Just Kidding

The epistemological asymmetry between evolutionary biology and supernatural religious explanations is fundamentally a consequence of their radically divergent relationships with empirical falsifiability, predictive utility, methodological naturalism, and evidentiary convergence.

Biological evolution is not merely the proposition that organisms “change over time.” It is a population-level phenomenon arising from temporally iterated changes in heritable allele frequencies under the influence of mutation, recombination, genetic drift, gene flow, natural selection, sexual selection, and demographic stochasticity. The theory acquires its explanatory strength not from any singular observation, but from the consilience of independently derived evidence across population genetics, comparative genomics, molecular phylogenetics, developmental biology, biogeography, paleontology, comparative anatomy, and directly observed evolutionary change.

Particularly damaging to the hypothesis of independently created, immutable species is the hierarchical structure of genomic similarity. Organisms do not merely possess superficial similarities that could be dismissed as the reuse of an efficient “design.” They inherit nested patterns of homologous sequences, endogenous retroviral insertions, pseudogenes, conserved mutations, chromosomal rearrangements, and other molecular historical artifacts whose distributions correspond remarkably well with phylogenetic relationships independently inferred from morphology and the fossil record. Common ancestry therefore explains not simply why organisms function similarly, but why they share particular historical biological peculiarities.

Evolutionary theory is also epistemically vulnerable in precisely the manner expected of a scientific theory: conceivable observations could contradict particular evolutionary hypotheses. Phylogenetic predictions can fail. Genetic relationships can contradict proposed ancestry. Fossils can occur outside predicted temporal distributions. ✝