In this essay I will present my views on why the debate of evolution verses intelligent design (from hereon referred to as ID) is completely ridiculous. It is on a par with debating whether thunderstorms are caused by meteorological forces like convection, condensation, and meeting of different air masses, or are designed by an intelligence.

     First of all, it should be stated that evolution is a proven fact. In fact evolution is one of the most solidly proven facts in the history of science. The evidence for evolution is multifaceted and comes from a variety of disciplines, from morphology, pathology, physiology, epidemiology, genetics, and of course, the fossil record. Furthermore, evolution has actually been observed, both in the laboratory and in the field.

     If I say that evolution is a proven fact, just what does that mean? What does the word ‘fact’ mean in science? Something is called a fact if the evidence against it is nil and the evidence for it is so voluminous, so powerful and overwhelming, that is ridiculous to even consider an alternative. And what is a theory? The word ‘theory’ is one of the most misused words in the English language. Many people think it means the same thing as a hypothesis or an educated guess. In the vernacular, this is how the word is used. But in science, the word ‘theory’ has a far different meaning. A theory is a principle or coherent group of propositions that explains, and makes sense of facts. Thus we have gravity theory, electronics theory, meteorological theory, and so on. Einstein’s theory of gravity replaced that of Newton, and scientists may debate on new theories of gravity, but, as Stephen J. Gould pointed out, apples will not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome of such debates. Gravity is a fact just as evolution is a fact.

     Another attribute of a theory is that it must be testable. A theory must make certain predictions that can be tested in the real world. If a concept does not have corollaries that can be checked and tested, then it is not a theory. Theories are subject to modification as new evidence arises. Sometimes, when new evidence comes to light, theories must be thrown away completely and replaced by new ones. Theories on evolution, such as Darwin’s natural selection theory, have been modified over the years, but the fact of evolution is not going to go away.

     Something that is not generally known is that Charles Darwin set out on his famous voyage for the purpose of disproving the “hypothesis of common descent,” as evolution was called in those days. In his years in college Darwin had sat in on debates about the hypothesis of common descent and he totally rejected it. He had read Paley’s book “Natural Theology, which opens with the argument of the watchmaker (discussed below) and was totally convinced by it. After he graduated from seminary school he set sail to South America and the Galapagos islands so that he could hopefully find indisputable evidence that all life on Earth was created within a very short time span. It slowly dawned on him as he examined his specimens that what he actually had in front of him was incontrovertible evidence for evolution. As he went back over specimens that he had already scrutinized, he realized that he had missed some obvious evidence for evolution. He overlooked the obvious because he had been looking for the opposite. His intention had been to prove evolution wrong, and it was somewhat of a crisis for him when he realized that he had amassed a large amount of very convincing evidence for evolution.

     Another thing that is not generally known is that Charles Darwin made a clear and unambiguous distinction between the two great achievements of his life. His first great achievement was proving that evolution is a fact, and the second achievement, which took him nearly two decades, was arriving at his theory of evolution, which he called the theory of natural selection.

     Since Darwin’s time, evolution has been confirmed over and over again by many types of evidence in disparate disciplines of biology. For example, the science of genetics didn’t exist in Darwin’s lifetime, but in the twentieth century, especially in the last decade of it, the science of genetics gave the world a plethora of evidence for evolution.

     Before I list a few of the arguments against evolution and debunk them one by one, I would like to discuss a few reasons why some people are uncomfortable with evolution. No other fact of science since the Copernican Revolution has been so hard for the populace to accept. It seems to me that most anti-evolution people wholeheartedly believe in some sort of creation myth, and they feel that if that creation myth is not true, then life has no meaning. They view evolution as an attack on the existence of God. Many of these people believe in a conflation of the two creation myths in the bible, completely unaware that there are two creation myths in the Book of Genesis.

    People are for the most part unaware that the bible contains two creation myths because they do not bother to actually read the bible. They believe what they are told to believe and never question it. They prefer to remain ignorant because they are afraid of finding out something that will make them feel uncomfortable. What if they were to sit down and read the first two books of the bible? They would see for themselves that there are two creation myths and that those two myths contradict each other on every detail.

     The first biblical creation myth is derived from a Babylonian creation myth and has God put the earth in the waters below the dome (firmament means dome or arched support) and put the sun and moon inside the dome. In this myth God creates the entire universe in six days and rests on the seventh day. He creates plants and animals first, and then creates people. This myth contains a rather amusing self-contradiction. It says that God created day and night on the first day, but He created the sun on the fourth day. It doesn’t take a genius to see the problem with that one.

