“Experts changed the DNA of chicken embryos in the early stage of their development, enabling them to undo evolutionary progress and give the creatures snouts which are thought to have been lost in the cretaceous period millions of years ago.”
I am so tired of people writing as if evolution was fact and not a theory. Red flag when they write “are thought to”, doesn’t sound very factual to me. I don’t think they can prove they have undone anything. They have just altered and damaged the DNA.
Exactly. This is like saying that if they pull out all the chicken's feathers and cut off his wings, they've turned him "back into" a lizard.
blah blah blah yada yada yada drivel
Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould writes:
"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 do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them.
Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, 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."
The National Academy of Science (U.S.) makes a similar point:
"Scientists most often use the word "fact" to describe an observation.
But scientists can also use fact to mean something that has been tested or observed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing or looking for examples.
The occurrence of evolution in this sense is fact.
Scientists no longer question whether descent with modification occurred because the evidence is so strong."