Yes, Evolution Really is a Proven Fact

I do not need to be convinced of the fact of evolution. I’ve known that organisms have evolved ever since I took biology in high school all those decades ago. I also know that not everyone shares my conviction that evolution has happened.

Oh, I know, even the most ardent creationist admits that evolution happens up to a point, within a species. But they go on blindly denying that one species can evolve into another.

Although I needed no convincing, I decided to read Richard Dawkins’ newest book on the subject, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I’m not even completely finished with the book yet, but I’ll have to say, if I were ever a fence sitter, I would no longer be straddling. I have taught biology in high school and middle school for years, and I know all the standard lines of evidence commonly taught to students. But I must admit I did not know how deeply the evidence supporting evolution went until I started reading the book.

Forget fossils. Yes, they still provide grand evidence supporting evolution. But, as Dawkins states, fossils are neither the only nor the best evidence for evolution. In fact, evolution would be on solid ground even if not a single fossil existed.

Take the DNA evidence for example. I’ve taught genetics as part of my science class as long as I’ve been a teacher, but the story of how DNA provides astonishing evidence for evolution was a revelation to me. I was aware that humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their DNA. That is striking enough, but it becomes far more compelling when one compares the similarities in the genomes of several different species of animals that are not closely related.

Currently, scientists have devised a family tree of more than 3,000 species of organisms, including plants, animals, and bacteria. The family tree comes not from fossil evidence, as was the case with the trees of life I became familiar with when I was taking science in high school and college. Those were based primarily on fossil evidence. They are still quite accurate, given that fossils do exist and do provide striking evidence of ancestry. But the family tree Dawkins describes is based on DNA sequences. And it is far more precise.

Creationists are fond of pointing out how statistically unlikely it would be for evolution to take place purely by chance. “It would be like throwing pieces of a watch in a box, shaking it, and having the pieces accidently assemble into a watch,” I’ve heard it said. Of course those who say this have no clue about how evolution works. It is not driven by pure chance, but by selection pressures - natural selection.

But the family tree of life created by DNA evidence can provide some real statistics. The statistics show that the similarities in DNA sequences among multiple species have to be because the species share a common ancestry. Any other explanation would be so extremely unlikely as to be non-existent. In other words, DNA has statistically proven evolution.

But what if you just don’t believe in statistics? That might only be true because they tell you something you don’t want to know. Nevertheless, DNA is not the only form of evidence for evolution other than fossils. Darwin himself realized that the fossil record was incomplete. Although we have vastly more fossil evidence today than Darwin did, it will never be complete. Fossilization is just too rare an event for that to happen.

But we still have what Darwin had. We have comparative anatomy. Things such as homologous structures and convergent anatomy exist only because species have evolved. It is well beyond the scope of this blog to explain the evidence in detail. Books such as the one by Dawkins do a great job providing all the evidence anyone should ever need.

Suffice it to say that evolution of species through natural selection is now a proven fact. Sure it is still a theory, but only because, like all scientific theories, there is room for improvement in the details. Einstein’s theory of gravity is still a theory, yet we take advantage of it daily when we use our GPS devices. Rocket scientists used its predictions to place satellites in precise orbits. And the theory of evolution has been used extensively to make real-world predictions in medical science, genetics, and paleontology, to name a few.

Researchers in Switzerland have even managed to simulate natural selection using robots. The robots "evolved" over several generations to do their jobs better, to cooperate with each other more, and even to behave civilly toward each other. Researchers programmed the robots to produce random changes in their neural nets, which led to various behavior changes over time. Only the changes that improved performance were kept, just as in natural selection.

There really is no room for any doubt. The fact that 44 percent of Americans doubt evolution is due to the vocal minority of evangelical truth deniers who care nothing of evidence. They have convinced those who were capable of being convinced. Those who have been convinced of creationism are obviously open-minded. It is they who really should read Dawkins’ book or others like it so that they can be exposed to the truth, along with the evidence to back it up. That is something the truth-denying creationists can never provide.

Finders Keepers?

There they were, two folded dollar bills lying flat on the tile floor at McAlister's Deli. I was one table up the aisle from where they lay. And there was a party of four at the table next to the dropped dough, but none of them saw it lying there. There was a party of five at the table across the aisle and the man on the end was within arms length of it, but he didn't see it either.

My daugher, sitting at the booth with me and facing away from the money, noticed that people at other tables farther away from the cash had noticed, too. They were all eying it.

I kept wondering if anyone was going to get up and make a mad dash for the dough, but everyone showed restraint. It was, after all, only two bucks. But it was a FREE two bucks for anyone willing to bend over for it.

My daugher told me that she has taken a lot of personality quizzes, especially online, and one of the questions invariably is about what to do with found money. Would you keep it? Would you turn it in to the cashier or at lost and found, or maybe to the police? Or would you just ignore it, like everyone was doing at the restaurant?

It really depends on the circumstances, I think, and maybe on the amount. If you see a few bucks lying on the ground or on the floor and there is no one around, most people would pick it up and pocket it. I know I would.

If you found, say, $1,000 or even $100 lying around would you turn it in? That's some serious cash for most folks. Unless I knew, or at least suspected whom it belonged to I would pocket it without remorse. Sure it belonged to someone. And they lost it; I found it. So now it belongs to me.

