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Common Misconceptions About Evolution _ Davidson Institute of Science Education
Common Misconceptions About Evolution _ Davidson Institute of Science Education
c March 8, 2014
Still, some people take issue with evolution for all sorts of non-scientific reasons
and present faulty arguments against it. Advocates of the pseudo-scientific
“Intelligent Design” theory go as far as claiming that features in forms of life on
earth were designed by an intelligent being, and were created as we find them
today.
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Many people confuse the word “theory” with “hypothesis”(an educated guess),
which still needs to be tested, experimentally or otherwise.
“If people descended from apes, why are there still apes?”
In each generation, each species must face natural selection. If a species is
adapted to its surroundings, meaning it can survive and produce another
generation, it will remain over time. If it can’t do these things, for any reason, then
it becomes extinct.
One species might evolve from another, which is called an ancestral species, but
the ancestral species might still be adapted enough to its surroundings to keep
existing and surviving. Moreover, the newer species might go extinct while the
ancestral one might survive.
All in all, what determines the extinction of a species is natural selection, not
whether new descendent species have emerged as “branches” of the ancestral
population.
“Evolution happens only at the micro level, not the macro level”
Many evolution deniers tend to separate evolution into two levels. The “micro
level” refers to changes in single traits by point mutations, such as in the evolution
of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, whereas the “macro level” refers to the
appearance of new organs, physiological systems and species, such as the
development of the eye.
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Still, the fossil record we do have contains many transitional fossils, all of which
support evolution.
As the first step to challenge this, we should look at whether evolution creates
order. It doesn’t. But this argument is moot for other, more important reasons.
Firstly, the second law of thermodynamics only refers to total entropy. In some
local areas, however, entropy can be lowered and order can be increased, at the
expense of an entropy increase in the surroundings, over time.
Moreover, many design failures in living organisms are tell-tale signs for how life
evolved gradually, without any preconceived plan. The vagus nerve serves as a
good example for this. In mammals, it leaves the brain, extends to the heart and
goes back up to the larynx. In giraffes, the anatomical constraints are so extreme,
the vagus nerve must extend up to almost five meters until is reaches the larynx.
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In other branches of the tree of life, such as in fish, the vagus nerve is much
shorter, because the brain, the heart and the gill arches are all next to each other.
But as these structures evolved over time, and as the neck formed and extended
over time, the vagus nerve got “stuck” on the wrong side of the heart and had to
do a long detour to enervate the larynx. Any “intelligent” design would have
planned a much shorter route.
“How do organisms pre-emptively evolve traits they will only need in the
future?”
Quite simply, they don’t. Populations of organisms just adapt to specific habitats
all the time. Each generation, traits are put to the test of natural selection. If a
trait confers a fitness advantage, it is more likely to be found in the next
generation. If it confers a disadvantage, the organism is less likely to survive and
reproduce, and the trait is less likely to spread throughout the population. Small
changes in traits add up to larger changes. Environments change and organisms’
traits closely follow those changes, step by step, and continuously over time,
never pre-emptively.
For example, let’s have a look at the eye, which everyone can agree is quite a
complex system. Being able to see gives organisms a huge advantage over their
blind counterparts. In 1994, a study by Nilsson and Pelger showed that an eye
could develop step by step from a tissue of light-sensitive cells, where each step
confers a relative fitness advantage. What’s more, they also estimated that the
eye could have evolved over the course of 364,000 years, which, in evolutionary
terms, is a brief moment. So, all in all, even complex systems like eyes can evolve
gradually.
“How do the ‘more advanced’ life forms sexually reproduce, as they are
genetically different from the rest of the population?”
Small genetic changes don’t necessarily create a reproductive barrier. Just as a
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Pinscher dog can mate with a Rottweiler, despite their physical differences, so an
organism with a variant trait can usually reproduce with other members of the
same population. If the trait precludes reproduction, it won’t be found in the next
generation, and before long, it will disappear from the gene pool.
There are many more claims out there concerning evolution and I invite you
to write them in our comments section. I will try to answer each point, and
the most interesting arguments will be added to the article.
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