Is evolution "accepted science"?

Question

I posted a question in the religious section about why Christians are allowed to sit out of the section on evolution in my 10th grade biology class when it's accepted science, and a lot of people said it's not.

I thought it was, and it's just the Christians who don't believe it. Are there non-Christians who don't believe in evolution? Is it widely accepted as sceince?

Answer 1

It is widely accepted as science. The *vast* majority of scientists believe in evolution.
Remember, however, that science is not "truth". Any scientific theory must be able to be challenged and overturned in the face of contradictory evidence. This has not happened for evolution yet.

There are some (Christian) scientists who try to put forward alternatives, such as Intelligent Design. This theory is *not* science. And people of other religions, like muslims for example, also have a problem with evolution. So it is not limited to Christians.
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Edit (in response to the Rev. Albert Einstein above):

Evolution is *not* a belief system. It is a scientific theory that can be tested, and that makes predictions. Religious dogma *is* a belief system, and is not science!

And he has missed the point entirely about what "theory" means to scientists. For example, gravity is a fact - matter is attracted to other matter; there are a number of *theories* about *how* that happens, but the basic observation is still factual, and still stands.
The "Theory" is used in science to explain observations, and evolution has been observed, and does happen.
For example, the emergence of antibiotic resistance traits in bacteria.

And he is mis-quoting Stephen Jay Gould. A common technique among anti-evolutionists is to mis-quote pro-evolutionists, and make it sound like they are against evolution.
Gould developed the idea of "punctuated equilibria" in evolution, which puts forwards that you might have periods of history where relatively little evolution is taking place, and then you have another (shorter) period where rapid evolution occurs. For example, if a global disaster makes 70% of all species of life on earth extinct, then the ones remaining will evolve rapidly to fill the opportunities left behind when the others died off. This is one explanation for the relatively low number of "transitional forms"; you might only find them in relatively short periods of history.

Another inconvenient fact that he is failing to mention is that you *do* get "transitional forms" (fossils of creatures "halfway" between one type of organism and another). Like the archaeopteryx, for example - which has reptile-like features, and bird-like features.
The likely reason you don't get more of them is because of the rarity of the conditions that allow fossilisation. The vast majority of organisms that die are *not* fossilised, so we only have snapshots to construct our picture from. For most rational people, these are more than enough.

Answer 2

Evolution is absolutely accepted science. It is taught is every high school, college, and university world wide. Christianity is about the only religion that has a problem with it. The Pope has no problem with it. Evolution has been around for 150+ years and the evidence only grows stronger every year. Some people just choose ignorance. Evolution DOES NOT make any inference about the existence or non-existence of a higher power. Any higher being or whatever is not science and thus does not belong in a science class. Good luck in your biology education. Do yourself a favor and keep an open mind and educate yourself and make your own decisions. Many christians choose to keep a closed mind and ignore the obvious, that is their choice. Don't choose ignorance.

Answer 3

> why Christians are allowed to sit out of the section on evolution in my 10th grade biology class
That would be politics, m'dear. Your school board is either a a bunch of fundies or a bunch of spineless gits. Guess what? Adults can be poopoo-heads. I hope this isn't the first time you've heard that.

On the plus side, you can probably sit out the frog dissection too.

> Is it widely accepted as sceince?
Yes, the theory of evolution is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community.

Answer 4

I think it is shocking that just because someone's parents believe in a particular creation myth, that their children have to suffer and miss out on one of the greatest ideas in human history. Why stop there? I bet they are already excused from learning about human reproduction. Why not skip germ theory for the Jehovah's Witnesses? If someone says that their religion tells them that the world is a giant plate on the back of elephants standing on an infinite stack of turtles, let's excuse them from learning earth sciences.

If your teacher is successful, you will learn more than just facts. You will learn that the true power of science is that it is the best way to figure out how things work. It is a method of thinking used to bring together observations, make testable hypothesis, and then experimentally test the predictions of the hypothesis.

Evolution is a fact. It is something that is observed. Just as if you were to drop a ball, you would see it fall. You can measure how quickly it falls. You can use many such observations to find a pattern of how long it takes for something to fall different distances. Using that pattern, you can make predictions of how something will fall under different conditions.

