Posted by:
esias
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Date: September 23, 2014 01:41PM
Evolution Is Cool
All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet
Each beastly little squid
Who made the spiky urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!
All things scabbed and ulcerous
All pox both great and small
Putrid, foul and gangrenous
The Lord God made them all. Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album 1980
Those funky funsters from the polling companies every year publish a shaft of statistics with the evergreen power to shock despite the findings being consistent with those of the previous year. Gallup’s May 2012 poll found that 67% of regular American church-goers, 58% of Republicans and 46% of all Americans believe God created humans within the last 10,000 years; a humble 15% of Americans believe humans evolved with God playing no part in the process (the 2000 poll put this figure at 9%). God is not going away any time soon.
Imagine the massive coast to coast cognitive dissonance! The inconvenient truth shoots with the shock of a hot comet across the celestial sphere of the God-fearing brain. The brain has evolved the flexible ability to store two battling bands of information in chorus, but with Belief on top. ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ sighed Ophelia of her lost love. ‘... Blasted with ecstasy!’ (Hamlet III i 149&159)
The last time I attended a normal Mormon church service was a Fast and Testimony Sunday. Once a month members are urged to occupy the pulpit and chant with as much emotion as they can muster not, ‘I believe this Church is true ...’ but, ‘I know this Church is true; I know Joseph Smith was a prophet,’ blardy blah. The ward eccentric (and there are a fair few to choose from, including me), with more clarity, certainty and candour than any Archbishop, evangelised to a cryogenic congregation, ‘Evolution is not true,’ but neglecting to relate the reasons why evolution is not true. So that’s all right then.
Myopic judgments of this kind are not uncommon in virtual Mormon chat-rooms from persons who see nothing wrong with evincing a verdict against evolution without having read a book. The frustration of the biologist is understandable. The truth is out there. Skulls and bones sit prettily in the glass cabinets of museums waiting to tell us their story. And they are not going away any time soon.
"The belief in a supreme being or creator is actually a pernicious belief. It does a great moral and intellectual damage to our poorly evolved primate species." (Christopher Hitchens v Rabbi Shmuley Boteache 30th January 2008, New York)
Scientists have proved that evolution is more fun, more fascinating and more rewarding that watching Arsenal play. The deep-dyed Creationist will be scratching the hairs of an ape-like chinny-chin-chin at the revelation that evolution is fun and addictive – ‘Yeah! Right!’ – and I dedicate this small chapter to persuade the religious die-hard to excavate any one of many excellent explanatory texts.
One of the funniest encounters of recent years was suffered by Professor Richard Dawkins who showed admirable restraint and patience when trying to interview the scary Wendy Wright for the Channel 4 programme The Genius of Charles Darwin. The interview is covered more fully in the explanatory text The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution. From the documentary you will see that Richard Dawkins is made to stand in the foyer of the front offices of this far-right faction, but the attempted insult is shrugged off, and with high professionalism the show rolls on.
The ex-TV evangelist Ted Haggard was another who, rather than engaging Richard Dawkins in an intelligent conversation, stood face to face accusing him ad nauseam of being aggressive, and if you’ve seen the size of Richard Dawkins you may find this difficult to believe.
‘I was a dog and worthless, an awful person,’ confessed the exposed swaggering TV evangelist Ted Haggard. Oh how the minatory miscreants are fallen. ‘I am a deceiver and a liar.’
Why didn’t Wendy Wright avail herself of the venerable Professor’s valuable time and ask him to walk her through the museums and explain in more detail the intermediate stages of human evolution? Wendy Wright was trying to pull the same trick as the Mormon ward eccentric and pass judgment on evolution without explaining why the evidence is false.
"The bio-geographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist." (Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True)
Richard Dawkins raises in Chapter One of The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution the unique plight of the teacher of biology. The teacher of no other discipline faces an invading phalanx of evidence-deniers:
"The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology: when they honestly place the living world in its historical context – which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied." (The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution p4)
Society should be shocked and up in arms that parents are actively teaching their children to dismiss the disciplines of evidence. These same evidence-denying parents would be dismayed if they were subjects of a police investigation in which the police used the methods of prayer, faith, and a warm fuzzy feeling.
"I meet many people offended by evolution, who passionately prefer to be the personal handicraft of God than to arise by blind physical and chemical forces over aeons from slime. They also tend to be less than assiduous in exposing themselves to the evidence. Evidence has little to do with it: what they wish to be true, they believe is true ... The clearest evidence of our evolution can be found in our genes. But evolution is still being fought, ironically by those whose own DNA proclaims it — in the schools, in the courts, in textbook publishing houses, and on the question of just how much pain we can inflict on other animals without crossing some ethical threshold." (Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World p325)
But the reader has a choice whether to bring method to the madness and dismiss the foul crimes done in the frivolous days of faith. ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’ (Hamlet I iii 78). We provide no favour to the living by profaning the service of the dead.
"Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees." (The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution p8)
The Creationist’s favourite analogy is Fred Hoyle’s tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 – an analogy designed to rubbish the origin of life by chance. We find this wicked world awash with weighty, worthy issues with which the rebel can wage war. But for a scientist to fly in the face of evidence is defiance to the point of deviancy. Fred Hoyle detested the detective work of Charles Darwin.
You could select potatoes as much as you pleased but you would never make them into a rabbit. Nor by selecting oak trees could you make them into colonies of bats, and those who thought they could in my opinion were bats in the belfry. Fred Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution
John Maynard Smith countered in The Problems of Biology that – ‘No biologist imagines that complex structures arise in a single step’.
Fred Hoyle, a crusading double act with his doctorate student the boy wonder Chandra Wickramasinghe, proselytised the hypothesis of panspermia – the seeding of life from the space debris dumped daily on planet Earth. But the trail of Darwinian evidence Hoyle was not prepared to follow:
The Darwinian theory is wrong and the continued adherence to it is an impediment to discovering the correct evolutionary theory. Fred Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution
The religious reader who reaches for Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species will be rewarded with writing riper and richer than the ribald rigor-mortis poetry of scripture:
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, and various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and yet so dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. Thus, from the war of Nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we can think of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling along according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
Darwin’s sweet-natured friendly-step field-guide of Chapter One reminds readers of our familiarity with the domestication of species where the farmer or breeder has supplanted Nature as the selecting agent. The various breeds of dog have evolved from the wolf with astonishing speed – with the human hand nurturing the desired characteristics to achieve differences as varied as the Great Dane is to the Chihuahua. Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show On Earth carries a picture of a Great Dane staring down at a Chihuahua – ‘both are wolves under the skin ... after a few centuries of artificial selection’ sure to stroke the heart of softies like the author.
"The main point I want to draw out of domestication is its astonishing power to change the shape and behaviour of wild animals, and the speed with which it does so. Breeders are almost like modellers with endlessly malleable clay, or like sculptures wielding chisels, carving dogs and horses, cows and cabbages, to their whim ... The relevance to natural evolution is that, although the selecting agent is man and not nature, the process is otherwise exactly the same. This is why Darwin gave such prominence to domestication at the beginning of On The Origin of Species. Anybody can understand the principle of artificial selection. Natural selection is the same, with one minor detail changed." (Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution p28)
For the local Mormon ward eccentric to pontificate that ‘Evolution is not true’ is as insane as you or me converting the President of the Kennel Club to the mongrel belief that breeders are unable to alter the distinctive qualities of their little darlings.
‘How is it we find ourselves not merely existing but surrounded by such complexity, such elegance, such endless forms most beautiful and wonderful?’ (The Greatest Show On Earth p426)
Darwin’s great revolution of reasoning was to realise that survival is Mother Nature’s ruthless, remorseless selecting agent as the survivors live to pass on their superior advantage (genes).
"Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest, rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working ... We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long geological ages, that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were." (Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species)
"The breeders of artificial, prettified pooches can achieve in a couple of hundred years a stunning variety usually the preserve of Nature’s adaptations over millions of years.
Every landscape in the world is full of these exact and beautiful adaptations." (Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 1973 1/13: Lower Than The Angels)
A lack of research results in monster-like misconceptions flourishing in the mind of the religious addict. For the Mormon ward eccentric to declare with conviction that ‘Evolution is not true’ is to determine that species are unable to adapt to their environment. Someone should have told the polar bear.
"A hundred and fifty years ago Charles Darwin explained the incredible diversity of life in a new way ... New species appeared as they adapted to a new environment. At the time Darwin’s proposal was controversial. He argued that monkeys, apes and ourselves have a common ancestor – that ancestor we know must have lived hundreds of millions of years ago." (David Attenborough, Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor)
The religious addict will self-medicate with the comforting thought that cows do not give birth to sheep therefore ‘Evolution is not true’.
"Darwinian man though well behaved, is really but a monkey shaved!" (Gilbert & Sullivan, Princess Ida)
The religious addict with almost mischievous resolve refuses to accept the rudimentary reasoning that we homo sapiens did not evolve from the ape or chimpanzee but we shared a common ancestor.
"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans." (Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, introduction)
All species are related to each other by a common ancestor. Fred Hoyle was surely being provocative by claiming you can never make potatoes into rabbits. He must have known that changes to a species in the wild over many millennia are incremental and that you can indeed trace a common ancestor of potatoes and rabbits if you go back far enough.
"Every species is a cousin of every other. Any two species are descended from an ancestral species, which split in two. For example, the common ancestor of people and budgerigars lived about 310 million years ago. The ancestral species split in two, and the two strands went their separate ways for the rest of time." (Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution p254)
Richard Dawkins has formulated an alternative Meaning of Life from the vicissitudes of the copying process: ‘Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators’. For the Mormon ward eccentric to preach that ‘Evolution is not true’ is to certify that DNA duplicates its double helix of information with perfect precision every time. A moment’s thought of the heart-breaking faults that afflict the unfortunate at birth will belie this false assumption.
