From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Evolution is a fact.
Date: 4 Sep 92 19:27:33 GMT
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <Bu0891.26J@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> lamoran@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (L.A. Moran) writes:
|
|                    EVOLUTION AS A FACT AND A THEORY
|
|When non-biologists talk about evolution they often confuse two different
|aspects of the definition. ...
|
|Stephan J. Gould has put this as well as anyone else,
|	...
|
|      Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of 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. Darwin
|      continually emphasized the difference between his two great and
|      separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and
|      proposing a theory - natural selection - to explain the mechanism
|      of evolution."
|  
|      Stephen J. Gould "Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981

Indeed this point becomes especially clear when one looks closely at
the response of the scientific community to Darwin's book.

The *fact* of evolution was almost universally accepted by biologists within
a couple of decades of the publication of "Origins" (with a few odd hold-
outs like Agassiz).

Darwin's proposed mechanism was widely, and strongly, opposed by numerous
biologists right up intil the Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1940's.

Thus the acceptance of the two aspects was seperated by nearly 80 years.

|     "Since Darwin's time, massive additional evidence has accumulated
|      supporting the fact of evolution - that all living organisms present
|      on earth today have arisen from earlier forms in the course of
|      earth's long history. Indeed, all of modern biology is an affirmation
|      of this relatedness of the many species of living things and of
|      their gradual divergence from one another over the course of time.
|      Since the publication of The Origin of Species, the important 
|      question, scientifically speaking, about evollution has not been
|      whether it has taken place. That is no longer an issue among the 
|      vast majority of modern biologists. Today, the central and still
|      fascinating questions for biologists concern the mechanisms by
|      which evolution occurs."
|
|      Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, BIOLOGY 5th ed. 1989,
|      Worth Publishers, p.972

Excellent summary.  Even the Mutationists of the 20's and 30's were engaged
in depbating the *mechanism*, not the fact of evolution.

|       No biologist today
|      would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for 
|      evolution"; it simply has not been an issue for a century."
|
|                                  Douglas J. Futuyma, op. cit., p.15

I can just imagine the editor falling out of his chair with shock.
The very image of such a paper is absurd.

|We also need to distinguish between facts that are easy to demonstrate and
|those that are more circumstantial. Examples of evolution that are readily
|apparent include the fact that modern populations are evolving and the fact
|that two closely related species share a common ancestor. The evidence that
|Homo sapiens and chimpanzees share a recent common ancestor falls into this
|catagory. There is so much evidence in support of this aspect of primate
|evolution that it qualifies as a fact by any common definition of the word
|"fact".

Indeed, the only thing I have seen debated in regard to this in recent years
is whether that same common ancestor is also shared with the gorilla.
This is almost on the level nit-picking, since the two branch points could
not have differed by more than a million years or so.
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
Newsgroups: talk.origins,alt.atheism