     The second biblical creation myth is derived from a Sumerian myth and is, in fact, the oldest story in the bible. In this myth God creates plants first, then a man, then animals, and then a woman. The order of creation is completely different in these two myths, and furthermore, everything is created in one day in this myth.

     The authors and redactors of the bible never meant for those stories to be taken as literal truth. If they meant for it to be taken as literal truth they would not have included two stories that contradict each other down to almost every detail. Those stories are allegories and nothing more. Furthermore, there are many creations myths. Most religions have at least one creation myth. If creationism is to be taught alongside of scientifically proven facts, then which creation myth should be taught? There are hundreds of them.

     If someone feels that the concept of evolution contradicts their cherished beliefs about how God created the world, then they should look more carefully at what it is they believe, and where those beliefs come from. They need to cast off their primitive, simplistic views of the nature of God, and of the method of God’s creation. By denying evolution, they are denying one of the most ingenious and beautiful of all of God’s creative acts, giving life the ability to adapt to environmental changes.

     When scientific discoveries are denied because they conflict with religious ideas, science has always won out in the end. Religion only hurts itself when it denies scientifically proven facts on the grounds that those facts conflict with its own understanding of reality. God becomes nothing more than an agent whose purpose is to fill in gaps in our knowledge of the physical laws of the universe. This is known as the “God of the gaps” problem. God was once needed to keep the planets in their orbits. Isaac Newton did away with the need for God to constantly perform that particular task. Benjamin Franklin did away with the need for God to create every lightning bolt. The discovery of viruses and bacteria did away with the need to invoke the wrath of God as the agent of disease. Evolution by natural causes has taken away another task of God.

     The problem is not that science is steadily doing away with the need to believe in God. The problem is that most of humanity wants to believe in God as some sort of anthropomorphic entity who sits outside the universe, but intervenes in its affairs. The idea of God as a universal intelligence behind the universe, a mysterious force whose very thoughts created and continue to create the universe every nanosecond, is too much for most people to even try to consider. Inasmuch as God is thought of as an entity separate from the universe, yet responsible for intervening in its affairs, science will continue to conflict with religion. The problem is not with science. The problem is the fact that people want to cling to outmoded, primitive concepts of the nature of Divinity.

     Personally, I have no serious problem with the idea of ID, and not just as it applies to evolution. I believe the entire universe is a manifestation of thought of the one and only Divine Mind. But I will be the first to say that such a belief should not be taught in science class. Discussions of ID belong in a class on philosophy or religion, not biology class. Perhaps the evolution of humans was meant to happen, and was sort of guided by the mind of God. Science can explain it perfectly without any holes, and without internal contradictions or inconsistencies, but that does not preclude the concept of a divine intelligence guiding the evolution of life. Even the problem of why God waited so long to create humans is no big deal to me. In our concept of time, a few billion years seems incredibly long, but God is beyond time.

     Let us now take a close look at the anti-evolution camp and its tactics. Ever since its inception a century or so in the past, the so-called creationist movement has come up with certain arguments against evolution, and when these arguments were shown to be fallacious, they discard them and come up with new ones. For example, they used to say that evolution contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. When it was shown quite clearly that their argument was based of a complete misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics, they abandoned that argument, and came up with other, equally fallacious ones.

     They have come up with such ridiculous arguments as, “Darwin could not explain how the eye could have evolved, therefore evolution is false.” This is ridiculous for two reasons. First, Darwin brilliantly explained how they eye might have evolved, and only after his death was their any good evidence for those speculations. Second, saying that evolution is false because Darwin could not explain the eye is like saying that gravity is false because Isaac Newton could not explain certain perturbations in the orbit of Mercury.

     They claim that there are no transitional fossils in the fossil record. This is completely false. Have they not heard of the archaeopteryx? This strange looking creature had teeth and bones like a reptile and feathers like a bird. There are good fossilized imprints in fine sandstone, which show the feathers in detail. Its wings were hinged to the shoulder joint in such a way as to make the flapping of them for flight nearly impossible. And what do these creationists think of fossils of whales with legs and feet? They merely close their eyes and put their hands over their ears when confronted with such things. There are thousands of good examples of transitional fossils. Also there are animals alive today that represent transitional stages, for example, the duckbill platypus. This creature is sort of frozen in time, stuck in the transitional stage between mammal and reptile, a stage which occurred hundreds of millions of years ago, but which the ancestors of the platypus found no need to evolve from.

