Richard Dawkins: Evolution is a fact

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Q. Texas governor and GOP candidate Rick Perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is ”just a theory” with “gaps” and that in Texas they teach “both creationism and evolution.” Perry later added “God is how we got here.” According to a 2009 Gallup study , only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution. If a majority of Americans are skeptical or unsure about evolution, should schools teach it as a mere “theory”? Why is evolution so threatening to religion?

A. There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

Any other organization -- a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society - -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of relevant experience are meticulously scrutinized, their publications are read by a learned committee, references are taken up and scrupulously discussed, the candidates are subjected to rigorous interviews and vetting procedures. Mistakes are still made, but not through lack of serious effort.

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.

Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur to a human mind. The power of a scientific theory may be measured as a ratio: the number of facts that it explains divided by the number of assumptions it needs to postulate in order to do the explaining. A theory that assumes most of what it is trying to explain is a bad theory. That is why the creationist or ‘intelligent design’ theory is such a rotten theory.

What any theory of life needs to explain is functional complexity. Complexity can be measured as statistical improbability, and living things are statistically improbable in a very particular direction: the direction of functional efficiency. The body of a bird is not just a prodigiously complicated machine, with its trillions of cells - each one in itself a marvel of miniaturized complexity - all conspiring together to make muscle or bone, kidney or brain. Its interlocking parts also conspire to make it good for something - in the case of most birds, good for flying. An aero-engineer is struck dumb with admiration for the bird as flying machine: its feathered flight-surfaces and ailerons sensitively adjusted in real time by the on-board computer which is the brain; the breast muscles, which are the engines, the ligaments, tendons and lightweight bony struts all exactly suited to the task. And the whole machine is immensely improbable in the sense that, if you randomly shook up the parts over and over again, never in a million years would they fall into the right shape to fly like a swallow, soar like a vulture, or ride the oceanic up-draughts like a wandering albatross. Any theory of life has to explain how the laws of physics can give rise to a complex flying machine like a bird or a bat or a pterosaur, a complex swimming machine like a tarpon or a dolphin, a complex burrowing machine like a mole, a complex climbing machine like a monkey, or a complex thinking machine like a person.

Darwin explained all of this with one brilliantly simple idea - natural selection, driving gradual evolution over immensities of geological time. His is a good theory because of the huge ratio of what it explains (all the complexity of life) divided by what it needs to assume (simply the nonrandom survival of hereditary information through many generations). The rival theory to explain the functional complexity of life - creationism - is about as bad a theory as has ever been proposed. What it postulates (an intelligent designer) is even more complex, even more statistically improbable than what it explains. In fact it is such a bad theory it doesn’t deserve to be called a theory at all, and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be taught alongside evolution in science classes.

The simplicity of Darwin’s idea, then, is a virtue for three reasons. First, and most important, it is the signature of its immense power as a theory, when compared with the mass of disparate facts that it explains - everything about life including our own existence. Second, it makes it easy for children to understand (in addition to the obvious virtue of being true!), which means that it could be taught in the early years of school. And finally, it makes it extremely beautiful, one of the most beautiful ideas anyone ever had as well as arguably the most powerful. To die in ignorance of its elegance, and power to explain our own existence, is a tragic loss, comparable to dying without ever having experienced great music, great literature, or a beautiful sunset.

There are many reasons to vote against Rick Perry. His fatuous stance on the teaching of evolution in schools is perhaps not the first reason that springs to mind. But maybe it is the most telling litmus test of the other reasons, and it seems to apply not just to him but, lamentably, to all the likely contenders for the Republican nomination. The ‘evolution question’ deserves a prominent place in the list of questions put to candidates in interviews and public debates during the course of the coming election.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/attention-governor-perry-evolution-is-a-fact/2011/08/23/gIQAuIFUYJ_blog.html

[Pooky 3,792]

No, evolution is still a theory and still developing. Darwin's basic premise still appears sound, but there have been many refinements in the century and a bit since it was first published. Richard Dawkins does science a disservice when he calls evolution a fact.

