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Planning to get married in Goa? www.weddingsetcgoa.com Making your 'dream wedding' possible ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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.
