Darwin – Happy Birthday!

Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein…how do you rank great scientific thinkers and their works?  Is it possible?  Certainly, Darwin is one of the most important scientists in history, and his ideas have probably had more popular and widespread impact than any other scientist.  Sure, everyone gabs about relativity, how many people really are bothered by it?

Here is a listing of other posts on this blog with Darwin as a major subject.

For Darwin, the man, read Janet Browne.  Her two-volume biography of Charles deserves every bit of praise that has been heaped upon it.  I have never read a biography that so strongly impressed on me the feeling that if I were to go back in time and actually meet the subject, I would know how to sit and talk with him or her!

Moths & Men

The Peppered Moths of the area near Manchester, England hold a special place in the history of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He doubted that evolution by natural selection would ever be observed in the wild – it would be just too difficult to find it and it would happen too slowly. These moths seemed to prove him wrong and to give a huge boost to his theory when it needed one most, at the end of the 19th century.

In the 1890s and early 20th century, Darwin’s theory was under attack by people who had discovered Mendel’s ideas on genetics – totally unknown to Darwin because they were published and then forgotten for a generation or so – and by other evolutionists who favored Lamarckian ideas or more mystical fare. The idea of evolution itself wasn’t in danger of abandonment, but the mechanism, was disputed, and there were implications from that. Darwin, himself, without benefit of Mendel, was somewhat fuzzy and uncommitted in his notions of precisely how selected traits were passed on, even though he was confident in the outlines of his theory. Only in the 1920s to the 1940s was synthesis worked out that joined modern genetics to Darwin’s theory, wrapping it all up in a rigorous bundle.

Along the way, there were those moths. They seemed to clinch Darwin’s case because as the air around England, especially Manchester, grew black with smoke, the trees too were blackened under a pall of soot. Of course, the mutant black variety of the moth would be less visible to predators and would tend to squeeze out the white moth in the local populations. That’s exactly what was observed – the populations did change. It fit nicely with Darwin’s theory, but it turns out that the science behind the field observations was not so reliable. In fact, it may have been downright wrong.

Judith Hooper has narrated this story in her book, Of Moths and Men: An Evolutionary Tale. I happen to think she’s a rather good writer and that she does a very good job at explaining the details of how Darwinian Theory was given a firm quantitative and experimental basis with genetics. Yes, she’s a journalist, and she wants to tell a good story, so she emphasizes personalities a lot, but that stuff is part of the day to day mess of scientific advancement. Scientists are people like anyone else: it’s just that they all subscribe to a culture that provides some ruthlessly objective methods for winnowing fact from fiction. It can take a while, however.

I find it very interesting that this book is cited by creationists as “evidence” for the stupidity of Darwinian Theory. Does the fact that one piece of evidence may be wrong mean the entire Darwinian theoretical structure is wrong? Does it matter that this example was highly publicized and included uncritically in inumerable textbooks? Is this an evidence for a conspiracy? I think it just shows two things: science is hard; most people don’t bother too much about scientific details – especially textbook publishers. (This fact was discussed a year or so ago in the context of scientific “cliches” about basic physics.) After all, the principals in the controversy were all scientists, all evolutionists, mostly Darwinians, and none was a creationist or proponent of “Intelligent Design,” yet these know-nothings will trumpet this controversy as proof that Darwin is a fraud. (See Icons of Evolution.) The simple fact is, as one blogger put it, these people use their religion to “correct” science.

A Memory of William F. Buckley

When I think of William F. Buckley Jr., I think of a piece he wrote for the New York Times Op-Ed page a few years ago on Darwin and “Intelligent Design.” (I cannot find the piece in the Times archive online, and I’d be grateful for a link. I know my memory of it is correct, because Buckley refers to the piece himself elsewhere.) In that piece, he reprised an argument that he had used before, and that has been popular with religious anti-evolution critics since Darwin first published his theory.

