Lets talk EVOLUTION

There are ever increasing efforts in this country to somehow prohibit, minimalize, discredit or counter the teaching of human evolution to our young in science class. Evolution being the study of how humans began and evolved from the earliest possible time to the present.

The impetus behind these efforts is of course religious, more specifically Christian. These Christians somehow view the teaching of the evolutionary process as a threat to their belief system, more specifically the creation story in the Christian Bible.

The problem here is that there are Christians that do not take the Bible literally and there are Christians that do. Both groups are devout Christians, they just have their own form of Christian belief. In fact, there have always been many "Christianities" throughout history and that is true even today.

I will not get into whether the stories in the Bible are factual or not, that will be a subject for a later blog but for now we will concentrate on those fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. that absolutely oppose the teaching of evolution to their young and for that matter, our young, since it appears, they have the clout to impose their views on all of us.

Their argument is that Darwin's Theory of Evolution is just that; a theory. Actually, this is true. Darwin published "On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection" in 1859 as his theory. Let me make this perfectly clear; the theory part of his work is in the "Natural Selection" and not on evolution.

Darwin postulated that species evolved by the natural selection of the fittest which meant that the species most adapted to their environment would survive and the species not adapted to their environment would perish and become extinct.

A crude example would be, lets say, between two small animals of the same species living on the plains. Some animals had short legs and could run only slowly while other animals had long legs and were very swift of foot. These animals were the favorite food of a larger animal

According to Darwin's theory, the slower animals would perish because they could not outrun the predator while the faster animals would survive because they could. Therefore future generations of the small animal would tend to have long legs because they were the product of a male and female with long legs. I hope this makes sense to you.

What makes this a theory is that it has not been proven that natural selection or survival of the fittest is what controls the evolution of species. Some in the field today have proposed a "chaos" theory saying that it is all random chance as to which species survives and which does not.

Evolution itself, the fact that we and other inhabitants of this earth, did evolve from previous versions, is not a theory, that is a FACT. How do we know this? We have proof. We have bones, we have eggs, we have imprints, etc. We can date them with the carbon dating process. We now have a lot more scientific equipment and methods to help us in dating our finds.

So I hope I have made it clear that "evolution" is not a theory but Darwin's natural selection mode of evolution is a unproven theory.

In the United States, a majority of the population believes that God created us in our present form. This belief negates the evolutionary process and stipulates that we are direct descendants of Adam and Eve who looked just like us.

A smaller percentage of the population believes in the evolutionary process BUT believes the process was guided by God.

Only a small percentage of the population believes in the evolutionary process without any involvement of God.

Getting back to the topic at hand; teaching evolution. I feel the subject of evolution MUST be taught in our schools as a valid and documented scientific process otherwise we are keeping the FACTS away from our children and therefore, willfully misguiding them. How that evolution developed and is developing can be taught as a theory; all current theories should be taught.

Creationism is not a science but a religious belief. No one knows exactly how the world began, how the world was formed and how life started. Here, injecting God and creationism would not be out of the question but that should be left to the churches and is not a subject for science class; it cannot be proven, ever. It most definitely should come up in a class on world religions.

A new effort to inject some form of creationism into the evolution discussion is called "Intelligent Design". This theory basically states that living creatures are just TOO COMPLICATED AND INTRICATE to have arisen through simple evolution; there had to have been an intelligent designer to have created all of this.

This argument allows evolution to be viewed as fact but injects God as the designer of this evolutionary process. In a nut shell, this Intelligent Design theory can be countered with existing, totally unintelligent design in nature. I will give you male nipples as an example - I have many, many more examples of gross imperfections in nature.

This also could be a plausible idea except I would question the "intelligent" part but definitely, God could have designed the evolutionary process - but again, it could never be proven.

I do not wish to denigrate anyone's religious beliefs and as I have mentioned above, it is not out of the question that God could have played a role in evolution. What I object to is the determined efforts of a small group of fanatics that is making regular, intelligent Christians look bad by denying obvious reality; evolution cannot be denied.