Why Darwin Matters Read Online Free PDF Page A

evidence technique to deduce who most likely committed a crime, scientists employ the method to deduce the likeliest explanation for a particular phenomenon. Cosmologists reconstruct the history of the universe through a convergence of evidence from astronomy, planetary geology, and physics. Geologists reconstruct the history of the planet through a convergence of evidence from geology, physics, and chemistry. Archaeologists piece together the history of civilization through a convergence of evidence from biology (pollen grains), chemistry (kitchen middens), physics (potsherds, tools), history (works of art, written sources), and other site-specific artifacts.
    As a historical science, evolution is confirmed by the fact that so many independent lines of evidence converge to its single conclusion. Independent sets of data from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, herpetology, entomology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics and population genetics, and many other sciences each point to the conclusion that life evolved. This is a convergence of evidence. Creationists can demand “just one fossil transitional form” that shows evolution. But evolution is not proved through a single fossil. It is proved through a convergence of fossils, along with a convergence of genetic comparisons between species, and a convergence of anatomical and physiological comparisons between species, and many other lines of inquiry. For creationists to disprove evolution, they need to unravel all these independent lines of evidence, as well as construct a rival theory that can explain them better than the theory of evolution. They have yet to do so.
The Tests of Evolution
     
    Creationists like to argue that evolution is not a science because no one was there to observe it and there are no experiments to run today to test it. The inability to observe past events or set up controlled experiments is no obstacle to a sound science of cosmology, geology, or archaeology, so why should it be for a sound science of evolution? The key is the ability to test one’s hypothesis. There are a number of ways to do so, starting with the broadest method of how we know evolution happened.
    Consider the evolution of our best friend, the dog. With so many breeds of dogs popular for so many thousands of years, one would think that there would be an abundance of transitionalfossils providing paleontologists with copious data from which to reconstruct their evolutionary ancestry. Not so. In fact, according to Jennifer A. Leonard of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., “the fossil record from wolves to dogs is pretty sparse.” 23 Then how do we know the origin of dogs? In a 2002 issue of
Science
, Leonard and her colleagues report that mitochrondrial DNA (mtDNA) data from early dog remains “strongly support the hypothesis that ancient American and Eurasian domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray wolves.” In the same issue of
Science
, Peter Savolainen from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues note that the fossil record is problematic “because of the difficulty in discriminating between small wolves and domestic dogs,” but their study of mtDNA sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs from around the world “points to an origin of the domestic dog in East Asia ~ 15,000 yr B.P.” from a single gene pool of wolves. Finally, Brian Hare from Harvard and his colleagues describe the results of their study in which they found that domestic dogs are more skillful than wolves at using human communicative signals indicating the location of hidden food, but that “dogs and wolves do not perform differently in a non-social memory task, ruling out the possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all human-guided tasks.” Therefore, “dogs’ social-communicative skills with humans were acquired during the process of domestication.” 24 Although no single fossil proves that dogs