Simply stated, the argument is that organisms are too complex and perfectly suited to their environments to have evolved by random mutation. To bring this home, Buckley and others employ, with various degrees of derision and sarcasm, the reductio ad absurdum of the room with ten monkeys and ten typewriters on which they bang away happily, and randomly. Could we expect this monkey business to produce Shakepeare’s Hamlet? Well…since the play has a finite number of words, and since the number of possible combinations of the letters in the text of the play is finite, albeit unfathomably large, it is possible if there were enough time provided for the (immortal) simians to do their work. Now, Darwin shivered at the colossal lengths of time his evolutionary scheme required, but that was as nothing compared to the duration we are contemplating here! Intelligent Design triumphs?

Of course, the entire argument is based on a complete misunderstanding, a profound ignorance of what Darwin’s theory entails. Evolution is not a random process. Genetic mutations occur randomly, but their selection and propagation is based on their survival value for the organism. As Ernst Mayr says, it’s a two-step process: mutation, then selection. Sort of as if those tapping monkeys had an editor in the room looking at their output, saving the good scraps of random prose, and somehow feeding that back into the process. Except, of course, the “editor” in evolution is not intelligent or active, but only the blind, crushing, indifferent force of the environment that leads to the disappearance by death or disuse of most mutations.

This fundamental ignorance is how I recall Buckley. He was clever and genial, and ever willing to evade a hard question. When verbal puffery wouldn’t do, he would employ snide humor, innuendo, or sarcasm. He was serenely confident of his opinions, bigotted and otherwise, and acted as though it was bizarre that anyone would question them. When an interviewer asked him if he had felt isolated from “real life” as a young man – he was home schooled – he replied that no, of course not. After all, you don’t need to experience things to understand them. He read a lot. Yes, true, reading is wonderful. But only a blockhead or someone uninterested in testing their ideas would be so confident that there is nothing more to know.

Anatomy of the “Dismal Science”

Reading Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution got me curious about him. A friend of liberty? He describes the epochal event in 700 close print pages of exciting narrative. A stormy, breathless, you-are-there quality, with dashes of sarcasm and much heavy irony, makes it fascinating reading. What did he mean by writing On Heroes and Hero-Worship? No, he was no friend of democracy, liberty, and the common man, though he did begin as a radical. In fact, he seems to have been a rather tortured intellect, maybe a tormented soul.

While thumbing through his life, however, I came upon this interesting tidbit about him and his coinage, perhaps his most famous, i.e., economics is “the dismal science.” It can easily be interpreted as a protest against the pessimistic, inhumane, and souless discipline of a “science” devoted to money. Well, think again…

Everyone knows that economics is the dismal science. And almost everyone knows that it was given this description by Thomas Carlyle who was inspired to coin the phrase by T. R. Malthus’s gloomy prediction that population would always grow faster than food, dooming mankind to unending poverty and hardship.

While this story is well-known, it is also wrong, so wrong that it is hard to imagine a story that is farther from the truth. At the most trivial level, Carlyle’s target was not Malthus, but economists such as John Stuart Mill, who argued that it was institutions, not race, that explained why some nations were rich and others poor. Carlyle attacked Mill, not for supporting Malthus’s predictions about the dire consequences of population growth, but for supporting the emancipation of slaves. It was this fact—that economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus all entitled to liberty—that led Carlyle to label economics “the dismal science.”

“The Secret History of the Dismal Science: Economics, Religion and Race in the 19th Century“
by David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart

The image at the top is a medallion produced by the abolitionist industrialist, Josiah Wedgewood. JW was good friends with that practitioner of the dismal science and fellow abolitionist, Adam Smith. (Darwin was married to one of JW’s family, and was also an abolitionist, as well as being about 100 years ahead of his time on the question of race. Not only was he against slavery, not only did he think that Africans were the same (species) as Europeans, but he was actually friends with some.) This children of The Enlightenment – that fearsomely evil, anti-moral, godless, soul-destroying ideology – seem like pretty good guys compared to Thomas Carlyle, romantic apologist for dictatorship and slavery.

Still, he was a pretty nice looking fellow, don’t you think?

Bumper Sticker Debate on Evolution & The 2nd Law

Some people who are irritated with the creationist/ID crowd have bumper stickers like this one, but I don’t want to get in peoples’ faces: I just want to get my views across, so I chose a bumper sticker that didn’t satirize or appropriate their religious symbols.  Here it is:

.

