Disclosure and Some Background
I'm working on a book review right now that's a bit of a departure from the sort of things that I usually read. I'll refrain from too many details just yet, but just to keep everything above-board, the author contacted me about writing a review and provided a review copy of the book on the strength of some previous posts of mine.
With that out of the way, I'll provide some background.
The book in question is about a fundamentalist Christian1 girl trying to sort out her love of science (specifically her interest in evolution) and her religious background.
This is a topic of personal significance to me for several reasons, but the one I'll focus on here is that nobody ever approaches the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of the kids.
Pretty much every forum or blog out there that routinely covers the topic deals with it from an adult perspective. When kids enter into the discussion at all, it's most often (these days) in the context of discussion about the Dover trial or of creationist school board candidates and textbook selections in Texas2, or somehow in connection with Ken Ham's Creation Museum.
While the adult-side discussions of evolution and creationism (and the broader discussions of science, religion, and whether or not they can coexist) are certainly important, even crucial, it's all too easy to forget that on the other side of the court cases and the school board elections and the museum exhibits are tens or hundreds of thousands (or more) of kids who are directly impacted by the outcomes of those events. In the U.S., most of those children will be from religious backgrounds that are at best ambivalent towards evolution and at worst outright hostile to the concept3.
Some of these kids may respond to material about evolution by simply ignoring it, or learning enough to pass a test, or challenging it with what they may believe are strong, well-reasoned objections that they read in a book or on a website somewhere4, but some of them will start to engage with the material, and that engagement will lead to some questions that may well fly headlong into the face of religious doctrine and foundational beliefs.
This is a difficult enough situation for adults to work through, and it's easy to suppose that it's much harder for kids, since the parents and family members that they would normally go to for answers might not be receptive to discussing the subject - few topics are more capable of dividing people than religious disagreements - but it's a situation that I suspect is more common than people might think, particularly as increasingly unfettered access to the internet means that more children will be exposed to different points of view than they have been in the past.
So, all that being said, I was intrigued by the opportunity to review a book that deals with the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of a child trying to sort things out. It should be interesting.
-Jay
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1Still wishing there was a word that was equally descriptive but less pejoratively loaded...
2Why Texas, you ask? It seems that Texas is a huge influence on textbook publishers because of the number of students in the state. Texas buys a lot of textbooks. Textbook publishers want to sell textbooks to Texas. Therefore curriculum decisions in Texas can influence the textbooks that are used in many other states.
3I'm operating on the assumption that parents teach their kids according to their own beliefs, and based on the numbers shown here.
4When I was active on some of the E/C forums, it wasn't uncommon to see the same arguments pop up nearly word-for-word in many different threads. Once you're familiar with them, it's even possible to tell where they originally came from.
A Short Evolution Refresher
Geeks are Sexy has a nice post from a bit over a year ago giving a solid, high-level overview of evolution. It also includes an excellent 10 minute video that I'm including below, because it deserves as wide an audience as possible (I may have posted this before. If I haven't, I should have).
The article and video hit a number of frequent objections to evolution. Actually, it would be more correct to say that the article and video address a number of objections to a strawman caricature of evolution.
The distinction is important because more often than not, the vocal evolution deniers out there will start their sales pitch by claiming that "evolution says <something>", and typically that <something> is either something that evolution doesn't "say" at all, or else "says" quite a bit differently than the denier suggests. Some examples:
- Have you ever seen a dog give birth to a cat?
- Evolution says that man came from monkeys, so why are there still monkeys?
- DNA evidence proves that all humans came from one woman!
- Most mutations are harmful and would kill an organism!
The first two, of course, are the same concept phrased slightly differently, and reflect at least three misunderstandings - that individual organisms evolve directly into other individual organisms like some sort of Pokémon, that one species will cease to exist once it gives rise to a new species, and that humans are descended from monkeys. (There's a part in the video starting at 5:33 that covers these with a nice little graphic.)
