A Thought On Ontology

Sometimes, one theory is better than another. Having overheard a conservation today at lunch about how evolution is “just a theory,” and trying my best to not jump out of my chair and bitch-slap the participants, I take this opportunity to vent here. After all, what’s a blog for if not that?

If you asked me, “TL, how did you come to be,” I’d answer that I was the product of a sexual union between my father and my mother, which resulted in a pregnancy. There is no tangible evidence I can point to in order to corroborate this theory (other than my own physical existence, which is tautological evidence). Since I can’t find any tangible evidence that corroborates the theory, and the only other witnesses to the event (my parents) can only provide testimony with no tangible evidence they can point to, this theory is doomed to remain just that – a theory.

Indeed, if the events underlying the theory were to be re-created, identical results would most definitely not recur (even though my parents would probably have a lot of fun trying). Even if they were to have attempted to re-create those events during their childbearing years, we can all be very, very certain that someone other than me (or, perhaps more accurately, someone who was a clone of me) would result. So this theory has not only been posited in the absence of any tangible evidence supporting it, the theory is scientifically untestable and unverifiable in any objective sense.

And, if you think about it, sexual reproduction is an astonishingly counter-intuitive way for a member of the species to reproduce. It necessarily involves the dilution of that individual’s genes and it provides little tangible benefit other than a few moment’s pleasure to the male – and to the female, the few moment’s pleasure (sometimes) is followed by months of physical inconvenience and distress. It carries the risk of communicating diseases and of killing the mother during pregnancy or childbirth, absent the use of powerful scientific techniques, developed over hundreds of years of experience, to mitigate those risks. The sexual organs of homo sapiens are particularly vulnerable to both physical injury and a panoply of diseases. Really, if you were God (which would mean I would have to capitalize the second-person pronoun) and You were designing humans from scratch, is sex the mechanism You would have picked? Really?

So the theory lacks tangible evidence, is based strictly on the unverifiable testimony of a very small number of purported participant/eyewitnesses, and cannot be reproduced under even the most ideal laboratory conditions imaginable.

But no one sane suggests that because of this, the “stork theory” of existence deserves to be taught as the intellectual and scientific equivalent of the “sexual reproduction” theory. The idea that I came into existence as the result of sexual reproduction is, however flawed a theory it might be, nevertheless so overwhelmingly likely to be correct that it can be treated as the equivalent of fact. And, the “stork theory” is so overwhelmingly improbable, and so unhelpful an explanation, as to be properly disregarded completely.

No one would seriously suggest that the “flat earth” model of cosmology be an equally valid model of astrophysics as compared to “conventional” celestial mechanics.

So why does creationism (or its thinly-veiled clone, intelligent design) deserve to be taught side-by-side with evolution? It doesn’t. It’s not science, and it’s not even science fiction. It’s just plain fiction. And saying evolution is “just a theory” doesn’t bring evolution down to the level of being equivalent to the creation myth of a tribe of bronze age nomads.

(UPDATE: To clarify, what made me upset about the conversation was not that the people were ignorant of evolution, it was that they were willfully so, and wanted public schools to teach religion as an equivalent alternative to real science.)