That’s all there is to say, I think. Surprising to me, I’ve gotten reaction. Two within the last year, which is not much, but how often do you get comments on your bumper stickers?

Once, I was chugging along stuck in traffic and a guy in a van pulled up next to me, rolled down his window, and gestured with his thumb to the rear of my car. “How do you square that with the 2nd Law?” he shouted. I shouted back, “It’s not a closed system!” and we both drove off, after he waved away my response derisively. [Technical background on that below.]

A few days ago, I returned to my car in a parking lot and found a piece of paper wedged into the door handle, reading,

Nice bumper sticker. (…Evolution) They say it exists. But God and Evolution coexist. Big Bang says that something can come from nothing. It will be an interesting debate! Just don’t get arrogant. Have a good 1!

Cheery note from a creationist, I think. Well, what about this stuff? The thermo argument is often made and it arises from complete ignorance of what the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics really means. Popularly, it is said to show that order cannot arise spontaneously out of disorder, and that the amount of disorder in the world – entropy – is always increasing. A teenager’s room will gradually degrade into a chaotic mess, almost on its own, but it won’t neaten itself up unless the guiding intelligence of a teen (parent) is applied. So, on the face of it, for complex forms of life to arise out of less complex ones would seem to be an increase of order (design) out of less order, without any intervention. QED, Darwin’s theory must be wrong. Well, not so fast…Let’s look at what the 2nd Law really says.

Imagine you have a box – a system – like the one shown below:
This box is divided into two compartments, and there is an opening in the partition that can be covered or opened by sliding a door up and down. There is also a min-turbine wheel just in front of the opening. The box is insulated so that no heat (energy) can get in or out of the box’s two compartments. This point is very important because it defines the system as closed, or separate from the rest of the world. Imagine also that the right compartment is heated up already (we won’t bother with how) and the left is more like room temperature.

This system, as we’ve decribed it, is highly ordered. It is neat and tidy. One half is hot with high energy, one side is cool with low energy. They are clearly separated, and it takes work to get it this way, like putting in some energy to the right to warm it up before everything is sealed for the experiment. Now, let’s imagine we activate a remote control to slide the partition door up and let the hot air move into the cool compartment. Of course, it will.

As the hot air rushes through the little hole, our turbine will turn and do work for us, like rotate a generating coil and produce electricity. But after all the hot air has rushed in and turned the wheel, then what? This is the key point! The amount of heat energy in the box (both sides, now connected as one by the hole) will be the same as at the start of the experiment! No heat can get out because the box is insulated, a closed system. But, of course, the wheel will no longer turn! The energy will be diffused throughout the box, and the work was done only because the system was ordered, organized, with separate compartments that had vastly different energy levels. Once the door is opened, the temperature in the two sides will become equalized, and no more work (wheel turning) can be done. Thermo-people say that the entropy (disorder) of the system has increased. It is obvious also that there is no way that the system will spontaneously re-order itself so that compartments have different temperatures and we can do more work. It’s like water running down a chute to turn a waterwheel: Once it’s down, it doesn’t spontaneously go up the hill again. It takes energy from sun to evaporate the oceans, make clounds in the mountains, then rain, then rivers, etc. And this brings me to my final point.God-talkers are wrong to equate this system illustrating the 2nd Law with our world and living creatures in it. The fact is, we do not live in a closed system. We live on a planet that is bombarded with energy from the sun that causes DNA to be mutated, moves water from the oceans to the mountains, and makes all terrestrial work possible. The energy inputs make the possibility of ordered systems arising out of disorder possible, and that’s just what happens.

It may be true that the universe as a whole is tending to a higher state of entropy, i.e. a condition in which all energy is evenly dispersed throught the cosmos and nothing ever happens anywhere because entropy is at a maximum, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the local conditions now on our planet. It may not even be true…there are other cosmological considerations.And what of my anonymous debater? Well, some people believe in God and accept evolution, it is true. My sticker says nothing at all about God. As for the Big Bang and creation from nothing, or ex nihilo as the theologians put it, what has that got to do with the issue? I don’t see how that’s relevant. Still, I’m glad to get such a good natured response.

