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Nov. 2, 2007
The origins debate continues
Evolution versus creationism: the battle between science and religion keeps resurfacing.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Every few years, somewhere in North America, there is a court battle between evolutionists and creationists. Several years ago, when the Abbotsford school district, in British Columbia's "Bible Belt," fundamentally strayed from the standard biology curriculum, the Education Ministry forced it back on the Darwinian path.
The last publicized showdown on this issue was in the Harrisburg, Penn., School District. The evolutionists brought in their "big guns": eminent professors and researchers, and won the day. This starkly contrasts with the first evolution trial in 1925, where proceedings against John Scopes, a Tennessee public school instructor who was accused of teaching evolution, found him guilty.
Evolutionists maintain that all contemporary life forms were derived from simpler, earlier ancestors. Biblical creationists, on the other hand, believe that God created all species, just as they now exist. The latter concede that some died out and became fossils, but insist there have been no new forms since Genesis.
One issue that early evolutionist theorists couldn't explain was how organisms could evolve in the short time that the earth has been in existence. After all, based on calculations made by 17th-century literalist Bishop Ussher, by adding up all the "begats" in the bible, the world began in October 4004 BCE, a span of time far too short for the slow process of evolution to have an effect.
Important geological studies, undertaken by Charles Lyell during the first half of the 19th century, had considerably extended the presumed age of the earth. This "extra time" provided evolutionary theory with the explanation they needed. What Darwin supplied was a theory about the mechanism of evolution: natural selection.
Recently creationists have advocated the concept of "creative intelligence" or "intelligent design," meaning that there is an intelligence, presumably God's, that governs the Universe and all its contents, and who initially set the process of evolution in motion. Opponents of creative intelligence view it as the "backdoor" to creationism.
The controversy is not simply a matter of teaching about origins; the outcome will influence future generations on how they see themselves and their environment. A similar battle took place 600 years ago over whether the earth or the sun was the centre of our planetary system. Heliocentricity (the belief that the sun is at centre) was a blow to humankind's conceit. Just imagine what a bigger blow it was to admit that our distant ancestors were hardly distinguishable from apes and that we evolved from them through the element of chance!
The contemporary theory of evolution, the mutation-selection hypothesis, posits that alterations in an organism's DNA appear on a more or less random basis and the changes that they cause are then selected for by the environment. If they contribute to the organism having more viable offspring, the changes are favored in the struggle for existence. They, in turn, will have more surviving offspring and their new traits will become part of a variant and may, over time, form a new species. Their descendants simply displace other competing species members who do not possess these advantageous traits. This phenomenon is famously known as "the survival of the fittest."
Much of the zeal displayed by evolutionists is due to their feeling under attack and reacting dogmatically. Yet Darwin himself never defined species, had severe doubts about his theory and didn't believe that the changes were random.
In fact, natural selection, Darwin's greatest contribution, is what, in reasoning, is called a tautology. The theory says that the fittest survive and produce a greater number of offspring. How do we know that they were "the fittest"? Because they survived and left a greater number of offspring. That's like saying the rich are rich because they have more money. It doesn't really reveal anything new.
Part of the often unstated reasoning behind modern Darwinism is a doctrine proclaimed by August Weismann. Weismann cut off the tails of several generations of mice but did not produce a tailless mouse. He concluded that changes during an organism's lifetime could not be transmitted to its progeny. (He could have saved himself a lot of time (and mice) if he had examined the penises of week-old Jewish boys.)
The initial major opposition to evolution came from the Anglican Church, which not only lost the debate, but attracted ridicule. The Vatican, with the experience of the Galileo affair, never made anti-evolutionism a cause célèbre. Neither did Jews – probably because Jews have no central authority, dispute has always been at the centre of Judaism, and because Jews believe that if God could create the universe, He could also create evolution.
Recent advances in biology have cast some doubt, not on evolution, but on natural selection as its only mechanism. Over the long run, science is self-corrective and it can be expected that in the next 50 years, the cult of Darwinism will shrink markedly. The same may not be true for the biblical creationists, who seem to be growing in numbers and influence in the current round of the long-lasting debate.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic with a PhD in biology, living in New Westminster.
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