an established fact, or else the trial wouldn’t be happening in the first place – by explaining the mechanisms by which it happened (and, at the same time, establishing or denying someone’s guilt).
Similarly, evolutionary changes happen in nature. They have been observed ‘in the wild’ and produced under artifical conditions in laboratories. Animal species such as the domestic sheep can no longer breed with their wild forms; human intervention has meant that they’ve evolved into different species altogether. Evolutionary theory certainly doesn’t cause these changes, or even simply assert they do happen. Rather, the theory explains the mechanisms by which these changes take place.
Think of it this way – disproving theories of gravity won’t for one second stop objects falling to earth when you let them go.
Theory theory
A ‘theory’, as in ‘evolutionary theory’, doesn’t mean ‘a hypothesis’. Check the dictionary. In science, a theory is a ‘a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena’. Colloquially, we do use the word ‘theory’ to mean ‘a guess’ – this is the second listed meaning in the dictionary link above – but in science, where an exactitude of language is necessary to ensure that its practitioners can have meaningful discussions, the word used for such a guess is a ‘hypothesis’. (Again, if you’re going to wade into a scientific debate, take care to learn the most basic levels of language before you do.)
If evolution were a guessed explanation, rather than a set of principles intended to explain observed facts (such as the fossils and living species I mentioned above) it would be called ‘evolutionary hypothesis’. That it isn’t speaks for itself.
This, ultimately, is the crux: evolutionary theory isn’t a guess without evidence. Evolution, like gravity, is a fact – it has been observed and documented thousands of times in fossils, living species (both in the wild and in the lab) and in simulations. This is to the extent that asserting these facts to be forgeries is tantamount to saying that there is a worldwide conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people across dozens of countries, disciplines and, yes, belief systems (many evolutionary scientists are Christian). If you want to believe this of course that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s a solid argument or criticise others for being ignorant when this conspiracy theory is a position that can only persist in wilful ignorance.
Evolutionary theory serves to explain facts that already exist. No amount of arguing will annul those facts; they are, literally in some cases, set in stone.
Aquinas: world as book
Revival, I’d like to suggest respectfully that, if you believe that the world is created by a benevolent creator, which I do not, then surely the most reasonable approach to that creation is to try to find out as much about it as possible, in order to understand the mind of its creator.
Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church Father, argued that the world was like a book; in reading it, one comes to know its author better. To deny facts of this creation in order to fit your own pre-conception of its nature is arrogant in the extreme. One should seek to understand the world’s creator – which, again, I do not believe in – by exploring the vast, intricate world that has been created, not denying huge swathes of it to fit your own desires.