For the record, I am a firm believer in the theory of evolution and consider the evidence supporting it to be compelling. I don't believe a word of creationism and don't consider intelligent design to be worthy of the term "science" and see no evidence anywhere for either of them.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

[scandal 951]

No, evolution is still a theory and still developing. Darwin's basic premise still appears sound, but there have been many refinements in the century and a bit since it was first published. Richard Dawkins does science a disservice when he calls evolution a fact.

For the record, I am a firm believer in the theory of evolution and consider the evidence supporting it to be compelling. I don't believe a word of creationism and don't consider intelligent design to be worthy of the term "science" and see no evidence anywhere for either of them.

It's a theory in precisely and exactly the same way that we have a Theory of Gravity, a Theory of Relativity, and a Theory of Electromagnetic Radiation. We are still searching for a Grand Unified Theory that will link the elemental forces of nature together: Gravity together with the electromagnetic/weak/strong, all in a system that fuses General Relativity with Quantum mechanics. That is the quest of modern physics.

Calling Evolution a theory is simply what scientists in a working paradigm do. It doesn't demean it or lessen it. It certainly doesn't make it untrue or questionable.

We are here.

We are living creatures on planet Earth, some 4.5 billion years after the formation of the planet, some 500+ million years after the Precambrian explosion and emergence of multicellular life.

We are carbon based. We have at our core a double helix strand of DNA, composed of amino acid chains formed of A, C, G, T. Adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. So is every single other organism ever existent on this planet.

We got to be here through a painstaking and lengthy process of mutations and adaptations. Generation upon generation who with mutated genes was found slightly more fit and better adapted to their surroundings, and thus produced slightly more offspring to the next generation, thereby slightly increasing the concentration of this gene mutation in the gene pool. Some of these successive mutations, in populations isolated and cut off from others by geographical features such as mountain ranges, oceans, islands, etc. - led to new speciation. As a result we, ** sapiens, emerged from primates and in turn from earlier mammalia, and from reptiles, and from earlier vertebrates, and from invertebrates, and from single celled creatures, and from the same primordial protein soup that all life emerged from.

This is not supposition, or rumor, or fantasy, or heresy, or possibility. Call it theory, again in the sense that gravity is theory. The fact is, it is fact.

Natural selection.

Genetic mutation.

Environmental adaptation.

Speciation.

That is Evolution. And that is us.

Fact.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Fact.

This is P&R. Facts are frowned upon.

[Pooky 3,792]

It's a theory in precisely and exactly the same way that we have a Theory of Gravity, a Theory of Relativity, and a Theory of Electromagnetic Radiation. We are still searching for a Grand Unified Theory that will link the elemental forces of nature together: Gravity together with the electromagnetic/weak/strong, all in a system that fuses General Relativity with Quantum mechanics. That is the quest of modern physics.

Calling Evolution a theory is simply what scientists in a working paradigm do. It doesn't demean it or lessen it. It certainly doesn't make it untrue or questionable.

We are here.

We are living creatures on planet Earth, some 4.5 billion years after the formation of the planet, some 500+ million years after the Precambrian explosion and emergence of multicellular life.

We are carbon based. We have at our core a double helix strand of DNA, composed of amino acid chains formed of A, C, G, T. Adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. So is every single other organism ever existent on this planet.

We got to be here through a painstaking and lengthy process of mutations and adaptations. Generation upon generation who with mutated genes was found slightly more fit and better adapted to their surroundings, and thus produced slightly more offspring to the next generation, thereby slightly increasing the concentration of this gene mutation in the gene pool. Some of these successive mutations, in populations isolated and cut off from others by geographical features such as mountain ranges, oceans, islands, etc. - led to new speciation. As a result we, ** sapiens, emerged from primates and in turn from earlier mammalia, and from reptiles, and from earlier vertebrates, and from invertebrates, and from single celled creatures, and from the same primordial protein soup that all life emerged from.

