Eat more cookies

I was listening this morning to my favorite podcast, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. The Skeptical Rogues had a great round-robin discussion on the top five misconceptions about evolutionary theory. I so enjoyed the discussion, I thought it would make great fodder for a five-part series of posts, right here. So here is a paraphrase of misconception #1 from Rebecca Watson.

“Evolution can’t explain the origin of life.”

This one is technically not a misconception because it is, in fact, correct. Evolution cannot explain the origin of life, but this is not a problem or weakness with evolutionary theory, as many detractors from the theory believe. Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life. It never has.

Modern evolutionary theory seeks to explain the morphological, ecological, behavioral, physiological, and genetic change in organisms over time, and to construct phylogenetic trees of relatedness among organisms. Living things change over time. Evolution is concerned with the mechanisms and the pathways of those changes. Evolution assumes life is here – it does not specifically attempt to explain the forces that may have occurred for life to develop from non-life.

Abiogenesis attempts to do that. While there have been some tantalyzing descriptions of mechanisms that may explain how life arose on earth, no one theory has garnered universal appeal. Abiogenesis is a dynamic field.