To Falsify Evolution

I recently had a discussion about what it would take to falsify evolution with another atheist. We both agreed that theories based on evidence are all falsifiable by counter-evidence, but we disagreed on the amount of counter-evidence it would take in the case of evolution.

Here is the hypothetical evidence that he believes would falsify the theory: “If we found an organism that clearly breaks out of the evolutionary tree we know. Say - a 5 legged creature, or an animal without DNA, or an animal that has a DNA that doesn’t have any common parts with the rest of the life on earth.”

Such a find would certainly be compelling, but I would first consider that the outlier was created artificially or evolved in isolation of all other known life before throwing out evolutionary theory. As unlikely as either of these sound, they would be more reasonable explanations. To show evolution is false, each line of evidence needs to be overturned. Each aspect of the theory needs to be falsified. Evolution isn’t too big to fail, but it’s certainly too big to die of a single counter-point.*

(*Unless, of course, that counter-point was that all known evidence was found to be lies planted by the Great Deceiver. Positing the devil as a way to reject evolution is one of the more honest and internally consistent methods--if only it wasn’t based entirely on mythology.)

Back to reality...or at least hypothetical reality--even if such a find could impact evolution as a whole, it would revise the theory, maybe falsifying parts, before it would falsify the whole shabang. This happened before with the theory of gravity. Isaac Newton understood gravity in a manner that worked to explain all gravitational movement...at first. It didn’t quite work with the solar orbit of Mercury, much like current evolutionary theory wouldn’t work for the aforementioned hypothetical creature. It wasn’t until Einstein hashed out relativity that a new understanding of gravity could account for Mercury. If we one day discover gravitons or something, we might have to adjust gravitational theory further. Edits aside, I can think of no natural evidence regarding either evolution or gravity that could falsify all previous findings that work perfectly well with what we have. Natural selection happens. Mutations occur. Heritability is a thing. If you find a glaring example of uncommon decent, let me know. It could modify evolutionary theory, but smart money says it's an alien.

A Darwin Day Exchange

Darwin Day was last week, or as religious apologists call it "question evolution day." In that spirit, I posed a question to those not sold on the theory.

What aspect(s) of evolution do you have a problem with?

• Is it that you don't believe in heritability?
• Is it that you don't believe natural selection is a sufficient mechanism to propagate beneficial genes and weed out harmful or useless genes?
• Is it that you don't believe in genetic mutation?

There was one apologist who answered saying that they didn't believe in heritability--he actually didn't believe that traits were based down from parent to child. I asked if he noticed that black parents typically have black kids and that tall parents usually have tall kids, but to that he said anecdotal evidence can't be used to show anything. Luckily, only one respondent went to this extreme a denial.

There was another apologist who didn't believe natural selection is a sufficient mechanism for the theory. I asked him to hear out this simplification of the process:

You have a random selection of rabbits in a room with the only food source on the ceiling. They all need to get up on their hind legs and stretch to try and get the food, but only about half can actually reach. Very quickly the ones who can't reach starve, most before mating. The remaining rabbits go about their lives, stretching for their food every day. Eventually they have kids. Given that the mating pool is taller rabbits, the next generation of bunnies inherit traits from taller rabbits--making the new generation taller, on average, than the group we started off with.

Say we very slowly raise the ceiling, weeding out rabbits that don't meet the new minimum height to eat. Each generation would be taller and taller as the shorter die off. Given that mutations occur, (which this apologist admitted do occur) some rabbits might even be taller or shorter or more or less stretchable or better or worse jumpers than the heritable gene pool suggests. Those with an advantage, the better jumpers, the more stretchable, the taller, whatever then mate and pass on their new mutation while useless mutations die off.

The apologist actually agreed that this would happen. So...does he believe in evolution now? Of course not. Once he couldn't deny evolution on a scale of a lot of generations he opted to deny evolution on a scale of a whole lot of generations. The vague micro- versus macro-evolution divide.

Yet another apologist argued that mutations and heredity happen, but only as changes or improvements on preexisting traits. In his words "this can give you blue eyes instead of brown but it cannot create eyes." He then went on to list the various cells that are absolutely required for a working photoreceptor in an effort to show that multiple mutations with no benefit would need to exist for generations before anything light sensitive could kick off the evolution of an eye...then I pointed out single-celled organisms that exists today, euglena, that demonstrates phototaxis (movement according to a light source) via a photoreceptor literally called an eyespot. At this point his brain seemed to get caught in a feed back loop.

There are many ways to deny evolution, just none that I've found are internally consistent or based on reality. For a reading of the exchange that prompted this post click here.

Brain Death and Other Happy News

The belief of a soul or spirit that can exist independent of a brain is a romantic idea that I don’t often go out of my way to debate. After all, believing that the essence of one’s identity continues after death is an understandable comfort to those dealing with mortality. That said, I’ve been asked recently why exactly I don’t believe in disembodied consciousness and figure that here is the perfect place to record my thoughts.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t an atheist issue. The existence of a God doesn’t imply an afterlife nor does the absence of a deity imply that there can’t be a hereafter. The fact that the two beliefs are so often tied speaks to how religions have positioned themselves to appeal to desires in order to gain a following. By this I mean that a master who must be worshiped and a church that must be paid doesn’t fulfill many emotional wants, however, a master who can eternally reward worship and a church that serves as the proxy for heaven--that’s desirable to many. Still, the afterlife, like God, is an issue for skeptics. Neither can be proven or specifically understood and they both rely on supernatural assumptions. It’s impossible to say for certain that we don’t wake up somewhere else post-mortem, but below are my reasons for doubting.

There are many ways to show that my consciousness (or my mind/spirit/soul/self--depending on definitions) is directly tied to my physical brain. Drink too many beers and I become less inhibited, more friendly, and slower to process new information. Drink enough, and my consciousness goes on hiatus entirely--and booze is just the tip of the iceberg. When considering the full range of effects pharmacology has our brain, how can anyone deny that chemicals are a catalyst for how we think and behave? We observe higher levels of serotonin or dopamine when happy. Age wears down the brain as much as any other bodily organ--resulting in sluggish thinking, memory loss, and confusion--which in some cases are diagnosable as Alzheimer's or Dementia. There is a laundry list of contributing evidence that shows as goes the brain, so goes the mind. The reasonable conclusion is that when the brain goes completely, (dies) so does the self. I get it, it's a bummer, but desire does not dictate reality.