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Last month, the Herald Mirror published an article entitled “Did Charles Darwin 
Mislead Us?”, written by a man named Bernard Simoes. This article is the 
ugliest piece of writing I have read in a long time. As I have said elsewhere, 
it is a perfect example of a fusion between abysmal ignorance and appalling 
dishonesty. The article, from start to finish, peddles horrible lies about one 
of the most successful and significant of scientific theories in existence, 
propounded by one of the greatest of scientists the world has ever seen. In a 
particularly morbid and mendacious assault on our sanity, it claims that 
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was responsible for racism, 
Nazism, Fascism, Communism and the genocides committed by all the dictators and 
mass murderers of the 20th century, as well as for the lack of progress in 
science.

To those who might be wondering why any sober-minded and educated individual 
would attack a well-established scientific theory today, the reason is 
two-fold, disregarding the trivial but real possibility of a lapse of sobriety 
and/or sanity: 1) an unshakable belief in an ultra-conservative political 
movement driven by religious cults and fanatical sects of mainstream religions, 
and 2) the failure of basic high school education to impart a proper 
understanding of science. 

The extremist religious movements are opposed to evolution because they feel 
that it threatens their sacred faith in the literal truth of the scriptures, 
i.e. in a young earth that is only a few thousand years old and in the creation 
of humans and other living organisms by a divine creator. There are many 
versions of this ideology being propagated by preachers and publicists of all 
persuasions through sermons, lectures, books and websites. An article written 
by Patrick Ferdinand in the last issue of Herald Mirror has already exposed the 
misguided nature of this religious ideology. So I will not address it here any 
further. Instead, I will try to explode the lies that were smudged on these 
pages by Bernard Simoes as they pertained to the proper scientific 
understanding of Darwinian evolution.

The scientific theory of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Darwin 
in 1859 on the basis of an enormous body of objective evidence collected by him 
and others over several decades. It stated that all living organisms on earth 
have descended from a common ancestor. Those who have inherited physical 
variations that are better adapted to a changing environment, have survived 
longer and have been able to bear more offspring, who in turn have been better 
equipped for survival – a process which Darwin termed as natural selection. The 
confluence of variation, heritability and selection has produced the entire 
diversity and complexity of life that we see around us.

There are many popular misconceptions regarding evolution, bred by scientific 
illiteracy, in general, or by ignorance of this subject, in particular, of 
which the following three are the most common.

The first is that monkeys became humans over time. This is no truer than the 
statement that your great grandfather became you. What the theory of evolution 
actually says is that monkeys and humans had common ancestors. Chimpanzees, 
bonobos and humans had one common ancestor who lived about 7 million years ago. 
In fact, humans had a common ancestor with every other living organism farther 
back in the history of life on earth. 

The second misconception is that humans are more evolved than other organisms. 
But the truth is that in the context of evolution, all organisms that thrive on 
earth today, which includes bacteria, cockroaches, monkeys and humans, are 
equally evolved because they have all been very successful at surviving in the 
present environment. Evolution does not proceed as a linear, progressive and 
directional process. It branches out as a tree, generating diversity and 
complexity in an aimless and undirected manner.

The third, and by far the worst misconception is that evolution is only a 
theory that has never been proven. This myth has been propagated far and wide 
using a variety of deceptive means by various forms of religious 
indoctrination.  However, scientific discoveries of the last century and the 
first decade of the present century, enabled by technological advances, have 
amassed formidable evidence that life has indeed evolved exactly as originally 
predicted by Darwin in 1859.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is a scientific theory 
because it is falsifiable – a condition that any scientific hypothesis must 
satisfy. For example, this theory can be falsified by any of the following 
observations: 1. The finding of a 500 million year-old fossilized human 
skeleton.  2. The finding of no similarity between the DNA of a modern organism 
and that of its fossilized ancestor. 3. The finding of a human footprint in a 
fossilized lump of dinosaur dung.

Despite 150 years of relentless and rigorous attempts to test this simple but 
elegant theory, conducted each and every day in hundreds of laboratories around 
the world, no scientist has been able to falsify it.  On the contrary, in this 
process nearly every single detail of this monumental insight has now been 
thoroughly confirmed, refined and strengthened. Indeed, evolution by natural 
selection is one of the most firmly established statements in all of science, 
making it the rock solid foundation of modern biology and medicine.

I list below significant pieces of scientific evidence that fully establish the 
validity and reality of Darwinian evolution. 

1. Scientists have repeatedly observed that all species of living organisms on 
earth are biochemically and genetically related. Their bodies are composed of 
the same types of complex molecules, and a high percentage of the sequence of 
DNA that comprises their genetic material is identical or similar across 
species. For example, humans and chimpanzees share 98% of their DNA sequence.

2. They have reproducibly verified that the degree of genetic similarity 
corresponds nicely with the temporal separation between species over the entire 
history of life on earth, which has been independently determined to span about 
3.8 billion years.