The third one is a distortion of the concept of the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA). We commonly see the term applied to the unfortunately named idea of a Mitochondrial Eve - the most recent common female ancestor of all living humans.1
The reason that it's a distortion is that the MRCA depends on what group you're looking at. The MRCA of all living humans is not required to be the MRCA of all humans that have ever lived:
(From Wikipedia)
The MRCA of everyone alive today could thus have co-existed with a large human population, most of whom either have no living descendants today or else are ancestors of a subset of people alive today. The existence of an MRCA does therefore not imply the existence of a population bottleneck or first couple.
At this point, some alert individual might assert that even if you expand the pool to all humans that have ever lived, you still necessarily end up back at a first couple, but you'd be wrong because there isn't a requirement that the female MRCA and the male MRCA live at the same time. Think about it. If our notional female MRCA had children by two different men, and descendants of all of those children survived to the present day, then neither of her partners would be the male MRCA - her father would be. (There's also the little matter of identifying exactly where you draw the line between human and non-human. For a very relevant graphical demonstration, see here.)
The last point is simply untrue. Most mutations aren't fatal. Most are neutral. The fatal ones tend to get removed from the population pretty quickly for obvious reasons. Neutral ones can just sort of drift around in the gene pool without any particular consequences. Beneficial ones tend to increase in frequency.2
We could go on with this, and we'd see the same thing over and over again. That suggests to me that the evolution deniers out there aren't at all interested in addressing the subject on the basis of facts and evidence, but rather seek to turn it into an exercise in emotional manipulation.3
The lesson here, as always, is to do some fact checking when you run across references to cats birthing dogs and such. If nothing else, ask yourself "if this is such a simple and obvious flaw in evolution, then why on Earth does anyone still accept it?" Your answer should be "maybe this supposed flaw has already been addressed, or maybe whoever proposed it doesn't understand evolution very well."
-Jay
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1So named because mitochondria within cells come from the mother - sperm lack mitochondria. Similarly, we can talk about a Y-chromosomal Adam.
2But remember that beneficial depends on the environment, and may be a tradeoff. Conspicuous physical displays may increase the chances of finding a mate, but may also increase the chances of getting eaten.
3Ken Ham is perhaps the current master of this approach. What the man actually knows about evolution is unlikely to fill a thimble, so he takes the fear-mongering approach of linking evolution to everything that is bad in the world. Ham also attracts attention for his horribly distorted theology. James McGrath recently had a post up summarizing some of the criticism Ham has been receiving from within the evangelical community of late.
(Mis)information Overload
(Note - this post has been cooking for a while. I'm not completely satisfied with it, but I'm releasing it to the wild anyway. It may get edited in the short near term. )
During a recent business trip to New Orleans, I was having dinner with some colleagues when the conversation turned from whether jambalaya was a dry rice dish or more of a soup (it's the former) to evolution. Of the five people at the table, two of us were doing most of the talking, a third was attempting to moderate the discussion, and the other two were probably wishing they'd gone to the next restaurant down the street.
Within the dialog, my colleague raised several issues of the form "evolutionists say [something]" or "evolution means [something else]". The problem was that none of the things he was claiming are true. This was a lesson to me that even well educated people can have serious misunderstandings about evolution and evolutionary theory.
There are many reasons for such misunderstandings - incorrect or incomplete information in the popular media, lack of adequate discussion in science classes1 , religious teachings - but the net result is that when many people think they're talking about evolution, they really aren't. This essay will discuss some of the more common misconceptions that came to light in the aforementioned conversation, and will provide links to resources where the interested reader can learn more.
Before getting into the details, we first need to define what evolution (and evolutionary theory) is. I like the following definition of evolution by Douglas Futuyma: Evolution is change in the properties of groups of organisms over the course of generations.2 It's a clean definition, and unencumbered by elaborations, and really gets to the heart of what evolution is. By this definition (and this is the definition that scientists working in the field use), a generation of children with more blue eyed kids than there were in the parents' generation is evolution.
