Why Darwin Matters Read Online Free PDF

came from wolves, the convergence of evidence from archaeological, morphological, genetic, and behavioral “fossils” reveals the ancestor of all dogs to be the East Asian wolf.
    The tale of human evolution is revealed in a similar manner (although here we do have an abundance of transitional fossil riches), as it is for all ancestors in the history of life. One of the finest compilations of evolutionary convergence is Richard Dawkins’s magnumopus,
The Ancestor’s Tale
, 673 pages of convergent science recounted with literary elegance. Dawkins traces innumerable “transitional fossils” (what he calls “concestors”—the “point of rendezvous” of the last common ancestor shared by a set of species) from
Homo sapiens
back four billion years to the origin of replicating molecules and the emergence of evolution. No one concestor proves that evolution happened, but together they reveal a majestic story of a process over time. 25 We know human evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life’s pilgrimage.
    But the convergence of evidence is just the start. The
comparative method
allows us to infer evolutionary relationships using data from a wide variety of fields. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues, for example, compared fifty years of data from population genetics, geography, ecology, archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics to trace the evolution of the human races. Using both the convergence and comparative methods led them to conclude that “the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits.” By comparing surface (physical) traits—the phenotype of individuals—with genetic traits—the genotype—they teased out the relationship between different groups of people. Most interesting, they found that the genetic traits disclosed “recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection.” For example, they discovered that Australian aborigines are genetically more closely related to southeast Asians than they are to African blacks, which makes sense from the perspective of the evolutionary timeline: The migration pattern of humans out of Africa would have led them first to Asia and then to Australia. 26
    Dating techniques
provide evidence of the timeline of evolution.The dating of fossils, along with the earth, moon, sun, solar system, and universe, are all tests of evolutionary theory, and so far they have passed all the tests. We know that the earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old because of the convergence of evidence from several methods of dating rocks: Uranium Lead, Rubidium Strontium, and Carbon-14. Further, the age of the earth, the age of the moon, the age of the sun, the age of the solar system, and the age of the universe are consistent, maintaining yet another consilience. If, say, the earth was dated at 4.6 billion years old but the solar system was dated at one million years old, the theory of evolution would be in trouble. But Uranium Lead, Rubidium Strontium, and Carbon-14 have not provided any good news for the so-called Young Earth creationists.
    Better yet, the fossils and organisms speak for themselves.
Fossils do show intermediate stages
, despite their rarity. For example, there are now at least eight intermediate fossil stages identified in the evolution of whales. In human evolution, there are at least a dozen known intermediate fossil stages since hominids branched off from the great apes six million years ago.
And geological strata consistently reveal the same sequence of fossils
. A quick and simple way to debunk the theory of evolution would be to find a fossil horse in the same geological stratum as a trilobite. According to evolutionary theory, trilobites and mammals are separated by hundreds of millions of