Evolution
Chris McGeady
Issue date: 11/30/05 Section: editor's picks
Versus Magazine Online [Image Edition]
On July 21, 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, John T. Scopes was convicted of violating the Butler Act, which said it was illegal "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Despite over 180 years of scientific research that supports evolution's veracity, the debate between evolution and creationism still rages on today.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution says that species evolved from other forms of life by eventual adaptation to their environmental conditions. Eventually, if groups of a species are sundered from one another, whether by migration or a geographic separation, the traits accumulated by the species because of natural selection in the two environments, as well as random processing of genetic information, causes the groups to become so different from one another that mating between the two is no longer genetically feasible, and they are now considered separate species. Intelligent design (ID) states that life as we know it is too complex to have evolved on its own and that an ethereal and purposeful creator must have spawned life. For all intents and purposes, ID takes many cues from Biblical creationism in that it demands the existence of an incorporeal being wholly outside of the realm of natural law.
I cannot say that present evolutionary theory is perfect, but I can say that ID is not and will never be science: it spawns no independent hypotheses and cannot be tested by scientific experiments. Proponents of ID fail to realize that just because we do not know everything about evolution since life began does not mean that evolutionary theory is incorrect. For example, every day scientists are discovering more and more evidence to support the Big Bang theory, progressively filling the gaps in the hopes of someday finding absolute and undeniable proof of the theory. The same can be said of evolution.
On July 21, 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, John T. Scopes was convicted of violating the Butler Act, which said it was illegal "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Despite over 180 years of scientific research that supports evolution's veracity, the debate between evolution and creationism still rages on today.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution says that species evolved from other forms of life by eventual adaptation to their environmental conditions. Eventually, if groups of a species are sundered from one another, whether by migration or a geographic separation, the traits accumulated by the species because of natural selection in the two environments, as well as random processing of genetic information, causes the groups to become so different from one another that mating between the two is no longer genetically feasible, and they are now considered separate species. Intelligent design (ID) states that life as we know it is too complex to have evolved on its own and that an ethereal and purposeful creator must have spawned life. For all intents and purposes, ID takes many cues from Biblical creationism in that it demands the existence of an incorporeal being wholly outside of the realm of natural law.
I cannot say that present evolutionary theory is perfect, but I can say that ID is not and will never be science: it spawns no independent hypotheses and cannot be tested by scientific experiments. Proponents of ID fail to realize that just because we do not know everything about evolution since life began does not mean that evolutionary theory is incorrect. For example, every day scientists are discovering more and more evidence to support the Big Bang theory, progressively filling the gaps in the hopes of someday finding absolute and undeniable proof of the theory. The same can be said of evolution.