The Theory3 of Evolution (ToE), consequently, is the theoretical framework that seeks to explain evolution. It encompasses a number of mechanisms, the most well-known of which is Darwin's concept of Natural Selection - the idea that selective pressures in the environment lead to an increase in organisms with traits that are advantageous with respect to those pressures. There are numerous other mechanisms that are described as well, but they are beyond the scope of this essay.
Evolution says that life came from nothing
This is not true. Evolution deals with how life changes over time. It doesn't address the origin of life. In point of fact, evolution presupposes the existence of living organisms.
The study of the origins of life is known as abiogenesis, and there are currently several theories about that origin. Two of the more well-known are exogenesis - the theory that simple organic molecules were brought to Earth from elsewhere in the universe (perhaps on meteorites), and clay theory - the theory that simple self-replicating molecules arose at the shorelines of primordial oceans, catalyzed by the presence of certain mineral-rich clays.
Regardless of how life on Earth originated (and perhaps we'll never know), evolution is still the best explanation of how life has changed and diversified on Earth.
Evolution implies that the universe appeared in the Big Bang
This is also not true, and is an erroneous conflation of biology and cosmology. As with the origin of life, the ToE presupposes the existence of a universe. Whether that universe was brought into being by God, the Big Bang, or any other mechanism, the ToE doesn't change.
Evolution says there is no God
Once again, this is a misconception. The ToE specifically, and science in general, is neutral with respect to the existence of God. The ToE seeks to explain observations of the natural world in terms of natural processes and causes. Many devoutly religions people have no problem at all reconciling their faith with evolution. Indeed Ken Miller of Brown University, a prominent evolutionary biologist is a staunch Catholic, and sees evolution as a process through which God works in the world.
What the ToE does tell against are certain literal readings of the Book of Genesis.4 The assertion that evolution is atheistic is, at the root, an assertion that evolution tells against the notion of Biblical literalism.
Scientists keep changing their story
This statement is technically true, but the implication that this is a bad thing is wrong. Scientific theories change through time as new observations are made. Newton's Laws of Motion were perfectly serviceable as descriptors of how things move through space. Einstein's theories of General and Special Relativity represent refinements of Newton's Laws, and ultimately came about because of new observations.
Evolution is the same way. In the latter half of the 19th century, when Darwin published On The Origin of Species, he didn't have any knowledge of genetics. Once genetics became known and understood, it's connection to evolution became apparent. As we gain more knowledge of how populations of organisms interact, we become aware of new evolutionary mechanisms at work. The underlying principles of the ToE aren't changing - the extensions serve to strengthen the theoretical framework, not undermine it. The inability of a theory to grow and explain new observations is a sign of a brittle theory. The assertion that data should be interpreted to support a predetermined conclusion is bad science, and an indication that the conclusion isn't strong enough to stand on its own merits.
Evolution says humans came from chimps, or, you've never seen a cat give birth to a dog
This statement represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole concept of evolution. Evolution is a differential process, meaning that from one generation of organisms to the next, the changes are very small. Cats give birth to cats that have minutely different genetic structures than their parents. Stacked up over thousands of generations, those differences become significant. The exact same processes are at work in bacteria, and the results are easier to see - such so-called superbugs as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) emerge as successive generations of S. aureus become more resistant to certain antibiotics. The difference is that we can watch ten thousand generations of bacteria grow and reproduce - we can't watch ten thousand generations of cats.5
Good Introductions
The books listed here provide good introductions on the basics of evolution and on the analysis of the fossil record. They're not comprehensive, by any means, but they're accessible and fairly quick reads.
Bones, Rocks, and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened, by Chris Turney. Macmillan, 2006. This book discusses the various dating methods used by scientists to determine the age of really old things (though, perhaps fortunately, it doesn't discuss Boney Rock Stars, so there is no information on Mick Jagger). It's extremely readable, and provides excellent background.
Evolution vs Creationism: An Introduction, by Eugenie Scott and Niles Eldridge. University of California Press, 2005.
