Is Evolution an Essential Theory in Science?

[youngborean]

I am curious on how important the Theory of Evolution is to the Whole of science. Since most other disciplines of Science cross their own boundaries, such as the use of Chemistry and Physics in Biology, the usefulness of Taxonomy in identifiying Gross chemical operations (especially in the plant world) of organisms. Unlike many disciplines of Science, evolutionary biology seems to be isolated, with no interdisciplinary innovations. That being said, why is it such a big deal? Are there contributions that Evolutionary Biology has made to the rest of Science that I am not aware of? If there are, I would enjoy discussion. I don't see how this theory has progressed the rest of Science. To me personally it is centered in the past and not interested in the progressive revelation of the active intelligence. That's why I personally believe it would be better served to be taught as an art along with Archeology or Anthropology.

[youngborean]

I disagree with this statement. Because wouldn't everyone's answer for why they believe in Evolution be similar to yours, Jose? But everyone does not say, "I believe in Evolution because it is the model with the most evidence." (Excuse me if I paraphrase) Instead we have a great multitude of people that believe in evolution without knowing all the evidence. Therefore it has gone into the realm of Religion in that it has a group of people that support it buy Faith.

Not relevant.

I doubt you're a doctor, and I doubt that most everyone is a doctor. Is medicine then a religion?

I doubt most everyone has taken higher level physics. Is nuclear fusion a religion? Is Quantum Theory?

In fact, at this moment, I'm willing to say that I doubt most anyone has taken hardly anything in regards to science, so chemistry, biology, physics, history, etc...So that must also be religion?

Simply because every person on the street can't sit down and give you a half-hour explanation on the basics of evolution, does not make it religion by a long shot. It is more likely an indication that not everyone has spent a good deal of time in biology, then an indication that it is a religion.

It is completely not relavant if the point is taken out of context. My point is that people believe things that they cannot explain themselves as empirical truth based on the authority of others. The same issue that is described as the failing of Religion. It does make their individual perception of that entity religious if they cannot provide an explanation for it, only that they believe it. It in no way changes the evidence. It is the reality of the theory in the public's conscience, which is a result of education.

[youngborean]

If you can offer suggestions for how to improve this situation, please do.

I think a healthy dose of honesty is in order in University education. I believe I would have respected my professors a lot more if they would have been honest about the limits of their knowledge. I find that when people of prominence are confronted with difficult questions they often come up with athoritative answers out of laziness. This is usually the point when statements are made that do nothing to benefit Scientific education. Like, "That is just the way things are". There is truth in your approach. The ideal should be to offer another model with evidence to back it up. But I can't recall many professors that wanted to invest the time in people to really encourage theories that may conflict with there assumptions about reality.

[Jose]

My point is that people believe things that they cannot explain themselves as empirical truth based on the authority of others. The same issue that is described as the failing of Religion. It does make their individual perception of that entity religious if they cannot provide an explanation for it, only that they believe it. It in no way changes the evidence.

There is a difference, as I see it. In the case of evolution, we say "the evidence is in the world itself. Go and see. Look up the reports in the scientific journals, all of which provide methods that enable you to reproduce the results yourself--or, if the paper describes the finding of a fossil, it will provide sufficient detail about the location and fossil characteristics that you can assess the validity of the conclusions." In the case of religion, we say "the holy book describes it. The holy book is the word of God because we say it is, or because the book says it is, and we don't question the book." That is: evolution is based on evidence that anyone can examine and interpret, while creation is based on belief that a book is Truth."

Thus, the appeal to Authority is different in each circumstance. For evolution, it is an appeal to someone who analyzed the data personally, and described it in a journal that will not publish papers unless they have been reviewed, critiqued, and accepted by people who are usually the direct competitors of the authors. For religion, it is an appeal to someone who claims to know the book better than you do, or to the book itself. There is no independent verification that the book is what it says it is--which is why so many people don't accept it as anything beyond the written stories of a particular group of people.

