The Evolution Controversy

A Survey of Competing Theories

Fowler, Thomas B., Kuebler, Daniel

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441201645
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

In the emotional debate surrounding evolution, it is often difficult to cut through the competing agendas to gain an unbiased understanding of the scientific issues involved. The Evolution Controversy provides a resource for doing so. The authors leave aside the profound philosophical and religious issues involved in the controversy in favor of a balanced and critical examination of the four major schools of thought involved: Neo-Darwinism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Meta-Darwinism. The focus is on an objective evaluation of the scientific merits of each school, as well as an examination of areas of agreement and disagreement among the schools. The goal is to equip readers, whether students, church leaders, or the general public, to come to their own informed conclusions.

PART 1

BACKGROUND
ON THE
CONTROVERSY

1

INTRODUCTION

Drawing the Battle Lines

Charles Darwin’s theory of organic evolution, which emerged from his long meditation on living organisms and the history of life, undoubtedly has the strangest and most amazing history of any major scientific theory. From his remarkable insights into the subject, published in his 1859 classic, The Origin of Species, evolution has developed into the dangerously combustible subject that it is today. Hailed as one of science’s greatest and most far-reaching achievements by some, condemned as a fraud by others, it is more controversial today than in Darwin’s own time. Never before has a legitimate scientific theory become surrounded by so many extra-scientific trappings, triggered such visceral reactions, caused so much ink to be spilled, or led so many otherwise rational people—including scientists—to abandon their reasoning powers wholesale and lose sight of the ultimate objective, which is the pursuit of truth. Why is this happening? What is at stake? What makes the theory of evolution so unique? The answer is not far to seek.

The majestic sweep of evolution, together with its enormous explanatory and integrative potential, makes it one of the pivotal intellectual issues of our time. Darwin’s theory—assuming it to be correct—illuminates such an enormous range of phenomena that its impact extends far beyond a narrow specialty of biology. It has the potential to influence many, if not most, of the ways in which we organize our experience and ground our beliefs. In the sciences, it affects all of biology because it is one of the keys to our understanding of the relationships among organisms; it also draws upon and to some extent influences chemistry, geology, physics, and even engineering, all of which are used to explicate aspects of evolutionary history. In the humanities, it is often used as a paradigm for understanding historical, social, and political change. Perhaps more important, however, it affects the way we view ourselves in the universe, our belief (or nonbelief) in the supernatural, and our relationships with the rest of the natural world.

Evolution, or more precisely as we shall see, the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, makes certain claims in these areas that appear to be in direct conflict with the views held by some of the world’s major religions. The impact of Darwin’s theory on religion therefore can be devastating:

Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves. . . . The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us (all creatures great and small) and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight—that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must be either turned into a symbol for something less concrete, or abandoned altogether.1

The potential for conflict is therefore very real, and in the eyes of some, there must be a fight to the death. As usually posed by the media, the question is one of evolution versus religion, with biblical fundamentalists arrayed on one side and scientists on the other—a reprise of the infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925.2 Hence the widespread interest in evolution and the heated controversies surrounding it.

Scientific controversies often become venomous and spill over into the general culture when they concern fundamental beliefs of society, or at least beliefs deemed essential at the time. This happened with Galileo and the controversy over the geocentric universe in the early seventeenth century. More recently, it happened when cherished views of the deterministic nature of scientific laws (and nature itself) were challenged by quantum mechanics in the first decades of the twentieth century. But evolution is undoubtedly the longest running and most bitterly fought of these controversies, and the one with the highest stakes. The reader may even have observed the “emblem war”: fish and Darwin auto emblems, by which drivers exhibit their predilection—something unheard of in any other scientific controversy (see fig. 1.1).

Figure 1.1. Dueling auto emblems, symbols of the culture war swirling around the subject of evolution.

In the midst of this debate, we would like to look past the noisy and nasty arguments that dominate popular literature on the subject and penetrate to the core of the matter. Let us begin our search with a brief historical overview.

Capsule History of the Evolution Controversy

The notion of fixed and immutable species, coupled with the belief in a recent creation of the earth and the heavens, dominated Western thought from Roman times until the middle of the eighteenth century. By that time, evidence had accumulated that suggested an old earth. Fossils began to be recognized as species of animals no longer living, and gradually the notion emerged that these extinct animals were related in some way to modern, living animals. In about 1830 natural selection, as a conservative principle, was recognized by Edward Blyth, Charles Lyell, and others. This principle—in essence, the survival of the fittest—was used as an example of divine providence ensuring the conservation (survival) of species. Charles Darwin took that idea and by conjoining it with ever-present random variations exhibited by organisms, endowed it with a new function, the promotion of innovation. In doing so he created a theory intended to explain the growing body of facts about the history of life on earth. His famous book, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859 and triggered a raging controversy. Under Darwin’s theory, small changes (mutations) are constantly arising in living things, and natural selection chooses the better ones, those that improve the species’ ability to prosper in certain environments. Gradually these small improvements accumulate to yield a whole new species, and eventually new genera, orders, and phyla. Darwin made several predictions based on his theory, indicating what sort of discoveries should be made in the future about the history of life on earth, especially regarding the fossil record. Some of these predictions were not fully borne out, causing doubts to arise in scientific circles about the theory in the years after Darwin’s death.

