Explanations for Common Misunderstandings About Evolution

Evolution is a heady concept to consider, so it is understandable that some people may not have the entire story in their mind when they start to think about it and hash it out. Many religions dismiss evolution outright, but they do so based on the fact that it contradicts their teachings, not because there is no evidence. On the contrary, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, which leaves those religions with two courses of action: either acknowledge evolution, but give it a religious justification or discredit it. In the wake of this reasoning, I've seen many people refute evolution with various fallacies or even misattribute it based off of faulty knowledge. These misunderstandings don't come just from the religious individuals, but also from the insufficiently educated ones. Here are some common misunderstandings that I've heard, along with explanations for the truth.

1. Evolution is "just a theory."
One must first make the distinction between evolution and the Theory of Evolution. Evolution is real; this much cannot be disputed. It is a fact that only the most willfully ignorant can deny. The Theory of Evolution is a set of scientific observations that describe how evolution actually works. The difference between these two is similar to gravity and the Theory of Gravity. We know that gravity exists; to deny it transcends idiocy. The Theory of Gravity explains how gravity actually works by citing physical laws and scientific evidence. In science, a theory is an explanatory statement that fits the evidence that exists and is real. So, to say that evolution is "just a theory" is like starving to death because your orange juice carton told you to "concentrate." If you use it as an argument, you're basically trying to use semantics that you don't even understand in the first place.

2. Evolution is "survival of the fittest."
There are many things wrong with this idea. First, it is a huge misnomer when applied to evolution because "on a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." (Chuck Palahniuk) In fact, I wince every time someone mentions the Darwin Awards. Evolution is simply the "change in the genetic material of a population of organisms through successive generations." (Wikipedia) Even if you look at evolution through the scope of some cosmic competition, it is the most adaptive species to the challenge-du-jour that continue evolving, not the strongest, fittest, or smartest. One would hesitate to call cockroaches any of those adjectives, yet we can easily see them surviving simply through their adaptability. And even then, they wont be around millions of years from now; they'll have evolved into something else.

3. Species evolve for specific purposes.
To assume that a species evolved in a certain direction is to insinuate that there is a guiding meta-intelligence that oversees the process. Evolution is not guided by any intelligence, but its randomness is hidden by history, so it appears to be systematic and intentional. If you've heard the expression describing a bunch of monkeys on typewriters eventually coming up with Shakespeare, evolution works in pretty much the same way, except all the unfit manuscripts have been thrown out and we only end up seeing the ones that add up to Hamlet and King Lear. Given the evidence we're able to see, we would be lead to believe that monkeys ONLY produce Shakespeare. We must remember that there have been many species that existed on this planet for which we have absolutely no evidence of. If they existed for a reason, why are they gone without a trace? All one needs to do is observe the chaos involved in mammal egg fertilization to realize the amount of randomness involved in nature. Millions of sperm thrown at a single egg and only one gets in. Think of those odds. On one hand, it is a one-in-300-million chance. On the other hand, it was inevitable that at least one succeeded.

4. "If we evolved from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist?"
We did not evolve from "monkeys," rather, we share a common primate ancestor with the monkeys of today. We both evolved from the same now-extinct animal. Through a process called speciation , this ancestor evolved into different variations of itself; it branched. One branch became gorillas and other exotic monkeys while another branch became another type of primate, one that eventually speciated further into chimps, bonobos and humans.

5. Charles Darwin discovered evolution.
The idea of evolution was not original when Darwin published The Origin of Species. A few biologists before him had already come up with similar theories, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who conjectured that all species are descended from common ancestors. Alfred Russel Wallace also contributed a lot to Darwin's ideas, providing theories to correlate the ones that Darwin already held. As is often the case in academia, it is usually the author who takes the ideas of those before him and correlates them into a concise theory who gets the credit for the discovery. People think that if the idea came from a single source, then discrediting that source is the key to unraveling the whole theory, but you cannot do that in academia. Evidence comes from many different places, which is exactly what makes it evidence in the first place.

6. There is a "missing link" that ties mammals to reptiles.
Creationists like to hold on to this point as one that supposedly cripples the notion of evolution being true. However, this is essentially the same argument as the monkey one. Challengers use a half-cocked understanding of the evolutionary process to pose a question that can simply be answered with, "That's not how evolution works." Instead of looking for a point where mammals evolved from reptiles, one should be looking for a common ancestor that existed before either family was speciated . Also keep in mind that just because fossils exist doesn't mean that every organism that ever existed has left evidence that survived the hundreds of millions of years it took for us to discover it. There is, however, evidence of our shared ancestry within our embryonic stages during gestation. Mammals and reptiles share similar embryonic forms before they go on to develop class-specific features.

7. Life cannot come from non-life.
One of the most compelling scientific theories (that happens to be extremely poignant) to emerge over the last 60 years helps to explain the basics of how life came about: the chaos theory. I'll take a stab at it in a few sentences. The amount of randomness in the world is staggering if you know how to look for it. No two waves in the ocean are ever the same, nor are any two ripples in a pond, nor any two splashes in a puddle. If you rack up billiard balls and strike the first with a cue, it is possible to predict how the first will move, then as it crashes into the second, it is fairly likely you can predict how that one will go as well. However, the further down the line, as the balls crash into each other, the more unpredictable the results become. No two breaks are the same. So now, when you consider that all we are, as organisms, are just a few basic elements working together in a basic fashion, realize that all it takes is a single "spark" of the right atoms coming together at the right time under the right conditions to create life. Give this process a few billion years to happen, just once in all the chaos, and I'm sure at the end you just might win your high school science fair.