Evolution is a fact because it is simply, the change in relative amount of pieces of DNA found in a population over generations. Here is an example. Say that there are a set of genes that makes someone more likely to be extremely religious. These people will make bonds with people of similar beliefs and they will usually have more children than people who do not believe in creation myths. The next generation will have a higher fraction of people who are religious compared to the fraction of people who accept science because children learn the religion of the parents and they are denied a proper science education as some of these parents believe that ignorance is better than thinking. That change in the fraction of the population that has a certain set of genes, is evolution. It is easy to measure.

You have the observation, that the pool of genes in a population changes with each new generation. What science does next is to figure out why this change happens. What drives evolution? You make a hypothesis. You then have to test the hypothesis. The explanation of why evolution happens, accepted by essentially all scientists, is the theory of evolution by Natural Selection. This theory not only explains what we observe, it makes predictions. The predictions of the theory have been tested and are still being tested. There are no observations that do not agree with the theory. Yet. Here is another example of how science differs from religion. If someone were to show by experiment, evidence that conflicts with the predictions of the theory, that would be a tremendously exciting discovery. Scientists will have to come up with a new and better explanation. On the other hand, the religious do not take well to disagreement with their dogma. Reactions range from denial, ostracism, to even genocide.

Answer 5

With the evidence that we have, it is the most reasonable scientific explanation for the origin of species. Admittedly, there are problems with trying to determine what happened millions of years ago - fossilization isn't exactly a highly likely and homogeneous process that shows us all animals that ever lived - but no other rational explanation has its support.
That those students can sit out of the class is very sad. You should always hear out people you disagree with, otherwise you can't say you understand their viewpoint well enough to disagree with them validly!


From adopted:
"The Giraffe, they say kept trying to reach up and get an apple from a tree and would die and then the next until its neck was long enough. Lets face it, if I pull on my thumb and do that my whole life, and then have a kid, his thumb isn't going to be longer!!!!"

This is exactly the kind of problem I am talking about! Evolution says that the taller giraffes survived better because they had access to more food, and as a result had more children increasing the share of the population that was tall, until it became the dominant trait. It has nothing to do with stretching necks up, or dying because food isn't reached, and certainly has nothing in common with your thumb analogy.

Answer 6

Only certain groups of fundamentalist Christians disagree with evolution. The objection occurs because the book of genesis recounts God's creation which is obviously different from what science tells us about how current organisms came to be. The belief that life was created by God as told in genesis is called creationism another term which is slightly different but still contains the same ideas is intelligent design.

Now that I have explained why people object let me say that evolution is science, and is in fact one of the most well substantiated theories in science. It is as close to fact as a theory can come in science. It is accepted by all biologists except a few fundamentalist Christian scientists.

The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, people who reject evolution do not object to the evidence as they can not disprove it. They reject it based solely on not being able to reconcile evolution and genesis. Creationism can not offer any evidence to prove its ideas, and its theories are not falsifiable therefore creationism is not science, it is a deliberate stance of ignorance to the facts.

Answer 7

In science, when a concept is denoted a theory, that means it has already underwent intense scrutinizing and it can be accepted as the best possible solution at this time. AS far as Xians are concerned, the Vatican has already issued statements saying effectively that evolution and religion are not mutually exclusive. So those that still don't "believe" in evolution are even more backward than an institution that waited until that late 1970's to acknowledge that the Sun is in the center of our solar system. (Another Theory)

Answer 8

Well secretsauce pretty much said it all. And as usual there is a pack of misrepresentations to lies by a couple of head in the sand anti-sciencers who deliberately just have no clue.

Such claims can always be checked in the link below... most galling, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of transitional fossil species. I see them nearly every day.

Virtually all scientists in my and other relevant fields to evolution, accept evolution. The only ones I have ever heard of who don't are Fundamentalist Christians / Muslims first, scientists second. And most of them are honest enough to say that they reject it based on religious faith, and have no scientific reason to.

Answer 9

Just to add to the others: scientists stopped debating evolution more than 100 years ago. also, the US is on of the only countries that has people questioning whether or not it's real. finally, the science behind evolution permeates many other branches of science including medical research. Drug design relies heavily on the premises of evolution. I people really knew the impact of it on their health, they probably wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

Answer 10

Go Gribblin!

All three Abrahamic fundamentalists believe in Genesis. The Hindu version of creation is 100% ccompatible with the big bang/expanding and contracting universe theory. So, no ,other hard line religious people don't believe in evolution, even though you can see it taking place within human history, and even a human lifespan with the London underground mosquitoes.