Darwinian Evolution: science or not?
About 150 years ago a ship called The Beagle arrived at the Galapagos Islands carrying on board a naturalist researcher that’s destined to forever change the way we look at ourselves and at the rest of the life on this planet. His name is Charles Darwin. His book – The origin of species – will lay the fundations of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology, Paleontology and many more. He’ll spend about 3 years hopping from one island to another dazzled by the varaiety of species of birds and turtles. There are no mammals on any of the islands and the ones that arrived with the ship – namely rodents and cats – will be responsible of the later problem native species will have to face. Because of the lack of predators before the arrival of the Beagle, many animals nested on the ground making them an easy target to the new arrivals. By the time Darwin goes home the new concept of Natural Selection and its sister in law, Evolution, are firmly nested in the scientist’s mind. Even thought it took him many years before he got confortable enough to pubblish his theory he had no doubt that the theory was sound and as for today Natural Selection enjoy a place among succesfull theories that can only be compared with Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Simply put, it works and it has been proved right so many times that no one in his right mind would doubt it.
In simple words the process of Natural Selection works like this
1) The parents pass on a mix of genes to their newborns
2) The new mix of genes will confer the newborn certain characteristics that are unique to him/her
3) If any of those characteristics will give the newborn an advantage of any kind the newborn will have a better change to pass them on to the next generation. After thousands of generation, especially if the specie lives in a cut off ecosystem -something like an island – the new characteristics will pile up and form a new specie.
Evolution is one of the most brilliant and most misunderstood concept in science. Those that don’t understand it often point out that if humans descend from apes then why we don’t see chimpanzee turning into human right now? The reason why you don’t go to a safari in africa and see chimps hanging around on a tree falling down and becoming humans at the moment they hit the ground is very simple. First of all it require a lot more time and a number of generations greatly superior to one. Second, it just doesn’t work that way, Evolving from chimps doesn’t means your grandad was an orangutan, it just means that humans and chimpanzees shared a similar ancestor a long time ago.
There are 2 main types of people that refuse the basic tenents of Evolution
1) Religious Zealots. Those that want to believe it’s better to leave all knowledge buried under myths and legends so that it will make it easier for them to take advantage and/or control other people. Those people have a lot to gain from keeping you in an ignorant state, with the frame of mind that it’s wrong to question anything because of some old human like figure sitting on a cloud getting unhappy with the fact that we can now manipulate life to help everyone live better and longer. Those people will always refuse any proof science has to offer and rely heavily on old books supposedly written by the only man that was able to speak to their god. They replace scientific method with utter nonsense.
2) Creationists. A rare lonely breed of wanna be scientists that are strongly rooted in religious beliefs and challenge scientific proofs with a single line of reasoning. Listening to them you get the idea that the world is way too young than it actually is and features like eyes in mammals or bones in birds are way too complex to be given rise naturally. You basically must have a creator that’s perfect, that doesn’t have to be created even thought it’s way more complex than any feature in the natural word, that created features that are far from perfect and wouldn’t have any reason to be there in the first place and the list can go on and on ad infinitum.
Evolutionary biologists have amassed tons of proof backed up by fossil records about most of animal species that the theory of Evolution by Natural Selection has happened in the past and it’s happening right now. Experiments on microorganisms have proved time and again that bacteria and viruses adapt and change, in a word, evolve. If that wasn’t the case we wouldn’t need a flu shot that’s slightly different every year, we wouldn’t have pandemics scares, we wouldn’t have bird flu. But most of all we wouldn’t have the most exciting field in 20th century biology: Genetics. The fact that Genetics works at all is because Evolution does happen, otherwise there wouldn’t be any chance of having corn with fish genes and tomatoes laced with bacteria genes that help boost your immune system. Those genes would be incompatible with other species and would never be expressed by a different species. Yet we have plants that express animal genes and animals that express plant genes. You can see that Genetics works and scare the living hell hell out of creationists and zealots alike by how much money they spend trying to control or stop research in the field under the moral banner. Why would they spend any money if the research won’t work? Why are they so afraid of something that clearly cannot be possible? Could be that the fact that it works and you can use it to better your life so much that you won’t need to whine at a marble statue in a marble church would take away the chance to make money out of you by so many people wearing fancy robes?
