Steve Jones
Professor of Genetics, University College London
Abstract - Why Creationism is Wrong and Evolution is Right
Science is about disbelief. It accepts that all knowledge is
provisional and that any theory might in principle be disproved.
Some theories are better established than others: the earth is
probably not flat, babies are almost certainly not brought by storks
and men and dinosaurs are unlikely to have appeared on earth within
the past few thousand years. Even so, nothing is sacred. In 1905
classical physics collapsed after a seemingly trivial observation
about glowing gases and the same is potentially true for all other
scientific theories.Many biologists are worried
by a recent and unexpected return of an argument based on belief –
by a widespread certainty, untestable and unsupported by evidence,
that life did not evolve but appeared by supernatural means.
Worldwide, more people believe in creationism than in evolution.
Why do no biologists agree? I will talk about what evolution is,
about new evidence that men and chimps are close relatives and about
how we are, nevertheless, unique and why creationism does more harm
to religion than it does to science.
Biography
Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University
College London. His own research is in population genetics – the
evolution and diversity of fruit-flies, snails and human beings and
he has worked extensively on these subjects in Europe, the United
States, Africa and the Middle East and has published many tedious
scientific papers on them. Much of the work has to do with the
response of genes to environmental stresses and in particular to
high temperature.
He also has a concern with the public
understanding of science and has written several books including,
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution; The Language of the
Genes; In The Blood; Almost like a Whale: The Origin of Species
Updated; Y: The Descent of Men; The Single Helix: A Turn around the
World of Science.
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