Reason Triumphs!

Another pseudopod heard from!

Judge Jones, a conservative, a republican, appointed by George Bush, Sr., has issued a sweeping ruling that places the claims of the Intelligent Design science-bashers into the dustbin where they belong. From his ruling, as reported in the NY Times, emphasis added:

It is notable that defense experts’ own mission, which mirrors that of the IDM itself, is to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world, which the Supreme Court in Edwards and the court in McLean correctly recognized as an inherently religious concept… First, defense expert Professor Fuller agreed that ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology. Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich acknowledged that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened to allow consideration of supernatural forces.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of anactivist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which
has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Evolution or …Nothing

Darwin, the most in-depth exhibition ever mounted on this highly original thinker, botanist, geologist, and naturalist and his theory of evolution will open at the Museum on November 19, 2005, and remain on view through May 29, 2006. This exhibition continues a series of exhibitions the Museum has developed on great thinkers, explorers, and scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Shackleton, Albert Einstein, and now Charles Darwin.

Design De-Signed

The intellectual confusion that is at the core of the so-called Intelligent Design Theory was on display once again in this mornings’ NYTimes in the opinion piece, “Design for Living” by Michael J. Behe. Let’s do him the favor of assuming he’s honest, and not some stooge for the religious right, and examine his ‘arguments’ such as they are.Okay, so according to him, the proponents of ID do not doubt that evolution and natural selection occur, simply that they are not sufficient to explain the organisms we see. Lets say right off that that ends the argument. If they can show that current theories are inadequate, and they can propose a new one that can be proved to fill in the gaps, good for them! But what does that have to do with ID? Asserting that complexity theory or the permutations of cellular automata may be a crucial element in explaining evolution does not contradict Darwin’s theory (if the assertions are ever proved) any more than Mendellian genetics did. And it certainly does not support the notion of ID.

At the core of his position is a deep prejudice which he makes clear with his statement, “…we often recognize the effects of design in nature.” NO! That was precisely what Darwin showed to be false. Are we back in the 18th century when we must listen to pontificating natural theologians rambling on…”Notice, we have two feet, perfect for shoes, and noses, perfect to hold our glasses…” I suggest that an alien visiting earth from another galaxy (where are those guys when you need them?) might have difficulty recognizing Mt. Rushmore as ‘designed’, especially if their life forms were radically different from ours. Anthropologists often have trouble distinguishing ancient tools from randomly chipped shards found in their digs – is design really so obvious? I think not, unless you have already decided it is prevalent.

Mr. Behe never explains what design is, because he doesn’t know or care. It just explains everything he can’t easily explain now. Sounds like a religious idea to me. If you stop assuming design is present everywhere, you stop seeing it…if you have another explanation, which we do have.

I truly enjoyed his comment that scientists are probably gritting their teeth and muttering, “It wasn’t designed, not really,” despite their ‘common sense’ knowledge that it ‘obviously’ is designed. Yes, reminds me of a Polish astronomer I once knew who looked at the heavens and said, “It’s not really spinning around the earth, not really. It goes around the Sun.” He said that even though his eyes suggested that the solar system did revolve around the earth. Hadn’t people noticed it for centuries? We have to believe our eyes, but we also have to know that sometimes we just don’t know what we’re looking at. Alas, the world may look like the toy ground on the lathe of the Great Toymaker in the sky, but it ain’t.

Some of Behe’s arguments are simply rehashes of anti-Darwin screeds from the 19th century, such as his claim that “no research studies indcate that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.” Seems to me that the entire thrust of biological research over the last hundred years, including micro-biology and physiology, all of which employ Darwin as a foundation element, are just that. There is nothing so far that CANNOT be explained with Darwinian mechanisms. We are back, once again, to the Bishop Wilberforce pseudo-arguments about the eye being too complex for it to be the product of ‘random’ evolution. (Of course, we know that evolution is not random.)

