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Evolution: Mechanistic or More?
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12517 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
1,620 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
Most educators have long accepted as a fact that evolution proceeds as a consequence of selection and mechanistic mutation. We know that DNA, the genetic code, is compatible among all known biological beings. In some respects, the similarities between the genetic code of a bumblebee and a human are more striking than the differences. Thus, only a very dogmatic person would fail to se the continuity.
Creationists have long pointed to the gaps in the fossil record as evidence for divine intervention. On the other hand, the fossil record clearly shows that the less complex organisms appeared earlier in time. Thus, it makes more sense to believe that the fossil records is incomplete for reasons that are unknown but scientifically understandable than to believe that intermediate species never existed in the evolutionary chain.
I have been very careful to speak of reasonable belief rather than of proof. All knowledge is fallible. It is not impossible that the world was created roughly six thousand years ago and that our carbon-dating and other scientific techniques produce plausible but incorrect conclusions. But anyone who would assert the truth of this has left the court of reason, and if he uses evidence at all, uses it only to illustrate a belief based on religious conviction.
However, as the interview of the noted astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe in this issue of The World & I makes clear, the current accounts of evolution are unsatisfactory despite most scientists' dogmatic faith in them. The problem with the evolutionary theory is much deeper than the usual issue of whether evolution proceeds by slow stages or by jumps. The problem is that it is as difficult to believe the current mechanistic theories as it is to believe that the world was created six thousand years ago.
There are a number of hypotheses that support creationism, including the anthropic. I am not much impressed by the anthropic argument that small changes in the nature of the physical world would have made life impossible. In the first place, this is true only for life as we know it. There may be other forms of life in the universe so different from us that we have difficulty even conceiving of them. In the second place, if this is an argument for creationism, it suffers from a near-fatal defect. Why could not an omnipotent God have made a universe in which life was less sensitive to small changes in its character?
If one wants to argue that the
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