Well, not really. I honestly don't see why evolution has any controversy whatsoever about it. Well, I can see why but it shouldn't. This is the information age, we should've all outgrown this.
Now, I'm not a biologist. I don't understand the details behind evolution, but quite frankly, I don't see why I'd need to be. Honestly, it seems like common sense to me. But before I get into all of that, I'm going to try cover a few common misconceptions, but first, since, for some insane reason, religion is brought into these debates, I'm going to cover my own religious beliefs very quickly.
I consider myself a Christian. It's how I was raised, and quite frankly, Jesus seemed like a pretty clever guy and following his teachings seems like a good idea. The whole "do unto others as you would have them do to you" is a pretty good philosophy to live by.
With that said, I consider myself a scientist (And I have a degree to prove it!). I put a lot of faith into basic logic and reasoning and when logic and reasoning dictates that the measurable universe is 14 billion years old (Seriously, young earth Creationists, you're all idiots), and that humankind came from evolution, that's what I believe.
But anyway! Misconceptions!
Evolution is not Pokémon.
Seriously, this seems obvious, but for some reason, when someone says that we descended from monkeys (Which, by the way, isn't true, we descended from a common ancestor with monkeys), they seem to picture
What? Homo Neanderthalensis is evolving?
Homo Neaderthalensis evolved into Homo Sapein!
Seriously, do I need to say why that isn't the case? Evolution isn't something that happens over night. The earth is very very very very old. Homo sapien, as a species, has existed for roughly 200,000 years. Yeah, compared to the earth (4 million years old), it's a blink of the eye, but 200,000 years is a huge amount of time. But I'll get more into this a bit later.
Evolution explains how life began
No it does not. That would be abiogenesis, which explains how various amino acids and other organic molecules existed together and in some process, formed proteins and the building blocks of life as we know it.
What evolution is all about, is how we went from single celled organisms to, well, this guy sitting at his computer typing a blog about evolution.
But the big misconception, and one of the two main topics of this blog:
Evolution is just a theory
This one really really annoys me because it shows that you don't understand what a theory is. Yes, in common nomenclature, a theory is an idea that you haven't proven yet. In science, we call that a hypothesis. We don't talk about the hypothesis of evolution, we talk about the theory. So what is a theory?
the·o·ry
[thee-uh-ree, theer-ee]
noun, plural the·o·ries.
1. a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity. Synonyms: principle, law, doctrine.
(Courtesy of dictionary.com)
In short, a theory is a group of ideas that explains a physical phenomenom. Such as, a group of ideas that explains how we went from single celled organisms to us. Or, evolution. Evolution is a theory, which means that it's a group of ideas, commonly regarded as correct.
"BUT HURR WANI IF IT'S PROVEN WHY ISN'T IT A LAW"
Because you don't understand what a law is either. Yes, I know, in common nomenclature, a law is a rule that you absolutely musn't break. The scientific use is a bit different.
11. a general principle, formula, or rule describing a phenomenon in mathematics, science, philosophy, etc: the laws of thermodynamics
(Again, courtesy of dictionary.com)
I think it's best to prove my point with an example.
Gravity! We all love gravity. It's that crazy thing that stops us from floating off into space, and keeps the earth flying around the sun. So.
The theory of gravity is a set of ideas about how objects with mass cause space-time to bend in such a way that the objects move towards each other. It's more complicated than that but that's the basic idea. It explains how gravity works.
The law of gravity is
. [Which, if your computer isn't handling TeX, F = (G x m1 x m2)/(r^2)] The universal gravitational constant multiplied by the mass of both objects multiplied together, divided by the distance between them squared. It's a basic, mathematical equation describing the gravitational force between two bodies.You see the difference? I hope so, because I can't be bothered thinking of any other examples. (For the record, I should strictly be calling the above law, Newton's law of universal gravitation).
The other problem with saying evolution isn't proven because it isn't a law is the implication that because something's a law, it's absolutely true and that will never change. Another example! Probably the most famous laws in all of physics, Newton's three laws of motion:
- An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external force. So, in other words, if you start moving, you will never stop moving unless something stops you. You don't come across this in every day life, because we constantly have friction and drag stopping things. With that said, ever skidded on ice? There's no friction (Or little friction), so you remain in motion until acted upon by an external force.
- The force on an object is proportional to its mass multiplied by its acceleration, or F=ma. Basically, this defines what "force" is. Pretty simple and to the point.
- Any action force will cause a reaction force equal in magnitude but opposite in direction. You've almost certainly heard this referred to as "every action has an equal an opposite reaction" but, quite frankly, that makes very little sense. The definition I've used here makes more sense. You push with 50N of force on your shopping trolley? It pushes back at you with 50N of force. This seems a tad nonsensical, obviously when you push your trolley, you don't go flying backwards but 1: You weigh more than your trolley and 2: You have friction from your shoes on your side.
