![]() But there's also a second part, known as speciation. So much for one part of the evolutionary process, known as anagenesis, during which a single species is transformed. ![]() No one needs to, and no one should, accept evolution merely as a matter of faith.Įvolution is a beautiful concept, more crucial nowadays to human welfare, to medical science, and to our understanding of the world than ever before. Furthermore, the supporting evidence is abundant, various, ever increasing, solidly interconnected, and easily available in museums, popular books, textbooks, and a mountainous accumulation of peer-reviewed scientific studies. The essential points are slightly more complicated than most people assume, but not so complicated that they can't be comprehended by any attentive person. It's also deeply persuasive-a theory you can take to the bank. Sure, we've all heard of Charles Darwin, and of a vague, somber notion about struggle and survival that sometimes goes by the catchall label "Darwinism." But the main sources of information from which most Americans have drawn their awareness of this subject, it seems, are haphazard ones at best: cultural osmosis, newspaper and magazine references, half-baked nature documentaries on the tube, and hearsay.Įvolution is both a beautiful concept and an important one, more crucial nowadays to human welfare, to medical science, and to our understanding of the world than ever before. Many people have never taken a biology course that dealt with evolution nor read a book in which the theory was lucidly explained. Honest confusion and ignorance, among millions of adult Americans, must be still another. Creationist proselytizers and political activists, working hard to interfere with the teaching of evolutionary biology in public schools, are another part. The American public certainly includes a large segment of scriptural literalists-but not that large, not 44 percent. Why are there so many antievolutionists? Scriptural literalism can only be part of the answer. ![]() ENGLISH HERITAGE PHOTOGRAPHIC LIBRARY, DOWN HOUSE, KENT By 1854 he was known as a barnacle expert-though not yet an evolutionist. Right: Then, believing no one should speculate about species “who has not minutely described many,” he spent eight years classifying barnacles. (This view, according to more than one papal pronouncement, is compatible with Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god. ![]() Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such means. Many fundamentalist Christians and ultraorthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. As applied to our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. It's such a dangerously wonderful and farreaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. We plug our televisions into little wall sockets, measure a year by the length of Earth's orbit, and in many other ways live our lives based on the trusted reality of those theories.Įvolutionary theory, though, is a bit different. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally-taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is "just" a theory. ![]() If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory. It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living creatures. This story appears in the November 2004 issue of National Geographic magazine.Įvolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. ![]()
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