This is not supposition, or rumor, or fantasy, or heresy, or possibility. Call it theory, again in the sense that gravity is theory. The fact is, it is fact.

Natural selection.

Genetic mutation.

Environmental adaptation.

Speciation.

That is Evolution. And that is us.

Fact.

You can bastardise the English language as much as you like. That doesn't get around the fact that evolution is still a theory and scientists are still refining that theory, practically daily.

That is a fact.

[dalegg 143]

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

I'll give him that.

[웃 910]

You can bastardise the English language as much as you like. That doesn't get around the fact that evolution is still a theory and scientists are still refining that theory, practically daily.

That is a fact.

Evolution has got to be wrong, a myth even. Cause if it were true, we'd be able to see monkey's evolving into humans.

Evolutionary change takes about one million years

[Pooky 3,792]

Evolution has got to be wrong, a myth even. Cause if it were true, we'd be able to see monkey's evolving into humans.

Which one are you referring to?

[scandal 951]

You can bastardise the English language as much as you like. That doesn't get around the fact that evolution is still a theory and scientists are still refining that theory, practically daily.

That is a fact.

I suggest you read a book.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Or two. What is this thing called Science?

Or three. For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence

Then perhaps we can have a rational discussion of what scientists mean when they use the word "theory" to describe their work.

And then perhaps we can discuss why you feel necessary to use a word like "bastardise". Temper, temper.

What you call "refining that theory" is what Kuhn likes to refer to as "articulating the theory", and in which he goes into quite precise detail as to the forms of articulation.

By all means biologists do this within their paradigm, as do physicists, chemists, geologists, paleontologists and others within theirs. It is the vital essential work of a scientist conducting normal science. It involves improving a measuring apparatus, or adding a significant digit to a measurement or computation, or repeating an observation, or observing a new empirical datum to corroborate those already known.

Evolution is a theory. In precisely and exactly the same way that gravitation and electromagnetism and the wave/duality of light and general relativity and quantum mechanics are theories.

The tell-tale sign of trouble in these discussions is the usage of the phrases "still a theory" or "only a theory" or "just a theory". That's the "uh oh, here we go again" moment.

[Pooky 3,792]

I suggest you read a book.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Or two. What is this thing called Science?

Or three. For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence

Then perhaps we can have a rational discussion of what scientists mean when they use the word "theory" to describe their work.

And then perhaps we can discuss why you feel necessary to use a word like "bastardise". Temper, temper.

What you call "refining that theory" is what Kuhn likes to refer to as "articulating the theory", and in which he goes into quite precise detail as to the forms of articulation.

By all means biologists do this within their paradigm, as do physicists, chemists, geologists, paleontologists and others within theirs. It is the vital essential work of a scientist conducting normal science. It involves improving a measuring apparatus, or adding a significant digit to a measurement or computation, or repeating an observation, or observing a new empirical datum to corroborate those already known.

Evolution is a theory. In precisely and exactly the same way that gravitation and electromagnetism and the wave/duality of light and general relativity and quantum mechanics are theories.

The tell-tale sign of trouble in these discussions is the usage of the phrases "still a theory" or "only a theory" or "just a theory". That's the "uh oh, here we go again" moment.

First of all, bastardise is a word in the English language and its definition met the meaning I meant to convey. Where your assumption of temper comes from I have no clue.

Secondly, the theory of evolution is continually being refined. There continue to be discoveries that modify Darwin's basic premise. A fact is a proven premise that will not be altered by future discovery.

Lastly, there is only trouble because you somehow have failed to comprehend that I am a firm supporter of the theory of evolution. There is nothing else that comes close to explaining life on Planet Earth.

So chill out a bit and stop trying to pick an argument for arguments sake.

