Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cameron M. Smith, Ph.D. (Portland, OR), is a prehistorian at Portland State University’s Department of Anthropology and a popular science writer. He is the author of The Top Ten Myths about Evolution (with Charles Sullivan) and, in addition to his scientific works, has published articles in Scientific American MIND, Archaeology, Playboy, Spaceflight, Skeptical Inquirer, and The Writer.

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THE FACT OF EVOLUTION

Prometheus Books

Contents

List of Figures..............................................9List of Tables...............................................11Foreword.....................................................13Preface......................................................19Introduction.................................................21Chapter 1: Nullius in Verba..................................23Chapter 2: The Fact of Replication...........................37Chapter 3: The Fact of Variation.............................69Chapter 4: The Fact of Selection.............................103Chapter 5: The Fact of Speciation............................137Chapter 6: The Fact of Evolution.............................177Chapter 7: Evolution in Action...............................183Chapter 8: The Mirror-House of Evolution.....................211Chapter 9: The Grand Illusion................................245Notes........................................................253Bibliography.................................................295Websites for More on Evolution...............................315Index........................................................319

Chapter One

Evolution is change, adaptation to new circumstances. Evolutionists see a world of process, of flux, incomplete, imperfectly known. —A. Kehoe, What Darwin Began: Modern Darwinian and Non-Darwinian Perspectives on Evolution

In January 2008, the world's leading scientific journal, Nature, carried an editorial titled "Spread the Word: Evolution Is a Scientific Fact, and Every Organization Whose Research Depends on It Should Explain Why." Speaking for the world of science, Nature publicly established evolution as a fact, in black and white, and called on educators worldwide to teach it as a fact.

WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG?

Evolution has been referred to as a fact by many, and for a long time. Today evolution is considered a given in the life sciences, as gravitation is considered a given in physics. A universe of detail remains to be investigated in the domain of evolution, and discoveries in the life sciences, which occur every single day, ensure that our understanding of evolution is constantly updated. Even twenty-five years ago evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge wrote:

Evolutionary theory is currently in a state of flux. There is far less agreement on basic elements of evolutionary theory now than there was ten years ago.... Though some biologists may long for the halcyon days when nearly everyone agreed on the essentials of a single, simple and quite elegant evolutionary theory, the zest for renewed explorations in evolutionary theory is more than adequate compensation. The fervor of argument in evolutionary biology these days is the surest sign of its intellectual health: evolutionary theory, perhaps now more than ever before, is an active, vital, and truly scientific endeavor.

Despite occasional mass-media hype that some new finding means that "evolution is dead," evolution is certainly not dead; it is actually buzzing with life, as we'll see throughout this book. Still, drama sells; a recent National Geographic issue carried a cover story titled "Was Darwin Wrong?" The article concluded that he was not wrong about the basic principles of evolution, but the striking title is memorable.

Charles Darwin (1804–1882), who proposed the basics of evolution as we understand them today, might well have been wrong about many things; indeed, he lived before the genes, as we know them today, were even understood. But, as we'll see, he was not wrong about the basic facts of the evolutionary process. For over 150 years, scientists have scrutinized Darwin's theory, searching the natural world—from the seafloor to the high mountains—for anything that would disprove it, and they have tested it with laboratory experiment. While many other theories have been rejected in the past 150 years, Darwin's has not.

If things are so clear, why did science—spoken for at large by Nature—take so long to publicly declare evolution a fact? There are at least two reasons.

SCIENCE IS SLOW

While there are many scientists and they discover new things every day, science at large—meaning general consensus—moves slowly. A century or a century and a half is not so long; the great biologist Ernst Mayr (1904–2006) was born only twenty-two years after Darwin's death, and modern field studies consume entire careers. Another titan of biology, Carl Woese (b. 1928), who worked for years on the problem of the basic classification of life-forms, recently described his years of labor:

You got up in the morning, ate breakfast and came into the lab. And then you put these silly X-rays up on your wall. And you looked intensely. But you had to be intense to get through this task. This happens on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, week after week and ultimately year after year. I would finish the day, having looked at these films for many many hours, and I would go home saying to myself "You have destroyed your mind again today." That's how it felt.... All my mental energy was used up.

This went on for ten years, but it culminated in a fascinating new understanding of the origins and evolution of life. The scientific community—who demand evidence for claims (as characterized by the Royal Society's motto, Nullius in Verba, loosely translated as "take nobody's word for it")—are normally slow to overturn basic concepts.

AS GOES AMERICA, SO GOES THE WORLD

Nature is a British journal, and in Britain there has been far less public acrimony over the "theory of evolution" than here in the United States. Why not, then, declare evolution a fact earlier? Because in Britain the very lack of debate caused evolutionary principles to be accepted as fact early on. The obvious did not need stating. While the details of Darwinian evolution have been debated from day one, Darwin's essential points were so convincing that they were rapidly accepted in Britain and on the continent. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in November 1859, and by 1863 biologist T. H. Huxley (1825–1895) wrote that "all other theories are absolutely out of court." And these other theories (we'll come to the distinction between fact and theory below) were not "out of court" simply because Huxley greatly admired Darwin. They were "out of court" because year by year alternatives to Darwinian evolution, based on worldwide, independent studies focusing on independent lines of evidence—such as embryology (the development of life-forms before birth), paleontology (the study of ancient life-forms, performed in the 1800s by examining fossils), and botany (the study of plants)—all pointed (as Huxley noted and as we'll see in this book) in the same direction; Darwin was right.

Things were very different in the United States, where Darwin's ideas took more than a decade to catch on widely. But by the 1920s, when most American scientists believed that Darwin was essentially correct, a strong opposition to evolution appeared. It is interesting (and transparently self-serving) that this...