Terry Pratchett: The Science of Discworld III - Darwin's Watch

Similarly, to early proponents of divine design and their modern reincarnations creationism and `intelligent design', the latest quasireligious fad, once we know that living creatures were created (either by God, an alien, or an unspecified intelligent designer) then the problem is solved and we need look no further. We are not encouraged to look for evidence that might disprove our beliefs. Just things that confirm them. Accept what we tell you, don't ask questions.

Ah, yes, but science discourages questions too, say the cults and religions. You don't take our views seriously, you don't allow that sort of question. You try to stop us putting our ideas into school science lessons as alternatives to your world view.

To some extent, that's true - especially the bit about science lessons. But they are science lessons, so they should be teaching science. Whereas the claims of the cults and the creationists, and the closet theists who espouse intelligent design, are not science. Creationism is simply a theistic belief system and offers no credible scientific evidence whatsoever for its beliefs. Evidence for alien visitations is weak, incoherent, and most of it is readily explained by entirely ordinary aspects of ancient human culture. Intelligent design claims evidence for its views, but those claims fall apart under even casual scientific scrutiny, as documented in the 2004 books Why Intelligent Design Fails, edited by Matt Young and Taner Edis, and Debating Design, edited by William Dembski and Michael Ruse. And when people (none of the above, we hasten to point out) claim that the Grand Canyon is evidence for Noah's flood - a notorious recent incident - it's not terribly hard to prove them wrong.

The principle of free speech implies that these views should not be suppressed, but it does not imply that they should be imported into science lessons, any more than scientific alternatives to God should be imported into the vicar's Sunday sermon. If you want to get your world view into the science lesson, you've got to establish its scientific credentials. But because cults, religions and alternative belief systems stop people asking awkward questions, there's no way they can ever get that kind of evidence. It's not only chance that is blind. The scientific vision of the planet that is currently our only home, and of the creatures with which we share it and the universe around it, has attained its present form over thousands of years. The development of science is mostly an incremental process, a lake of understanding filled by the constant accumulation of innumerable tiny raindrops. Like the water in a lake, the pool of understanding can also evaporate again - for what we think we understand today can be exposed as nonsense tomorrow, just as what we thought we understood yesterday is exposed as nonsense today. We use the word `understanding' rather than, `knowledge' because science is both more than, and less than a collection of immutable facts. It is more, in that it encompasses organising principles that explain what we like to think of as facts: the strange paths of the planets in the sky make perfect sense once you understand that planets are moved by gravitational forces, and that these forces obey mathematical rules. It is less, because what may look like a fact today may turn out tomorrow to have been a misinterpretation of something else. On Discworld, where obvious things tend to be true, a tiny and insignificant Sun does indeed revolve round the grand, important world of people. We used to think our world was like that too: for centuries, it was a `fact', and an obvious one, that the Sun revolved round the Earth.

The big organising principles of science are theories, coherent systems of thought that explain huge numbers of otherwise isolated facts, which have survived strenuous testing deliberately designed to break them if they do not accord with reality. They have not been merely accepted as some act of scientific faith: instead, people have tried to falsify them - to prove them wrong - but have so far failed. These failures do not prove that the theory is true, because there are always new sources of potential discord. Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation, in conjunction with his laws of motion, was - and still is - good enough to explain the movements of the planets, asteroids and other bodies of the solar system in intricate detail, with high accuracy. But in some contexts, such as black holes, it has now been replaced by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Wait a few decades, and something else will surely replace that. There are plenty of signs that all is not well at the frontiers of physics.

When cosmologists have to postulate bizarre `dark matter' to explain why galaxies don't obey the known laws of gravity, and then throw in even weirder `dark energy' to explain why galaxies are moving apart at an increasing rate, and when the independent evidence for these two powers of darkness is pretty much non-existent, you can smell the coming paradigm shift.

Most science is incremental, but some is more radical. Newton's theory was one of the great breakthroughs of science - not a shower of rain disturbing the surface of the lake, but an intellectual storm that unleashed a raging torrent. Darwin's Watch is about another intellectual storm: the theory of evolution. Darwin did for biology what Newton had done for physics, but in a very different way. Newton developed mathematical equations that let physicists calculate numbers and test them to many decimal places; it was a quantitative theory. Darwin's idea is expressed in words, not equations, and it describes a qualitative process, not numbers. Despite that, its influence has been at least as great as Newton's, possibly even greater. Darwin's torrent still rages today.

Evolution, then, is a theory, one of the most influential, farreaching and important theories ever devised. In this context, it's worth pointing out that the word `theory' is often used in a quite different sense, to mean an idea that is proposed in order to be tested. Strictly speaking, the word that should be used here is `hypothesis', but that's such a fussy, pedantic-sounding word that people tend to avoid it. Even scientists, who should know better. `I have a theory,' they say. No, you have a hypothesis. It will take years, possibly centuries, of stringent tests, to turn it into a theory.

The theory of evolution was once a hypothesis. Now it is a theory. Detractors seize on the word and forget its dual use. `Only a theory,' they say dismissively. But a true theory cannot be so easily dismissed, because it has survived so much rigorous testing. In this respect there is far more reason to take the theory of evolution seriously than any explanation of life that depends on, say, religious faith, because falsification is not high on the religious agenda. Theories, in that sense, are the best established, most credible parts of science. They are, by and large, considerably more credible than most other products of the human mind. So what these people are thinking of when they chant their dismissive slogan should actually be `only a hypothesis'.

That was a defensible position in the early days of the theory of evolution, but today it is merely ignorant. If anything can be a fact, evolution is. It may have to be inferred from clues deposited in the rocks, and more recently by comparing the DNA codes of different creatures, rather than being seen directly with the naked eye in real time, but you don't need an eyewitness account to make logical deductions from evidence. The evidence, from several independent sources (such as fossils and DNA), is overwhelming. Evolution has been established so firmly that our planet makes no sense at all without it. Living creatures can, and do, change over time. The fossil record shows that they have changed substantially over long periods of time, to the extent that entirely new species have arisen. Smaller changes can be observed today, over periods as short as a year, or mere days in bacteria.