Between Truth and Myth What drives scientists to believe in evolution?

On a quiet summer evening, while Matthew Harris, a researcher at a University of Wisconsin lab, rearranged and examined the samples of chicken embryos, a task almost daily that he had been accustomed to for several years, he noticed something different from the habit. One chicken showed, in her jaw, The crocodile's teeth instead of the beak were a unique event that prompted Harris and his supervisor, John Fallon, to isolate the gene responsible for the mutation, and then replicate it in the laboratory to more embryos. This was later found to be a developmental developmental gene.

From hen to dinosaur

When we talk about genes, it is usual to conjure up qualities such as eye color, hair, nose shape and neck length. For example, this unique type of gene plays the role of general planner, such as: "Put this scene here, 50th minute. " These genes activate or inhibit the most specialized genes in specific places of the body and specific dates. It is like telling the genus of the nasal formation about where and when to start creating a nose in the fetus, with a specific number, for example, one nose.

The same regulatory genes exist in most organisms now on earth, such as humans, flies, mice, fish, etc. When we move an organizational gene responsible for the creation of an eye, for example, from mouse to fruit fly, it actually makes an eye, A mouse's eye, because the role of this kind of gene is to put the general plan just as if to say: "Create an eye here, and there there."

This type of gene is believed to have played an active role in many evolutionary processes on Earth, especially when it entered the CRISP technique to help researchers, several years ago, modify the feet, limbs, and faces of chicken embryos to become more Similar to their predecessors of dinosaurs, those that existed for nearly 150 million years. Yes, that has already happened. Researchers have re-invented the dinosaur, not by reproducing it in the lab, but by returning the hen to its origin, for its dinosaurs.

Controversy of social communication

Evolutionary development, popular among the popular sciences, the EVO-DEVO, is one of the most active branches of evolutionary biology that has enabled researchers in this field to better understand the molecular events responsible for many spectacular transformations. The fossil record, which was not clearly understood before, but despite its importance and spread in research, all that we know about evolution, through discussions of long-lasting social media, is a dreary talk about Darwin himself and his history, butterflies, giraffes and bacteric whips, etc., even in the controversy Facebook revolves among young people Lord about the birds and dinosaurs, no one mentions this area.

In fact, the basic observation that we can make after a short tour of these discussions is that none of them speak in evolutionary biology as taught by schools and universities to students, I mean we only argue about side issues, sometimes even very accurate, without That is to say, to go into the basics of evolutionary biology itself as a science that can be referred to some references in order to learn it, exactly as a student in high school or undergraduate year.

In addition, the former example of the world of "genetic liberation" illustrates what can be seen as the main problem facing evolutionary biology: that, although it is building itself entirely on one research program, existing organisms evolved from a common ancestor One, it has a huge scope branching in, and gaining support from different research domains, from chemistry to geography.

When everyone talks about evolution, with explanation or even attack, they often refer only to a particular part, while the main answer to the question that is being asked about you as a person who has never been exposed to this science is lost: if evolutionary biology is - "Just a theory", if the debate on it - so will ask the young Arab, and in all the world alike - still exists, why scientists deal with evolution as a scientific fact? Is there a conspiracy?

Four scenes for one film

In fact, it is impossible to understand the reason for the validity of evolution without combining all aspects together, as one argument with multiple faces that can not be understood together except in the presence of evolution. To digest the idea, let us imagine that we are now sitting together in a huge cinema. We have four scenes. In each scene a different group of actors appears in different stories, but in the end we are asked to connect them without contradicting each other so that we can come out together with just one film.

Scene 1: We are now standing in front of a huge dinosaur fossil in a museum of natural history. What you see is what we call the "Braciosor," a very large ancient object that lived 150 million years ago. Now we begin with a simple question: How did we know that this creature lived 150 years ago? A million years?

Here, let us identify the "fossil record", 4 which is simply what fossils have been able to extract from the ground from fossils, and then record the time in which each fossil was found, depending on the rock layer in which it was found. 20 million years ago, another 120 million years ago, and another 300 million years ago. Scientists continue to record all their finds in this record year after year.

