National Geographic - Was Darwin Wrong? (Part 1)

Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is "just" a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally—taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

The rest of us generally agree. We plug our televisions into little wall sockets, measure a year by the length of Earth's orbit, and in many other ways live our lives based on the trusted reality of those theories.

Evolutionary theory, though, is a bit different. It's such a dangerously wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. Many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls the theory of evolution "nothing but a deception imposed on us by the dominators of the world system." The late Srila Prabhupada, of the Hare Krishna movement, explained that God created "the 8,400,000 species of life from the very beginning," in order to establish multiple tiers of reincarnation for rising souls. Although souls ascend, the species themselves don't change, he insisted, dismissing "Darwin's nonsensical theory."

Other people too, not just scriptural literalists, remain unpersuaded about evolution. According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.

Only 37 percent of the polled Americans were satisfied with allowing room for both God and Darwin—that is, divine initiative to get things started, evolution as the creative means. (This view, according to more than one papal pronouncement, is compatible with Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god.

The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't changed much in two decades. Gallup interviewers posed exactly the same choices in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999. The creationist conviction—that God alone, and not evolution, produced humans—has never drawn less than 44 percent. In other words, nearly half the American populace prefers to believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most.

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Education

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• darwin
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• natural
• selection
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• abiogenesis
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• dawkins
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• space
• adaptation

[FreeSilio]

@llewellleo What you call "macro evolution" has been proven by many evidence such as genoma comparation, population distribution, fossile record, and many others.

It's the same evolution, but on a wider scale of time. That's why the alleged distinction between micro and macro evolution is not usual between true scientists, and it's used mainly by creationists, which (having NO VALID ALTERNATIVE to forward) attempt to destroy evolution in the name of blind faith.

[CrabTastingMan]

What christian creationists fail to realize is that, even if in their little brains they think they won against an evolutionist by being thickheaded douchebags, they never even THOUGHT about other religions. How are they going to fight 100s of other stories of how life became diverse?

Scratch that, they are just going to cover their ears again. "LALALA YOU ARE ALL DEMON WORSHIPPERS LALALA YOU ARE GOING TO BURN IN HELL HAHAHA".

[artifexlinguarum]

@HEYstfu117 As far as Adam and Eve are concerned, they had three sons- Cain killed Abel, but they had a third son, Seth, along with numerous unnamed children. Some traditions also state that Adam was the world's first divorcee, as those traditions posit a first wife, Lilith. Adam and she had a falling out, so she left him, ultimately, according to those traditions, becoming a powerful demoness who attacks newborn mortal infants and seduces lonely men. Cain probably married one of his sisters.

[Catsandoggs]

All your comments are full of hate-Christians,Catholics my ass and Athiests,can't we all get along;after all we came from the same frog.

[TheGuitargod80]

so were all the offspring of a inbred-retarded-monkey-fish-fr­og that fucked another inbred-retarded-monkey-fish-fr­og?

[exponentialcrazy]

/sarcasm

[exponentialcrazy]

@MrUday7777 im sure thats what jesus would have said too. good on ya reppin him like that.

[MrUday7777]

Darwin is absolutely wrong but the atheists (the educated fools)still feel that he is their god.

get lost atheists one day you will end in hell

[iloveafg123]

never was right

[kokalol7]

i have a micro organism in my butt, sad thing is that it hasn't evolved to make computers TELL ME WHY THIS IS !?!? FML

[Hobu123]

@tonebone8

Actually we know quite a lot.

>>>It's so easy to ridicule something you're completely ignorant about.

Tell that to biblical cretinists who do not have even mid-school level of education about biosciences but who walk around and imagine that they can refute all 21st century science.

[HEYstfu117]

I have no problems about evolution even I am a Christian. I just have a strong connection with God without knowing what true and what's not as long as I have my faith. And honestly I also have questions about the Bible. One of it is"HOW DID PEOPLE BECAME ABUNDANT AFTER ADAM AND EVE? IF THEY HAD TWO SONS AND ONE OF THEM GOT KILLED, DID CAIN SEXED WITH HIS MOTHER AND HAVE A CHILD? If you believe that these things are true, then stick with it and be open minded and if you don't just shut up.