An Evaluation of the Myth That “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”
The arguments presented in this link don't
actually address the point the article is contesting, although at first glance it seems like it does. Nor does the article address the
context of the statement “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”, which is that the Big Picture™ is explained by Evolution, the taxonomic tree, the genetic relationships between species, the fossil record, the agreement with the geological record, agreement with physics and even cosmology and on and on....
At the high-school and even college level, of course evolution isn't given extensive treatment, because it IS irrelevant to the problems being studied! Relativistic corrections aren't given extensive treatment even in third semester college physics classes either, even though "Nothing in Cosmology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Relativity"......because at the scale (size and speed) of the objects in the students coursework, relativistic corrections are negligible. You simply don't need to complicate the coursework with relativistic corrections when you're computing F=ma by using a baseball and radar gun. And despite this, it is still
true that "Nothing in Cosmology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Relativity".
The same is true for Quantum Mechanics. A student in Electrical Engineering would, of course, be taught Maxwell's Equations. This would include application, implications, and derivations. Yet how many EE students are introduced to the
quantized versions of Maxwell's Equations? How many are given application coursework, or asked to discuss the implications (
and there are implications) of the quantized versions? NONE. It's unlikely those equation forms
are even in their textbooks, at best their professor wrote it on the board one day as an aside. This is because you (probably) don't need to apply this degree of detail to the problem at hand.
Nor do you need to correct for the curvature of the Earth when you drive to work....it's irrelevant at your
scale.
(I mean seriously, when was the last time you heard of a Driving Instructor teaching about "Round Earth Theory", it's all obviously a big lie. The Earth is flat.)
Likewise, one doesn't need to know Evolutionary Theory
at all to study genetic sequencing, cellular membrane permeability, ATP synthesis, or protein chirality etc... It simply isn't applicable at that
scale. Nevertheless, it is
still true that overall, at the largest scales, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”.
