NewMexiKen wonders how many of those who oppose Darwinism have ever read his works — and for that matter how many of those who oppose creationism have ever studied the Bible. In an introduction to a new collection of Darwin’s major works, famed biologist and author Edward O. Wilson takes an intelligent look at Darwin and the debate. The entire piece is well worth your time (not long) if you’re interested in this important, continuing issue in American life. Here’s an excerpt:
Thus it is surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rocklike conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the 60 percent that accept the prophecies of the Book of Revelation as truth, and yet in more evidence is the weight that faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious Right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as “only a theory” rather than a “fact.”
Yet biologists, particularly those statured by the peer review and publication of substantial personal research on the subject in leading journals of science, are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably firm evidence, natural selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution.
I wonder how bacteria mutate and become resistant to bactericides if evolution doesn’t exist.