3. They have conclusively demonstrated the process of selection of biological 
variations by the environment, and the fact that these variations pre-exist the 
occurrence of the environmental changes that select them. As a matter of fact, 
this is being done on a regular basis in every modern molecular biology 
laboratory. Antibiotic resistant bacteria can be made to evolve from 
non-resistant bacterial colonies by selection on culture dishes containing 
specific antibiotics. Indeed, a microbiologist named Richard Lenski has 
experimentally recreated the evolution of bacteria in his laboratory at 
Michigan State University over the past two decades. He started out in 1988 
with 12 colonies of the simple bacteria Escherichia coli that inhabit our gut. 
Over more than 35,000 generations these colonies under varying environmental 
conditions have now evolved into different complex varieties of bacteria. The 
course of their evolution has followed almost precisely what
 was predicted by Darwin and by the later refinements of his theory. During 
some periods the changes were gradual; at other times they were sudden, just as 
predicted.

4. In contradiction to the lies propagated by creationists, evolutionary 
biologists have discovered many fossilized organisms that represent 
transitional forms or links between major divisions of life, such as birds and 
reptiles, reptiles and mammals, apes and humans, etc. For example, there are at 
least 21 fossilized species of reptile-birds, and 11 species of ape-humans. A 
new ancestral species of ape-humans, Ardipithecus ramidus, has just been 
discovered.

5. Biologists have also observed the origination of new species of organisms 
such as new bacteria, mosquitoes, plants, apple maggot flies, silverside fish, 
the stickleback fish, the salamander Ensatina, the greenish warbler and many 
types of birds, the deer mouse, the American bee, and the subterranean mole 
rat. Just as an amusing example, a new species of mosquito, Culex molestus has 
emerged in London's Underground in the 90's. It was first reported in the 
literature in 1998.

6. The bogus creationist claim that an undirected chance-driven process cannot 
in principle lead to order has been roundly refuted. Such a chance-dictated 
process has been simulated innumerable times in many different ways on a 
computer, and has always found to produce the type of diversity and 
organization seen in living organisms of today. Currently, there is a fantastic 
new chance-dictated simulation of evolution of life being conducted at 
California Institute of Technology's Digital Life and Michigan State 
University's Digital Evolution Laboratories. They have developed a computer 
program called Avida, which completely replicates Darwinian evolution by 
natural selection. It has validated every tenet of this theory in great detail, 
something which cannot be done in real life because evolution by its very 
nature is a historical process that has been understood to have occurred over 
three billion years.

The Avida program can be downloaded by anybody free of charge. It shows how 
complexity and diversity emerge when chance is allowed to work over thousands 
of generations under various simple environmental constraints. In fact, 
creationists of all types have downloaded the program with the singular purpose 
of finding a fatal flaw in it, and to their great frustration have found 
nothing wrong with it. You can download the program at 
http://avida.devosoft.org/

7. Most organisms possess organs and parts that are of limited or no use to 
them. They are understood to be vestigial organs in the context of evolution. 
In other words they are obsolete organs that were once useful in the organism's 
distant ancestor but have persisted because of the inefficient and undirected 
nature of the process of evolution. Examples of such vestigial organs are the 
ostrich's wings, the eyes of the blind cave salamander and the Mexican 
cavefish, the appendix in humans, etc.

There is also a biological phenomenon known as atavism that can only be 
explained in evolutionary terms. Atavism refers to the anomalous appearance of 
an organ or limb that was present in an evolutionary ancestor. Examples of this 
are appearance of hind limbs in whales, tails in newborn human babies, thigh 
muscles in sparrows, etc.

The most interesting example of how useless baggage persists in our bodies 
comes from the field of molecular biology. Scientific research in this field 
has uncovered many molecular vestiges. One example is particularly fascinating. 
As you might know, humans have to consume vitamin C through their food or 
nutritional supplements because they cannot synthesize it in their bodies. This 
is also true for other primates and guinea pigs. However, all other animals 
have an enzyme that synthesizes this vitamin. Evolutionary theory predicted 
that the gene for this enzyme must have existed in our ancestors, and that it 
should be present in our DNA in a non-functional or vestigial form. And lo and 
behold, some years ago such a vestigial pseudogene was discovered by a group of 
Japanese scientists in human DNA, as well as the DNA of guinea pigs.

In addition to the type of useless molecular baggage just mentioned, all 
eukaryotic (whose genes are enclosed in a nucleus) organisms possess a huge 
amount of junk DNA, which does not have any function at all. Furthermore, it is 
now well recognized that most bodily processes are inefficient from an 
engineering standpoint. For example, replication of DNA during cell division, 
and its recombination during fertilization are error-prone mechanisms.

In sum, modern science and scientists accept evolution by natural selection as 
a valid explanation for the diversification of life on earth not because they 
are stupid, racist, fascist, communist, autocratic, criminal-minded or 
genocidal. They are not compelled to accept it because of their allegiance to 
atheism or to religions other than those that worship the God of the Old 
Testament. They are convinced it is the correct biological explanation because 
there is compelling objective evidence for it, and because it is the most 
parsimonious rational explanation for this natural phenomenon. 


      

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