Evolution as Fact and Theory
Stephen Jay Gould
Sirtley Mather, who died last year at age
ninety, was a pillar of both science and Christian religion in
According to idealized principles of scientific discourse,
the arousal of dormant issues should reflect fresh data that give renewed life
to abandoned notions. Those outside the current debate may therefore be excused
for suspecting that creationists have come up with something new, or that
evolutionists have generated some serious internal trouble. But nothing has changed;
the creationists have presented not a single new fact or argument. Darrow and
Bryan were at least more entertaining than we lesser antagonists today. The
rise of creationism Is politics, pure and simple; it
represents one issue (and by no means the major concern) of the resurgent
evangelical right. Arguments that seemed kooky just a decade ago have re-entered
the mainstream.
The basic attack of modem creationists falls apart on two
general counts before we even reach the supposed factual details of their
assault against evolution. First, they play upon a vernacular misunderstanding
of the word “theory” to convey the false impression that we evolutionists are
covering up the rotten core of our edifice. Second, they misuse a popular
philosophy of science to argue that they are behaving scientifically in attacking
evolution. Yet the same philosophy demonstrates that their
own belief is not science, and that “scientific creationism” is a
meaningless and self-contradictory phrase, an example of what Orwell called
“newspeak.”
In the American vernacular, “theory” often means “imperfect
fact - part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory
to hypothesis to guess. Thus creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is
“only” a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory.
If evolution is less than a fact, and scientists can’t even make up their minds
about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President
Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in
Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts
and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing
certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain
and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories
to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced
Moreover, “fact” does not mean “absolute certainty.” The
final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and
achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world.
Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do
(and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favour). In
science, “fact’ can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be
perverse to withhold provisional assent”
I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the
possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been clear about this distinction between
fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always
acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms
(theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred.
Thus
Scientists regard debates on fundamental issues of theory as
a sign of intellectual health and a source of excitement Science is - and how
else can I say it? - most fun when it plays with interesting ideas, examines
their implications, and recognizes that old information might be explained in
surprisingly new ways. Evolutionary theory is now enjoying this uncommon vigour.
Yet amidst all this turmoil no biologist has been lead to doubt the fact that
evolution occurred; we are debating how it happened. We are all trying to
explain the same thing: the tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms
by ties of genealogy. Creationists pervert and caricature this debate by
conveniently neglecting the common conviction that underlies it, and by falsely
suggesting that
- evolutionists now doubt the very phenomenon we are struggling to understand.
Secondly, creationists claim that “the dogma of separate
creations, as
The entire creationist program includes little more than a rhetorical
attempt to falsity evolution by presenting supposed contradictions among its
supporters. Their brand of creationism, they claim, is “scientific” because it
follows the Popperian model in trying to demolish
evolution. Yet Popper’s argument must apply in both directions. One does not
become a scientist by the simple act of trying to falsify a rival and truly
scientific system; one has to present an alternative system that also meets
Popper’s criterion - It too must be falsifiable in principle.
“Scientific creationism” is a self-contradictory, nonsense
phrase precisely because It cannot be falsified. I can
envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary
theory I know, but I cannot imagine what potential data could lead creationists
to abandon their beliefs. Unbeatable systems are dogma, not science. Lest I
seem harsh or rhetorical, I quote creationisms
leading intellectual, Duane Gish, Ph.D. from his recent (1978) book, Evolution?
The Fossils Say No! “By creation we mean the bringing into being by a
supernatural Creator of the basic kinds of plants and animals by the process of
sudden, or fiat, creation. We do not know how the Creator created, what process
He used, for He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the
natural universe. This is why we refer to creation as special creation. We
cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative
processes used by the Creator.” Pray tell, Dr. Gish, in the light of your last
sentence, what then is scientific creationism?
Our confidence that evolution occurred centres upon three
general arguments. First, we have abundant, direct, observational evidence of
evolution in action, from both the field and laboratory. This evidence ranges
from countless experiments on change in nearly everything about fruit flies
subjected to artificial selection in the laboratory to the famous populations
of British moths that became black when industrial soot darkened the trees upon
which the moths rest. (Moths gain protection from sharp-sighted bird predators
by blending into the background.) Creationists do not deny these observations;
how could they? Creationists have tightened their act. They now argue that God
only created “basic kinds,” and allowed for limited evolutionary meandering
within them. Thus toy poodles and Great Danes come from the dog kind and moths
can change colour, but nature cannot convert a dog to a cat or a monkey to a
man.
The second and third arguments for evolution - the case for
major changes - do not involve direct observation of evolution in action. They
rest upon inference, but are no less secure for that reason. Major evolutionary
change requires too much time for direct observation on the scale of recorded human
history. All historical sciences rest upon inference,
and evolution is no different from geology. cosmology,
or human history in this respect. In principle, we cannot observe processes
that operated In the past. We must infer them from
results that still surround us: living and fossil organisms for evolution,
documents and artefacts for human history, strata and topography for geology.
The second argument - that the imperfection of nature
reveals evolution - strikes many people as ironic, for they feel that evolution
should be most elegantly displayed in the nearly perfect adaptation expressed
by some organisms - the camber of a gull’s wing, or butterflies that cannot be
seen in ground litter because they mimic leaves so precisely. But perfection
could be Imposed by a wise creator or evolved by natural selection. Perfection
covers the tracks of past history. And past history - the evidence of descent -
is the mark of evolution.
