Mankind's understanding of the natural world has exploded since the first half of the 19th century. Since then, more data has flooded in from both cosmic realms and the nanoscopic realms. As our data and theories of the world expand, the trend is moving conspicuously away from creationism. The gaps in our knowledge, where the creative acts of a supernatural god could be inserted, grow ever smaller and ever more sparse.
Join me on a six-part series as we travel along and discuss the evidence that is most disastrous for creationist accounts of nature's origins.
Part 4 covers evolution by natural selection.
The coining of the phrase "Homo Sapien" can be attributed to the Swedish botanist, Carl von Linne, who you first heard in grade school under the name Carolus Linnaeus. Homo Sapien is the species designation for human beings, as given by Linne's binomial nomenclature.
The work of Linnaeus first showed that species on earth are organized neatly into a hierarchy. For example, the branch of the hierarchy called "ungulates" contains a sub-branch called equines (horses, zebras) as well as another branch for suidae (pigs, boar). Ungulates are themselves a sub-category underneath the "mammalian" category. Mammals are contained inside the larger branch of chordata, and chordata is a sub-branch of animalia, and et cetera.
In the early 19th century, two field biologists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace were working the very bottoms portions of the so-called "Linnaean Taxonomy". At the very bottom of the hierarchy is the "species" designation. The two englishmen, being the foremost experts on the subject were aware that species themselves had a further sub-categories which they called "variants". ( A more contemporary version of the word variant, used in gardening and by arborists, would be "variety").
By 1856, Darwin was going to publish the first version of a book titled "On the Origin of the Species". What was Darwin's motivation for writing this book and what does this book say?
Darwin's motivation in writing "Origin" was to explain a nagging problem at the bottom portion of the taxonomy of living organisms. This nagging problem was exactly this: there is a perplexing issue with what counts as a species versus what counts as a variant.
Wallace and Darwin himself were very much aware of the Judeo-Christian account of the origins of lifeforms on earth. They considered it another theory to be tested against evidence collected in the field. What that theory dictated was that God created all the species on earth in a (geologically) recent event wherein each species was placed into its individuated category; very much like a zoo where each different animals gets it's own unique box stall in a "universal Stable of Life". For short let us call this the Creation Theory.
When Wallace and Darwin sat down at the end of the day and examined what they were collecting in the field, their data did not match the Creation Theory. Biology at this stage in history was just that simple: the data from the field did not match the theory. Period.
The data was showing researchers that boundaries between species and variants was amorphous, and in some cases outright impossible to define. The real world was not analogous to each species standing alone in its nice, neat stall, with solid walls seperating the bluebird from the sparrow. Instead nature's organization at the species level is more like a standing-room-only concert hall, where groups overlap, and are only amorphously defined in some semi-recognizable clumps.
Eventually theoretical biologists of the early 19th century were forced to admit to themselves that the species must be changing over time. That is to say, these outward traits we were using to differentiate species are themselves mutating over time.
The first 100 or more pages of Origin involve Darwin writing about the topic of variation. At around page 180, the reader becomes frustrated and demands that Darwin "get around to the stinking point". But therein lies the problem in reading Darwin's book. Variation and variants are the problem that his theory of evolution is going to explain! He is not only on-point, but he is literally writing about the point.
And yet today, in 2013, there is still a pervasive belief in the public psyche, that Charles Darwin wrote Origin of Species in an attempt to inflict atheism onto the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is still a pervasive belief that Darwin's theory was something he cooked up in his imagination while sitting in a rocking chair on his porch, smoking a pipe. This is equally false. The theory was reasoned backwards from a lifetime of active field research. The theory addressed a specific problem in biology at the time.
I have completed the answer to the first question: "What was Darwin's motivation in writing Origin?" Now let's begin chiseling away are the second question, "What does the book say?"
Darwin was facing two facts, namely that he had to now explain how the traits of species (and "variants") change over time, and second, why the Linnaean taxonomy was rigidly formed into a hierarchy of embedded branching. Darwin suggested that the traits of organisms have a measurable affect on their capacity to reproduce offspring. And since this effect will in fact make them produce more or less offspring, certain traits will come to dominate a population. The prefential treatment of traits came from the environment itself. In other words, nature itself was selecting which traits prevail against which will die off.
In chapter three, a summary sentence appears.
This is as small a synopsis of Origin one can get, and appears in the text itself. That sentence from chapter three acts as "the John 3:16" of evolutionary biology, as it were.I have called this principle, whereby each slight variation, if useful is preserved by the term Natural Selection.
The hierarchical embedding of lifeforms is a perplexing puzzle for any would-be creationist account of life on earth. In that case, we have to blame the organization on the intent of the creator, which is forever locked away as a mystery. As we can see above, evolution by natural selection is a theory about the way traits change incrementally in a population. There is a separate theory, now called the "Theory of Phylogeny". This theory says that all forms of life on earth share a common ancestral form. In the creationist approach, we have no answer for hierarchy of taxonomy, and we can barely ask the question in the first place. With phylogeny we see precisely why they are organized that way. To be more specific, equines are grouped together, literally because we can say that horses and zebras are the varied descendants of a primordial equine ancestor that lived long ago. This is repeated in modern literature with the now cliche phrase, "X and Y share a common ancestor".
Very often not described correctly in public, the theory of natural selection is a third-rail topic and its discussion in almost any context is considered politically incorrect. The best example of this is a television talkshow called "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher" where the topic of evolution is often breached.
Pretending that there is equal evidence for creation and evolution is truly a political game at its core. To talk of "teach both sides" in high school classrooms is to pretend like there are two viable sides. What should be said is the truth: Within universities and professional sciences, the theory of Natural Selection has been confirmed to the same level of confidence as the Germ Theory of disease.
Let us end this article with a discussion of Natural Geographic. Nat-Geo published a cover article with the title "Was Darwin Wrong?". The article itself had the question on one page. When the reader turned the next page they were greeted with a "N O" printed in letters large enough to take up 60% of the page. Under the giant "N O" was the subheading, also in large-ish font, "The evidence for evolution is overwhelming."
Let us pause for a second and step back and take a long look at how Nat-Geo handled this topic. Notice that Nat-Geo did not say this "We smart people at National Geographic personally believe that evolution explains the origins of life." or "We are really smart, so if you wanna be smart like us cool kids, you better believe what we write" or some such similar. Rather they completely divorced their personalities from the article. Notice that asserting the evidence is overwhelming for a theory does not make a statement of belief, or personal thought. It is a dry statement of numbers, really. A plain fact.
A topic not covered at all in this series is "What does evolution mean?" "What effect does the theory of evolution have on the meaning of life? Does evolution have a direction? That topic is simply too large and multidimensional for this work. An entire book could be written on that topic because it reaches into political, social, historical, and legal dimensions. To do it service, you have to include the histories of various personalities, Spencer, Hitler, Stephen J Gould, Richard Dawkins, among others. (In very brief passing: The NAZIs got it wrong. Say no more.) The interested reader should review remarks about genetics in the appendix. In all honesty the topic is only lighted upon there.