This book gives a high level introduction to evolution and evolutionary theory, as well as some discussion of the evolution/creationism/intelligent design controversy within the U.S. This book should allow the reader to understand the basic terminology and some of the underlying concepts of evolution, as they're actually used by biologists
Evolution and Religious Creation Myths: How Scientists Respond, by Paul F. Lurquin and Linda Stone. Oxford University Press, 2007. This book covers similar ground to the Scott/Eldridge book. However, chapters 5 and 6 deal with abiogenesis and cosmological issues, and so serve as a good supplement to the other material.
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin. Pantheon, 2008. Quite possibly the best book I've read so far this year. Shubin looks at the anatomical and genetic connections between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom in a very engaging way.
I'd recommend reading Turney first, then Scott, then Shubin.
Conclusions
There are many other very common misconceptions out there - these are just the ones that came up in one conversation. The lesson to be learned here is that evolution is a very complex subject that takes quite a bit of effort to understand well. Odds are, unless you've deliberately set out to learn about it, you're probably carrying around a number of misconceptions, too. There is also a vast amount of information on the subject, and it can get very complicated very quickly. That said, it's well worth your time to put forth the effort to understand some of the basics of evolution, particularly if you've been brought up with the idea that evolution is just some wild guess notion that a stodgy British guy came up with 150 years ago.
NOoC
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1As an aside - it is impossible, in my opinion, to get a working understanding of evolutionary theory from a high school general biology curriculum - there just isn't time in the school year. Additionally, the typical freshman Introduction to Biology course that most colleges offer doesn't have the structure to get into evolution in any great depth. (The Futuyma text referenced in this essay runs over 500 pages, and is an introductory text. Another, Evolution, Barton, Nicholas H., et al, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2007, runs about 850.)
2 Evolution, Futuyma, D. J., Sinauer Associates, 2005. (This is an excellent book, but it's college level text. It would be very difficult to get through without a decent background in basic biology.)
3 The word "theory" is used here in the formal sense - a framework that seeks to explain a body of observations in a consistent and logical manner. A theory is not just a guess or a hunch, despite how the word is often used casually. A "fact", in the formal sense, is an observation.
4 While this is a subject for another essay, it's worth mentioning that geology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, genetics, linguistics, history, archaeology, paleontology, and meteorology (among other disciplines) tell against the notion of Biblical literalism as well. That doesn't make any of those other fields atheistic, either.
5Large timescales are hard to get our heads around. Turney's book is really a must-read.
A Quick Book Review
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body By Neil Shubin (Pantheon, 2008).
Neil Shubin is the Provost of the Field Museum in Chicago, and is a professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago. He's also a paleontologist, and in 2004 discovered the fossil that was to become known as Tiktaalik at a dig on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada. (Tiktaalik is notable for being an exemplar of the evolutionary transition between fish and tetrapods.)
The general theme of the book is that many features of the modern mammalian body (specifically the modern human body) can be traced back to (sometimes radically different) features in more primitive organisms, including fish, sponges, and bacteria.1
This represents a different viewpoint than many books on evolution, which often frame the subject in terms of humanity's hominid and primate ancestry. By employing such a shift in perspective, Shubin is free to investigate such things as the origins of body plans, sensory organs (specifically visual, auditory, and olfactory senses), and teeth - things we all largely take for granted.
His approach is to consider a feature - let's say the mammalian eye - and then discuss how this feature is built up from features that already existed (e.g. the mammalian camera eye ultimately evolved from light-sensitive patches of cells, which underwent various elaborations over millions of years). Typically he employs genetic comparisons, pointing out that genes that regulate various features in humans are also present (in perhaps slightly different forms) in other organisms. (An example would be the eyeless gene in fruitflies compared to PAX6 in vertebrates, including humans.)
The net result of Shubin's efforts is a very readable, engaging book that takes the reader through a comparative anatomy course with a generous helping of genetics in a mere 200 pages. A well-assembled notes section provides additional resources for anyone who might want to dig deeper into the topics presented.
All in all, highly recommended.
NOoC
1Primitive here means "found earlier in the fossil record".
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