Science »

Often not only is evolution misinterpreted but it is also taken from Darwin’s writing, a stupid person will quote Darwin without understanding that unlike static religious dogma scientific theories are corrected and develop to include things that were missed the first time around. Far from being my type of science it is important since arguments against evolution are often so huge simply because they go against the God did it approach. More interesting evidence is presented by Dawkins in ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ still these are a few of the important notes to consider. First of all the very word theory is at least a two definition expression, in science it’s considered a set of ideas which has empirical and material evidence but also is reasoned enough to withstand the independent reconstruction by different researchers and scientists. The second definition is more like a guess and something that can be reconstructed to mean something completely different depending on who is doing the thinking. You find this second use of the term quite often in superstitious thinking, compare two of the 23,000 or so versions of Christianity for their slight differences to see my point.

In order to expand the methods of how species change over time [or evolution] there are four different types of selection to consider. Artificial selection is when humans do things in order to change the gene pool, Darwin’s pigeons are examples of this but so are farm animals and plants, all are made for improvements in yields of food or beautifulness. Sexual selection is not based on particular useful changes but ones that attract mates, male birds such as peacocks do this and peahens through their lure the most attractive mate preserves the genes. Natural selection is perhaps the most well known, in short genes that increase the chances of reproduction through survival increases once again the continuation of those genes. I have written about how this process is guided by nature here. Last of all superior equipment selection (Dawkins did not call it this although I found it easier to remember) is different from natural selection since it refers to the ability to survive by having something different from others in its species rather than the existence of what a species has. Natural selection is the general term for all of these types, still to make it clearer natural selection could be the colour of a fox to blend into its environment reducing the risk of dying before reproduction whereas superior equipment selection would be larger teeth increasing the likelihood that reproduction can occur.

The picture is much more complex than this; consider that if you are a mixture of your mother and father then by the laws of average all individual differences would slowly be bred out of a species including us and every other species! Dawkins puts forward a most beautiful explanation of this using paint: if you mix two colours of paint then at some point all you will end up with is the same colour and no examples of two individual colours would ever exist past that point. Mendelian law is what actually happens, in short it results in a random shuffle of genes which runs along the line of on or off position, dominant genes take control while recessive genes lay in none used form still these recessive genes might be within the next random shuffle. Despite this genes have to be present in the current generation in order for them to be present in the next generation. Genes also come along for the ride such as in the silver foxes breed by Belyaev et al, through artificial selection of tameness was bred into these foxes still the further down the line the more dog like these foxes looked. The resulting conclusion is that despite never being bred for their dog like features it just so happened that tameness and dog like belonged to the same configuration of genes. This is very like natural selection only the cause was humans rather than nature.

Artificial selection appears to be an accelerated form of evolution; most often it causes generations to breed quicker than they would naturally although it might still take a significant period of time. Since 1925 the size of elephant tusks has reduced, this could be due to the ivory trade, despite probation laws and protection the average size is still reducing. This might be some sort of evolution in action but it could be that the larger tusks elephants are still being killed for their ivory. Most of the changes in species take a very long time and we have to look at millions of years to see them. Perhaps the best part of Dawkins book is when it takes each of the misconceptions, they are:

1. The idea of one species living today has evolved from another species again living today is nonsense each species shares at some point a common ancestor however a monkey did not evolve from an earthworm. Both monkeys and earthworms are evolved as each other to suit their environments; one is not a higher life form.

2. Monkeys are not more complex than earthworms in terms of genomes, potatoes have more chromosomes than humans but that does not mean that potatoes are more intelligent.

3. Humans might be more like monkeys than earthworms but this is because we share an ancestor back fewer years than the common ancestor between us and earthworms.

4. There is no cross species that can cause dogatees, elephanzees, kangaroceros or crocoducks! A species is defined as a set of individuals that can breed with each other, two species can be created from one although this takes selection and perhaps different environments. A monkey cannot give birth to a new species; it can only give birth to a monkey that has very small variations from its parents through copying errors.

5. There are no missing links! Homo habilis evolved into homo erectus which evolved into homo antecessor which evolved into home heidelbergensis which evolved into homo sapiens sapiens (or us). Although this change was slow through each generation they are labelled as such in order to help understand our development. There might be variations or missing links which have been put into these categories, such examples must be labelled as they are required to, this is an academic falsehood rather than a sign of anything missing.

The last set of ideas that comes across is that the religious are forcing schools to stop teaching evolution and in some cases putting clearly wrong information out to mislead people into thinking that evolution is not scientific fact. Gravity is less of a scientific fact in that it has weaker evidence and is less of a known than evolution. Evolution makes more sense than theology for if a designer created the species (and life on earth as it is) then you would assume that these species would be uniform, penguins would be found in the northern hemisphere, a perfect environment for them. It would also be logical the pain most animals suffer when dying would somehow be lessoned, this is not the case. For evolution this does not create a problem but for God it reflects badly on this design. Science should not be dragged down by theology, it is fascinating and full of wonders itself. The hard copy of this book has pictures of the process and has significantly more information than is presented here.