Is It Too Much To Ask That Reporters Understand Evolution?
Excerpt 1): “Most scientists believe Darwin got it right: Single-celled creatures evolved into complex ones, a process of natural selection and genetic adaptation that over eons turned a primordial swamp into shape-shifting cells, into ape-like primates, into people.”
My comment: Serious scientists know that Darwin was half right. His “conditions of life” are nutrient-dependent. He did not know that nutrients metabolize to species-specific pheromones that control the physiology of reproduction or he would have said “condiitions of life” are nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled, which is how ecological variation leads to ecological adaptations.
Excerpt 2): “Anyway, Stephanie Keep over at the National Center for Science Education offered a challenge to readers: Can you demonstrate that a basic definition of evolution can be both concise and correct?”
Why would anyone encourage that kind of pseudoscientific nonsense? Serious scientists don’t define their terms and invent theories. “[W]hat Haldane, Fisher, Sewell Wright, Hardy, Weinberg et al. did was invent…. The anglophone tradition was taught. I was taught, and so were my contemporaries, and so were the younger scientists. Evolution was defined as “changes in gene frequencies in natural populations.” The accumulation of genetic mutations was touted to be enough to change one species to another…. No, it wasn’t dishonesty. I think it was wish fulfillment and social momentum. Assumptions, made but not verified, were taught as fact.” — Replace the Modern Synthesis (Neo-Darwinism): An Interview With Denis Noble
Serious scientists learn about biologically-based cause and effect and link it across species via experimental evidence from model organisms.
