Why Evolution Is True Read Free Page A

two thousand people to describe their view of how life formed and developed. While 48 percent accepted the evolutionary view, 39 percent opted for either creationism or intelligent design, and 13 percent didn’t know. More than 40 percent of the respondents thought that either creationism or intelligent design should be taught in school science classes. That isn’t so different from the statistics from America. And some schools in the UK do present intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, an educational tactic illegal in the United States. With evangelical Christianity gaining a foothold in mainland Europe, and Muslim fundamentalism spreading through the Middle East, creationism follows in their wake. As I write, Turkish biologists are fighting a rearguard action against well-funded and vociferous creationists in their own country. And—the ultimate irony—creationism has even established a foothold on the Galapagos archipelago. There, on the very land that symbolizes evolution, the iconic islands that inspired Darwin, a Seventh-day Adventist school dispenses undiluted creationist biology to children of all faiths.
    Aside from its conflict with fundamentalist religion, much confusion and misunderstanding surrounds evolution because of a simple lack of awareness of the weight and variety of evidence in its favor. Doubtless some simply aren’t interested. But the problem is more widespread than this: it’s a lack of information. Even many of my fellow biologists are unacquainted with the many lines of evidence for evolution, and most of my university students, who supposedly learned evolution in high school, come to my courses knowing almost nothing of this central organizing theory of biology. In spite of the wide coverage of creationism and its recent descendant, intelligent design, the popular press gives almost no background on why scientists accept evolution. No wonder then that many people fall prey to the rhetoric of creationists and their deliberate mischaracterizations of Darwinism.
    Although Darwin was the first to compile evidence for the theory, since his time scientific research has uncovered a stream of new examples showing evolution in action. We are observing species splitting into two, and finding more and more fossils capturing change in the past—dinosaurs that have sprouted feathers, fish that have grown limbs, reptiles turning into mammals. In this book I weave together the many threads of modern work in genetics, paleontology, geology, molecular biology, anatomy, and development that demonstrate the “indelible stamp” of the processes first proposed by Darwin. We will examine what evolution is, what it is not, and how one tests the validity of a theory that inflames so many.
    We will see that while recognizing the full import of evolution certainly requires a profound shift in thinking, it does not inevitably lead to the dire consequences that creationists always paint when trying to dissuade people from Darwinism. Accepting evolution needn’t turn you into a despairing nihilist or rob your life of purpose and meaning. It won’t make you immoral, or give you the sentiments of a Stalin or Hitler. Nor need it promote atheism, for enlightened religion has always found a way to accommodate the advances of science. In fact, understanding evolution should surely deepen and enrich our appreciation of the living world and our place in it. The truth—that we, like lions, redwoods, and frogs, all resulted from the slow replacement of one gene by another, each step conferring a tiny reproductive advantage—is surely more satisfying than the myth that we were suddenly called into being from nothing. As so often happens, Darwin put it best:
    When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

Chapter 1
    What Is Evolution?
    A curious aspect