We owe a great deal — indeed, literally everything — to evolution, and yet never have so many said and written so much about something they understood so poorly. Not that evolution is all that difficult to understand. Rather, so many people have such strong feelings about it, often connected to so many regrettable stock phrases, that clear thought has often been obscured. This is especially unfortunate in today's intellectual — or, more to the point, anti-intellectual — climate, with the Bush administration persistently seeking to trump science with ideology.

Unlike theology, with which creationists are more familiar, science is founded on ideas, discovery, testing, and refinement rather than on presumably inerrant doctrines of faith. Disputes about the details of evolutionary fine-tuning, far from undermining the validity of evolution, are testimony to the vitality of the whole enterprise, since any worthwhile science raises more questions than it answers. Accordingly there is uncertainty as to whether evolution always proceeds gradually or is punctuated by occasional bursts of change, but no question that it proceeds, and that it does so by the accumulation of genetic modifications.

posted by issek @ 20:54