It’s become somewhat de rigueur in recent election cycles to ask politicians about their beliefs regarding biological evolution. This was an issue again this last year with several Republican candidates earning the condemnation of pundits over their views on the matter. The issue rears its head occasionally, mostly in the context of public schooling, but rarely is any actual discussion on the matter allowed. The question is only asked to make a political point, and never to discuss specifics.
Whether applied to political candidates or not, the immediate response in any case in which any person expresses some skepticism around evolution is to suggest or suspect that the skeptic is therefore some kind of young-Earth creationist who thinks the Earth was created in 6 days about 10,000 years ago.
This is a false dichotomy. Creationism is hardly the only alternative to devout and orthodox Darwinism, and evolution is not synonymous with Darwinism. Evolution is one thing, and Darwinian natural selection is another, but ever since the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial, creationism is the straw man repeatedly set up to illustrate the alleged foolishness of those who express even the slightest doubt about the infallibility of Darwin and natural selection. The favored strategy is to suggest that the choice is only between Darwinism on the one hand, and creationism on the other.
This approach is nonsense. Evolution as a general concept has been a
well-accepted theory among the educated since the ancient Greeks.
What’s interesting is that the most venomous condemnation of skeptics seems to come from those who know nothing about evolutionary science whatsoever. Those who have read anything about the field at all know that natural selection as an explanation of evolution, while generally accepted by most biologists, is nevertheless a theory that is critiqued and questioned in scholarly publications.
As with any scientific theory, natural selection needs to be evaluated based on how well it explains natural phenomena. It is a theory like general relativity or quantum theory. Sometimes it explains natural phenomena quite well and sometimes it does not.
The reason physicists search for a "unified theory" is because the theories of Einstein and the great physicists of the past have their shortcomings. Does one therefore embrace "superstition" if he notes that general relativity is "a theory" and that another theory might be shown to better explain the universe? I suspect not.
In the same way, natural selection is a theory that has hardly proven itself as infallible. As this article by W.E. Lonnig illustrates, problems with the theory have been pointed out for years by biologists and other physical scientists who have encountered scores of natural phenomena that natural selection cannot fully account for.
Obviously, the scientists found questioning natural selection in scholarly texts are not arguing for any kind of creationism. They are, however, pointing out that the empirical evidence is insufficient to prove that natural selection is an adequate theory to explain all aspects of evolution.
Although refereed journals are hardly the last word on scholarly matters, they are helpful in illustrating what is considered acceptable discourse among most scholars. This bibliography of peer-reviewed articles questioning the validity of natural selection well illustrates that natural selection is indeed "a theory," and that a defense of the theory as unassailable smacks more of dogmatic metaphysics than of a healthy and open mind regarding scientific theories.
If one accepts generally accepted notions of empirical analysis, a theory must be regularly analyzed for its ability to describe the phenomena that it is supposed to describe. If it is found wanting, then the theory obviously has its shortcomings and remains but a theory. The fact is that natural selection has, on more than one occasion, been found wanting. Does this prove it is a useless theory? Not necessarily. But it does prove that it is not an immutable fact of life, and we would be right to harbor doubts about it.
The idea that science, if left to the scientists, would proceed unmolested by ideology and politics is unserious in the extreme. Scientists, physical and otherwise, all function within a little world probably best explained by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend in which scientific "progress" is not a matter of rational acceptance of a better theory over a worse theory, but is really a reflection of the ideologies of those who decide what is "scientific" and what is not.
Anyone who has spent any time in academia at all knows full well that the ideological and economic concerns of the gatekeepers dictate what is acceptable research at least as much as the quality of the research itself.
Beyond labeling everything they disagree with as
superstition or religious extremism, the pundits who vilify critics of natural
selection as creationists or religious nuts merely illustrate their own
dogmatism about theories to which they have ascribed a devotion of religious
proportions. When it comes to
It seems to me that for the idea of Macro-evolution to work, at some point, two fish must have given birth to an amphibian; at some point, two amphibians must have given birth to a mammal; and at some point, two apes must have given birth to a human. Now, my old biology book says, "An animal can belong to only one taxonomic family." That is, an animal cannot belong to the set of all lobsters and the set of all kangaroos. And two, the offspring of any two animals also can only belong to the one taxonomic family, that of its parents. Even when cross-fertilizations occur, e.g. the mating of a horse and donkey bringing forth a mule, the mule belongs to the same family (equines) as the parents, even if not to the same species as either.
Changes in Finch beak length appear to show adaptation or micro evolution but it does not seem to be proof that humans are the result of a random, purposeless, materialist universe, slowly being accidentally changed from an amoeba. Micro-evolution is a fact that is plainly observable throughout nature. Macro-evolution is a theory that has never been observed in science.
The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. Physicist, for example, spent nearly three centuries looking for a substance, heat, to correspond to the substantive noun, "heat"; it took a revolution in chemistry and thermodynamics we realized that heat should not be thought of as a noun (a thing) but a verb (a process) – a relationship between the motions of molecules.
Relativity was made possible by Einstein’s insight that “space” and “time’ were not necessarily things, but were functions, relations, models.
I believe that traditional ideas of theism and atheism would have to be changed and redefined if we all said and thought “it” instead of “he” when referring to God. I believe it is this “he” which has given Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that anthropomorphic cast which makes them so unattractive to scientific minds. What they are objecting to is the dualistic image of Big Daddy separate from the universe. A scientist who professes a belief in God is more likely to be talking about “it”; “the order of nature”.
Certainly, nobody, not even the most rabid Bible-smashing professional atheist can deny that all the forces, principles, and laws observable in nature may be aspects of one bedrock underlying in-form-ation system or implicate order active in all times and places. It may be conscious, even; or, if not conscious as we are conscious, It may be “intelligent” in some sense.
This “trans-personal” (or un-personalized) It is invoked by Lao-tse as follows:
Something cloudy and unclear
Before existence and non-existence,
Before heaven and earth,
I do not know its name
So I call it Tao
Perplexed beyond endurance by the paradoxes of quantum physics, Sir Arthur Eddington once wrote, “Something unknown is doing something we cannot understand.”
As for myself, I strongly suspect that a world "external to," or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense. I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignty, like Internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style of an American corporation or Christian theology. I somewhat suspect that both Theism and Atheism fail to account for such decentralized intelligence, rich in circular-causal feedback.
In the words of Woody Allen, "Maybe" is a thin reed to hang your life on but it's all we've got.