Evolution isn't merely a theory: It's a fully developed science

March 13, 2005

This article was published in the Chicago Tribune on March 13.

By: Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis
Professor Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis teaches the history of science in the departments of zoology and history at the University of Florida.

Ernst Mayr, the world renowned evolutionary biologist who died recently at the age of 100, spent most of the 20th Century studying and promoting Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. But if you've followed American media in recent months, you might think Mayr and his colleagues were failures, and that evolutionary theory is suspect, full of holes in evidence and logic, and kind of a religion of its own.

Despite its--and other--scientific advances in the 20th Century, evolution is under assault in America. People with thinly disguised religious and political agendas are demanding that alternative "theories" with euphemistic names such as "creation science" and "intelligent design" be given the same or greater weight than evolution in our textbooks and classrooms.

But thanks to people like Mayr, there is a big difference between these theories and the theory of evolution. That difference is science. Mayr took Darwin's abstract theory of evolution and turned it into the science of evolutionary biology.

During his nine-decade career, Mayr wrote or edited 20 books and more than 600 journal articles, yet that was just a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of papers and books that have been written detailing experimental and observational studies supporting evolution. Through studies of diverse organisms ranging from viruses to plants and animals to humans, Mayr and others helped evolution itself evolve from its early incarnation as an incomplete and abstract theory into a rigorous science drawing on genetic principles, mathematical tools and some of the most sophisticated experimental methods known to modern science.

Conversely, proponents of alternative theories such as intelligent design cannot produce a single testable, repeatable experiment to support their position. They want us to take it on faith. They argue that some things in nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher being and that there is some greater purpose in the universe.

Pre-Darwin religion

They're especially fond of tired examples and arguing from analogy--the old "watch must have a watchmaker" kind of fuzzy logic familiar to 18th and 19th Century minds. That doesn't sound like science to me; it sounds like religion before the age of Darwin. And here's the irony: While they would like you to believe that their arguments have the support of current mainstream religions, they do not.

Scores of religious leaders, including Pope John Paul II, have in fact affirmed the validity of evolutionary science.

But that hasn't stopped proponents of this latest creationist fad from gaining a foothold in American education and popular culture.

In Dover, Pa., the school board became the first in the country to require the teaching of intelligent design. In suburban Atlanta, a school district required that stickers be placed in all biology textbooks stating that evolution was a theory and not a fact. In Kentucky, a museum devoted exclusively to "creation science" is in the works. In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education removed evolution from its central place in the teaching of biology, but restored it in 2001.

The truth is that evolution is a scientific explanation for the origin of biological diversity in the natural world; it also happens to be the best explanation we've got if we want to uphold any scientific understanding of the world at all.

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution," Mayr's friend and colleague Theodosius Dobzhansky once famously declared. Evolutionary understanding has spread to virtually all scientific disciplines.

The success of evolution has been due to its synthetic and integrative power.

It has even become an applied science, embraced enthusiastically by medicine, agriculture, conservation science, even computing and engineering sciences. From understanding the evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, to comprehending the reasons for emerging viruses, evolutionary understanding is essential to modern science and its applications.

In turn, scientists from these diverse fields are enriching the study of evolution with their own knowledge and expertise. We can thus, with confidence, speak of not just evolutionary theory and evolutionary biology, but evolutionary science--with the full weight of that mighty last word.

Mayr recognized all that some time ago.

Way back in 1959, and exactly 100 years after the publication of Darwin's book, "On the Origin of Species," he was one of the key participants at the University of Chicago's Darwin Centennial. A font of evolutionary study, the university attracted thousands of international dignitaries to the event--all representing the diversity of interests unified by the new science.

It also included distinguished theologians and humanists, along with high school teachers, all of whom embraced the new science. It was so successful that evangelical fundamentalists in the area had a panic attack. They and others immediately countered with their own made-up "alternative" that came to be known as "creation science." They've since made their careers doing nothing to gain us any understanding of the natural world, but doing lots to confuse the public about the legitimacy of evolution as a science.

Mayr made his own career out of defending and promoting evolutionary biology against these and other subsequent assaults. Of all the scientific figures of the 20th Century, he came closest to filling Darwin's shoes. He was indeed the "Darwin of the Twentieth Century."

Fighting to the end

Whether it was garden-variety scientific adversaries, misguided scientists searching for ET, or the same old die-hard religious fundamentalists, Mayr never turned down the challenge to fight the good fight. "I'm an old-time fighter for Darwinism," he once told the Harvard Gazette. And he fought to the very end.

In his later years, Ernst Mayr was a frequent visitor to the University of Florida; he enjoyed visiting with me and other friends, but what he really liked most was sharing his understanding of evolution with a new generation of students.

He never gave up the opportunity to visit a class. Those of us who knew him, and all of us who value science--indeed knowledge--owe it to Mayr and to the history of science to continue that fight.