Breaking News from the Academy: There’s Plenty of Time for Evolution! — January 14th, 2011 by Douglas Axe
If you search the current issues of professional science journals, I doubt you’ll find any papers titled “The Moon Orbits the Earth” or “Copper Conducts Electricity.” Assertions like these would work as section headings in an elementary science textbook, but no scientist would consider them newsworthy, for the simple reason that they aren’t.
Things are different in evolutionary biology, though. Here is a field that somehow never outgrew the need to reiterate its most basic tenets, as though its practitioners never had enough confidence in them to let them stand on their own two feet.
I think it has to do with evidence-envy. If someone were to claim not to believe in gravity or electricity, we could devise any number of ways to impress upon them the realities to which those words refer. No stern lecturing. No scolding. No indoctrinating. Just a simple demonstration followed by the words, “We call that electricity.” Even dogs and cows seem to get it. more…