[D. Stocum] February 12th is the 200th anniversary
of the birth of Charles Darwin, who is most
famous for his development of the theory of
evolution. We might start by first giving
a definition of evolution, which is that with
the passage of time, the descendants of organisms
will come to differ both morphologically and
physiologically from their ancestors.
Two great contributions to the theory of evolution
was one, to document that these morphological
changes actually occurred over time, and he
did this over a period of twenty years up
until about 1859 when he published his theory
in the book that he wrote on evolution, The
Origin of Species.
Darwin did one other thing that was even more
important. He proposed a mechanism for evolution.
That mechanism was natural selection, and
his idea was that in the natural world, there
was constant variation arising, and that the
environment would act on these variants to
produce organisms that were more fitted to
the environment, or in the opposite case,
if the variations were less fit, that organism
would be wiped out.
Science operates only on mechanistic explanations.
We seek mechanistic explanations for all the
phenomena that we see in the world, and that\'s
all because that\'s all we can test as scientists.
We cannot test supernatural explanations like
creators or designers or anything that\'s
outside our mechanistic realm.
So, it\'s unlikely that we\'re ever going
to convince creationists or intelligent-design
people the correctness of the theory of evolution
and that\'s just the way it is in the United
States. We keep amassing the evidence for
evolution. Why don\'t people believe in evolution?
I think it gives them comfort to have the
idea of a creator that they can turn to in
times of crisis.
Mechanistic explanations appear to be cold
and devoid of moral value and so forth. So,
they\'re not very satisfying to people who
hold religious views about things.