The circular arguments of this pathetic exposition are capped by his fourth argument in which Behe asserts that the “strong appearance of design” is a simple and strong argument in favor of ID. That which we desire to prove is the proof of what we desire to prove. Great logic! And I have to disagree that Darwin was “laboring to explain” the profound appearance of design in biological life. He was working to explain how species came about, and the resolution of the false appearance of design is simply an after affect. And how do species come about, Mr. Behe?

Finally he appeals to a vox populi argument: most people don’t accept Darwin’s theory, therefore it’s justified to discard it. We won’t settle the issue by arguing over definitions – especially when he won’t define any of his terms. And science should “keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there.” Yup, go to it, Mr. Behe. Do your theorizing, publish your experimental results, and good luck to you. If you can disprove Darwin, you will be hailed as a great man, but the fact that you are on your quixotic quest for ID does not prove that it is valid.

Mr. Behe says it doesn’t seem useful to search for non-design explanations of Mt. Rushmore. He takes the humanly created and the natural world to be all of a piece, no distinctions. Ah, yes, those Alps, so beautifully designed, surely there must be a supreme artist…The marvelous thing about culture is that it is created by us, the thinking ones. Do we have evidence that the raw material of the world was similarly created, other than an intellectual weakness to assume that what’s good for the goose is always good for the gander?

But, you know, I’m tired of this. I give up. Let’s grant Mr. Behe his argument. Intelligent Design rules! Yahooo! Now, please explain to me: who or what is the intelligent designer; if it’s not a superhuman god, then how is it different from unintelligent design? If you don’t know, what on earth does your theory add to our knowledge of the world?

Much of the confusion and delusion of this piece stems from one basic idea. ID advocates think that because Darwinians have not explained every element of every complex organism of interest, they cannot explain anything. But when they do attempt to explain organisms’ evolution, they succeed. But to explain the details of complex organisms that have evolved over tremendous reaches of time…that’s a work in progress. But there is only one path to the end as of now, and each small step it takes is solid. This explains the confusion, but it doesn’t excuse it. Fact is, Newton’s laws of gravitational attraction are pretty simple and straighforward, but last I heard, it still isn’t possible to accurately solve for the motion of three bodies that are mutually attracting one another simultaneously. It’s too difficult for us now. Does that mean Newton was wrong?

Ape Men

Darwin is long gone, and now, Ernst Mayr is dead at 100. He was the most prominent evolutionary biologist, perhaps the most prominent biologist, of the 20th century. Author of hundreds of papers, scores of books, a ground breaking researcher, brilliant and devoted ornithologist, and the guiding intellect of the great synthesis of modern genetics and Darwinian theory, he was a towering figure. (Recall, Darwin knew nothing of genetics, even after Mendel’s work, because it was not published!) One of his latest books, What is Evolution? is a wonderfully lucid exposition for laymen that even a creationist could read, should read, but perhaps, alas, cannot understand.I never met Mayr, nor heard him speak, so I don’t know what this brilliant and scholarly gentleman thought of popular culture, let alone rock n’ roll, nor have I any idea of what his sense of humour was, but I like to think he might have chuckled at this, one of my favorite songs by The Kinks:

Ape Man

I think I’m sophisticated
’cos I’m living my life like a good homosapien
But all around me everybody’s multiplying
Till they’re walking round like flies man
So I’m no better than the animals sitting in their cages
In the zoo man
’cos compared to the flowers and the birds and the trees
I am an ape man

I think I’m so educated and I’m so civilized
’cos I’m a strict vegetarian
But with the over-population and inflation and starvation
And the crazy politicians
I don’t feel safe in this world no more
I don’t want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an ape man

I’m an ape man, I’m an ape ape man
I’m an ape man I’m a king kong man I’m ape ape man
I’m an ape man
’cos compared to the sun that sits in the sky
Compared to the clouds as they roll by
Compared to the bugs and the spiders and flies
I am an ape man

In man’s evolution he has created the cities and
The motor traffic rumble, but give me half a chance
And I’d be taking off my clothes and living in the jungle
’cos the only time that I feel at ease
Is swinging up and down in a coconut tree
Oh what a life of luxury to be like an ape man
I’m an ape, I’m an ape ape man, I’m an ape man
I’m a king kong man, I’m a voo-doo man
I’m an ape man
I look out my window, but I can’t see the sky
’cos the air pollution is fogging up my eyes
I want to get out of this city alive
And make like an ape man

