SCIENCE!
I'm supposed to be doing my homework, but I'd rather not (c'mon, you guys, I have a Chinese midterm, give me a break :P), so instead, I'm going to write about evolution. One of my classes this year is an upper-division biology class, Experimental Ecology & Evolution (E3, for short, and I love it more than any class ever), which is giving me uppity ideas about the scientific method and science and in fact empirical thinking in general. Some of you may be insulted by what follows, although I hope not, and if so, I'd ask you to keep reading anyway, and to tell me about how insulted you are!
It's also giving me uppity ideas about education, though. Namely: biology classes. How many of [those of you in or past college] have had university-level biology classes? How much biology do you remember? (Could you tell me what a phenotype a genotype a base pair a transcription area Batesian mimicry mutualism allopatric speciation is? I ask because a friend of mine - the very well-educated graduate of a very impressive school - can't. And probably you don't need to remember these things, but do keep in mind that the vast majority of the elected members of your government - the people who decide a vast amount of our science (and relatedly, environmental) programs - haven't had any more education in science than you have: which would be fine if they were willing to listen to scientists, but a copious number of them aren't. My point is not that we should have more scientists serving in the legislature - I think most of them would be fairly terrible, although not necessarily all - but rather that the criteria most antisicence legislators are deciding to be antiscience on, are not very strong.)
And, err, forgive me, but how many of you know someone who doesn't 'believe' in evolution? Some of you may even 'not believe' in evolution, although I hope not. It's not really a matter for belief, unless you also 'don't believe' in the empirical world, factual evidence, etc. (While you are certainly allowed to refuse to believe in the empirical world, factual evidence, etc., I hope that you are still willing to support governmental and especially education and research programs which interact with the empirical world, as a) it's the reality that most of us live in, and b) the intellectually rigorous alternative seems to be rejecting all of the products of successful science, starting with, you know, antibiotics and vaccines and so forth, which is maybe fun for you and dangerous for everybody else.)
This isn't really meant to be an essay about creationism (or its wannabe cousin "Intelligent Design"), though. This is about evolution.
And evolution itself? Is pretty damn reasonable:
1. There is phenotypic variation (differences in expressed traits) among the individuals of a species. This one is pretty simple, and easy to make examples for. Some of them have blue eyes, some have brown; some are bigger; some have a different number of CAGs on the short arm of chromosome four.
2. At least some of this variation is heritable. One or both of your parents having some trait - blue eyes, big feet, a crooked pinkie finger - means that you have it. (Loosely. It's a little more complicated than that, but let's stick with this - the even looser example would be, "you resemble your parents".)
3. Individuals vary in fitness. Some individuals live longer; well, more specifically, some individuals have better reproductive success: i.e. more babies.
4. Variation in some phenotypic traits is correlated with variation in fitness. Certain traits predispose an individual towards having greater reproductive success - which includes more probable survival allowing them to have a longer period of reproduction, etc. For instance, a finch with a bigger beak can open bigger seeds, so in a drought in which only big seeds survive, finches with bigger beaks will have a survival advantage.
These are pretty common sense; fairly hard to deny, and there's a reason for that. [if you - very reasonably - don't feel that 'this is common sense' is a good enough reason to accept any of these postulates, comment and I can link you to pretty much endless scientifically rigorous papers on whichever postulate you're wondering about.] However, these are so widely supported that there is really no excuse for not supporting them - unless you have another theory in mind which has superior quantities evidence; or maybe evidence which contradicts one of those fundamental tenents. A theory, incidentally, doesn't just mean "this idea I came up with the other day," it's a testable model of interaction, capable of prediction of future occurances, supported by large bodies of empirical, observed evidence. (Ergo, no, intelligent design is not a theory, and no, creationism is not a theory.) Evolutionary postulates: not facts - that's not how science works - but pretty damn strong.
And you know what else? They're awesome. This is how we got from squiggly ancestral single-cellular things in deep-sea vents or in the bubbly bits of the ocean, proceeded through eukaryote cells (with a nucleus!), promenaded into multicellularity and waltzed around vertebrae and animal structures and ended up with silly hairless apes with the most fantastic ideas about life and laughter and law; this is how we got 30 million species of insects, and flowering plants everywhere, and fungi, you guys. Fungi are awesome, they have hyphae and make community sacrifices (altruism!) and can infect everything. We are absolutely intrinsically connected - literally, related - to every single living thing on this planet (probably!), and not by some big fuzzy hand-waving act of creation: we grew, organically, slowly, incrementally, and awesomely. And this is what we got: a world full of awesome bits that all work together and compete and eat each other and poison each other - until something big changes, and then they have to figure out how to change to make it work all over again.
I think I'm going to leave this here; it's turned into more of a paen to the awesomeness of the universe than I really intended, but you know what? Some days the universe needs a paen to its awesomeness. So it stands.