The article is two years old, so this may not be news to some people – but it’s a pretty interesting breakdown of the percentage of people who accept evolution by country.
That graphic to your left is from the livescience.com article. It’s pretty amazing where the US is on that graphic.
Evolution is, of course, relevant to a number of philosophical debates. One of my favorites are the many arguments that purport to show that we should draw some interesting philosophical conclusion from facts about wide spread disagreement.
Evolution is one of my favorite examples to talk about when students are inclined to argue that widespread disagreement with respect to P entails that there is no fact of the matter with respect to P (or that the truth of P is relative).
It seems obvious that somebody is definitely wrong here. There is a fact of the matter. Either evolution is true or it isn’t, and it’s truth certainly isn’t relative. I make sure to emphasize to my students that I’m not saying which side is wrong. I only argue that we can know that someone is wrong.
The reason I like evolution so much when we discuss these disagreement arguments is that the class will typically divide concerning the truth of evolution, but everyone seems to be in agreement about the claim that someone in the room is wrong. Neither side is willing to go no objective truth in this case.
I’m sure many of you like to talk about evolution in your philosophy classes at some point, and so I thought this would be of interest to those who do.
There is an unfortunate ambiguity in the question whether it is true that “[h]uman beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” This is ambiguous between the statement that human beings entirely developed from earlier species of animals, or did so in part (large part, small part, etc.).
Because of this ambiguity, it is not clear, e.g., how a dualist (whether substance or hylomorphic) who believes that the human body is in an appropriate sense (this covers over some complications in the hylomorphic case) the product of evolution but that the soul of each individual is directly created by God should answer.
Nor is this view a rare one: it is the standard view among Catholics.
Hi Alex,
That’s a good point. After posting this I forgot to mention something else.
I know of quite a few atheists who say they are not sure whether evolution is true or not…their reason is usually something like this – I have no idea what the doctrine even says!
They are usually philosopher who in virtue of doing philosophy feel that they cannot in good conscience endorse a thesis until all terms have been clarified to their satisfaction.
So I can actually understand marking ‘unsure’ in their case.
The kind of case you mention might allow one to say that there is no objective fact whether evolutionary theory is true. For there may be no objective fact about what counts as evolutionary theory. So our relativist students might in fact stay relativist here.
It’s just about impossible to ask good polling questions on philosophical topics. 🙂 If one makes the questions too precise, most people won’t understand them. If they’re not precise, many people will misunderstand them.
Personally, when talking about relativism with undergrads, I use the example of the question whether there are aliens in other galaxies as an example of a question that there is an objective fact of the matter about but that we have no idea of the truth or falsity of. I hope this punctures the idea that if we aren’t in a position to know the answer, there is no answer. On reflection, this question also has significant ambiguity. (Do bacteria count as aliens?)
Is evolution consistent with perdurantism? Perdurantism seems to say that change is different temporal parts of a four dimensional object having different properties. This resolves the problem of temporary intrinsics, but now leaves the problem that the different temporal parts need not have any causal relationship to each other. In fact, since by definition they don’t endure, a ‘prior’ temporal part ‘goes out of existence’ before its successor ‘comes into existence’. So it would seem efficient causation is impossible.
Supposing the tree of life to be one of these perduring objects: On such an account, how can natural selection be said to be responsible for changing one temporal part (say, bacteria) into another (say, human beings)?
Supposing a coherent account of causation could be maintained, there is still the problem that the direction of causation is arbitrary. It would be just as valid to say that humans evolved from bacteria.
There is also the problem of defining the boundaries of the four dimensional object (assuming we are not embracing conventionalism here). What is a perduring object? Individuals? Species? The tree of life? The whole space-time universe?
Faced with rejecting evolution or perdurantism, surely one should reject the latter.
Sinclairj – that’s a pretty interesting argument!
If evolution and perdurantism are incompatible, then my money is on perdurantism being false. I’m in agreement with you on that.
I suspect the perdurantist is going to resist by asking for a fleshed out account of causation.
If you’re on board with a reductive analysis, there are many that seem to pose no incompatibility issues between perdurantism and evolution.
On many reductive accounts of causation (e.g., a Humean reduction, a counter-factual reduction, or a probabilistic reduction) – there would be a story to tell where there is a causal relationship between temporal slices.
I’ll have to think more about that, though.
I’ll also have to think more about what sorts of non-reductive accounts of causation would say.
Thanks for the comment.
It seems to me the burden of proof is on the advocate of perdurantism. Evolution seems quite natural and straightforward on the endurantist account.
I look forward to seeing if you can find any material on these reductive accounts.
Why isn’t this question more prominent in the debate? It seems central to me.
BTW, part of the argument can be found in footnote 79 on pg. 206 of Craig’s “THE TENSELESS THEORY OF TIME” (2000, Kluwer).
Craig indicates that there is no overlap between “prior” and “successor” temporal parts in a perduring object, “even in a common instant”. Hence how can an account of efficient causation succeed?
Thanks Sinclair,
I’ll have to check that out.