I think a healthy dose of honesty is in order in University education. I believe I would have respected my professors a lot more if they would have been honest about the limits of their knowledge. I find that when people of prominence are confronted with difficult questions they often come up with athoritative answers out of laziness. This is usually the point when statements are made that do nothing to benefit Scientific education. Like, "That is just the way things are".

I often have no choice but to say "that is just the way things are." For example, my students often stumble on cellular biochemistry because they don't know why ATP is the energy molecule that cells use. Why not something else? There are only a few answers, none of them satisfying. They are: [1] That's how God set it up. [2] An ancient life form happened to use ATP, and it happened to work, so that life form out-competed everything else, and we are its descendeents. [3] When we try to find out how cells work, we find that they use ATP. That's just the way things are. We can describe what they do. We can't describe "why" they do it that way.

But, to get to the real point: In what ways were your professors unwilling to admit the limits of their knowledge? Specific examples would be really useful. I say this because there are two scenarios that I can imagine. There are certainly more than that, but I'm a simple kind of guy. The first is that they really were pompous dorks who pontificated as if they knew everything. There are a few of these types out there, and maybe you were unlucky and got a whole string of 'em. The second scenario is more complicated, but is, I think, common.

It goes like this. The traditional science class attempts to teach what we know now. Usually, what we know now includes a number of things that are on the forefront of science. We try to put these in, because it keeps the courses current and exciting. Usually, a number of things we know now have to be revised as new information comes to light--at which point, it becomes clear that we didn't really know then what we thought we knew, even if it was in our classes.

Usually, when we talk about various things that we "know" now, we describe some of the experimentation that led to this knowledge. To be more precise, we describe the experiments that led us to this conclusion about how things work. (It may not be real "knowledge" if our conclusion isn't perfect; it's just the best we can do at the time.) In doing this, we are telling the students, "we think this is how it works, and here is the evidence." We do this assuming that our message is getting through, because this is how we treat everything in science. There are no "facts." There is only "the current best interpretation based on current evidence."

Usually, however, students come into our classes with the mindset that they have had since the beginning of school: that teachers are there to tell them Facts. In science, they think this is especially true, because they think science is nothing but memorizing Facts. It's not, of course, but this is still what most students think. They tell us, when we describe the experiments that support a conclusion, "don't tell us the experiments. Just tell us the right answer. If you don't really know it's the right answer, then don't teach it." [This is a paraphrase of a great many teaching evaluations from our department.] For students who have this view, the experiments seem irrelevant, and they ignore them. They memorize the conclusions as if they were facts. Then, years later, when those "facts" are changed, they conclude that their professors were idiots because they lied to them.

That is, professors teach the way they were taught. It worked for them...but most students are not science majors, and most students now have very different backgrounds and expectations than did the professors when they were in school. It may be good teaching for students who are destined to become scientists, but it is mis-perceived by too many others.

We see this sort of thing a lot, where people don't hear the full message because they think science is just "facts." One popular area currently is nutritional recommendations. People want to memorize the One True Fact, but science doesn't work that way. The best it can do is say "here's the evidence" and "here's our best interpretation of it at this time." Most people don't bother to look at the evidence. Instead, they conclude that the scientists are idiots because they can't get their story straight.

Another good example is antibiotics. In the 1950's, people thought science was King. They'd discovered penicillin, and other wonder drugs. Diseases would become a thing of the past. Years later, it turned out that bacteria developed resistance to penicillin. We had to find other antibiotics. Bacteria are developing resistance to these antibiotics, too. One result of this is that people decided the scientists were wrong about antibiotics. They lied to the public about the promise of a disease-free future. Did they really? No. But the public didn't want to look at the data. Most significantly, the public didn't want to think about evolution. Any biologist would have said, as they still say, that overuse of antibiotics will select for antibiotic resistance. It is guaranteed. That's how evolution works. But do we get it? Not yet. The administration, and the current Congress, won't look at the data, either. Clinton recommended curtailing, if not banning, the routine use of antibiotics in the meat industry. Bush scrapped that idea right away, as "a burdensome regulation." They don't pay attention to science, and they don't pay attention to evolution, even in such obvious things as this.

