Creation and evolution

Un texte du groupe Mensa Archeology. Bien que ça déborde allègrement du domaine de l'archéologie, ce sujet m'intéresse beaucoup. J'aime particulièrement cette partie:
...all living creatures on Earth are relatives, even if some are cousins untold billions of times removed. We living things are all family, and wherever we look, it is abundantly clear that our differences are a matter of degree, not substance....

Creation and evolution: Reconciling faith and reason.

`Men never do evil as completely and cheerfully as when they do it
from religious conviction' – Blaise Pascal.

There had been a growing realisation that the old school biology
curriculum, hitherto little more than an unedifying `naming of the
parts', has yet to enter the twentieth century. The Department of
Education now wants to do something about it, by introducing the
theory of evolution. Just in time for the twenty-first century.
Predictably, across the print media spectrum, this has prompted a
flurry of indignant `letters to the editor' from the anti-evolution
lobby. A recurring theme in these letters is exquisitely ironic: from
a platform based on purely doctrinal belief, comes a shrill demand
for `proof'. This betrays a misunderstanding of scientific method
that needs correcting.

No theory can be proven conclusively, nor does it need proving.
Proof is an abstract concept for mathematicians or a legal one for
lawyers, but the basis of scientific method lies exclusively in
refutation, or disproof. Formal reasoned enquiry is nothing more
than an extension of what we all do from the moment we are born:
building mental models of physical causes and effects, which inform
our responses to fresh events in the quest to stay alive. These
models are continuously discarded, replaced and adapted with
experience. So it is with science: An hypothesis is proposed to
explain the mechanisms underlying observed facts and events, and as
long as the hypothesis remains in keeping with the observed causes
and effects it purports to explain, it gains the status of a theory,
provisionally accepted as a working explanation for the time being.
Where facts emerge in conflict with a theory, it is discarded or
corrected to admit the new facts, improving its predictive power. Or
if another hypothesis is proposed that more efficiently (that is,
more simply) explains everything the old theory explained and more
besides, the old theory might be tossed on the scrap heap altogether.
This process has over the centuries been enormously useful. Even
obsolete theories can remain powerful: Newton's equations are still
used by airline pilots every day, despite Einstein's comprehensive
refutation. Yet from the moment this process of rational enquiry
ventured beyond mere survival, it has had to contend with the most
dogmatic and hysterical persecution whenever its discoveries came
into conflict with entrenched doctrine. Doctrine that turned out to
be just plain wrong. Just recall the treatment meted out to
Copernicus for suggesting, on fairly solid observational grounds,
that the sun might not revolve around the earth after all.

In the case of evolution, no credible refutation has yet emerged.
Granted, Darwin has been shown to have been wrong in most of his
speculative details as to the mechanisms of inheritance and
variation. And it seems he was over-focussed on competition, whereas
a more modern understanding reveals as much co-operation as
competition* . But the last century and a half of careful research
and analysis has only strengthened the broad sweep of the theory, and
has filled in more consistent and rigorous detail, across a multitude
of disciplines, than Darwin ever dreamed of. This only magnifies the
scale of his achievement - it takes rare insight to perceive the
workings of the big and complex without knowing its small and
detailed components. Much constructive debate as to details
continues, but our entire understanding of life on this planet and
how it works would make no sense at all without the evolutionary
framework to give it a coherent structure. As with all scientific
theories, for a criticism of evolution to be valid, the onus lies
squarely on the critic to disprove it. Nothing remotely close has
been forthcoming to date, still less a proposal for a more efficient
and robust theory to replace it: Indeed, the entire creationist
thesis lies in one or two pages of allegorical mythology, whose
literal interpretation has been completely and comprehensively
disproved.

The circumstantial evidence for the theory of evolution is
overwhelming, but if `proof' is required, it would have to be argued
from first principles. The following basic observations might serve:

1. Each individual of a species is unique (except perhaps
clones, rare enough to ignore here).
2. The progeny of two individuals exhibits some similarities to
each of its parents, but is also unique, not being identical to
either parent.
3. The environment changes with the passage of time.
4. Some individuals live long enough to reproduce, others do not.

