Thousands of observable facts from completely independent fields of study have come together to tell us the exact same story: all living things on Earth are related,

Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more secure facts known to science. All that we have seen and tested in 150 years has confirmed the concept of evolution.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

All evolution says that over millions of years small genetic changes like those that occur between siblings and cousins add up to where the descendants of one lineages genetics are so different from the other lineages that they cannot create viable offspring which is what defines a species. The simple mechanisms of evolution can explain all the anomalies of our species.

The evidence for evolution and for the Earth being over 4 billion years old is so overwhelming that only a person with a morally irresponsible disposition to ignore evidence would not accept it. That is the definition for a stupid person.

Geology shows that fossils are of different ages.
Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species representing changes through time.
Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species.
Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together.
Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing
"Does not!"

Evolution does not strive for complexity.
Evolution does not have a direction or a predefined goal.
Evolution is an undirected process completely devoid of any purpose or plan.
Evolution does seem to create immense diversity in all life forms.
Evolution is a copy machine that makes lots of small errors.

Evolution is counter-intuitive.
The scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennet pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. Call it the "trickle down theory" of creationism. You'll never see a spear making a spear-maker, a horse-shoe making a blacksmith or a pot making a potter. Darwin's discovery of a workable process that does that very counter-intuitive thing is what makes his contribution to human thought so revolutionary, and so loaded with the power to raise consciousness.

See The Watchmaker analogy and The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

February 12: Happy Darwin Day, everyone!
Here's to the man whose theory of evolution by means of natural selection did immensely to advance science and put one giant nail in the coffin of religion.

Excerpts from The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins

  1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

  2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artifact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye, a spider or a person.

  3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a crane, not a "skyhook", for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

  4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say the the illusion of design in living creatures is just that - an illusion.

  5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinisn does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postilate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.

  6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

What is the evidence for evolution?

Intelligent design is an assumption without a scientific basis. For this assumption to be considered a hypothesis, there must be evidence. Where is the evidence of intelligent design, unless you consider evolution itself intelligent design.

For a hypothesis to gain credibility, it must be testable. I do not see how intelligent design can be tested.

For that same hypothesis to become a theory, the testing of it must be repeatable with the same results each time. It should also be open to all for meticulous scrutiny.

Intelligent design can not be considered a hypothesis or a theory, but it can be considered as a nice fairy tale.

The Bible is the only one source of creationism. It merely provides an assertion of creationism, without any shred of evidence.

Evolution denial is the gold standard of religious nonsense.

The evidence for evolution is found in numerous scientific fields like

  • anthropology,
  • archeology,
  • astronomy,
  • astrobiology
  • biochemistry,
  • biology,
  • cosmology,
  • embryology ,
  • DNA,
  • entomology,
  • genetics ,
  • geology,
  • microbiology,
  • molecular anthropology,
  • molecular biology ,
  • molecular engineering,
  • paleontology,
  • plate tectonics,
  • taxonomy

More than anything else, modern genetics and DNA confirms all aspects of evolution.

Why would God create a man with nipples?

Evolution is a single event where one entire species changes into a different one through a series of discrete intermediate stages, or more bizarrely one member of one species gives birth to a different species which then goes on to reproduce, presumably with itself, to form a new species.

Evolved organs, elegant and efficient as they often are, also demonstrate revealing flaws -- exactly as you'd expect if they have an evolutionary history, and exactly as you would not expect if they were designed.

On the humorous side of evolution....

Why would a god create a man with nipples?

Why would a god create a man with a foreskin on his penis and then require that it be artificially removed?

Consider the female vagina and anus. Why would a god place two sewer lines in the middle of a recreation area?

So let me get this right.

  • You use a computer and the internet
  • You watch TV
  • You use a smartphone extensively
  • You take medicine when you are sick
  • You fly on airplanes
  • You drive cars
  • You live in a modern home with smoke alarms and security systems
  • You use electricity
  • You use clean tap water
  • You use a sewage system
  • You cook on a stove or oven or microwave.
  • You wear clothes that are massed produced.
  • You use a toilet and toilet paper
  • You drive to churches with modern sound systems
  • You live a life surrounded by science and likely dependent on science.

But you think scientists are lying about evolution?

You're much closer to science than to god, when you analyze your beliefs.

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.

Send comments to: hjw2001@gmail.com