The first comment on this part, in the heated Facebook discussions, is usually that the fossil record is incomplete, but - despite the problems faced by such a claim - let us not argue this argument now, let us assume that there are many problems facing the registry Fossil, but in spite of everything we can all agree on two important points are fixed:

The first is that the more time we go back, in the layers of the earth from which fossils are extracted, there are different beings than we see now, in the sense that we can not find rabbits 400 million years ago, and we can not see horsepower as we know it before. 50 million years, there is always a different set of objects with time, and the second is that the more time we live, the simpler the living things are, so that we can reach a time when there were only mono-cells on the surface of this planet Multicellular, and so on. Now, let us put those facts aside, and we consider that they do not prove anything separately, and we continue our path.

We are now standing in Papua New Guinea to see the birds of paradise together. It is a wonderful collection of objects that you can not easily see anywhere else. But here is a simple question: Why can not we easily find All objects in all places?

Here we will need to identify "biogeography" (5), the research domain that examines the effect of different geographical ranges on the static objects. In other words, when we look at the Earth we observe that each object adapts to its environment as if it were a lock and a key. Polar for example can not live in Tanzania While the elephant can not do the opposite, freshwater fish can not live in salt water easily, and those that inhabit warm water adapt their bodies with water temperatures.

Wherever you look, on this planet, you will notice that the organisms that live within a geographical range adapt to this range, so accurately descend to the bird species, for example, that the birds that live in the Galapagos Islands, located 1000 km off the Ecuadorian coast, About the birds of Paradise in Papua New Guinea, located in the eastern half of the island of New Guinea in the Southwest Pacific, which in turn is different from the Hawaii bird seeking honey in the Hawaiian Islands, in each of these places adapted birds to their environment, both degrees Heat or nature of food, the forms of beaks are proportionate to species The grain you eat on those islands.

This is a fact that can easily be understood, how can an organism live in an environment that does not adapt to it? When we talk about global warming, one of the problems that many plants and birds face are the temperatures they are used to. They travel north with every degree that rises in average temperatures, and plants will bloom early in the spring. In fact, the earth's environmental cover can be thought of as a huge clock that matches each gear with a specific function and adapts to that function.

Scene 3: Now we stand on Earth about 300 million years ago, when you ask: On which continent are we now standing? The answer will be somewhat different. Now we are on the continent of Panjia. At that time the continents of the Earth were part of one continent, and then gradually divided into two continents: Jindwana in the south and Lurasia, which ascended north, For the picture we know now, in the course of all this, every spot on Earth has seen varying degrees of geological change of nature.

With this change in terrestrial geology, there were also permanent climatic changes between glacial and interglacial ages, and the slight changes in the Earth's inclination and the so-called pivotal initiative had a strong impact on the Earth's climate during its geological changes. In the late Cretaceous period, for example, from 100 to 65 million years ago, the atmospheric carbon dioxide was 1000 ppm, meaning there were no snow in the poles, the average weather was six degrees higher than what we now know .

Scene 4: During his journey to describe the country of India, which lasted nearly forty years, Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad al-Biruni noticed that the farmers there are very intelligent to adjust the level of production of their crops, that they - in each generation of production, for example corn - And then in the next crop cycle they use the seeds as the seeds for the next crop, and then they pick the best produce in the crop and store it for the next cycle, and so on each cycle.

Some consider that what Peroni said was more than three-quarters of a century earlier than what Charles Darwin described in his most famous book, "The Origin of Species," when he referred in the first chapters to so-called "artificial selection," a process man- Years. Do you want to get a larger production of cabbage? It is not that difficult, just focus on the largest production of the crop size, then "elect", that is to put aside and farm next time, the output will be varied, but take the largest plant, and plant it again, in fact may not know many For example, corn and cabbage are not natural plants in the sense of the concept, but humans since ancient times made the process of artificial selection in order to develop the image we know today.

At the bacterial level we can easily observe this type of change in one of the most famous contemporary phenomena - bacterial resistance to antibiotics, which began to develop clearly from the 1960s to the present moment. The cause of this resistance is natural mutations in the gene responsible for the protein composition to which the antibiotic is linked , The mutation changes the shape of the space in which the antibody is attached to the bacterial cell wall to be decomposed. The latter dies, but when this contact is not done accurately, the antibiotic becomes inactive. In this case all the bacterial cells that did not get the mutation die. Mutations have to multiply, and so antibiotic resistance continues.

In all living organisms, we can observe the change from one generation to the next. This is a natural thing that can be found in the history of dogs to fruit and down to bacteria. In addition, there are many experiments and observations that indicate that one type can turn into two types with time , Some of course will object to that point strongly, but let us now, we have a separate report, only all we want to know at the moment is that change is observed in living organisms throughout history.

