Stephen Meyer Explains Modern Evolution

 
The video below shows Stephen Meyer explaining evolution to the people who attended the Four Nails in Darwin's Coffin event at Southern Medodist University.

I'm posting this for my students in the class I teach on scientific controversies. One of the fundamental principles of any debate is to define your terms in a way that's intellectually honest and consistent. In the case of the creation/evolution debate, if there's actually a scientific controversy (there isn't) then everyone should be using the best scientific definition of evolution.

In his latest book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer refers to "modern" evolutionary theory as "neo-Darwinism." He never defines it but it's clear that he thinks of neo-Darwinism as the idea that mutation and natural selection are all there is to evolution. It's clear that Stephen Meyer has not read any modern textbook on evolution.

Watch the video and see how Meyer explains evolution to his mostly scientifically illiterate audience. At 6 minutes he says, "What we want to address tonight is the question of whether or not the principle neo-Darwinian mechanism of mutation and selection is sufficient to produce the forms of life that we see."

The scientific answer to this question is "no," mutation and selection are not sufficient. You also need random genetic drift, speciation, and geological events such as meteor impacts and ice ages in order to account for life as we see it today. (That's not an exclusive list, see Macroevolution.)

Meyer, and the next speaker, Richard Sternberg, are criticizing the ability of natural selection to explain the evolution of new forms in just a few million years. Most of their criticisms would apply to ALL explanations of evolution and not just those that rely only on mutation and natural selection but their arguments are much weakened by their lack of knowledge of modern evolutionary theory. It seems easy for them to knock down the strawman version of evolution that they don't believe in.

If there's a genuine scientific controversy here, you'll never learn about it by listening to these IDiots. However, it's worth noting that the quality of debate in the evolution/creation wars has improved considerably over the past thirty years. It used to be the case that any college student could instantly recognize the main flaws in the creationist position. Today, the average college biology student would have a great deal of difficulty debating Stephen Meyer, Richard Sternberg, Michael Behe, or Doug Axe. (Jonathan Wells? Not so much.) In part, that's because the average college student doesn't know enough about evolution. We aren't doing a very good job of teaching evolution.

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