That's a bit of a rant, perhaps, but it does bring the issue back to the topic of the thread. Evolution has some really important messages, some of which might even come under the heading of "national security," and certainly "public health." It is undermined, however, by the issues you've raised: the perception of science teaching, and often even the practice of science teaching itself, leads to the wrong conclusion. It leads to the notion that science is supposed to present facts to memorize, and that science is supposed to find Objective Truth. When reality conflicts with this perception, people don't really know what to do--so we fall back on our instinct to blame someone else, and usually blame the scientists.

There are ways to deal with this, and there is a significant movement in the Science Education field, to get more "real science" into science classes. We've got to get away from the mere memorization of "facts." I'm not very hopeful, however, because of the so-called "no child left behind" law. It mandates standardized tests, most of which test little beyond mere memorization. This law pretty much forces K-12 science teaching to go backwards--especially since its purpose is to punish schools that don't do well, rather than to help them do better.

[old ag]

Jose: I know this is from an old string. I got to it based on the link you provided in my current question of What Use Is It? I wish to address this quote you gave back in Nov. 04

"The fossil record alone--i.e. the solidified history book of evolution--has been of singular importance in geology, and contributes to the tremendous success of oil geologists in finding oil deposits."

Two points: One, the real guys know that the fossil record does not provide the proof for evolution, and they say so to each other in their magazines and conferences (Numerous quotes and admissions of such may be found at answersingenesis.org site. Go there and do a search for some quotes). This is why the late S. Gould of Harvard had to invent "punctuated equilibrium". Looking at the fossil record, Gould could not find the transitions he needed, but found long periods of stasis. So, with no missing links to latch onto, he solved the problem with Punctuated Equilibrium which may be summurized as follows:

No missing link fossils are known (lots of frauds and mistakes - see Why the Epidemic of Fraud Exists in Science Today-by Jerry Bergman Ph D and biology/chemistry professor at Archbold State, in the current issue of TJ the in-depth journal of Creation); but since we know that evolution is true, it must mean that evolution takes place in such a manner or at such a time that it does not leave the appropriate fossils for us to find. Therefore, we (Gould and his cohort whose name escapes me at the moment but it begins with "P") posulate that evolution occurs in short, active burst separated by long periods of stasis. Hence we can not expect to find fossils proving it. Therefore, the absence of intermediate fossils now becomes proof of evoliution! instead of their presence!

Secondly: Concerning oil exploration. I have had occassion in a previous life, to sit in the back of a Schlumberge' well service truck while they lowered various tools down a well bore in west Texas. The electric/radio-active signals sent into the soil provided a computer printout of the formation charateristics. I asked the engineer to explain to me how they used the print out to find oil. He began to explain the various scales and lines on the paper. I have forgotten most of the details but I remember one thing clearly, the age or origin of the rocks/oil was never mentioned and did not figure into his search.

Once again, reverting back to my original question, What Use Is It?, I submit that "evolution" plays no practical part in this search for oil. If so, HOW? Specifically. Would the engineer by-pass a formation that had every charateristic of oil just because the evolutionist might tell him the formation is to "young" to have allowed for oil to form?

Your example of geology as proof of evolutions practical application is ironic since it was a book about geology "The Genesis Flood" by Dr. Henry Morris that started the whole modern creationist movement in the first place.

That all for now, got to earn a living!
Old Ag

[Nyril]

Once again, reverting back to my original question, What Use Is It?, I submit that "evolution" plays no practical part in this search for oil.

Strawman. Nobody claims biological evolution helps in the search for oil.

[old ag]

Once again, reverting back to my original question, What Use Is It?, I submit that "evolution" plays no practical part in this search for oil.

Strawman. Nobody claims biological evolution helps in the search for oil.

Of course it doesn't and it doesn't play a practical point in anything else either....That's my point and the challenge of my question...remember it is my contention that evolution is not science but IS AND CAN ONLY BE - a philosophical/religious discussion. Maybe I am not making myself clear.

