On May 4 the Post ran an article on the evolution workshops sponsored by the Society for Evolution Education. In the article Ken Ham is quoted as asking why the need for more education about evolution, if what (the creationists) are saying is so obviously not true?
My whole point is that we need more evolution education at all levels in our society because evolution is not obvious. It is also not obvious that the Earth goes around the sun, that the Earth is a sphere, that cells are the basic form of life.
In the days before science, roughly until 300 years ago, societies relied on their five senses to understand the natural world. With the invention of microscopes and telescopes and the scientific method new breath and depth of understanding of nature could be achieved. It took hundreds of years for most people to accept that the Earth is really not flat, that the sun really doesn’t rise in the east and climb in the sky. Our ordinary senses tell us one thing (the Earth is flat), but scientific study says another (a sphere).
Evolution is not obvious because when we look around outside, it doesn’t look like all living things are descendents from one long-ago living thing. It looks like almost nothing is changing except with the seasons. It looks like all things are separate.
But if we look deeper with the tools of science we see a different world.
Evolution is a natural biological process. When a population of living things changes the distribution of its traits (from let’s say short legs to long legs) we know that evolution has occurred. Evolution means changes in genes (that is in DNA). Nature is tinkering with the blueprint for life.
Genes change in mutation and in sexual reproduction. A population of microbes could evolve in days, while other larger organisms may take millions of years. In either case it is the same process of natural selection. Nature determines which organisms are better suited for surviving and reproducing under the current environmental conditions.
Just as the fact of gravity is explained by the theory of gravity, the fact of germs is explained by germ theory, the fact of cells is explained by cell theory, the fact of evolution is explained by evolution theory. A theory as used in science is not a guess, but a system of tested hypotheses, which explains what is happening in nature. As the evangelical Christian and scientist, Francis Collins says in his book The Language of God: “Truly it can be said that not only biology but medicine would be impossible to understand without the theory of evolution.”