It's the same thing as if a cashier accidentally gives me back too much money. The store can afford it; it was the cashier's mistake, I just benefited. It's nothing personal; it's business. Again, I would feel no remorse for keeping the booty.

But two bucks on the floor next to a table in a crowded restaurant, that called for a more subtle approach. I was considering standing up and walking toward it and then asking the man at the table next to it if he had dropped the money. After all, if I was going to be bending over right next to him, decorum would dictate that I give him a heads up.

But I was busy finishing my soup and I certainly didn't want to look greedy by making a dash for the money and then returning to my table to finish my meal. If I had already been on my way out and saw it, that would be different.

Still, there was free money lying on the floor no more than a dozen feet from me and I felt compelled to go pick it up. But I showed restraint. I figured if it was still there when I finished I would get it.

Seeing money on the floor and leaving it there, to me, is kind of like losing a sneeze or refraining from popping the bubble wrap. It doesn't really matter that it was only two bucks; it was begging to be picked up.

When I was about 10 years old, I found a dollar lying on the sidewalk near my home. I couldn't wait to spend it. I went down to our local toy store and spent half an hour trying to decide how to spend my new-found treasure. Back then, a dollar would buy some cool stuff.

That memory popped into my head at the restaurant. But two dollars today would have been like finding two bits back in those days. I would still have been happy to pick it up, but it would not have bought many thrills, even for a 10-year-old.

But, alas, I had no excuse for picking up the money off the restaurant floor without looking like a cheap miser. And after about two minutes, although it seemed like forever, one of the servers walked by, bent over and nonchalantly picked it up. Finders keepers.

Daily Newscasts have become Daily Fluff-casts

In my last post I complained about how the news media often encourages a misunderstanding of the facts by the general public because of its insistence that both sides of every story be reported even if the other side is based on faulty science. The examples I included were anthropogenic climate change and the theory of evolution. Few legitimate climatologists debate that humans are affecting modern climate, yet the truth deniers on the far right get an equal voice in the media. And virtually no biological scientist disputes the fact of evolution, yet nearly half of the general population reject the science in favor of an ancient creation myth because evolution’s opponents have an equal voice in the media.

Well I’m not quite finished ragging on the news media, especially TV news coverage of hard-luck stories. I watch local news coverage on TV almost every day because I still believe the benefits of getting the information outweigh the sensationalism that is often intermingled in the reporting.

And it’s not just television news that is at fault. Newspapers over the last several years have followed the trend of filling up their front pages with soft news and human interest stories at the expense of real news that I prefer to read about.

Once upon a time if you opened up a newspaper to read a front-page story, all you would really need to do is read the headlines and the first paragraph and you were well informed of the basic facts. If you wanted more details, read the rest of the story. These days the headline often sensationalizes a minor point of the story and the first paragraph reads like the beginning of a novel. To get to the guts of the story, you have to read far down the page.

That style works fine for the entertainment pages or human interest stories that belong on internal sections of the paper, but not for the front page or the main news pages. These days, the front page of some newspapers is more than half filled with a huge color photograph of somebody doing something cute.

On television, stories that might barely qualify for news coverage are often expanded to include interviews of, not only any victims, but their neighbors or friends. Sad stories of people’s trials and tribulations that take up several minutes of air time dominate, highlighted by interviews of people breaking into tears on camera. Local news shows now last 90 minutes, so if there is not enough real news, they fill the airtime with fluff.

An example is a story I remember about a local woman who was partially disabled and who couldn’t afford to pay her heating bill. The story was generally about those who are forced to use space heaters in their homes when their gas has been shut off. Sometimes space heaters cause fires, especially when not used properly. So this poor woman had a single heater that she used to heat her living space. The woman was afraid to go to sleep for fear that the heater would fail and cause a fire.

The underlying story is legitimate. But it could easily have been covered by reading a paragraph about the situation in general while perhaps showing images of those, like the woman being featured, huddled around a space heater. But no. They had to interview the woman and I was forced to listen to her sad sob story while she broke into tears while the camera cut to the face of the reporter looking all concerned. The story went on like that for several minutes.

Then there are the disaster stories of tornadoes or earthquakes. In my region, a tornado is often the cause of a local disaster. And obviously if a tornado hits and causes damage, it is worth reporting on local TV news. But most channels don’t stop at simply reporting that a tornado hit and destroyed this building and that storefront and killed X number of people. They have to go in and find the poor soul whose house was just destroyed and ask him how he feels about the situation. And invariable, the man or woman being interviewed thanks God for allowing them to survive the catastrophe, never mind that their neighbor didn’t.

When I was the news editor of my hometown newspaper, readers could scan the headlines for stories that interested them, read the first paragraph, and be reasonably informed. Those who were interested in the story could read the whole thing. As Sgt. Friday was so often misquoted, “Just the facts, Ma’am.”

That might seem like dry news coverage, but I say let the news itself decide how juicy the coverage is. A tornado is sensational enough; you don’t have to embellish. Besides, there are legitimate places to cover fluff, both in newspapers and on TV news shows. Fluff does not ever have to be added to hard news stories. To me, that’s bad journalism.