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evolutionary theory maintains

December 30, 2012


A news item on BBC Radio 2 at 8 a.m. last week was about an interesting new scientific idea. Apparently aggression was a bigger factor in human development than was previously thought, and the evidence for this is to be found in the human hand, which is much easier to ball into a fist and use as a weapon than the hands of other apes. So far so good, and I was rather enjoying the rare experience of listening to a news item that was actually about an advance in knowledge, as opposed to a piece of celebrity gossip or report of some disgusting atrocity. But then the newsreader ruined it. Human thumbs, she said came to be longer and stronger than those of ‘the apes from which evolutionary theory maintains we descended’.

It’s as though the concept of evolution has to be handled with tongs. It beggars belief that a newsreader would distance herself from any other scientific theory in so conspicuous a way. One can’t imagine an announcer referring to gravity as ‘the force which gravitational theory maintains attracts bodies to the earth’; or to the sun as ‘the star which the heliocentric theory maintains our planet orbits’. Why didn’t the newsreader just say ‘the apes from which we descended’? What could have been the purpose of that phrase, evolutionary theory maintains?

The question is rhetorical, of course. The purpose of the distancing phrase was to protect the sensibilities of those who choose not to believe in the well-attested fact of evolution by natural selection. Two key words are clearly designed to give comfort to the creationist. One is maintains. You can maintain anything, even the most absurd and wrong-headed notions, if you are sufficiently dogged.

The other word is theory. In everyday parlance, a theory is conditional and unsubstantiated. You can take it or leave it. It’s just a theory, and theories are often proved wrong. This is quite unlike the concept of a theory in science. In science a theory is considerably stronger than a hypothesis: it has evidence from experiment and/or observation in its favour. The evidence will have been tested mercilessly, in an attempt to falsify the theory. Ultimately, of course, most scientific theories end up being falsified in some particular or other, but that seldom means they are completely overturned. What happens is that a more complete, more refined version of the theory replaces it, which accounts for the evidence even better, and has better predictive power. Then that new theory, too, is tested to destruction, and so it goes on. This is completely unlike the lay-person’s idea of a theory, as being one among a collection of equally suitable possibilities, like a rail of garments in a shop – something you can try on to see if you like it and discard if you don’t.

Of course the theory of evolution by natural selection in its present form could one day be falsified. But only when a better theory comes along, which better explains the fossil record, the DNA evidence and actual observed instances of evolution (eg the way bacteria have evolved to resist antibiotics). It will be a refined, extended, improved theory of evolution, not a crude denial of it. I don’t think it’s tendentious to say that such a theory is not going to be found in the Bible or the Koran.

Which brings us back to where we started. Creationists don’t disbelieve in evolution by natural selection because they have a better theory. They don’t have a theory at all. Their belief is dictated by what it says in an ancient book. Evidence doesn’t come into it; the driver of belief is the impiety of doubting what the ancient book says.

The BBC newsreader, or whoever wrote her script, was clearly bending over backwards not to give offence. But why should it be offensive to state that we descended from apes? This is current scientific knowledge. Not a single practising scientists doubts it. It couldn’t be overturned without overturning the whole of biology, zoology, geology and chemistry as we know them. Obviously people can believe what they like – actually, I can’t, personally, but often find myself having to believe things I wish were not true – but anyway, lots of people can believe what they like, and they are welcome to do so. But they shouldn’t expect others to respect their irrational beliefs. The BBC’s mealy-mouthed form of words was a small victory for the forces of unreason.



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  1. Jams O'Donnell permalink

    Or maybe it was just a shorthand way of saying, ‘By the way, the fact we are descended from apes was worked out from a theory known as evolution which everyone knows was developed by Darwin and which is the underlying premise of what I am talking about but which I don’t have time to go into now…’?

  2. Colin Davis permalink

    Hang on a minute, this poor woman is not at fault., The article calls her a “newsreader”, which means she was merely reading what someone else wrote. That’s all a newsreader is paid to do, surely?

    • Well, yes I agree that if she had no input into the script then it’s unfair to blame her personally. But I did say in the article,’the newsreader, or whoever wrote her script’.

  3. Just be thankful it wasn’t fox news and the newreader didn’t put air-quotes around “evolutionary theory maintains”. It could be worse, be thankful you’re not an American. 🙂

    • Cormac permalink

      Of course the newsreaders have input, they are the ones who have to read it live on television. If a newsreader was just there to read straight from a script, why do they all have masters in journalism? For a long live report where news is breaking, of course proof reading is not possible, but this was not a breaking story.

  4. Albert Sterenborg permalink


  5. Emma permalink

    If people believe in god, people that do believe think God is the reason all things were created and evolve. Not because of anything written in the bible but because they believe god created everything. That stands up to the scientific theories which are still theories as they are never 100% proven.

    • It’s certainly true that, since scientific theories depend on evidence, they are always subject to revision, because fresh evidence may always turn up. However there is now so much evidence in favour of evolution that it’s vanishingly unlikely it could ever be disproved – though the details of the evolutionary story may be modified.

      • Emma permalink

        There is no evidence the big bang ever happened though just theory. Which is more likely that the intricacies of nature and complexities of being human were caused by rocks exploding in space and evolution or someone creating them. But I do like a good debate. Lol xx

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  1. Daily Overload – News in short (18-09-2012) « The Skeptical Bear

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