Mark Twain Quotes

The Pope went on to state that Evolution was consistent with Roman Catholic doctrine, changing a position that had been taken by the Catholic Church and many fundamental protestant denominations. A few actually still reject evolution even after all the evidence and proof of the basic Darwinian theses. There is nothing in evolution that per se denies the existence of God or even that God created the universe and the mechanism of evolution. That is why the Catholic Church and so many Protestant Churches, Judaism, Buddhists, and so many other religions have no theological problem with evolution. Those religious groups who have difficulty with evolution are those fundamentalists (Protestants, Jewish and Muslims) who believe in the literal truth of Holy Scripture. They also assume that God designed each particular plant or animal species. Other religions hold that it was God who created the mechanism of evolution and that is how all the species developed and are developing today. Some religious evolutionists believe that evolution is God’s mechanism for perfecting man.

Darwin’s work had polarized England into two camps. Spencer was one of the major public supporters of Darwin. Tennyson expressed a similar intuitive view a decade earlier {627586}. Spencer reasoned that if an egg cell and a sperm cell could produce a human in 9 months, why was it not plausible that the cell could become a human in hunreds of millions of years.

The fundamentalist majority of the school board agreed, but the minority did not. Nor do virtually all the leading scientists in the country. The word “theory” as it is used to describe Darwin’s construct or in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity refers to an intellectual construct for which there has been continuous empirical demonstration since is was first promulgated. The attorney general and the school board, not being scientifically trained, mistakenly believe that a scientific theory is like a general theory which is a set of hypotheses which are established (proven) or not. But scientific theories are not proven or disproven per se. Various elements of them are, and elements of a scientific theory are modified and altered over time and research. Few scientific constructs has had as much empirical demonstration of the various elements as Evolution.

This particular quotation is particularly distressful to some religious fundamentalists who not only will not accept that man evolved, but find it worse to accept that man is continuously evolving.

He was commenting on the seemingly brilliant designs of organisms that evolution has brought about, so sophisticated, that planners could hardly have conceived of them. His point is that those organisms are the great successes which the failures have become extinct and the moderate successes have constantly gotten better.

Evolution sometimes produce or retain components that have no purpose or are even inefficient. But he is urging the biologist to remember that none of the life form were designed much less designed efficiently. We humans have an appendix for example, which does nothing positive and sometimes gets infected and kills us. Yet it is still there. We have so much else on the positive side that a few weaknesses are not material to our survival.

Here the Governor makes a very common error of people who do not have scientific training. They believe that a Scientific Theory is an assertion that has not yet been proven. That is not the way scientists use the term. The Theory of Relativity, Theory of Quantum Mechanics and Theory of Evolution all scientifically refer to a major set of scientific statements and relationships that have been proven over and over again, together with many corollaries and deductions. It is an established, experimentally proven body of knowledge that is still producing additional hypotheses that then need to be proven or refuted. The scientific THEORY is as high as it gets on the scientific scale of proof. The word “theory” used in science is not one fact, but a large set of related facts and their proofs. What the Governor refers to, scientists call hypotheses or speculations. There have been many more proofs of evolution -–many thousands of them—than proofs of Relativity which is actually harder to prove and only has a few thousand proofs. More important, not one person has ever been able to prove scientifically that any of the assertions of evolution are false. Some religions have no difficulty with evolution (Roman Catholics for example) and a few do (fundamentalist Protestants for example). Governor Huckabee was also a fundamentalist Protestant minister. Even the Federal courts have held that the objections and so called “refutations” and alternatives to evolution are religious and not scientific, and hence may not be taught as science in public schools. Non evolution (like creationism) is a religious and cultural notion and should be studied as that.

The school board had been pressured by religious fundamentalists throughout the state of Georgia to affix these stickers to all textbooks as there were no textbooks that met curricular standards that did not teach evolution. As soon as they started this practice, a suit was filed in the Federal District Court which found the practice violated both the Federal and Georgia State Constitutions ({586989}). The only reason that the stickers had been used was to try and placate those religious fundamentalists of the community who were opposed to the teaching of evolution. See {586968} for a quote from the legal opinion.

The Anglican Church of England like many others were originally threatened by the possibility of evolution. Darwin, himself a very religious man was castigated at the time. In modern days the mass of scientific evidence of evolution is overwhelming and most major religions have also learned that there is nothing inconsistent or threatening in this basic science. There are however some religious fundamentalists (mostly Christian and Muslim) who still reject this basic scientific notion, but this quotation represents most of the modern religious thinking.

Darwin did not develop an interest in the origin of life in a vacuum. His grandfather and many other scientists and naturalists had realized that species evolved and improved over tome and generations. What Charles Darwin added was the principles of the mechanism of how it all worked.