Oh yes, and let’s also explain to them what evolution is exactly about. I.E, what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and why creationism isn’t a competing “theory”.

Hooboy! That’s a big question.

OK, first off, evolution, fundamentally, is the proposition that biological organisms change over time. This has been directly observed, and the fossil record speaks volumes about populations and collections of populations changing over time. What is most remarkable in the fossil record is when a class of organisms persists for more than (say) 200 million years, as the trilobites did, and as horseshoe crabs have done.

The ToE describes the mechanisms whereby evolution occurs, including natural selection, sexual selection, hybridisation, genetic drift, sympatric speciation, allopatric speciation, and so on. A prediction of the ToE is that all organisms on Earth are related (Darwin commented at the end of OTOOS that life would have started with either one or just a few species of organisms). Evidence for common descent, as this is termed, is overwhelming, to the extent that common descent has been proven beyond reasonable doubt.

Creationism, OTOH, claims that biological organisms were created, species by species or genus by genus. However, there are four or five different kinds of creationism. What they share in common is the assertion that living things were created and did not arise through descent with modification. They all permit small amounts of change over time, but only because speciation events have actually been observed within living memory.

Creationism makes no predictions about what occurred when or where, it makes no predictions about the succession of organisms in the fossil record, it makes no predictions regarding the universal relatedness of all life on Earth, it makes no predictions about what may or may not be a valuable avenue of research, and it simply ends all lines of enquiry with “goddidit”. In other words, there is no science about creationism. It is instead the unfounded rejection of palaeontology and evolutionary biology (and, in some forms, the unfounded rejection of geology too).

Those forms of creationism that have attempted to masquerade as science (“creation science” in the 1960s,1970s and 1980s and its offspring “intelligent design” in the 1990s and early 2000s) have been nothing more than ill-conceived, dishonest and illogical critiques of evolutionary theory : they don’t actually propose anything to replace the ToE other than “goddidit” or “designerdidit” respectively.

I’ve always thought that molecular biologist in the last panel had a sort of evil genius/mad scientist look about him. Like he’s not cracking the genetic code but maybe perfecting his uberkruptonite formula or something.

Yes. This is what molecular biologists do. What of it? [j/k]

But…. “the breeding of domestic animals is evolution” was given as evidence for the claim that we can observe evolution. Therefore the argument reduces to “we can observe evolution because we can observe evolution” which is false. Any argument in which the conclusion is assumed by the premises is invalid.

The argument does not reduce as you claim. We can observe evolution because we do observe change over time.

Your claim that evolution cannot be observed rests on a narrow interpretation of the term, referring only to the ToE and not to any other usage of the word.

If any of this somehow does not fit with your stereotypes, elitist attitudes (I’m looking at you, W. Sanders and Nigel D.) or your agenda, feel free to ignore it.

It’s not elitism when you really do know more about it than the other side. Besides, does not your own company employ an elitist selection process when employing staff for technical positions?

In case you are new to the BA Blog, I have a PhD in biochemistry, a field in which the evidence for evolution is ubiquitous. To see evolution derided and dismissed really gets my goat. Why should I argue with kid gloves on, when the scientific argument (about whether or not evolution is real) was pretty much settled more than a century ago?

Nigel: “This is semantic hair-splitting.” — I don’t think philosophy of science is hair splitting. And… just to be clear, I brought this up because it is more interesting to me than creationism. I remember debating creationists in the 1970′s. It’s boooooooor-ing.

I agree that philosophy of science is more than semantic hair-splitting, but this does not mean that the part of your comment to which I referred is more than semantic hair-splitting.

And I agree that debating creationists can indeed get boring.

Neil: “the breeding of domestic animals is evolution by artificial selection” — No it isn’t. All domesticated dogs are still dogs. All domesticated cows are still cows. (you know what I mean, they’re still the same species).

But dogs are no longer wolves, and cattle are no longer aurochs.

Sure, they are all still dogs, but they are different varieties of dogs. If selection is continued, there is no barrier to those different varieties eventually becoming distinct species. In fact, the huge variety of different breeds of dog is an illustration of how plastic nature is.

And, although you find debating creationists boring, you seem to use some of the same arguments. The “but they are still just dogs” argument could be straight from AiG.

Neil: “As Mark and Nigel say, that evolution occurs is a fact and an observation. Our explanation of how it occurs is a theory. Please learn the difference.” —- When I look at those two sentences I see that the same word, “evolution”, is in both. To the best of my knowledge I have never seen a theory so how can I see evolution?

Evolution is three things: a fact, a theory and a history.

If you dispute that the same word can mean different things, I suggest you look up “set” in the Oxford English Dictionary (128 separate definitions last time I checked).

Evolution is a fact – living things change over time. This has been observed many times. In bacteria (such as the experiment to which I alluded earlier), in humans (e.g. our very-recently-acquired ability to metabolise lactose), in other animals (such as the peppered moths to which Neil referred), and in the fossil record.

The ToE explains how evolution occurs. It describes the mechanisms that make evolution happen, and it makes predictions about what we should expect to observe (such as drug-resistance in pathogenic bacteria and viruses, and pesticide-resistance in crop pests).

The evolutionary history of a lineage is what we attempt to reconstruct from fossil, genetic and other evidence. This depends on the fact of evolution, but neither the fact nor the theory depend on the history to be correct.

So, the simple observation of biological organisms changing (or having changed) over time is indeed an observation of evolution happening.

All that I can perceive, all that I could ever see, are brute facts. All I have available to me is data and from that I construct my theories *about* that data, but I cannot perceive my theories because they do not exist outside of me.

Well, this is true, but it is also irrelevant. Evolution is a fact that you can indeed observe should you go and look at the evidence. The “evolution is just a theory” argument could also have come straight from AiG.

When I drop a piece of chalk it does not think to itself “I must obey the law of gravity”. The law of gravity does not exist. It is just a description *of* the world and the things in it. Don’t mistake the map for the territory.

This also is true, but the fact is that in observing the fall of the chalk, we observe the fact of gravity’s existence. What gravity is and how it works are covered by the theory, but the fact of its existence is observable (within the constraints that Einstein described).

Nigel: “Actually, evolution has been observed, in a famous experiment (I forget the name of the PI) using bacteria cultured through many thousands of generations. The bacteria have been observed to have changed over time, and that is what Evolution means.” — No, evolution refers to the *theory* we created to account for that change.

As I note above, evolution referes to more than just the theory that explains how it happens.

It’s a good theory, it seems to work, but it could itself change. It is possible that in the future people will have a completely different theory. One that completely replaces previous theories the way that relativity replaced Newton.

This is possible, in principle. However, note that Newton’s theory of gravity turned out simply to be a special case of General Relativity. At low accelerations and in low-strength gravitational fields, Einstein’s equations give identical results to Newton’s. In the same way, if the current ToE is wrong, it is still a good approximation under the conditions that we have thus far observed.

Nigel: “And just because we cannot definitively state what gravity is or why it exists, does not mean we have not observed it.”

Just because we cannot definitively state what god is or why god exists, does not mean we have not observed god.

This is true, but irrelevant. We have observed gravity, and we have not observed god. In a slightly over-simplified view, gravity is the reading on a set of scales when one weighs something.

Ok. I was wrong. I misunderstood.

But if someone wants credit in a Science class they better know that the Earth going around the Sun (incl. how and why) is part of scientific knowledge.