     I mentioned above that the young Charles Darwin was totally convinced by Paley’s argument of the watchmaker. Paley’s argument was that if you found a watch, you would infer from its complexity, and functionality, that is was designed by someone, and could not have merely been created by random chance; likewise you would infer from the complexity and functionality of even the simplest biological organism that it was designed by an intelligence. In Darwin’s defense, I will say that he was young, and had not developed the ability of critical thinking to a high degree when he was convinced that the watchmaker analogy was a strong argument against evolution.

     This argument sounds rather convincing at face value, but why would God design such an imperfect retina for the eye of humans, and design a far superior retina for the eyes of birds? Why would God use the same bones and muscles for a fish’s fins, a human’s arms, a bird’s wing, and a bat’s wing, when a more efficient design could easily be conceived for all of the above? Why would God design a musculature and skeletal structure for humans that is only partly adapted for upright walking? Why do you think that back problems are so common in people? Poor design, that’s why! The watchmaker argument is not proof. It is an analogy, and a rather crude one. The only thing that it proves is that if all life was created in ex nihilo by a creator, then the creator is either a bungling, inept creator, or He has a sick sense of humor.

     Now consider what you would think if you found a cell phone lying on the ground near the watch. You would not assume that the watch and the cell phone were both created by the same creator, would you? Therefore, by the watchmaker analogy, you should not believe that all species were created by the same creator.

     One argument that is heard occasionally is “If we came from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?” This argument contains two misunderstandings of evolution. First of all no one has ever said that we came from monkeys. Apes and humans had a common ancestor millions of years ago, and apes, humans, and monkeys had a common ancestor many more millions of years ago. The fallacy of questioning how a species could still exist if another species had evolved from it stems from viewing evolution as a ladder, when the metaphor of a tree is much more appropriate. Evolution of life on Earth is like a tree with a huge number of branches, some of which have died, most of which have sprouted countless more branches over the millennia. The fallacy of that question is similar to asking someone how they could still exist if they came from their parents.

      Creationists like to emphasize the role of chance and probability in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. True, chance and probability plays a role, but natural selection is guided by environmental constraints, and is not simply a random process. Mutations may occur randomly, but the selection of which mutations survive and which do not is not a random process, but is determined by environmental constraints. Furthermore, Darwin’s natural selection, or survival of the fittest, as it is popularly known, is not the only driving force behind evolution. Sometimes evolution is driven by other mechanisms, such as, for example, sexual selection. If female antelopes consistently choose to mate with males that have the largest horns, then the species will evolve toward having larger horns. This is just one example of evolution proceeding by some other mechanism than natural selection.

     Another objection to evolution is that the chance of life beginning by random processes is infinitely small. First of all, I would like to point out that evolution is a totally different subject than the question of how life first got started. There are some scientific speculations on the origin of life on Earth, but no concrete evidence exists for any particular hypothesis. The question of the origin of life is a totally separate issue than how life evolved after its beginning.

     How do these creationists explain the many fossils of hominids? How do they explain the fact that the older these fossils are, the smaller the brain case is, and the more ape-like and less human the features are? They do not and cannot explain such things, so they chose either to ignore them, or they attack the methods that scientists use to date fossils. I would explain such things as Uranium decay, fissure-track dating, and the other forms of dating, but that would make this essay twice as long. Suffice it to say that these methods of dating have been critically scrutinized by some of the best minds in the world. It is funny how people are so willing to accept scientific forensics in the courtroom, or for that matter, in any application, as long as the results don’t conflict with their cherished views.

     Another thing the anti-evolutionists don’t realize is that long before methods of dating by radioactive decay were perfected, long before they were even discovered, people logically assumed that younger rock is deposited on top of older rock. Relative ages of rocks, and thus of the fossils in them, were ascertained this way long before radioactive dating.

     There are a few places in the world where land has been turned upside down from violent upheavals. Paleontologists first alerted geologists of such places when they found the sequence of evolution reversed in the layers. The geologists subsequently found that these layers had indeed been reversed, by performing radioactive dating and by digging up of larger areas which revealed just where the ground had fissured and flipped.

     Sometimes creationists say that Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed, and they use that as an argument against evolution. This is ridiculous on two grounds. First of all the story that Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed is completely false, and was invented by a woman who, according to Darwin’s family, never met him, not on his deathbed or otherwise. Even if he did refute evolution it would make no difference. Science, unlike religion, does not give supreme authority to an individual or a book, only to evidence, logic, and reason. If Newton had recanted on his deathbed, saying that the force that holds the moon in its orbit was not the same force that makes apples fall from trees, it would not have mattered, because he had already proven mathematically that it is.