Given these four indisputable facts and a little bit of logical
thought, evolution, the diversification of organisms through time and
space, is simply inevitable, there can be no other outcome.
Evolution is the mechanism which gives life as a whole its wonderful
capacity to `go forth and multiply' in the fullest sense of the
phrase, to expand and adapt itself to its changing surroundings, and
to ever more efficiently fill the spaces which allow it to thrive and
diversify. An omnipotent creator could not possibly have arranged it
any other way. A world in which all the known species were
separately brought into being ab initio, without the capacity to
adapt and develop, would be a bleak and stunted world of decay and
stagnation, and it wouldn't have lasted long. Our world is clearly
not like that. As long as life exists, it stands on the thresholds of
unlimited possibility.

Philosophically, a profound pause for reflection that evolution opens
up is the recognition that all living creatures on Earth are
relatives, even if some are cousins untold billions of times removed.
We living things are all family, and wherever we look, it is
abundantly clear that our differences are a matter of degree, not
substance. It was this implication that sparked the initial Western
hostility towards Darwin, as the sheer hubris of that society would
not permit them to accept that they might have been descended from
the same ancestors as mere monkeys. Indeed, many could not even
accept other races as their brethren! It is sad and ironic that this
anthropocentric arrogance lives on, in small pockets of fearful
bitterness within the ranks of religions that mostly profess goodness
and humility. After all, a religious viewpoint that denies the
essential kinship of life on earth seems a rather mean-spirited one.

The fear and loathing inspired by the concept of evolution among
these critics is based on a mistaken interpretation of what the
theory is about: a vague idea that it is somehow an explanation of
the origin of life, involving an explicit attack on the notion of a
creator. It is nothing of the kind, despite Darwin's misleading use
of the word `origin' on the cover of his book (And despite Richard
Dawkins's own loudly-claimed atheistic belief which sometimes
contaminates his otherwise splendid scientific reasoning).
Evolutionary theory is (thus far) silent on origins, and it has even
less to say about the existence of deities: it only describes the
mechanisms of life's diversification, given its existence. Indeed,
most scientific theory can only explain events as consequences of
previous events within time and space. It loses all relevance in
matters metaphysical, or as a physicist might say, beyond the
singularities which mark the analytical boundaries of the observable
universe. Granted, science does not permit the invocation of a
divine influence as an answer in its analysis of causes and effects,
because that is just another way of saying we don't know, and it
yields no useful predictions. But equally, science does not rule out
a `prime mover' either. It simply has nothing to say on the subject.
Whether there is a grand design set in motion by a creator, within
which the known `laws of nature' (that is, the sum total of all
theories in current use) operate with observable consistency, or
whether the same body of natural law is all just a gigantic
coincidence with no purpose or meaning, are questions that cannot be
answered from within the scientific paradigm.

These questions remain in the realm of metaphysics, the domain of
faith. And faith itself is a concept that demands an absence of both
proof and disproof. In the metaphysical world, one is free to believe
whatever one wants. But there is no such luxury in the physical
world of how things work. If the best available evidence and reason
points in one direction, whether one likes it or not, believing it
isn't so is not an option. Clearly, no amount of faith will stop a
brick from falling on your foot if you drop it there – although it
might help in transcending the pain.

Reason and faith are each unintelligible from within the other's
frame of reference, and neither has any business in the other's
domain. Yet both are paradoxically complementary. Just as reason
informs our understanding of the physical world, faith informs the
use to which we put that understanding, whatever it is we believe in.
Our power over the world is now such that the things we humans do
will largely determine the future directions life will take – an
awesome responsibility that we do not always use wisely. In our
actions lie the intersection of both faith and reason, where the
concepts of right and wrong, good and evil take on concrete reality –
after all, the final arbiter of what constitutes right and wrong lies
exclusively in the potential for actions taken by humans to create or
alleviate suffering. Honest use of the scientific method is the only
way we have available to understand the likely consequences of our
actions before we act, in making those choices wisely.
The `creationist' agenda that actively seeks to suppress,
misrepresent, or deny the abundantly confirmed and reconfirmed
conclusions of the most detailed and painstaking research is simply
the wilful fostering of ignorance, a form of dishonesty wholly
incompatible with the compassionate tenets of the religion on which
it is based.

* Herbert Spencer's phrase `Survival of the fittest', is arguably the
most misunderstood soundbite of all time. Spencer ( And Darwin) did
not mean that the biggest muscliest nastiest specimens kill or
overrun the small weak ones. In his time, `fit' did not have the
athletic meaning used nowadays. The use of the term here was in the
sense of a key `fit'ting a lock – the organism that best `fits' its
environmental context will thrive and have more offspring than one
not so well attuned to its surroundings - and THAT is the engine of
evolution.