Objections to evolution
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution initially met opposition from scientists with different theories, but eventually came to receive near-universal acceptance in the scientific community. The observation of evolutionary processes occurring has been uncontroversial among mainstream biologists since the 1940s.
Since then, criticisms and denials of evolution have come from religious groups, rather than from the scientific community. Although many religious groups have found reconciliation of their beliefs with evolution, such as through theistic evolution, other religious groups continue to reject evolutionary explanations in favor of creationism, the belief that the universe and life were created by supernatural forces. The U.S.-centered creation–evolution controversy has become a focal point of perceived conflict between religion and science.
Several branches of creationism, including creation science, neo-creationism, geocentric creationism and intelligent design, argue that the idea of life being directly designed by a god or intelligence is at least as scientific as evolutionary theory, and should therefore be taught in public education. Such arguments against evolution have become widespread and include objections to evolution's evidence, methodology, plausibility, morality, and scientific acceptance. The scientific community does not recognize such objections as valid, pointing to detractors' misinterpretations of such things as the scientific method, evidence, and basic physical laws.
History
Evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the early 19th century with the theory of the transmutation of species put forward by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. At first the scientific community – and notably Georges Cuvier – opposed the idea of evolution. The idea that laws control nature and society gained vast popular audiences with George Combe's The Constitution of Man of 1828 and with the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, he convinced most of the scientific community that new species arise through descent through modification in a branching pattern of divergence from common ancestors, but while most scientists accepted natural selection as a valid and empirically testable hypothesis, Darwin's view of it as the primary mechanism of evolution was rejected by some.Darwin's contemporaries eventually came to accept the transmutation of species based upon fossil evidence, and the X Club formed to defend the concept of evolution against opposition from the church and wealthy amateurs. At that time the specific evolutionary mechanism which Darwin provided – natural selection – was actively disputed by scientists in favour of alternative theories such as Lamarckism and orthogenesis. Darwin's gradualistic account was also opposed by the ideas of saltationism and catastrophism. Lord Kelvin led scientific opposition to gradualism on the basis of his thermodynamic calculations for the age of the Earth at between 24 and 400 million years, and his views favoured a version of theistic evolution accelerated by divine guidance. Geological estimates disputed Kelvin's age of the earth, and the geological approach gained strength in 1907 when radioactive dating of rocks revealed the Earth as billions of years old. The specific hereditary mechanism which Darwin hypothesized, pangenesis, which supported gradualism, also lacked any supporting evidence and was disputed by the empirical tests of Francis Galton. Although evolution itself was scientifically unchallenged, uncertainties about the mechanism in the era of "the eclipse of Darwinism" persisted from the 1880s until the 1930s' inclusion of Mendelian inheritance and the rise of the modern evolutionary synthesis. The modern synthesis rose to universal acceptance among biologists with the help of new evidence, such as that from genetics, which confirmed Darwin's predictions and refuted the competing hypotheses.
Protestantism, especially in America, broke out in "acrid polemics" and argument about evolution from 1860 to the 1870s—with the turning point possibly marked by the death of Louis Agassiz in 1873—and by 1880 a form of "Christian evolution" was becoming the consensus. In Britain, while publication of The Descent of Man by Darwin in 1871 reinvigorated debate from the previous decade, Sir Henry Chadwick notes a steady acceptance of evolution "among more educated Christians" between 1860 and 1885. As a result, evolutionary theory was "both permissible and respectable" by 1876. Frederick Temple's lectures on The Relations between Religion and Science on how evolution was not "antagonistic" to religion highlighted this trend. Temple's appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896 demonstrated the broad acceptance of evolution within the church hierarchy.
For decades the Roman Catholic Church avoided officially rejecting evolution. However, the Church would rein in Catholics who proposed that evolution could be reconciled with the Bible, as this conflicted with the First Vatican Council's finding that everything was created out of nothing by God, and to deny that finding could lead to excommunication. In 1950 the encyclical Humani generis of Pope Pius XII first mentioned evolution directly and officially. It allowed one to enquire into the concept of humans coming from pre-existing living matter, but not to question Adam and Eve or the creation of the soul. In 1996 Pope John Paul II labelled evolution "more than a hypothesis" and acknowledged the large body of work accumulated in its support, but reiterated that any attempt to give a material explanation of the human soul is "incompatible with the truth about man". Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 reiterated the conviction that human beings "are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary." At the same time, Pope Benedict promoted the study of the relationship between the concepts of creation and evolution, based on the conviction that there cannot be a contradiction between faith and reason. Along these lines, the research project "Thomistic Evolution", run by a team of Dominican scholars, endeavours to reconcile the scientific evidence on evolution with the teaching of Thomas Aquinas.
