The Non-Law of Evolution
The tension in the room was obvious to everyone, and I was aware of my neck and back muscles tensing. "Evolution is a fact. A law!" Rusty Swingset had raised his voice considerably. He punctuated his exclamation by slamming his fist on the table. The teaspoons rattled in our empty cups.
Many believers in descent-with-modifications evolution emphatically agree. Some say scientists know that evolution is a fact, but they are still hashing out the details. Indeed, to say that evolution is a law seems excessive, but the claim was even used in a paper in Academia Biology.
Hollow log in forest, Unsplash / Cowboy Bob Sorensen (modified) |
“Evolution by natural selection is a scientific law and not just a theory.” No, this quote wasn’t lifted from an atheist blog or a Reddit rant. It’s not from an angry Facebook outburst either. Instead, it was the title of a recent academic paper.And, no, the authors weren’t conceding that evolution is just a theory in the popular sense. They gave no evidence of ever thinking that evolution is just a hypothesis or a guess. Rather, they used theory in the strict scientific sense—that evolution is supported by a wide body of evidence:
To see where this is going, mount up and ride over to "Evolution Is a Scientific Law?"