A chemist can show me how to use chemicals to make a better world; a mathematician can show me how to use equations to design a spacecraft, a physicist can help us get it to Mars to analyze rocks, a biologist can show me how studies of animal hearts helped develope transplant techniques, but NONE of this requires any information or use of "evolution". The biologist may think the monkey heart evolved over 10,000,000 years, but that played no part in his experimental transplanting of it; the physicist may believe Mars is 10 billion years old but that has no bearing on how he calculates the course of the spacecraft.

So, I am back to my question. What use is it? Also, you didn't answer my question concerning the geologist and his readout. Will he bypass a formation that the readout shows has all the characteristics of oil simply because the evolution theory says it is to young to contain oil? I doubt it.

OL ag

Old ag

[John S]

So, I am back to my question. What use is it? Also, you didn't answer my question concerning the geologist and his readout. Will he bypass a formation that the readout shows has all the characteristics of oil simply because the evolution theory says it is to young to contain oil? I doubt it.

This is a guess on my part (but an educated one), but I bet before your driller/logger was sent to the field you visited the oil company that hired Schlumberger spent a lot of money figuring out the geologic history of the area. Here's a quick example why: in order for an oil reservoir to form you need a source rock to generate the oil and a trap to allow the oil to collect. In order for a rock to be a good source it needs to be buried deep enough for long enough that oil forms - if the company geologists don't think these conditions were met, the company's not going to waste time and money drilling wells there. Also, if the company geologists think that the traps only formed after the oil was generated (meaning that there was nothing to allow the oil to accumulate while it was forming), then the company's not going to spend money developing the field.

Major oil companies spend a lot of time and money conducting geologic research. That's reflected in part by the number of publications in the geologic literature from people who work for oil companies. I searched a database called GeoRef (the most common in the geologic community) and there are a lot of publications from people working for oil companies.

Publications in peer-reviewed journals including authors affiliated with:

ExxonMobil (including Exxon and Mobil before their merger): 2236

Shell: 1538

ConocoPhillips (and predecessors): 859

ChevronTexaco (and predecessors): 2026

Not all of the papers deal with the geologic history of oil fields, but there's a lot that do (I haven't gone through all the references).

Here's a paper that deals with one of the scenarios I mentioned earlier (I've highlighted the part about the importance of the timing of trap formation):

Post-breakup compression of a passive margin and its impact on hydrocarbon prospectivity; an example from the Tertiary of the Faeroe-Shetland Basin, United Kingdom by Davies, Richard; Cloke, Ian; Cartwright, Joe; Robinson, Andrew; and Ferrero, Charles in the AAPG Bulletin, vol.88, no.1, pp.1-20, Jan 2004

The Faeroe-Shetland Basin is part of a passive continental margin that formed as a result of multiphase extension associated with North Atlantic rifting during the Mesozoic and Paleocene. Breakup was followed by postrift subsidence during the latest Paleocene to late Eocene and the development of at least three 70-150-km (43-93-mi)-long, broadly north-south-orientated, slope canyons and linked terminal fans during the middle Eocene. The terminal fans filled northeast-southwest-striking basin-floor bathymetric depressions that had formed above the hanging walls of underlying, dormant northeast-southwest-trending Mesozoic extensional faults and adjacent half-graben depocenters. Compression during the middle and late Miocene caused contractional reactivation of the Mesozoic extensional faults and folding of the overlying uppermost Paleocene to middle Miocene postrift sediments into a series of 17 northeast-southwest-striking anticlinal domes. The switch from hanging-wall bathymetric depression during terminal fan deposition to anticlinal domal high during and after the middle to late Miocene compression has led to the present-day spatial coincidence of a potential hydrocarbon reservoir and an effective trap. The anticlines also acted as the foci for gas migration during or after compression (15 Ma to present). However, the timing of compression and differential uplift of the basin margins during the past 15 m.y., approximately 45 m.y. after the main phase of oil migration, may be a critical negative factor for oil exploration in this part of the basin. This hydrocarbon phase may have spilled during the structural reorganization, either updip into shallower traps or out of the hydrocarbon system via seeps.

