@JoeCienkowski’s Filthy Lie that Evolution is Not Science

A very big thank you to Ant Allan (@antallan) who submitted this to me via email!

As with all Joe’s lies, this is one that he repeats ad nauseam. This is just a recent instance:

Yes, Joe, evolution is science.

(The assertions that Joe loves science and trusts science may be true, but other tweets reveal that he just doesn’t understand science… But that’s the topic for another blog post, perhaps.)

So, Joe claims that there is ”no evidence at all“ that evolution is science.

Given the vast number of scientists that have worked in this area and the volumes of peer-reviewed research that have been published since Darwin, Joe’s claim is so obviously bogus that it hardly deserves a rebuttal.

But earlier today I chanced on the “perfect” rebuttal on the Daylight Atheism website. To put that into context, we must understand what a science is: Edward Wilson defines science as a systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories [my emphasis] – such as the theory of evolution.

The Daylight Atheism piece laid out clearly the evidence that evolution makes testable predictions to verify its hypotheses, the very essence of a scientific theory. Moreover, these predictions turn out to be true!

The theory of evolution not only explains and unifies a vast range of scientific observations, it’s given rise to an enormous, fruitful research program by predicting where we should look in order to find all kinds of phenomena of interest. One of the most famous examples is how Charles Darwin predicted that the earliest human ancestors would be found in Africa, which turned out to be 100% correct. Based on observing flowers from Madagascar, Darwin also predicted the existence of a moth species with a startlingly long proboscis, and a moth matching his specifications was discovered. Evolutionary theory led paleontologists to inspect rocks of a certain age in a certain location to find tetrapod ancestors, and lo and behold, we dug up Tiktaalik roseae. Evolutionary theory enabled us to predict the likely characteristics of an ant ancestor, and we found a species preserved in amber that matched our expectations almost perfectly. Evolutionary theory illuminated the similarities between birds and dinosaurs, and feathered theropods continue to turn up at a dizzying rate.

(For some reason, the ant ancestor example appealed to me the most. Lest I be accused of cherry-picking, evolution will also make testable predictions to verify hypotheses that turn out to be wrong, but – since it is science – such results are used to reformulate hypotheses and thus make continuous improvements in the larger theory.)

The website goes on with even more examples of “bold, surprising predictions” that have been used to verify hypotheses from evolution and thus continue to validate its scientific approach and more firmly establish it as a scientific theory: “no other theory or hypothesis accounts for [these discoveries] so consistently and so well.”

Evolution is science.

And that makes Joe Cienkowski a filthy liar.