Correcting the Lies about Darwin and Evolution
………By Santosh Helekar ( A rejoinder to the following
http://tinyurl.com/npzrus )
Last month, the Herald Mirror published an article entitled "Did
Charles Darwin Mislead Us?" written by a man named Bernard Simoes.
This article is the ugliest piece of writing I have read in a long
time. As I have said elsewhere, it is a perfect example of a fusion
between abysmal ignorance and appalling dishonesty. The article, from
start to finish, peddles horrible lies about one of the most
successful and significant of scientific theories in existence,
propounded by one of the greatest of scientists the world has ever
seen. In a particularly morbid and mendacious assault on our sanity,
it claims that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was
responsible for racism, Nazism, Fascism, Communism and the genocides
committed by all the dictators and mass murderers of the 20th century,
as well as for the lack of progress in science.
To those who might be wondering why any sober-minded and educated
individual would attack a well-established scientific theory today,
the reason is two-fold, disregarding the trivial but real possibility
of lack of sobriety and/or sanity: 1) an unshakable belief in an
ultra-conservative political movement driven by religious cults and
fanatical sects of mainstream religions, and 2) the failure of basic
high school education to impart a proper understanding of science.
The extremist religious movements are opposed to evolution because
they feel that it threatens their sacred faith in the literal truth of
the scriptures, i.e. in a young earth that is only a few thousand
years old and in the creation of humans and other living organisms by
a divine creator. There are many versions of this ideology being
propagated by preachers and publicists of all persuasions through
sermons, lectures, books and websites. An article written by Patrick
Ferdinand in the last issue of Herald Mirror has already exposed the
misguided nature of this religious ideology. So I will not address it
here any further. Instead, I will try to explode the lies that were
smudged on these pages by Bernard Simoes as they pertained to the
proper scientific understanding of Darwinian evolution.
The scientific theory of evolution by natural selection was proposed
by Darwin in 1859 on the basis of an enormous body of objective
evidence collected by him and others over several decades. It stated
that all living organisms on earth have descended from a common
ancestor. Those who have inherited physical variations that are better
adapted to a changing environment, have survived longer and have been
able to bear more offspring, who in turn have been better equipped for
survival – a process which Darwin termed as natural selection. The
confluence of variation, heritability and selection has produced the
entire diversity and complexity of life that we see around us.
There are many popular misconceptions regarding evolution, bred by
scientific illiteracy in general or by ignorance of this specific
subject, of which the following three are the most common.
The first is that monkeys became humans over time. This is no truer
than the statement that your great grandfather became you. What the
theory evolution actually says is that monkeys and humans had common
ancestors. Chimpanzees, bonobos and humans had one common ancestor who
lived about 7 million years ago. In fact, humans had a common ancestor
with every other living organism farther back in the history of life
on earth.
The second misconception is that humans are more evolved than other
organisms. But the truth is that in the context of evolution, all
organisms that thrive on earth today, which includes bacteria,
cockroaches, monkeys and humans, are equally evolved because they have
all been very successful at surviving in the present environment.
Evolution does not proceed as a linear, progressive and directional
process. It branches out as a tree, generating diversity and
complexity in an aimless and undirected manner.
The third, and by far the worst misconception is that evolution is
only a theory that has never been proven. This myth has been
propagated far and wide using a variety of deceptive means by various
forms of religious indoctrination. However, scientific discoveries of
the last century and the first decade of the present century, enabled
by technological advances, have amassed formidable evidence that life
has indeed evolved exactly as originally predicted by Darwin in 1859.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is a scientific
theory because it is falsifiable – a condition that any scientific
hypothesis must satisfy. For example, this theory can be falsified by
any of the following observations: 1. The finding of a 500 million
year-old fossilized human skeleton. 2. The finding of no similarity
between the DNA of a modern organism and that of its fossilized
ancestor. 3. The finding of a human footprint in a fossilized lump of
dinosaur dung.
Despite 150 years of relentless and rigorous attempts to test this
simple but elegant theory, conducted each and every day in hundreds of
laboratories around the world, no scientist has been able to falsify
it. On the contrary, in this process nearly every single detail of
this monumental insight has now been thoroughly confirmed, refined and
strengthened. Indeed, evolution by natural selection is one of the
most firmly established statements in all of science, making it the
rock solid foundation of modern biology and medicine.
I list below significant pieces of scientific evidence that fully
establish the validity and reality of Darwinian evolution.
1. Scientists have repeatedly observed that all species of living
organisms on earth are biochemically and genetically related. Their
bodies are composed of the same types of complex molecules, and a high
percentage of the sequence of DNA that comprises their genetic
material is identical or similar across species. For example, humans
and chimpanzees share 98% of their DNA sequence.
2. They have reproducibly verified that the degree of genetic
similarity corresponds nicely with the temporal separation between
species over the entire history of life on earth, which has been
independently determined to span about 3.8 billion years.
