What Evolution is Not
This morning I came across a short blog post that talks about pollution and environmentalism; the first sentence just irritated me:
The theory of evolution describes life forming and emerging billions of years ago from the slimy shores of a chemical soup.
This is not the theory of evolution. The origins of life are a completely different topic! Basically, evolution assumes that life already exists, somewhere, somehow, and describes how one species change over time. Evolution explains why bacteria and humans fundamentally share some similar biology, it explains why mitochondria look like bacteria, and it explains the diversity of traits within and between species. It does not talk at all about where life came from.
Origins of life studies are much harder and more controversial than evolution, basically because we have to speculate about things like the composition of the Earth billions of years ago, how likely life is under those conditions, and so on. For evolution, we have solid evidence, experiments, and well-thought-out quantitative predictions, regardless of what the “intelligent design” folks like to claim. For origins of life studies, mostly these are missing, save for a few prominent experiments (prominent because, well, there really aren’t that many, and so the couple that we do have get a lot of notice).
The theory of evolution is not controversial to those who know what they’re talking about. Theories of life origins are quite controversial. Very different.
