Why Evolution Is True

by Jerry A. Coyne

Why then do we need a book that gives the evidence for a theory that long ago became part of mainstream science? After all, nobody writes books explaining the evidence for atoms, or for the germ theory of disease. What is so different about evolution?

Check out this quote.

You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion.

It’s like asking that shamanism be taught in medical school alongside Western medicine, or astrology be presented in psychology class as an alternative theory of human behavior.

It’s important to realize, though, that there’s a real difference in what you’d expect to see if organisms were consciously designed rather than if they evolved by natural selection. Natural selection is not a master engineer, but a tinkerer. It doesn’t produce the absolute perfection achievable by a designer starting from scratch, but merely the best it can do with what it has to work with.

It doesn’t seem so intelligent to design millions of species that are destined to go extinct, and then replace them with other, similar species, most of which will also vanish. ID supporters have never addressed this difficulty.)

Evolution is like an architect who cannot design a building from scratch, but must build every new structure by adapting a preexisting building, keeping the structure habitable all the while.

All vertebrates begin development looking like embryonic fish because we all descended from a fishlike ancestor with a fishlike embryo.

If a designer did have discernible motives when creating species, one of them must surely have been to fool biologists by making organisms look as though they evolved.

What it really says is that if we don’t understand everything about how natural selection built a trait, that lack of understanding itself is evidence for supernatural creation.

Remember that the currency of selection is not really survival, but successful reproduction.

The problem with this, as I mentioned before, is that it’s hard to split one gene pool in two while its members remain in the same area, because interbreeding between the diverging forms will constantly be pulling them back into a single species.

like other animals, we are contingent products of the blind and mindless process of natural selection.