| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"johac" |
| Date: |
06 May 2006 02:24:44 AM |
| Object: |
Darwin Created Evolution? No, No, No, No ... |
Another refutation of fundy belief that Evolution is a religion and
Charles Darwin was its founder.
Comments at site.
---
Darwin Created Evolution? No, No, No, No ...
David Horton
Whenever Darwin is mentioned on HuffPo the blogosphere comes alive with
outrage on the one hand, and restatements of the obvious on the other.
Having watched, and contributed to, this discussion, I keep stumbling
across comments that make me realise I am totally misunderstanding
something in the fundamentalist mind, and that biologists and fundies
are not 'debating' in the same classroom (so to speak), although they
think they are.
Here's a thing. Biologists think everyone knows the history of science.
Fundies in fact know no history of any kind, let alone science history,
and think Darwin invented evolution, and if 'darwinism' would only go
away then so would evolution.
In fact even in the early nineteenth century there was no doubt that
evolution had occurred. You would have had to be blind, foolish, and
totally uneducated to not see the results, and the process, of evolution
all around you. Same today. There were fossils, closely related species
living in different places, species that looked different proving to
have almost identical skeletons or identical reproductive organs, and
then there were domesticated animals which had changed dramatically.
Darwin wasn't inventing evolution, he was discovering the mechanism by
which it works in the natural world (people already knew how it worked
with domesticated animals). When he began his research there were two
theories about how evolution worked. One was by Lamarck, who thought in
essence that the environment caused species to change and they would
pass the change on to their descendants (giraffes acquiring long necks
because they were stretching to reach leaves in trees is the example
always given). And the other, epitomised by Paley, was in effect that
god kept interfering to direct the development of individual species.
There was no evidence for either of those theories then, nor is there
now, but until Darwin (and Alfred Wallace) came along, nobody had come
up with viable alternative way to explain how evolution occurred in
nature. Charles and Alfred did, with the deceptively simple ('why didn't
I think of that' was a common reaction at the time) idea that just as
artificial selection had caused domestic plants and animals to evolve,
natural (that is, without human intervention) selection had caused wild
plants and animals to evolve. As a result of endless experiments,
Lamarck's ideas have been disproved. No one has ever found a single
piece of evidence suggesting god's involvement in the evolutionary
process. By contrast every investigation by every biological scientist
for 150 years has confirmed Darwin's theory as to how evolution in
nature worked.
Evolution has happened, is happening, and continues to happen. The only
question, 200 years ago was how it happened. That question has been
settled more thoroughly than any other scientific question. So let's get
the ground rules straight, fundies, the debate isn't about 'evolution',
it is about the mechanism of evolution.
Our next lecture will be on how god can use population genetics to cause
the evolution of species (here is a hint, even if he existed, he
couldn't).
---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/darwin-created-evolution_b_204
52.html
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
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