The Gospel According the Darwin

Today marks the 200th birth­day of Charles Dar­win. If evo­lu­tion is the true story of why we all exist, then why is there any doubt to its verac­ity? Richard Dawkins tack­les the “evo­lu­tion is just a the­ory” nar­ra­tive, which implies evo­lu­tion is merely an unfal­si­fied sci­en­tific hypoth­e­sis, with this prac­ti­cal def­i­n­i­tion of truth:

Evo­lu­tion is true in what­ever sense you accept it as true that New Zealand is in the South­ern Hemi­sphere. If we refused ever to use a word like “true”, how could we con­duct our day-to-day con­ver­sa­tions? Or fill in a cen­sus form: “What is your sex?” “The hypoth­e­sis that I am male has not so far been fal­si­fied, but let me just check again”. As Dou­glas Adams might have said, it doesn’t read well. Yet the phi­los­o­phy that imposes such scru­ples on sci­ence has no basis for absolv­ing every­day facts from the same cir­cum­lo­cu­tion. It is in this sense that evo­lu­tion is true – pro­vided, of course, that the sci­en­tific evi­dence for it is strong. It is very strong.