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How Evolution Really Works
And why it matters that we actually understand it
There’s a lot of confusion about evolution, especially in the USA. Hardly anyone understands how evolution works and this leads to a lot of misconceptions, many of which are harmful in our everyday lives.
Too often in the USA, evolution is presented as “just a theory” as if the word theory meant “someone’s idea, an assertion, nothing of substance.”
In reality a theory is a coherent logical construct that serves to explain one or more observed phenomenon.
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity wasn’t just an idea he had in the bathtub one morning; it was a coherent mathematical construct that showed how gravity works and it made several novel predictions about phenomena that could be tested. When these phenomena were tested, beginning with Eddington’s 1919 proof that massive objects really do “bend” spacetime, Einstein’s theory was shown to be indeed a very good description of how gravity works. It has since been confirmed thousands of times in dozens of different ways. GPS navigation systems, for example, depend on its mathematics in order to work properly.
So a theory isn’t simply someone’s bathtub idea, a personal assertion. It’s an intellectual framework that explains why some phenomenon or set of phenomena behave as we observe them to do.
