As a card carrying atheist, I find it very uncomfortable to say this, knowing that if our knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fundamentalist cousins find out, they'll think they've won a great victory, but my conscience compels me to say it anyway: The theory of evolution by natural selection is not a scientific theory at all. It makes no testable assertions at all; there is no experiment or potential observation that could possibly make it false. On the contrary, the central point, that nature kills off individuals that are less well adapted to their environment at a greater rate than individuals that are well adapted, is so bleedin' obvious that it's closer to logic or mathematics than to empirical science. How could it conceivably be false?
There are some very good theories about evolution -- Mendelian genetics and molecular biology come to mind -- that have genuine scientific stature. With robust and fertile theories like these, who needs natural selection in the toolbox?
Natural selection is not the only sacred cow in the history of science. The Darwinian revolution came a little more then three centuries after the Copernican revolution. Copernicus boldly suggested that the earth goes in circles around the sun, rather than that the sun follows a complicated trajectory around the sun. He was wrong, of course. The complicated geocentric trajectory gave a much better account of the real observable data than the circular heliocentric one. But that didn't matter much. Copernicus's change of perspective made things much simpler to understand. Sure enough, after a little while, Kepler swapped circles for ellipses, preserving the essential simplicity and enormously improving the accuracy of the heliocentric perspective.
Copernicus's theory was provably wrong on the facts. Darwin's theory seems to have had nothing at all to say on the facts. So what's so important about these guys that justifies their place in the scientific pantheon? What makes them special is not the details of their theories, but the changed perspectives that they offered. In the case of Copernicus, it's easy to identify the change: from geocentric to heliocentric. In Darwin's case, it's a little harder to state, but the essence of the change comes down to this: Darwin just pointed out the stark, staring, obvious fact that death comes quicker to those who are at a disadvantage in their environment, and that this, together with the fact that different places have different environments, is essentially adequate for explaining the existence of many species. Or more simply: There is a simple perspective that allows us to escape the clutches of the worthless notion that God created all the species that there are.
That's not science, and in the real world scarcely any working scientist makes any use of the theory of natural selection at all. Molecular biology is where the action is.
So the theory of evolution by natural selection really doesn't have a place in the high school science class, but it's ideally suited to the critical thinking class, where "intelligent design" could be used for comparison, showing how otherwise intelligent people can be made to wander around in the dark for thousands of years when they find themselves trapped by a silly, barren perspective.
There are some very good theories about evolution -- Mendelian genetics and molecular biology come to mind -- that have genuine scientific stature. With robust and fertile theories like these, who needs natural selection in the toolbox?
Natural selection is not the only sacred cow in the history of science. The Darwinian revolution came a little more then three centuries after the Copernican revolution. Copernicus boldly suggested that the earth goes in circles around the sun, rather than that the sun follows a complicated trajectory around the sun. He was wrong, of course. The complicated geocentric trajectory gave a much better account of the real observable data than the circular heliocentric one. But that didn't matter much. Copernicus's change of perspective made things much simpler to understand. Sure enough, after a little while, Kepler swapped circles for ellipses, preserving the essential simplicity and enormously improving the accuracy of the heliocentric perspective.
Copernicus's theory was provably wrong on the facts. Darwin's theory seems to have had nothing at all to say on the facts. So what's so important about these guys that justifies their place in the scientific pantheon? What makes them special is not the details of their theories, but the changed perspectives that they offered. In the case of Copernicus, it's easy to identify the change: from geocentric to heliocentric. In Darwin's case, it's a little harder to state, but the essence of the change comes down to this: Darwin just pointed out the stark, staring, obvious fact that death comes quicker to those who are at a disadvantage in their environment, and that this, together with the fact that different places have different environments, is essentially adequate for explaining the existence of many species. Or more simply: There is a simple perspective that allows us to escape the clutches of the worthless notion that God created all the species that there are.
That's not science, and in the real world scarcely any working scientist makes any use of the theory of natural selection at all. Molecular biology is where the action is.
So the theory of evolution by natural selection really doesn't have a place in the high school science class, but it's ideally suited to the critical thinking class, where "intelligent design" could be used for comparison, showing how otherwise intelligent people can be made to wander around in the dark for thousands of years when they find themselves trapped by a silly, barren perspective.