Islamic views on evolution ranged from those believing in literal creation to many educated Muslims who subscribed to a version of theistic or guided evolution in which the Quran reinforced rather than contradicted mainstream science. This occurred relatively early, as medieval madrasas taught the ideas of Al-Jahiz, a Muslim scholar from the 9th century, who proposed concepts similar to natural selection. However, acceptance of evolution remains low in the Muslim world, as prominent figures reject evolution's underpinning philosophy of materialism as unsound to human origins and a denial of Allah. Further objections by Muslim authors and writers largely reflect those put forward in the Western world.
Regardless of acceptance from major religious hierarchies, early religious objections to Darwin's theory continue in use in opposition to evolution. The idea that species change over time through natural processes and that different species share common ancestors seemed to contradict the Genesis account of Creation. Believers in Biblical infallibility attacked Darwinism as heretical. The natural theology of the early-19th century was typified by William Paley's 1802 version of the watchmaker analogy, an argument from design still deployed by the creationist movement. Natural theology included a range of ideas and arguments from the outset, and when Darwin's theory was published, ideas of theistic evolution were presented in which evolution is accepted as a secondary cause open to scientific investigation, while still holding belief in God as a first cause with a non-specified role in guiding evolution and creating humans. This position has been adopted by denominations of Christianity and Judaism in line with modernist theology which views the Bible and Torah as allegorical, thus removing the conflict between evolution and religion.
However, in the 1920s Christian fundamentalists in the United States developed their literalist arguments against modernist theology into opposition to the teaching of evolution, with fears that Darwinism had led to German militarism and posed a threat to religion and morality. This opposition developed into the creation–evolution controversy, involving Christian literalists in the United States objecting to the teaching of evolution in public schools. Although early objectors dismissed evolution as contradicting their interpretation of the Bible, this argument was legally invalidated when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968 that forbidding the teaching of evolution on religious grounds violated the Establishment Clause.
Since then creationists have developed more nuanced objections to evolution, alleging variously that it is unscientific, infringes on creationists' religious freedoms, or that the acceptance of evolution is a religious stance. Creationists have appealed to democratic principles of fairness, arguing that evolution is controversial and that science classrooms should therefore "Teach the Controversy". These objections to evolution culminated in the intelligent-design movement in the 1990s and early 2000s that unsuccessfully attempted to present itself as a scientific alternative to evolution.
Defining evolution
A major source of confusion and ambiguity in any creation–evolution debate arises from the definition of evolution itself. In the context of biology, evolution is genetic changes in populations of organisms over successive generations. The word also has a number of different meanings in different fields, from evolutionary computation to molecular evolution to sociocultural evolution to stellar and galactic evolution.Evolution in colloquial contexts can refer to any sort of "progressive" development or gradual improvement, and a process that results in greater quality or complexity. When misapplied to biological evolution this common meaning can lead to frequent misunderstandings. For example, the idea of devolution is a result of erroneously assuming that evolution is directional or has a specific goal in mind. In reality, the evolution of a biological organism has no "objective" and is only showing increasing ability of successive generations to survive and reproduce in their environment; and increased suitability is only defined in relation to this environment. Biologists do not regard any one species as more highly evolved or advanced than another. Certain sources have been criticized for indicating otherwise due to a tendency to evaluate nonhuman organisms according to anthropocentric standards rather than according to more objective ones.
Evolution also does not require that organisms become more complex. Although the biological development of different forms of life shows an apparent trend towards the evolution of biological complexity, there is a question as to whether this appearance of increased complexity is real, or whether it comes from neglecting the fact that the majority of life on Earth has always consisted of prokaryotes. In this view, complexity is not a necessary consequence of evolution, but specific circumstances of evolution on Earth frequently made greater complexity advantageous and thus naturally selected for. Depending on the situation, organisms' complexity can either increase, decrease, or stay the same, and all three of these trends have been observed in studies of evolution.
Creationist sources frequently define evolution according to a colloquial, rather than the scientific meaning. As a result, many attempts to rebut evolution do not address the findings of evolutionary biology. This also means that advocates of creationism and evolutionary biologists often simply speak past each other.