BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION

Now, biological evolution, which is largely what we are going to talk about today, is a particular kind of change through time.

EVOLUTION = CHANGE NO CHANGE = CREATIONISM

The big ideas here are that living things are related through common ancestry, and that living things have changed since they shared that common ancestry. Now, I want you to think about something else. What is the opposite of change through time? Well, if evolution equals change through time, no change is really what is meant by Creationism. That the universe does not change through time and that in fact it has been the same since it came into existence. Creationists look at God having created the universe and everything in it in essentially its present form with little change having happened since that creation event. According to some, this creation event was about six thousand years ago, the Young Earth Creationists. But, other, Old Earth Creationists feel that this took place over millions of years in a series of separate creations. The main idea of Creationism is that animals and plants did not descend with modification from earlier ancestors. So snakes and lizards didn't have a common ancestor--God created the snake separately. Sort of like this Gary Larson cartoon where God created the snakes and everything else separately. I want you to consider that this is the real difference between creation and evolution. It's the idea "Did things change?" or "Did they all appear in their present form with no change?" That is the real difference between creation and evolution.

It is not a matter of causation. If there is an omnipotent God, which most Americans believe, it can create any way it wants to, either everything in its present form, or gradually through time. Some people who call themselves Creationists, believe God created, but that he did so through evolution. Actually, they shouldn't use the term "Creationist" because that is very confusing. In theology the term for this is really "Theistic Evolution."

This Frank and Ernest cartoon, I think illustrates theistic evolution quite well. "I am tired of making decisions, let's just go with natural selection."

A rather more subtle version of this in fact is this one. "Instead of starting from scratch, why don't we just use modified chimp DNA?" But it's clear that many teachers run into opposition when they teach evolution. People don't understand what evolution is and why it's so important to biology, why it can't be left out. So when we decided to do evolution as the first Bioforum topic, we considered "What are some cutting edge areas in evolution that teachers need to know about?", and not incidentally, "What are the topics that teachers are most often challenged on by people who don't want them to teach evolution?" And, by golly, coincidentally, they were the same topics.

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