Evolution & Climate Change

As I meander through life one of my goals is to find that elusive thing called "reality." The polar opposite of this is a term called "availability heuristics," where people just plug in a preconceived notion rather than applying critical thinking. In other words, people take mental "shortcuts" and say what they believe, or draw from their own personal experiences, whether it's factually accurate or not. This is often done to defend their pre-installed belief system.

Now, rewind to 1967 and my uncle had just given my family a set of books called the Time-Life Nature Library. The books, published from 1961 to 1965, covered the universe, oceans, plants, and more. What an amazing gift! On rainy days or times when I couldn't find a playmate, I would dive into the books and learn. One book that I found particularly interesting was called "Evolution." Growing up in a super religious household I was already taught that evolution was bad, yet the Evolution book stayed in the bookshelf throughout my childhood and teen years. It was from this book that I first learned about Charles Darwin and the Galapagos Islands.

In my junior high school years I was told by church leaders that Carbon-14 dating wasn't accurate and that all this talk about the Earth being old was BS.  I later learned that this was simply a lie. A religious leader may slant or twist facts to defend the faith, but in the end they are simply liars, and the Bible clearly states that lying is a sin. That was quite confusing for a pre-adolescent youngster like myself.

Then, fast forward 7 years and I'm a college sophomore and it's the first day of class in Biology II. In his opening statements the professor says, "Now, we are going to be discussing evolution in this course. I want everyone to know that evolution doesn't replace God, and, in fact, God may have used evolution to create us." It was an 8 a.m. class and everyone was half asleep. No one seemed to care. We just wanted to dissect those poor frogs, get our grade, and get the heck out of there.

The HMS Beagle

Charles Darwin, a little known naturalist and biologist, started a major shit storm in 1859 when he published, "On the Origin of the Species, By Means of Natural Selection." Suddenly, the traditional religions and the conventional ways of thinking were seriously challenged. Poor Darwin was just doing his job. At every stop his ship made he collected plants, animals, rocks, and fossils, and took notes. His observations were brilliant and detailed, and even by today's standards his book is a fascinating read. Yet, all my life traditional Christians have framed him as a "bad guy." I would have thought that Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in 1966, would have been the target of Christian angst, but he hardly gets a mention.

Evolution Defined

Evolution is both simple and complex. By definition, it is the adaption of lifeforms to their environments through mutations. Or, put another way, it's all about having some beneficial mutation that increases an organism's chances of reproducing. In more complex organisms, such as humans, the goal is not only to reproduce but to also get your young to reproduction age, and even their young, which, as a grandparent, gives me another reason to live.

Many mutations create catastrophic results in an animal and they go quickly out of the gene stream. Other mutations are neutral. But every once in a while a mutation gives a creature a slight advantage, and over generations animals with that favorable mutation will multiply. In harsh, rapidly changing environments the mutations matter more to help creatures survive. In static environments, there's no need to change and Natural Selection is less relevant. So, alligators have hardly changed at all in 8 million years, but in 10 million years we went from ape-like creatures to modern humans, mainly because of the challenging life in the African savanna.

At this point, if you are a Young Earth Creationist, your conformation bias and availability heuristics will kick in and you will tell me that everything I've said is hogwash. But, let me continue.

So, evolution is taking place all around us all the time. There is social and technological evolution, and even religious evolution. We now have these hipster "contemporary style" churches everywhere that have rock music bands. Yet, even as late as the 1980s I was told by religious people that rock was "devil music" and that the drumbeat created sexual desires.

Furthermore, I have three dogs and I know that they came from wolves. Human breeders forced evolution along by picking desirable traits for various tasks. I know that my Labrador Retriever is a bird dog and that my hound-mix dogs were once and still are used for hunting. The hounds were used by nomadic people 10,000 years ago to hunt giant buffalo and other bovine-like creatures, but these animals were evolved into cows and herded, so the hounds had less work to do. And as for your broccoli, cauliflower, and kale, they were all bred by farmers from a weed. In the case of dogs and cows, people found animals with slightly more desirable traits and bred them, to create what we have now. In farming, farmers used the seeds of the more desirable plants for the next crop and over generations better vegetables were cultivated.

Even when you look at geological history you find fossils of the most primitive lifeforms at the lowest levels and life becomes increasingly more complex the higher up you go. Over the centuries shifting plate tectonics does twist and scramble the geological record some, which Creationists have gleefully used to make their cases.

Common Defenses

Now, I'm not sure how much of the anti-evolution movement is about protecting religious fundamentalism or simply built-in availability heuristics, but I do know that some of the favorite tactics of apologists are to twist information and use old facts. In addition to the "radio carbon dating isn't accurate" myth, here are some other creationism defenses I've heard recently:

• The Theory of Evolution is just that, a theory.
  Response: I keep hearing this line and it really annoys me. A "theory" in science is completely different from the common language use of the word "theory." I won't bother responding to this line any more other than to say it's disingenuous. I mean, did everyone sleep through science class growing up, or did all the Christian apologists simply "zone out" when these things were being taught? The fact is that evolution is one of the most well established and tested areas of science and is the foundation to many other scientific disciplines, like genetics, geology, etc.
• There's no transitional creatures in the fossil record.
  Response: Please allow me to step outside and scream. The entire fossil record is about transition. Dinosaurs are now birds. If you want a fish with feet, yeah, I can come up with that. The most famous transitional fossil, which is shown in most textbooks, is the Archaeopteryx, which is a transition between a dinosaur and bird. So, as Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise, surprise, surprise."
• The odds of evolution creating a human are the same as a tornado going over a junkyard and creating a B-747.
  Response: Yes, but a million tornados going over a million junk yards a million times may create the basics needed for flight. Come on, the evolution of flight is right under your nose. A couple of hobbyists in North Carolina invented the first aircraft in 1903 and hundreds of engineers around the world contributed small improvements, and, in 1970 the first B-747 rolled off the production line. The fact is that evolution goes from the very primitive to the complex, and nature has millions of years to get things right. 
• If monkeys evolved into humans, why are monkeys still around?
  Response: I can't take this much more. We did not descend from monkeys. We are cousins that share a common ancestor. At 25 millions ago we were all cute little ape-like creatures.

Conclusion

I've learned that people who deny evolution also always deny climate change, and I find this troubling. What's more, in my discussions with these folks they use the same types of arguments. I am told things like "the science of climate change is unproven." False. Or, "it's part of a natural warming trend." False. "No one really knows what will happen." False. The amount of computer modeling and the number of climate scientists studying this issue is massive. To educate yourself on the real facts of climate change, and the disinformation campaign against it, I recommend you visit the website of The Union of Concerned Scientists. They do a great job of presenting information in simple, plain English terms. Please educate yourself.

I wish that schools, families, and everyone would place a greater emphasis on science education for young people. However, I understand that science challenges many religious traditions and that capitalist oligarchs would prefer dumbed-down and unquestioning consumers. I'd also love to see more religious education in schools. By that I mean there should be courses where students are objectively taught about the world's major religions. Opening kids up to different belief systems would be a big step forward in addressing intentional ignorance.

There are a lot of cool religions in the world. If I had to pick one I would follow Janism, which is a non-theistic religion that comes from India. The religion teaches salvation by perfection through successive lives and non injury to living creatures. It's pretty cool.

Source:
How Does Evolution Actually Work?, Arvin Ash

  Photo: Johannes Plenio