3. They have conclusively demonstrated the process of selection of
biological variations by the environment, and the fact that these
variations pre-exist the occurrence of the environmental changes that
select them. As a matter of fact, this is being done on a regular
basis in every modern molecular biology laboratory. Antibiotic
resistant bacteria can be made to evolve from non-resistant bacterial
colonies by selection on culture dishes containing specific
antibiotics. Indeed, a microbiologist named Richard Lenski has
experimentally recreated the evolution of bacteria in his laboratory
at Michigan State University over the past two decades. He started out
in 1988 with 12 colonies of the simple bacteria Escherichia coli that
inhabit our gut. Over more than 35,000 generations these colonies
under varying environmental conditions have now evolved into different
complex varieties of bacteria. The course of their evolution has
followed almost precisely what
was predicted by Darwin and by the later refinements of his theory.
During some periods the changes were gradual; at other times they were
sudden, just as predicted.
4. In contradiction to the lies propagated by creationists,
evolutionary biologists have discovered many fossilized organisms that
represent transitional forms or links between major divisions of life,
such as birds and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, apes and humans,
etc. For example, there are at least 21 fossilized species of
reptile-birds, and 11 species of ape-humans. A new ancestral species
of ape-humans, Ardipithecus ramidus, has just been discovered.
5. Biologists have also observed the origination of new species of
organisms such as new bacteria, mosquitoes, plants, apple maggot
flies, silverside fish, the stickleback fish, the salamander Ensatina,
the greenish warbler and many types of birds, the deer mouse, the
American bee, and the subterranean mole rat. Just as an amusing
example, a new species of mosquito, Culex molestus has emerged in
London's Underground in the 90's. It was first reported in the
literature in 1998.
6. The bogus creationist claim that an undirected chance-driven
process cannot in principle lead to order has been roundly refuted.
Such a chance-dictated process has been simulated innumerable times in
many different ways on a computer, and has always found to produce the
type of diversity and organization seen in living organisms of today.
Currently, there is a fantastic new chance-dictated simulation of
evolution of life being conducted at California Institute of
Technology's Digital Life and Michigan State University's Digital
Evolution Laboratories. They have developed a computer program called
Avida, which completely replicates Darwinian evolution by natural
selection. It has validated every tenet of this theory in great
detail, something which cannot be done in real life because evolution
by its very nature is a historical process that has been understood to
have occurred over three billion years.
The Avida program can be downloaded by anybody free of charge. It
shows how complexity and diversity emerge when chance is allowed to
work over thousands of generations under various simple environmental
constraints. In fact, creationists of all types have downloaded the
program with the singular purpose of finding a fatal flaw in it, and
to their great frustration have found nothing wrong with it. You can
download the program at http://dllab.caltech.edu/avida/
7. Most organisms possess organs and parts that are of limited or no
use to them. They are understood to be vestigial organs in the context
of evolution. In other words they are obsolete organs that were once
useful in the organism's distant ancestor but have persisted because
of the inefficient and undirected nature of the process of evolution.
Examples of such vestigial organs are the ostrich's wings, the eyes of
the blind cave salamander and the Mexican cavefish, the appendix in
humans, etc.
There is also a biological phenomenon known as atavism that can only
be explained in evolutionary terms. Atavism refers to the anomalous
appearance of an organ or limb that was present in an evolutionary
ancestor. Examples of this are appearance of hind limbs in whales,
tails in newborn human babies, thigh muscles in sparrows, etc.
The most interesting example of how useless baggage persists in our
bodies comes from the field of molecular biology. Scientific research
in this field has uncovered many molecular vestiges. One example is
particularly fascinating. As you might know, humans have to consume
vitamin C through their food or nutritional supplements because they
cannot synthesize it in their bodies. This is also true for other
primates and guinea pigs. However, all other animals have an enzyme
that synthesizes this vitamin. Evolutionary theory predicted that the
gene for this enzyme must have existed in our ancestors, and that it
should be present in our DNA in a non-functional or vestigial form.
And lo and behold, some years ago such a vestigial pseudogene was
discovered by a group of Japanese scientists in human DNA, as well as
the DNA of guinea pigs.
In addition to the type of useless molecular baggage just mentioned,
all eukaryotic (whose genes are enclosed in a nucleus) organisms
possess a huge amount of junk DNA, which does not have any function at
all. Furthermore, it is now well recognized that most bodily processes
are inefficient from an engineering standpoint. For example,
replication of DNA during cell division, and its recombination during
fertilization are error-prone mechanisms.
In sum, modern science and scientists accept evolution by natural
selection as a valid explanation for the diversification of life on
earth not because they are stupid, racist, fascist, communist,
autocratic, criminal-minded or genocidal. They are not compelled to
accept it because of their allegiance to atheism or to religions other
than those that worship the God of the Old Testament. They are
convinced it is the correct biological explanation because there is
compelling objective evidence for it, and because it is the most
parsimonious rational explanation for this natural phenomenon.
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