The principles of genetics discovered by Gregor Mendel in the last years of the nineteenth century, and rediscovered by others in the early twentieth century, became critical to the prominence attained by Darwin’s notion of evolution. In the 1930s and 1940s, this new information was used to refurbish and solidify Darwin’s original theory, leading to the “new synthesis,” or “Neo-Darwinism,” as it is usually termed. This new form of Darwin’s theory quickly gained the allegiance of most scientists and intellectuals, and it has maintained that allegiance into the twenty-first century.

However, by the 1960s dissatisfaction with the theory was growing among a number of groups. Some religious groups were alarmed at the theological and moral implications that had become associated with the theory and its contradictions with the accounts of natural history as recorded in the Bible. This led to the modern Creationist movement, which immediately began to attack the scientific case for evolution. Gradually it developed alternative explanatory paradigms, nearly all of which are built upon a “young earth” hypothesis. Drawing upon its religious base, the Creationist movement currently claims many adherents.

In addition to Creationist challenges, many mainstream biologists became concerned with what they perceived as serious discrepancies between Neo-Darwinian theory and the fossil record. Others were disturbed by what they understood to be extraordinarily implausible events required by the theory. Still others became convinced that the proposed mechanisms of the theory could not bear the explanatory burden placed upon them. Another group became disgruntled with what they regarded as violations of established scientific methodology and norms for proof, claiming that the theory was riddled with tautologies, ad hoc arguments, and just-so stories.3 These groups, here collectively termed the “Meta-Darwinian” school, though small in number, came into prominence from the 1970s onward. They seek to go beyond the Neo-Darwinian theory by supplementing it with other natural explanations, while rejecting Creationism and all supernatural explanations.

In the 1990s, building on much of the same evidence that led to the Meta-Darwinian school, a group of scientists proposed that the extraordinary complexity of organisms and their component physiological systems cannot be explained by naturalistic means at all. Thus arose the Intelligent Design school, which, unlike the Creationist school, did not insist upon a young earth.

At the present time, then, there are four prominent schools of thought: the Neo-Darwinian school, which clearly dominates in terms of scientific and academic adherents; the Creationist school, which enjoys much popular though little academic support; the Meta-Darwinian school, which is well represented in the academic and scientific community and rapidly growing; and the Intelligent Design school, which is also growing in numbers although its influence in academia is still quite small. The schools and their relationships are depicted in figure 1.2.4

Figure 1.2. Relationship of schools of thought in the evolution controversy.

What Is Evolution? What Is Natural Selection?

If we are going to discuss the evolution controversy, we should at the very least know what we are talking about. So let us begin with a definition of evolution. As we shall soon discover, this is not just a simple lexicographical exercise. Rather, it is an investigation that goes to the very heart of the controversy, because “evolution” has more than one meaning. To start, we turn to the undisputed source for historical lexicographical information, the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.). The first meaning, attested as early as 1647, is that of unrolling, the “spreading out before the mental vision (of a series of objects); the appearance in orderly succession of a long train of events.” This is what one could call the basic or “wide” meaning of evolution; it corresponds to what is least controversial about evolution, the simple notion of change over time.

Harking back to Darwin (1859), a second definition of interest to us focuses on what causes this change. It states that evolution is the origination of species of animals and plants by a naturalistic process of development from earlier forms, and not by a process of “special creation.” This is what one could call the “narrow” sense of evolution—in essence, the Neo-Darwinian theory, as presently understood. That theory, which is the dominant theory of evolution today, is founded upon two principles: the common descent of all organisms from a single ancestor, and natural selection coupled with random mutations as the mechanism of innovation that drove the common descent. The thrust of evolution, as understood by the Neo-Darwinian theory, stems from the presumed ability of natural selection to harness and direct random events, so that increasing levels of order can emerge. What is perhaps most significant about this mechanism (and the whole notion of evolution behind this definition) is that it generates order without need of human or divine guidance. Moreover, as envisioned by the Neo-Darwinian school, evolution is also considered to be a fundamental organizing principle of science. This means that it has a dual role: it is both a theory to explain the history of life on earth and a conceptual framework for integrating the results of other disciplines.

As we shall see, “evolution” is sometimes used with different meanings not only in the same work but also in the same discussion or argument. Later in the chapter we shall distinguish three meanings, or tiers, of evolution, which unfortunately give the word “evolution” a slippery character. This can easily be exploited by unscrupulous proponents of a school to persuade people to accept a conclusion based on logically invalid arguments. We shall review instances of such arguments and discuss related problems later in this cha...