I hopes this illustrates that oil companies care about figuring out geologic histories (they're not going to waste time on them if they're not worth the money), and that they use conventional geology to figure out those histories. The age of the formations and the traps matter.

[Gollum]

Also, you didn't answer my question concerning the geologist and his readout. Will he bypass a formation that the readout shows has all the characteristics of oil simply because the evolution theory says it is to young to contain oil? I doubt it.

If course he won't ... but then evolution, being a set of statements about how life forms develop ... isn't likely to have much to say about the age of geological formations. In fact its the other way around. The age and sequence of geological strata is the input (or one of them) to testing evolutional hypotheses, not the predictive result of such hypotheses.

Oil exploration geologists routinely use fossils recovered from drill cores as part of the basis for predicting hydrocarbons but it's hardly the whole story.

As to your sitting in the back of a Schlumberger truck in West Texas ...

Presumably he was running a well log which means that he's looking for measures of porosity, permeability, salinity, etc. in the formation. He may also be running a drill stem test looking for indications of hydrocarbons. None of this has anything to do with evolution. You may as well ask that baseball statistics demonstrate their relevance in this area.

[Jose]

So, I am back to my question. What use is it? Also, you didn't answer my question concerning the geologist and his readout. Will he bypass a formation that the readout shows has all the characteristics of oil simply because the evolution theory says it is to young to contain oil? I doubt it.

The critical issue is: where are the most productive oil fields? Few are known in recent rocks. The most productive are found in rocks of a particular age. Because of the direct correlation of age with the biodiversity that was present at that time, rocks of different ages have different fossils--particularly microfossils. The microfossils provide a very valuable index to the type and age of rocks that oil geologists are drilling in.

Fossils point the way to black gold offers a good discussion, including this tidbit:

By means of the microfossils which the drill brings to the surface experts can conclude whether the area really is empty, or whether the drill has simply not yet reached the oil deposits. The fossil finds even enable specialists to find their bearings on the seismic map: by comparing the finds with the strata predicted, the micro-palaeontologist can determine where exactly the drilling should be made or how it needs to be corrected at the second attempt.

As they note, "modern" oil companies have largely given up on microfossils because they thought "modern" methods would circumvent the need for using them. They weren't exactly correct, but the trend of relying on "technology" instead of evolution may explain why the venerated tradition of relying on evolution isn't well advertised any more.

It is true, as you say, that we can rely on the information while ignoring the reason it exists, and still get the job done. But, that's the job of a flunky, who does as he is told, and not the job of the manager, who has to figure out what to do next, and how to do it right.

[Titan]

Hello, I am new here but would like to jump into this debate because it is about a topic that interests me.

I believe that there is a God, I am a Christian, but I believe in the Big Bang and partly in evolution. I realize that evolution is not capable of accounting for everything and I feel that both creationists and evolutionists have things that they need to come to terms with.

First of all, neither can be proven 100% because they existed in the past and we don't exactly have time machines. I know that sounds inane but it is important.

Evolutionists need to account for some incredible organs and things such as irreducible complexity (as well as many other things).

Creationists need to do a bit more research, I know this sounds harsh but let me explain. I was talking to a young earth speaker and he used evidence that had been shown to be inaccurate many years ago. This evidence isn't uncommon, many people use the same information. For instance, he said that we were receiving information from the furthest galaxies and they were showing us that they were young galaxies. He i both correct and incorrect. The information is correct but the conclusion is in the wrong direction. We see that the galaxies are young because it takes about 10 billion years for light to travel that far. He also said a few other things.

I know that it appears that I am being hard on the creationist but I actually agree more with them than with evolutionists. The problem is that such ignorance causes a barrier between science and religion. You have probably all seen the fish with legs that says "Darwin" (Jose has it in his picture) this is a classic example. The story of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with the origins of the earth but yet they do that, it is to show their disgust for religion. We need to solve this problem. What should we do?