Come and love me, be my ape man girl
And we will be so happy in my ape man world
I’m an ape man, I’m an ape ape man, I’m an ape man
I’m a king kong man, I’m a voo-doo man
I’m an ape man
I’ll be your tarzan, you’ll be my jane
I’ll keep you warm and you’ll keep me sane
And we’ll sit in the trees and eat bananas all day
Just like an ape man

I’m an ape man, I’m an ape ape man, I’m an ape man
I’m a king kong man, I’m a voo-doo man
I’m an ape man.
I don’t feel safe in this world no more
I don’t want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore
And make like an ape man.

Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get those peepers?

Today I read in the newspaper that conservative groups throughout the nation, emboldened by their success in the presidential election, are pushing their initiatives at the state level. In Kansas, they have one the majority of the State Board of Education, and they will once again try to have the “Theory of Intelligent Design” inserted into school textbooks on biology. Let’s put this one to rest.

The so-called theory of Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory at all – it is a religious creed. And notice the subtle word-play…”Intelligent Design” as opposed to dumb-ass haphazard natural selection. Sort of like being pro-life instead of anti-abortion, despite a readiness to fry people in the electric chair. The notion, let’s call it that, is an old one, most memorably discussed by William Paley, a theologian, who asked, if we came upon a pocket watch in a meadow, would we not assume it was designed by an intelligent maker rather than having come about by chance and happenstance?

Well, if you are an educated urbanite with experience of machines, yes, I guess so, but so what. What if you are a 2oth century scientist and you come upon a glittering hard-edged thing that emits radio signals? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Evolved organism, or designed machine? These Intelligent Design people love to try and prove everything in their religious system with a science they do not understand. They assume that the reasoning that they apply to things they see in our world apply to the natural world, but they have no reason to think that other than that this is how they are used to thinking. And when the 20th century scientist encounters the glittering thing, he cannot fall back on that happy way of viewing the world because he doesn’t even know if what he is looking at is alive! Our Mr. Paley in the meadow knows a machine when he sees one – why does he assume that nature is the same as a machine? Aha, he’s a closet Newtonian!! It’s easy to ennunciate a ‘theory’ built on an absurdly simple example chosen to appeal to unthinking ‘common sense.’

No, Intelligent Design explains nothing. Leaving aside the origin of the Intelligent Designer, it tells us nothing about how species change and arise. Most important, it is NOT a scientific theory. It cannot be tested, there are no experiments that verify it or refute it, and it cannot even be formulated except as a piece of wishful thinking built on predjudice, i.e., that our machine oriented view of things is the only way to think about them. The fact is, the natural world was NOT designed, and that is the wonder and beauty of it.

Of course, chance plays a big role here, and this is probably the most widely disseminated piece of mis-information about evolution that there is, i.e., that it is a random process. Nope – mutations are random, natural selection is not. If a mouse gives birth to a two-headed mouse, that mutation will fail, and die. If it gives birth to a mouse with super-eyesight, that mouse might survive, pass on the trait, and those mice might survive better, at a greater rate, and pass on the trait, and so on. It is not a chance process at all. In fact, computer simulations have re-enacted the evolution of the eye, and it doesn’t take as long as you might think – just a couple of tens of millions of years is all.

People seem to think, or want to believe, that a theory is the same as an opinion. It’s not. Darwin’s theory is an established fact. We only call it a theory to make clear that it is a proposition that was developed, tested, and proven by the scientific method. It is not a theory in the sense of speculative thinking. It is not a hypothesis – it has been proven too many times. Ordinary people use the word theory in a much looser way, but that is not what Darwin’s theory is. It’s rock solid – get over it, creationists! Yes, it is still tested, and sometimes challenged, but only regarding specific details of how it works out in the natural world.

If these people want the Theory of Intelligent Design included in the biology textbooks, then we must be more open minded. I want the theory of Satanic origins included, and the Native American creation theories there too. And what about the great Hindu theories of creation, eh? No end to it….