See, a clever young chap named Albert Einstein came along and decided to think up Special Relativity, which states in its simplest form that all laws of physics are the same, no matter how fast you're going. That makes sense, but without going into too much detail, what it means is that, no matter how fast you're going, the speed of light is always going to be exactly 299792.458 km/s. If you shoot a beam of light, it goes at 299792.458 km/s. If you suddenly start running at 1000 km/s because you're insanely fast, it still goes at 299792.458 km/s compared to you, not 298792.458 km/s. If you're not getting why this is strange, consider you shot a bullet that travels at 300 m/s, then you run off past it because you're still insanely fast, also at 300 m/s. Both you and the bullet are travelling at the same speed, so compared to you, the bullet is travelling at 0m/s. It's at rest.
I'm probably doing a terrible job of explaining why this is strange, but basically, it means that no matter how much you accelerate, you can never reach the speed of light, because the speed of light is always 299792.458 km/s, no matter how fast you're going. Which makes no sense right, surely if you have a large enough force, you can accelerate fast enough.
This is where one of Newton's laws winds up being wrong. The answer is the second one. It's not F=ma, that just happens to be an excellent approximation. It's actually F=γma, where γ is basically a number that increases the closer you get to the speed of light, making it so that as you get closer, the force needed to accelerate you the same amount increases until you need an infinitely large force to reach the speed of light.
(If you care,
, where 
) See! Law was wrong. Law does not mean absolutely 100% true.
This is a good time to mention that science does not have things that are 100% true. If you think things are 100% true, you will never learn anything because you're so blinded by your own ignorance that you can't. You have to be willing to admit that you might be wrong. Some of my friends may have noticed that I will never say that I'm 100% certain of things. I'll say I'm 99.99999% certain but I will always leave that shadow of a doubt because hey, something absolutely bat crap insane might happen and I might wind up being wrong. It's part of life and it's part of science. When science says something is proven, we mean that, as far as all evidence shows, it's true, and it can make predictions that also wind up being true. What this means is that as more evidence comes to light (For example, Einstein's predictions about the speed of light), what we believed to be proven might wind up being wrong and we might have to rework what we understand about the universe.
Sure, you might say "HURR BUT WHAT'S THE POINT OF SCIENCE IF YOU CAN'T SAY ANYTHING IS 100% TRUE" and you have a point. But, on the other hand, if all the evidence is saying that something is almost certainly true, are you going to go up against it?
This is what I mean when I say that evolution is proven. There is an insanely huge amount of evidence backing up evolution and there's basically none saying it's not true. Evolution is a fact of science. It's not "just a theory", it's a fact.
I'm not quite done yet. I mentioned earlier that evolution seems like common sense to me, and I want to demonstrate this to you. We need two, very basic principles to do this.
The Law of Natural Selection
Or, as I like to think of it, the law of evolution. (Hah! See! The title of this blog was that for a reason!) You've almost certainly heard of this. Survival of the fittest, and so on. It really is the big law behind evolution.
So, what exactly is natural selection? It's quite simple, really. Basically, if you can't breed, you won't breed and won't pass on your genetic make up. Make sense, right? There are two basic ways this happens. Firstly, you can't survive. Maybe you're easy target for a predator, or you don't have the necessary tools to eat enough food and you starve to death. If you get killed before you breed, your genetics don't get passed on to the next generation and are erased from the gene pool. The second way it can happen is if you're simply not desirable as a mate. You can't attract teh hawt chix or guiz and as a result, you never breed and your genetics don't get passed on to the next generation and are erased from the gene pool.
Now, I'd like to note here that "survival of the fittest" doesn't have to mean that you're the best species possible. It simple means that you're fit enough to survive long enough to breed, thus you do. Look at, say, fainting goats. Absolutely ridiculous species of goat that, when frightened, become paralysed and fall over. Surely, they should be extinct because there's no way they can avoid being hunted. But they exist. Why? Because they're specifically bred to be like that. They're born and raised in captivity and have no hunters. They breed, thus their stupid genetic make-up is passed on.
Second principle!
No two beings are exactly alike
This isn't some design that causes that, it's simple probability. There are trillions upon trillions of possible genetic makeups. Some work, some don't, but the chances that two are the same are miniscule and, while it might have happened at some point, it almost certainly hasn't. No two beings are exactly the same and your children will be slightly different to you. It doesn't have to be a big difference, but multiplied across tens of thousands of generations, the differences become slowly larger, and if two different sorts of beings stick together, they wind up being different enough that they form a different species to each other.
Get these two things together, and very slowly, organisms change. The ones that don't make the cut, they die out. The ones that do, live on to very very slowly change too.
See, that's the thing about evolution. It's a really really really really slow process. Life on Earth has been around for around a billion years, the last time I checked and that is a really really long time and it took nearly all of that for us to come from single celled, freshly abiogenesised organisms to the third most intelligent species on the planet. Don't knock it just because it's not as fast as Pokémon. We took a long time getting to where we are now, and it truly is one of the great miracles of the universe.
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