[mawilson 2,133]

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

Leadership has nothing to do with being the best and brightest.

George W Bush was a great leader. Barack Obama is not.

George W Bush had horrible ideas, but he was able to push them through. Barack Obama has some good ideas, but lacks leadership qualities and folds like a cheap suit at the first sign of opposition from the other party.

[웃 910]

First of all, bastardise is a word in the English language and its definition met the meaning I meant to convey. Where your assumption of temper comes from I have no clue.

Secondly, the theory of evolution is continually being refined. There continue to be discoveries that modify Darwin's basic premise. A fact is a proven premise that will not be altered by future discovery.

Lastly, there is only trouble because you somehow have failed to comprehend that I am a firm supporter of the theory of evolution. There is nothing else that comes close to explaining life on Planet Earth.

So chill out a bit and stop trying to pick an argument for arguments sake.

Theory in science basically means fact. Evolution will always be a theory. A million years from now it will still be a theory, ie a fact.

You've been told that "evolution is just a theory", a guess, a hunch, and not a fact, not proven. You've been misled. Keep reading, and in less than two minutes from now you'll know that you've been misinformed. We're not going to try and change your mind about evolution. We just want to point out that "it's just a theory" is not a valid argument.

The Theory of Evolution is a theory, but guess what? When scientists use the word theory, it has a different meaning to normal everyday use.¹ That's right, it all comes down to the multiple meanings of the word theory. If you said to a scientist that you didn't believe in evolution because it was "just a theory", they'd probably be a bit puzzled.

In everyday use, theory means a guess or a hunch, something that maybe needs proof. In science, a theory is not a guess, not a hunch. It's a well-substantiated, well-supported, well-documented explanation for our observations.² It ties together all the facts about something, providing an explanation that fits all the observations and can be used to make predictions. In science, theory is the ultimate goal, the explanation. It's as close to proven as anything in science can be.

Some people think that in science, you have a theory, and once it's proven, it becomes a law. That's not how it works. In science, we collect facts, or observations, we use laws to describe them, and a theory to explain them. You don't promote a theory to a law by proving it. A theory never becomes a law.

This bears repeating. A theory never becomes a law. In fact, if there was a hierarchy of science, theories would be higher than laws. There is nothing higher, or better, than a theory. Laws describe things, theories explain them. An example will help you to understand this. There's a law of gravity, which is the description of gravity. It basically says that if you let go of something it'll fall. It doesn't say why. Then there's the theory of gravity, which is an attempt to explain why. Actually, Newton's Theory of Gravity did a pretty good job, but Einstein's Theory of Relativity does a better job of explaining it. These explanations are called theories, and will always be theories. They can't be changed into laws, because laws are different things. Laws describe, and theories explain.

Just because it's called a theory of gravity, doesn't mean that it's just a guess. It's been tested. All our observations are supported by it, as well as its predictions that we've tested. Also, gravity is real! You can observe it for yourself. Just because it's real doesn't mean that the explanation is a law. The explanation, in scientific terms, is called a theory.

Evolution is the same. There's the fact of evolution. Evolution (genetic change over generations)³ happens, just like gravity does. Don't take my word for it.⁴ Ask your science teacher, or google it. But that's not the issue we are addressing here. The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is our best explanation for the fact of evolution. It has been tested and scrutinised for over 150 years, and is supported by all the relevant observations.

Next time someone tries to tell you that evolution is just a theory, as a way of dismissing it, as if it's just something someone guessed at, remember that they're using the non-scientific meaning of the word. If that person is a teacher, or minister, or some other figure of authority, they should know better. In fact, they probably do, and are trying to mislead you.⁵

Evolution is not just a theory, it's triumphantly a theory!

http://www.notjustatheory.com/

Edited August 30, 2011 by Lord Infamous

[Obama 2012 1,714]

did someone say EVOLUTION?

[SuperDuper! 230]

Another high octane baiting article. Way to go, Fudge Report!