Why Evolution is such a hot topic

Tech Central Station's Frederik Turner recently wrote a couple of articles on the ongoing battle over evolution.

For the record, he believes evolution is true.

Although nothing in science is ever proven true, we can say evolution is true in the sense that there's so much evidence supporting it that it would be be perverse to withhold acceptance.

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To get some idea of the weight of the evidence in favor of evolution, Turner offers the following point:

what opponents of evolution do not perhaps realize is what they are up against in terms of sheer human and civilizational achievement based on the evolutionary paradigm. This is not a proof of evolution, any more than the four-thousand year history of the survival of the Jewish people is a proof of Judaism or the worldwide congregation of Christianity is a proof of that religion; but it is an indication of the kind of scholarship that would be needed to refute it.

In other words, a successful argument against evolution has to provide convincing alternative explanations to a very intimidating volume of work – more convincing than the evolutionary explanations that underlie all of that work.

There are at least 50 major journals in the academic field of biology. All accept without question the theory of evolution [snip description of theory]. They are not attempting even to prove the theory, any more than math journals attempt to prove that the sum of the internal angles of a plane triangle is 180 degrees, or engineering journals revisit the existence of gravity. But they would be nonsense without the theory of evolution, just as engineering would be nonsense without gravity. Each of those journals is published about four times a year; several of them have been in existence for over a hundred years. Each journal contains at least ten articles of about 2-20 pages, and each of those articles represents several months' or years' work by a team of trained biologists whose most compelling material and moral interest would be to disprove the work of all their predecessors and to make an immortal name by doing so. The work of the biological teams is required to be backed up by exhaustive experiment and observation, together with exact statistical analysis of the results. There is a continuous process of search through all these articles by trained reviewers looking for discrepancies among them and demanding new experimental work to resolve them. Since every one of these articles relies on the consistency and truth of the theory of evolution, every one of them adds implicitly to the veracity of the theory. By my calculation, then, opponents of evolution must find a way of matching and disproving, experiment by experiment, observation by observation, and calculation by calculation, at least two million pages of closely reasoned scientific text, representing roughly two million man-years of expert research and perhaps trillions of dollars of training, salaries, equipment, and infrastructure.

And, just to add to the refuters' troubles, by the time any one claim can be offered, examined, and found to be without foundation, another 500 journal articles will have been added to the pile of material to account for. If evolution is, in fact, wrong, there's no particular reason for new data to comport with it, and every reason for this new data to show something else.

And just to make matters worse, scientific theories don't exist in isolation. Every mechanism that's uncovered has its effects on mechanisms in other disciplines. Biology has to obey the laws of physics and chemistry – the laws of physics have to be compatible with what we observe in chemistry and biology, and so on.

Geology, physical anthropology, agricultural science, environmental science, much of chemistry, some areas of physics (e.g. protein folding) and even disciplines such as climatology and oceanography (which rely on the evolutionary history of the planet in its calculations about the composition of the atmosphere and oceans), are at least partially founded on evolution. Most important of all for our immediate welfare, medicine is almost impossible as a research discipline without evolutionary theory. So perhaps the opponent must also throw in another 4 million pages, four million man-years, and ten trillion dollars – and be prepared to swallow the billions of human deaths that might follow the abandonment of the foundations of medical, mining, environmental, agricultural, and climatological knowledge. (Emphasis added)

That last sentence is why I consider the fight for evolution important. My passion over this issue boils down to four words:

Bad theories kill people.

If I had some assurance the deaths would be confined to those who have been tilting at Darwinian windmills for their own private agendas, I wouldn't mind nearly as much. But when science is shackled and blinded, the result is going to be barriers to progress and the sacrifice of lives well beyond the anti-Darwin community.

Go ahead and risk your own life all you like – don't pull others unawares into the same peril.