I am a theoretical physicist and currently Director of 
May 18, 2006
Why is evolutionary theory so upsetting to some?
(I will be traveling for a few weeks and rather than put this blog on hiatus, thought that I would continue with my weekday posting schedule by reposting some of the very early items, for those who might have missed them the first time around.)
One of the questions that sometimes occur to observers of the intelligent design (ID) controversy is why there is such hostility to evolutionary theory in particular. After all, if you are a Biblical literalist, you are pretty much guaranteed to find that the theories of any scientific discipline (physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, in addition to biology) contradict many of the things taught in the Bible.
So what is it about evolution in particular that gets some people's goat?
I had occasion to attend the annual program held by the ID advocates in Kansas a couple of years back, having been invited to be on a panel that was to debate the question of whether ID was a science. I took the opportunity to speak with a lot of the people who were attendees of the program about why they found evolution so offensive. The people I spoke to seemed to be almost all Biblical literalists.
It became clear very quickly that their main concern was that evolution by natural selection implied that human beings had no special status among living things. Natural selection implies that while human beings are quite impressive in the way they are put together, we did not have to be the way we are. Indeed, we did not have to be here at all.
To understand this concern better, here is a somewhat imperfect analogy to understand how natural selection works.
Think of starting out on a journey by car. At each intersection, we toss a coin and if it is heads, we turn left and if it is tails we turn right. After millions of tosses, we will have ended up somewhere, but it could have been anywhere. It might be San Francisco or it might be in the middle of a cornfield in Kansas. There is no special meaning that can be attached to the end point. We can try and reconstruct our journey starting from the end and working backwards to the beginning (which is what evolutionary biologists do) but the end point of our journey was not predetermined when we began.
The important point is that, according to natural selection we were not destined to end up as we did. The many small random genetic mutations that occurred over the years are the analog of the coin tosses, and the end point could have been something quite different.
For people who believe that humans are created in God's image, this is pretty tough to take because it is a steep drop in one's self-image. One day you are the apple of God's eye, the next you are the byproduct of random genetic mutations with no underlying plan at all. One can understand why this is so upsetting to those who want to feel that they are special and that their lives have a divine purpose.
Those who adhere to a belief structure labeled 'theistic evolution' strike a middle ground and argue that God created the laws of natural selection but guided the process by working within those laws. This is analogous to intervening only during some or all of the coin tosses to influence the way the coin landed. So what may appear to be random to us may not have been truly so.
Depending on how far one wants to take this, one can argue that God intervened at every coin toss or intervened only sparingly, say to prevent us doing something really stupid like driving off a cliff.
Yet other religious believers say that they are comfortable with God just creating the world and its randomly acting laws and then letting the chips fall where they may, by taking a completely hands off attitude and not intervening in any of the coin tosses.
Where one falls in this spectrum of beliefs depends on what one feels comfortable with. But it is clear that the fact that evolution by natural selection is not goal-directed is what bothers many religious people the most. They dislike the fact that according to the theory of evolution, all we can say is what we have evolved from, and that we cannot say that we are evolving towards anything.
POST SCRIPT: Lisa Simpson defends evolution
When the city of Springfield decrees that only creationism will be taught in schools, Lisa springs into action and gets arrested.
Comments
Evolution THEORY is upsetting to some when people try to present ET as fact. It is a theory, probably correct, but not scientific fact.
The real problem is that science and religion should work on totally different questions. Religion should ask, 'Why was life created and what do we do with it?' while science should ask, 'How was life created and how are we changing?'
Problems arise when one group tries to deal with the other groups issues.
For about 23 of my 27 years, including the years I spent at Case, I was a creationist and believed the bible was the literal word of God. What upset me was that evolution was incompatible with the doctrine of original sin, which I believed the bible advocated. In particular, death is a fundamental mechanism in evolution, so death must have preceeded humanity. However, death did not exist until humanity sinned. My somewhat self-consistent belief structure hinged on the concept of original sin, so I either had to reject evolution or seriously revise my beliefs. Though it is "only" a theory, there is an incredible amount of evidence in favor of evolution. I found it quite hard to argue against evolution in any rational way. If I accepted evolution though, how should I understand the bible? If it was not the literal word of God, what was it and how much of it was "true"? It seems to be much harder to change matters of faith than to reject a rational argument. Why are we that way? I eventually found a way to move ahead, but I had to reject the idea that any religious text is the literal word of God and accept the encouraging idea that we have so much we do not know.
If created beings, whether people or animals, developed according to that "coin toss" scheme, without any guiding controls, our resulting shapes would have been scary, at the very least. How would these random coins know where to attach the parts to the body? A foot may grow out of an arm, toes may be where the nose is now, and we might have kidneys where ears the are now.
Suppose a coin got the right eye in the right place and working OK. Who told it that another eye was needed on the other side of the face?
mac: I think you've misunderstood evolutionary theory. It doesn't describe biological development as a “"coin toss" scheme, without any guiding controls”, and biologists would agree with you that the development of species is not random. There is guidance, but that guidance is taken to be a natural process that we can investigate, rather than a personal, outside influence.
There are two important aspect to evolution to keep in mind: mutation and natural selection. Mutation is random, but natural selection is certainly not. Mutation could allow the development of beings with toes where the nose is now, or kidneys where the ears are now. But if these variations don't aid in survival and reproduction, then natural selection filters them out.
As for “Who told it that another eye was needed on the other side of the face?”: in some cases, another eye isn't needed on the other side. Some fish, for example, have two eyes both on the same side. Of all the variations that appeared over billions of years, the ones we see today are the ones that were advantageous enough, in survival and reproduction, to avoid extinction - and this result is different for species in different environments.
We can't really reject an idea we don't understand. So I hope now you are better able to reject the idea of evolution (and perhaps less certain of wanting to). :)