"No sensible person would have ever left the body the way it is ... We have an appendix, wisdom teeth, birth is difficult, many people get near-sightedness, and the combination of some things being so perfect and other things being such botch jobs is what should make us sit up and take notice that this is something that has been shaped by Natural Selection that has a lot of vulnerabilities built in that can be explained only by how Natural Selection works." (Randolph Ness, psychologist)
The religious addict will engage in elaborate mental gymnastics, suffer cognitive dissonance, and declare with sweeping grandeur that universal scientific truths are false rather than accept the fine showing of evidence. A fashionable misconception among Mormons who post on websites is that carbon dating doesn’t work – a charge driving to the heart of the life of isotopes that will have atomic scientists rolling in the road with laughter.
An old favourite of the fantasy-loving Mormon long in the tooth is the conjecture that God the rascally rabbit-pulling magician has planted dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith.
"When the bones of prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test our faith. This cannot be disproved. Nor can my own pet theory that, from the patterns of behaviour that are observable, we may infer a design that makes planet earth, all unknown to us, a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping group by far-off and superior civilisations." (Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great p81)
Another popular Mormon fallacy finds God foraging bones and bits and bobs from a foreign planet and constructing planet Earth from the recycled stuff and nonsense seven thousand years ago.
The Gallup poll of 2012 which found 46% of all Americans believing God created human beings within the last 10,000 years also found a consolatory 15% were convinced that humans evolved with God playing no part in the process. The third option of three – that humans evolved under the guiding hand of God – attracted a not inconsiderable 32%.
"Was the plan, was it made by someone who likes us? ... And if so, why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out? As part of what plan was that?" (Christopher Hitchens, lecture)
There is little grandeur in this view of Life: God’s guiding hand has grafted astonishing cruelty and suffering onto the backs of animals.
"Ichneumon wasps, with their habit of paralysing but not killing their victim, before laying an egg in it with the promise of larva gnawing it hollow from within, and the cruelty of nature generally, were major preoccupations of Victorian theodicy." (Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution p395)
Dolphins torture to death baby sharks and porpoises. Male dolphins kill baby dolphins so that the mothers are more likely to mate with them. Nature is nasty and amoral and won’t lift a finger to ease pain and suffering.
"If a tenth part of the pains taken in finding signs of an all-powerful benevolent god had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the creator’s character, what scope would not have been found in the animal kingdom? It is divided into devourers and devoured, most creatures being lavishly fitted with instruments to torment their prey." (John Stuart Mill)
To imagine murderous God’s guiding hand over the evolutionary process is to make God a perpetual tinkerer – how else could God be certain homo sapiens would survive and Neanderthals die out?
"My family has been an evolutionary mistake, Rab." (Ian Pattison, Rab C Nesbitt, Heat, father-in-law)
God sits on the throne of Heaven insouciant, sans guilt and comfortable with the culling of Australopithecus, Homo
Habilis, Home erectus and the rest.
"Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90% and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived, have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past." (Daniel C Dennett, Freedom Evolves)
Meet the Neanderthals whose descendants walk among us as Arsenal supporters – as closely our hominid brothers and sisters as we will see – but far, far more advanced than the average Big Brother contestant:
"When our ancestors first arrived in Europe thirty-five to forty thousand years ago there were people already waiting for them. Another species of human who had been living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. They were called the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were as much a part of the human family as we are. Closer to us than any living animal." (Horizon: The Day We Learned To Think, 2003)
Imagine you and I travelling back in time to say 30,000 years ago (a mere throwback in the timescale of evolution). Imagine you and I escaping from a glib English dark age of no decent tele in our huts to the heavenly holiday haven of Gibraltar. Like ancient missionaries of evolution we knock on the cave door and sell insurance over for a pleasant barbecued lunch at the last known refuge of the Neanderthal.
Yet experts are confident we’d be satisfied with a conversation more coherent and cogent than that with an Arsenal supporter.
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology announced in 2009 the ‘first draft’ of the complete Neanderthal genome. A comparison with the genome of modern humans from Eurasia and Africa shows that between 1% and 4% of our genome might have come from the Neanderthal.
Imagine the spiced variety of Life sharing a planet with the families of hominid now defunct. There is grandeur in this view of Life. There is more honour standing proud with our hominid family than cowering as the abandoned offspring of a fascist intergalactic empire-building fanatic. Let’s hear it for the hominids!
"It is no accident that we see green almost everywhere we look. It is no accident that we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life; no accident that we are surrounded by millions of other species, eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting ... We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection - the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth." (Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth, 2009)