Posted on 02/21/2005 4:03:29 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." Well over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand "just one transitional fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record.
This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I call the Fossil Fallacy: the belief that a "single fossil"--one bit of data--constitutes proof of a multifarious process or historical sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion.
We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they reveal that life evolved in a certain sequence by a particular process.
One of the finest compilations of evolutionary data and theory since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is Richard Dawkins's magnum opus, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)--688 pages of convergent science recounted with literary elegance. Dawkins traces numerous transitional fossils (what he calls "concestors," the last common ancestor shared by a set of species) from Homo sapiens back four billion years to the origin of heredity and the emergence of evolution. No single concestor proves that evolution happened, but together they reveal a majestic story of process over time.
Consider the tale of the dog. With so many breeds of dogs popular for so many thousands of years, one would think there would be an abundance of transitional fossils providing paleontologists with copious data from which to reconstruct their evolutionary ancestry. In fact, according to Jennifer A. Leonard, an evolutionary biologist then at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, "the fossil record from wolves to dogs is pretty sparse." Then how do we know whence dogs evolved? In the November 22, 2002, Science, Leonard and her colleagues report that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from early dog remains "strongly support the hypothesis that ancient American and Eurasian domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray wolves."
In the same issue, molecular biologist Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues note that even though the fossil record is problematic, their study of mtDNA sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs from around the world "points to an origin of the domestic dog in East Asia" about 15,000 years before the present from a single gene pool of wolves.
Finally, anthropologist Brian Hare of Harvard University and his colleagues describe in this same issue the results of a study showing that domestic dogs are more skillful than wolves at using human signals to indicate the location of hidden food. Yet "dogs and wolves do not perform differently in a nonsocial memory task, ruling out the possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all human-guided tasks," they write. Therefore, "dogs' social-communicative skills with humans were acquired during the process of domestication."
No single fossil proves that dogs came from wolves, but archaeological, morphological, genetic and behavioral "fossils" converge to reveal the concestor of all dogs to be the East Asian wolf. The tale of human evolution is divulged in a similar manner (although here we do have an abundance of fossils), as it is for all concestors in the history of life. We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.
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Religion is based on belief.
Science is based on theories that may ultimately be based on facts, thus creating new facts.
There is a divergence between beliefs and the plodding process of inductive reasoning through postulates and sometimes proofs.
While people are free to belief whatever they want, that does not make it fact any more than any other scientific theory. However, only one has a better chance of being proven, regardless of how a Supreme Deity might have shuffled the deck.
Just my $0.02.
Then why is evolution still a theory?
You can't meaningfully participate unless you buy a ticket. In this case, the ticket is some basic understanding of what's going on here, and the price you pay is the effort needed to bring yourself up to speed:
The Theory of Evolution. (Excellent introductory encyclopedia article.)
This is what science is: The scientific method.
What's a Scientific Theory? Encyclopedia article.
An opinion piece, at best.
And after reading all of that, he will end up back at his original conclusion.
I'm no Creationist, but evolution, as it stands today, is bunk.
Sigh...
For the same reason that gravitational theory is still a theory, not to mention atomic theory, the germ theory of disease, and the theory of limits (on which calculus is based), even though no sane person questions *them* either.
Read this: Evolution is a Fact and a Theory.
Educational, actually, although many refuse to learn.
Well, after reading that, one gets the idea that ‘evolution’ is a nebulous thing; sort of like looking at a impressionist’s painting, whereby one must stand back from the work and turn their a certain way, before they can fully appreciate it’s nuance.
Dawkins apparently has a ‘better eye’ for this ‘art’ than myself.
Omar.
Don't you guys ever get tired of this silly debate? It's always the same 20 or so guys arguing back and forth. Nobody gets convinced of anything.
Not directed personally at you, PH, but all of you as a group.
Theory: A belief that can guide behavior.
So is evolution.
Who cares what you "think?" Intelligent design is evidence whether or not you want to accept it. If only the fantasy referred to as "evolution" had as much evidence. Meanwhile, enjoy your sterile worms.
Article "We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage."
sirch "Then why is evolution still a theory?"
ARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!! LOL
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.
- Stephen J. Gould, " Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
Because Science creates Theories. Or, as I've said elsewhere, here on FreeRepublic, Science is not in the Truth Business: see the Religion or Philosophy departments for that. Science, when boiled down to the basics, is the process of constructing working models of reality, with a very close match to observed physical reality, that are dependable enough for engineering or prediction purposes. . .
How do you feel about evolution?
It must be difficult being you.
hahaha
now I've got everyone mad at me!!
No, because I've learned more about science and evolution from the likes of PH than I ever would have sitting in some boring class room.
Eventhough I believe evolution is a religion, the knowledge gained from science is immeasurable.
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