     Early in the twentieth century the creationist split into two camps, those who admitted that microevolution (tiny, seemingly insignificant changes within a species) occurs, and those who go so far as to deny even that, saying that if they allow for microevolution, then they open up a slippery slope because speciation is nothing but many micro changes over a long period. They were correct insofar as that goes. Speciation really is nothing but accumulation of many small changes from microevolution. But now they are really in between a rock and a hard place. Microevolution has been observed in many species of plants and animals. To deny it you really have to close your eyes to a plethora of observations and data. But to accept the truth of microevolution without accepting evolution in general is ludicrous. In fact the entire position of the creationists is downright ludicrous.

     Here’s another interesting fact. Human fetuses grow a tail because of a gene that initiates tail growth. In a later stage of development another gene is activated that causes the tail to be reabsorbed. Everyone has all of the bones, muscles, and nerves of a tail, but it is all scrunched up at the base of the spine. This vestigial tail is totally useless. Why would God have created us with such a useless feature? Why do fetuses grow a tail, only to reabsorb it? The ancestors of apes and humans did not lose the gene that initiates tail growth. They merely acquired a new gene that causes the tail to reabsorb.

     How do the antievolution people explain the existence of the dog, let alone its diversity? Dogs came from wolves many thousands of years ago, and branched off from the wolf population due to human intervention. Subsequently many different breeds were created from the original dog. The evolution of the dog is a perfect example of what you might call “guided selection,” or “artificial selection,” but the guiding force behind the selection has been the hand of humankind. The evolution from the wolf to the dog took place very quickly compared to what usually happens in nature and amazingly, most of the breeds alive today were created in a very short time, less than two centuries. And consider this; from the few breeds of dogs alive a couple of thousand years ago, we end up with Great Danes and Chihuahuas! Such a huge difference in two subspecies (breeds) in such a short time is truly amazing.

     When does a biologist refer to an animal as a separate species from another animal instead of calling it a subspecies or breed of that animal? There is a gray area here. There are several criteria which define whether or not two animals are of the same species, being able to produce viable offspring being one of the most important ones. A husky or a German Shepherd could perhaps be considered a subspecies of wolf. But what about a pug or a Chihuahua? It would be ridiculous to call a Chihuahua a subspecies of wolf. In a sense, it even seems ridiculous to refer to a Chihuahua and a Great Dane as being of the same species.

     The biologist, when classifying species, has an analogous problem to the linguist who classifies languages. When a group of people splits off from another group and their language evolves, at what point should their language be called a separate (though related) language to the original, rather than calling it a dialect of the original language? There is no easy answer. Likewise, there is no easy answer to when an animal should be called a separate species rather than a subspecies of the animal from which it evolved. The dog is a perfect example of such ambiguity.

     And what about the different races of humans? Look at all of the different races of humans. If no evolution has taken place, then God must have created each race separately in separate geographical locations.

     One more issue I will discuss is the attempt by creationists to portray evolution as a controversial subject. They sometimes claim that many biologists don’t believe in it and they quote biologists out of context to prove it. Evolutionary biologists sometimes fiercely debate the mechanisms by which evolution has occurred, but ever since Darwin, they no longer debate the reality of evolution. Some of the staunchest defenders of evolution, who have written volumes debunking creationists nonsense have actually been quoted out of context by creationists to make it sound as if they are in doubt of evolution. The fact that creationist routinely use such underhanded methods, as well as the most fallacious arguments, shows just how weak their position is. Also consider the fact that they have repeatedly had to retract previously debunked arguments, but are constantly inventing new ones, only to have those debunked.

     Evolution is here to stay. Like gravity, electromagnetic theory, or nuclear dynamics, it is not going away. If the truth conflicts with your conception of reality, maybe you should find a better version of reality. If the truth conflicts with your religion, find a new religion or learn how to interpret religion in a more transcendental or allegorical manner.

     In my opinion, the most ridiculous thing about the anti-evolution people is that most of them seem to equate belief in evolution with atheism. I am amazed and appalled when people automatically assume that I am an atheist because I believe in evolution. This makes as much sense as assuming that someone is an atheist because they believe in nuclear physics or meteorology. What this shows is the small-mindedness of so many of these people. It is a symptom of their inability to conceive of God in any way but the most simplistic, primitive, naïve, and childlike manner.

     The problem with the anti-evolution people is, more often than not, a psychological problem rather than an intelligence problem. For some reason many people are quite capable of using logic and reason in every facet of life, with one great exception. When confronted with something that conflicts with their cherished belief system, logic and reason go out the door. They will accept the arguments of prosecuting attorneys in ascertaining guilt, based on forensic evidence, but when similar evidence and reasoning is used to prove something scientific, they become blind to it if it conflicts with their world view. This is a serious problem, and it is the main reason why there is so much opposition to evolution amongst the uneducated masses.