As noted in prior posts, the scientific evidence for the "theory" of evolution is overwhelming. One simply has to keep in mind that the mechanism, as proposed by Darwin, was brilliant for its day, but it is too simplistic given what is now known about selection at the molecular, genetic, animal, species, ecosystem, and even planetary level.
To quote the recent review in The Economist (9/5/09) of Richard Dawkins' new book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution: "In his previous books the British biologist has presented new ways of looking at evolution, demolished barriers to understanding it and traced the family tree of all life back through its branching points to a single origin. These books all started with evolution. But in the bicentennial year of Darwin’s birth Mr Dawkins fills a gap in his oeuvre by setting out the evidence that the 'theory' of evolution is a fact—'as incontrovertible a fact as any in science'.
And what a lot of evidence there is. The fossil record, far from the tenuous succession of gaps described by creationists, provides an admittedly incomplete but beautiful and coherent set of clues to life in the distant past. That any traces at all remain from so long ago is astounding, and anyway it is not the completeness of the fossil record but its consistency that matters. When asked what observation would disprove the theory of evolution, J.B.S. Haldane, a pioneering British geneticist, replied: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian era.' But such anachronisms have never been found.
Then there is the evidence written on the bodies of all living things. The mammalian skeleton is consistently recognisable in creatures as various as bats, monkeys, horses and humans. Vestiges such as the stumpy wings of flightless birds, and the hairs that prickle on human skin just like the rising hackles on furry mammals, are further testimony to our shared origins. Glitches, like the laryngeal nerves that are so neatly laid out in fish but that must detour in animals with necks—by a crazy 15 feet (4.6m) in the case of giraffes—demonstrate the incremental, undirected business of evolution in touching detail. At the microscopic scale, molecular genetics connects the various parts of the grand family tree with fantastic detail and accuracy."
I remember during my undergraduate days that some anthropologists argued that pre-humans and early hominids were inherently violent, nasty, and brutish, and that such traits were to be seen in modern humans. Yet, evidence is beginning to pile up that the entire mammalian line has a trait that can be called empathy without being overly anthropomorphic. To quote the recent review in The Economist (9/5/09) of Frans de Waal's new book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society: "EVERY day the world seems more like Aesop’s 'Fables'. Rooks are found to use ingenious tools; dolphins are overheard talking to whales; and pigs, while not yet flying, play a passable game of football—at least according to the BBC. As for apes, they would hardly make headlines any more if they were found to be adept at composing limericks.
Frans de Waal, a primatologist in the psychology department of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, is perhaps best known for his studies of bonobos—the so-called 'politically correct' apes who are somewhat feminist, often resolve disputes by making love instead of war, and with whom humans share as much of their DNA as they do with chimpanzees. [However, I should note that recent research calls some of that stereotype into question.] His new book, 'The Age of Empathy', looks at altruism and sympathetic fellow-feeling in both humans and other animals.
His title has a double-meaning: empathy is both very old and freshly topical. It is as ancient as the entire mammalian line, he argues, engaging areas of the brain that developed in our distant ancestors over 100m years ago. And we are also entering a new age of empathy, he thinks, brought on by the financial crisis (the product of a selfishly oriented system), and marked by America’s election of President Barack Obama, who has re-emphasised the importance of compassion and helping one’s neighbour.
The book is a polemic, and its main target is what Mr de Waal takes to be a distorted idea of human life as relentlessly selfish and ruthlessly competitive. As an antidote to this picture, he offers plenty of evidence of apparently selfless sacrifice, unforced sympathy, co-operation and even a keen sense of fairness in our closest animal relatives, who evolved to reap the benefits of mutual aid. In other words, his answer to Thomas Hobbes’s famously gloomy statement that man’s existence tends to be 'nasty, brutish and short' is, in effect, that it is unfair to brutes. Beasts are not actually all that beastly, and so we need not be either. Nature does not force us to be selfish."