Answer in the overall picture

Very beautiful, now can simply ask: how can we combine those four scenes together? There is a clear contradiction between these facts. If the earth constantly changes, how can all beings be adapted to their contemporary environment? How did you adapt to her previous environment? Have you traveled from place to place with time? But here we have a new problem. We know that, with time, there were other organisms that did not exist now, so how can we put this scene in our previous questions? The change in living organisms was observed, even before the evolutionary biology or biology as a whole appeared in the picture, what could bring together these sporadic scenes?

Here evolutionary biology appears. Yes, you can question, individually, some of the topics falling within the scope of these four scenes, but the overall picture that brings together all these scenes can only be explained by the existence of evolution, in fact not only those four scenes is what confirms evolution as a scientific fact, The evidence of evolution contains other very complex scenes, such as comparative anatomy, molecular biology, genetics or animal classifications. In each of these scenes you will find a set of facts that can only be understood in the full picture with evolutionary biology .

At that point let us turn to critiques of evolution from non-scientific aspects such as ethics or intelligent design. None of these claims will provide any scientific theory or fact that can explain the full picture seen from all of these sciences. All it will do is present a partial picture Very small of only one scene, often inlaid with some philosophy and history !!, and tells you that evolutionary biology can not explain that particular part of this scene and that scientists disagree with it and there are those who oppose it, sometimes true, evolutionary biology is an active entity Very, but these scholars are not different on the true As far as evolution they disagree about its mechanisms.

Steven Jay Gould, for example, is one of the most critical critics of the theory of "progressive evolution," insisting that evolution occurred on the surface of the earth as intermittent jumps, so he has often referred to the weaknesses of evolution gradually, Stephen Jay Gould has often argued against evolution, but Gold - though - was one of the most famous promoters of evolutionary biology in the world, but his critique of evolutionary biology was evoked as a critique of the idea of ​​evolution itself, which never happened.

When one says that there are two kinds of evolution, one at the level of the object itself and the other when one evolves into another, it can easily convince you, using your weaknesses to understand the terms "genetics," but how, for example, Those previous scenes? Does that mean that there are 8.7 million species created separately? But what about the scene that tells about the change of geology and the landscape of fossils? Does this mean that every era in the history of the earth has seen its own animals? How can this claim be interpreted in the context of the previous full picture?

This is the permanent division of the full picture. Indeed, they appear as followers of the conspiracy theory, because conspiracy theorists do not build theories, but they only follow the anomalies of what can be called the "official narrative," only the anomalies, Or a "complete picture" that can explain all of these phenomena from all those bands together, will always talk in parts, will tell you that there is a documentary called "K", and that a scientist nominated for the " , And that one of them, a distinguished scientist, questioned "such" his episodes on YouTube and said that it is impossible to happen "kz "And" well ", and a philosopher of the school" as well as "science knows that" so "and" so ", although Darwin said," as well as ", etc., but where the whole picture?

How do I learn about evolution?

Do you know the Hardy-Weinberg equation? Have you ever seen genetic drift or genetics of groups? Have you studied, even simplistically, any of the four ranges that we talked about in the previous scenes in a more in depth? More generally, the answer to the above questions will be "no," because everyone is drawn directly to social media debates, mainly ideological differences (Muslim against atheists), which in turn turn to philosophical and even historical objections. (See the previous report, 8: Books and Courses for Evolutionary Biology). In fact, this report itself is based primarily on Chapter 4 of the Campbell Manual, Months among biology students in the world.

When you open Facebook and you find a number of publications here and there talking about the "problems" of evolution, it may seem that something new has emerged, some may have discovered shortcomings in the mechanisms of evolution or evolutionary biologists are "seriously" different about what evolution was real or not, But that is not true. It is always the same claims made by people themselves but with different images. In addition, this argument gives the ordinary person the feeling that evolutionary biology is an old theory that has no contemporary research activity, and that those who criticize it criticize only one thing or one book that has been issued and ended, but you can now open any scientific research database and look for The word "Evolution" is used to find that research in this area is published on a daily basis.

The debate will still be heated, but if you want to get scientific answers, if you really want to, leave that aside, why not start by giving some time to a simple course that explains the basics of evolutionary biology? (9), then it can be a basic idea of ​​your question: Scientists and scientific references did not deal with evolution as a scientific fact, although the comrades on Facebook had "shelled his forehead" more than once a day.