A: Evolution is just a theory. Big deal.
R: Quite the contrary. Evolution is a fact. It has been observed. It has been documented. It is happening. The theory of evolution that you're thinking of is that of evolution by natural selection.
A: Then natural selection (formally proposed by C. Darwin) is just a theory. If it could be proved, it would be a law...or other accepted fact.
R: Well, sorta. A theory is a hypothesis (an idea put into words) that can be tested and backed up, but never truly proved. As you may figure, this sort of idea would be difficult to reproduce and prove, by the nature of it.
A: Ha! You admit, it will never be proved, and I don't have to agree with it because it's just a theory.
R: Oh, that's your line of thinking? Well, we'll work with this idea then. How about gravity. I mean, the way it works out, it's just a theory. Let's disregard that on the basis that it's "just a theory." Most of Einstein's life work: gone...because it's just a theory. Ooh...atomic theory. There's a good one to look at. To all the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: get over the events of 1945. The bombs were, after all, "just a theory."
A: Yeah, but Darwin renounced his theory at the end of his life.
R: This argument is rendered ineffective in three ways. For one, it's horseshit. It's just a story. Click here for a more detailed explanation. Second, people change...and not always for the better. Teddy Roosevelt went a little loopy at the end of his life. Ronald Reagan has Alzheimer's disease. Would you listen to ol' Ronnie now? And finally, what would it matter, anyway, what he said later? He spent years showing that the theory was probably on target...but never showed that it wasn't, so a retraction would have been pointless.
A: You said that evolution exists, and describe micro-evolution (small mutations over a few generations). Okay, fine. But what about macro-evolution...slow, general shifts of one thing to something completely different? That isn't right.
R: Sorry, folks. You really can't pick and choose here. Yes, micro-evolution has been shown to exist, so, by default, macro-evolution has too. Here's a little analogy I like to use. When my family first got a computer, several years ago, it was a 286, with a 3½ in. and a 5¼ in. disk drive, monitor, keyboard, and trackball. That's it. The god-damned trackball was the first to go. We got a mouse. That was micro-evolution. We saw it. We can prove that. Soon, we upgraded to a 386. Again, micro-evolution. We put in a printer; micro-evolution. Over the years, up-grades included a CD-ROM, new monitor, new motherboard, another new mouse, scanner, 486 processor, new box, another new scanner (a flatbed, color one, this time), etc. These are all definite, documented cases of computer micro-evolution. However, at what point do you start considering it a new computer? You can't possibly consider it the same computer you started out with. For Pete's sake, the only thing original was the floppy disk drive. Through the small, proved cases of micro-evolution, macro-evolution occurred. Our computer evolved.
A: But none of this makes sense to me. Animals changing to something else? I don't get it. (This statement may sound like I'm patronizing those who don't agree with these ideas...and I am, a little...but I actually have had someone say this to me when we were discussing whether or not and how evolution occurs.)
R: Huh? Do you think this is a legitimate argument? Not hardly. I'm sorry if you don't understand the process, but do you always dismiss what you don't understand? I don't get trigonometry, quite often, but this does not mean I disregard what can be done when the ideas behind it are applied. What does your personal view or understanding of it have to do with the legitimacy of anything?
A: So, through the idea of natural selection and common ancestors, you're saying that I came from monkeys? See, I don't like that.
R: Well, I don't know your relatives, but generally, no, that's not exactly what we're saying. You came from your parents who came from their parents who came from their parents who came blah blah blah. What the masses quite often fail to understand is that a dog will never give birth to a cat. A bear will never give birth to an elephant, etc. This is not what evolution is. Those who dismiss evolution on this idea don't understand what evolution is. Over the span of millions of years, yes, our really really great great grandpa was a monkey-type-thing (not an actual monkey or ape or lemur, but close.) This bothers people? Are we really so conceited as a society to think that we can dispute the past because we think we are better than from hence we came? I've never seen a gorilla detonate a nuclear weapon. I've never heard of a chimp destroying miles of forest to turn a profit. I can't think of an instance when a lemur has tortured and murdered thousands for not being the right religion. Is it really so bad for us to think that we came from a more humane species than humans?
A: If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
R: I think I'm going to cry. This is an old joke, and wasn't really funny when it was created. However, what it shows others is that the person asking the question has a complete ignorance of what the common ancestor idea is. Our having a common ancestor does not mean that the common ancestor was an orang-utan (Pongo pygmaeus) or something like that, but something that is now extinct. From my experiences, I've found that many people think that a chimpanzee gave birth to a human and then continued on giving birth to chimpanzees. Uh-uh. Not really. It didn't look like this:
The idea of having a common ancestor fits in with the ideas of divergent evolution. If a species spreads out into new areas, then they will adapt to their new area (through natural selection...see, the whole evolution thing fits together). As time goes by, each group will become more and more different, until they are no longer the same species. Ta-da! Divergent evolution, roughly shown below.
This is how it works. It is through these ideas that scientists think that dinosaurs may have eventually evolved into birds. (Where else, they say, could the archeopteryx have come from?)
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