Creationists despise the Theory of Evolution, or as they call it "Darwinism". They claim to have a Creation Science, which amounts to little more than the predetermined conclusions in the Intelligent Design curriculum, such as the textbook The Panda's ThumbOf Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins [My bad. Stephen Jay Gould was a hero.--Mokurai], some other books and popular articles, and no properly refereed papers in journals. None of them has ever proposed a scientific Creation Theory that I have heard of. Unscientific ones, yes, of course.
But what is a scientific theory? What, in fact, is science? What are the basic ideas of science?
- How does Science work?
- What do scientists do?
- How can we tell whether a scientific theory is true?
Short answers, for Evolutionary Biology:
- It doesn't work.
- Lie and conspire all day long and into the night.
- Simple. It's obviously all lies intended to destroy religion, morality, and civilization.
But you knew they said that, and it doesn't get to the question of Theory. What if we dig for somewhat longer answers, and ask how these ideas (you should pardon the expression) evolved?
I must apologize in advance for the fact that, in the nature of the questions, I can't answer them in one Diary Entry. There is no complete answer to such questions. But I can make a good start, and we can usefully and even for many of you enjoyably come back to these questions again and again, examining a different topic each time.
If your education was as blighted as many have received from the schools, you will have reason to doubt my claim that you can enjoy this process. (Someday I should tell you how I almost failed third grade.) But these Diary Entries are not school. You won't be graded, for one thing. For another, actually understanding your opponent, the vacuousness of your opponent's arguments, and the reasons why your opponent clings to them is quite remarkably refreshing and liberating. You won't have to suppose that your opponents are simply stupid or evil, poor zhlubs. And in addition, the Universe is an amazing, fascinating, beautiful place when learning about it isn't a matter for punishment.
It also helps that we can use the history of astronomy and of other ideas to predict with reasonable confidence when Creationist ideas will cease to be candidates for "mainstream" status in Rightwing propaganda. It took nearly 400 years for the Catholic Church to forgive, exonerate, and elevate Galileo to his current position as very nearly the authority on the proper relationship between religion and science. It took about 50 years for the fight to abolish slavery in the British Empire to succeed. It has been 50 years since the publication of Advise and Consent brought the idea of gays out of the closet, and 40 years since Stonewall brought gays into the streets. 150 years of fussing and feuding about a book that Darwin got published in 1859 is really right on schedule.
Some Christians in the time of Darwin were content to deny everything and ignore him, but there are always some eager to refute the enemies of True Religion. Some, like Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce in England, turned to ridicule. Wilberforce inquired in a public debate whether "Darwin's Bulldog" Thomas Huxley traced his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother. Huxley is said to have replied (there was no transcript of the occasion), "If the question is put to me, would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather, or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape."
Opponents soon turned to other related scientific works, mainly on geology, and attempted to refute their theories by coming up with their own versions, eventually culminating in Flood geology, the notion that all of geology happened during Noah's Flood. They claimed to be creating alternative scientific theories and they also claimed proof for those theories, at the same time deriding geology and evolution as "mere theories" in comparison with their notion of Biblical inerrancy.
In common English, "theory" may be taken as a synonym for "conjecture", an idea that one has thought about, but not investigated sufficiently to establish it as true. This is not the usage in science. (Music theory or a legal theory are also quite different.) Science begins in observation, and progresses through conjecture and experiment, or through conjecture and mathematics, to a theory which explains some coherent set of observations, and predicts more observations that we can make or experiments that we can do. Or perhaps it fails to do so, as happened to Lamarck's theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics, for which there is no math, and which does not agree with observation.
We particularly need experiments designed to rule out alternative explanations. Having math means that we can make predictions and design things. Some of the predictions of a new theory may disagree with the old theory, in which case that makes an ideal candidate for testing both, if we can find a way to carry out the experiment. Well-chosen and well-executed experiments give us confidence that we are on the right path, and that the predictions and designs will continue to work.
We are hampered in studying evolution because we cannot experiment with natural selection, although we can observe it on short time scales. But we can experiment with artificial selection, like the work of the breeders of horses, dogs, birds, plants, and other forms of life. Even bakers and brewers in different regions bred many different strains of yeast by selection for many thousands of years before anybody saw one budding into two under a microscope. Darwin was hampered by not having a mathematical theory of genetics, or the later theory of molecular biology, including DNA and so on.
The result of these limitations is that Darwin's Evolutionary Theory could explain only so much of what was known at the time. He could not explain inheritance or genetic variation. But he and others using his theory could explain almost all known species in nature or in human breeding, alive or in the fossil record, and much about the distribution of species around the world, and predict important characteristics of future finds. Many of the remaining puzzles have since been solved. For example, why are South American monkeys so similar to African apes? That answer depends on plate tectonics and the splitting of the two continents from one, not discovered for another century.
So today, evolutionary theory has much better geology than was available in Darwin's day. We know how stars generate light, and why they can do so for billions of years. We have detailed molecular biology of genetic material (DNA and RNA), and of the machinery that transcribes the genetic code to make proteins. We have sequenced a number of genomes, and we are working to do many more, while also understanding the structure and functions of proteins coded by genes, and the other biological chemicals that proteins make. Altogether, we have many billions of facts on the side of evolution, a great deal of chemical and genetic math, and a multitude of experiments and observations about the changing distribution of genes in living things.
There remain many unanswered questions. In fact, it is one of the marks of a good theory that it raises more questions than it settles, something that Creationists generally cannot wrap their minds around. Creationists have a complete misunderstanding of what a theory is, and only a handful of alleged but widely debunked "facts". This seems to be in part because their notion of Truth is that there should be a source for all of the answers that matter, a source that cannot be doubted, no matter how poorly it hangs together.
In a fully-developed scientific theory we want the ideas, the math, and the supporting experiments, all fitting together, preferably without holes or contradictions, but we never get that. Philosophers of science, most notably Karl Popper in Conjectures and Refutations, have conjectured that falsification is the critical idea. This is parodied in popular accounts that claim that a single contrary fact should bring down a theory. This turns out not to be the case, as Popper himself emphasized, but Creationists have seized on this formula and run with it.
In real science, contrary facts do not cause current theories to be thrown out. The Michelson-Morley experiments in the 1890s measured the speed of light to be the same in every direction, no matter which way the Earth was moving around the Sun and turning on its axis. In Newtonian mechanics, this is impossible. But nobody was going to abandon Newton in the areas where his theory held up just because it failed in the most extreme case. As Popper puts it, you apply Newton where it is applicable, and leave aside the cases where it isn't. Then you can wait for Einstein and others to bring out theories that apply where Newton doesn't, such as Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Similarly Darwin wanted a genetic theory, and it is one of the great sorrows of scientific history that he failed to open and read the paper Gregor Mendel sent him on the subject. But lack of genetics, though certainly an imperfection in Evolutionary Theory for a time, was never a fatal flaw. Similarly, none of the nits that self-declared "Creation Scientists" try to pick in Evolution disturbs the great edifice, any more than it would destroy a cathedral to find one loose stone.
If you want to replace a cathedral, you have to build a whole new one and attract people to it. If you want to replace a scientific theory, you also have to build a whole one. Not only that, but your new theory also has to explain the known facts better than the old one, with more predictive and design power. "Creation Science" doesn't just fail the test. It hasn't shown up with a real Theory of Creation to take the test.