Evolution lies exposed in the imperfections that record a
history of descent. Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, and I
type this essay with structures built of the same bones unless we all inherited
them from a common ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design
better limbs in each case. Why should all the large native mammals of
The third argument is more direct: transitions are often
found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common - and should
not be according to our understanding of evolution (see next section) but they
are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim. The tower jaw of
reptiles contains several bones, that of mammals only one. The non-mammalian
jawbones are reduced, step by step, in mammalian ancestors until they become
tiny nubbins located at the back of the jaw. The “hammer and anvil” bones of
the mammalian ear are descendants of these nubbins. How could
such a transition be accomplished, the creationists ask. Surely a bone
is either entirely in the jaw or in the ear. Yet palaeontologists have
discovered two transitional lineages of therapsids
(the so-called mammal- like reptiles) with a double jaw joint - one composed of
the old quadrate and articular bones (soon to become
the hammer and anvil), the other of the squamosal and
dentary bones (as in modem mammals). For that matter,
what better transitional form could we expect to find than the oldest human,
Australopithecus afarensis, with its apelike palate,
its human upright stance, and a cranial capacity larger than any ape’s of the
same body size but a full 1,000 cubic centimetres below ours? If God made each
of the half-dozen human species discovered in ancient rocks, why did he create
in an unbroken temporal sequence of progressively more modem features - increasing
cranial capacity, reduced face and teeth, larder body size? Did he create to
mimic evolution and test our faith thereby?
Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical
bankruptcy of their own position creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo
to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am - for
I have become a major target of these practices.
I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a
jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my
colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory
of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil
record - geologically “sudden” origin of new species and failure to change
thereafter (stasis) - reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the
imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated
populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes
thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of time, so long when
measured against our lives, is a geological microsecond. It represents much
less than 1 per cent of the average life-span for a fossil invertebrate species
- more than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species,
on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the
inertia of large populations explains the stasis of most fossil species over
millions of years.
We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to
provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record.
Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within
lineages, but must arise from the different success of certain kinds of
species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs
(punctuated by stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria
to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by
creationists - whether through design or stupidity, I do not know - as
admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional
forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between
larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled “Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a
Hoax” states: “The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge … are forcing Darwinists to swallow the picture
that
Continuing the distortion, several creationists have equated
the theory of punctuated equilibrium with a caricature of the beliefs of
Richard Goldschmidt, a great early geneticist. Goldschmidt argued, in a famous
book published in 1940, that new groups can arise all at once through major
mutations. He referred to these suddenly transformed creatures as “hopeful
monsters.” (I am attracted to some aspects of the non-caricatured version, but
Goldschmidt’s theory still has nothing to do with punctuated equilibrium - see
essays In section 3 and my explicit essay on Goldschmidt
In The Pandas Thumb.) Creationist Luther Sunderland talks of the “punctuated
equilibrium hopeful monster theory” and tells his hopeful readers that “it
amounts to tacit admission that anti-evolutionists are correct in asserting
there is no fossil evidence supporting the theory that all life is connected to
a common ancestor.” Duane Gish writes, “According to Goldschmidt, and now
apparently according to Gould, a reptile laid an egg from which the first bird,
feathers and all, was produced.” Any evolutionists who believed such nonsense
would rightly be laughed off the intellectual stage: yet the only theory that
could ever envision such a scenario for the origin of birds is creationism -
with God acting in the egg.
I am both angry at and amused by the creationists: but
mostly I am deeply sad. Sad for many reasons. Sad because so many people who respond to creationist appeals are
troubled for the right reason, but venting their anger at the wrong target.
It is true that scientists have often been dogmatic and elitist, It is true
that we have often allowed the white-coated, advertising image to represent us
– “Scientists say that Brand X cures bunions ten times faster than …” We have
not fought it adequately because we derive benefits from appearing as a new
priesthood. It is also true that faceless and bureaucratic state power intrudes
more and mote into our lives and removes choices that should belong to
individuals and communities. I can understand that school curricula, imposed
from above and without local input, might be seen as one more insult on all
these grounds. But the culprit is not, and cannot be, evolution or any other
fact of the natural world. Identify and fight our legitimate enemies by all means,
but we are not among them.
I am sad because the practical result of this brouhaha will
not be expanded coverage to include creationism (that would also make me sad),
but the reduction or excision of evolution from high school curricula.
Evolution is one of the half dozen “great ideas” developed by science. It
speaks to the profound Issues of genealogy that fascinate all of us - the
“roots” phenomenon writ large. Where did we come from? Where did life arise?
How did it develop? How are organisms related? It forces us to think, ponder,
and wonder. Shall we deprive millions of this knowledge and once again teach
biology as a set of dull and unconnected facts, without the thread that weaves
diverse material into a supple unity?
But most of all I am saddened by a trend I am just beginning
to discern among my colleagues. I sense that some now wish to mute the healthy
debate about theory that has brought new life to evolutionary biology. It
provides grist for creationist mills, they say, even if only by distortion.
Perhaps we should lie low and rally around the flag of
strict Darwinism, at least for the moment - a kind of old-time religion on our
part.
But we should borrow another metaphor and recognize that we
too have to tread a straight and narrow path, surrounded by roads to perdition.
For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our
own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a united front
where it does not and should not exist, then we are
truly lost.
Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory, May 1981;
from Hen’s Teeth end Horses Toes. New York W. W. Noiton
& Company. 1994, pp. 253-262.)