Category Archives: Science>Evolution

Bungling the Facts Behind Evolution

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The last presidential election is, thankfully, long behind us, but do you remember Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry? He got flak for saying, “In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution. I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”
There’s plenty of anti-science nuttiness in this country to go around, but Texas has another prominent politician who’s doing more than his share. Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who is, bizarrely, the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, recently circulated a draft of his “High Quality Research Act,” which would politicize the work of the National Science Foundation by having it answer to politicians.
Can we question evolution?
In the wake of the response to Perry’s comments, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach asked, “Does Questioning Evolution Make You Anti-Science?”
Yeah, pretty much. Let’s take a look at his apologetic.
Denial of both climate change and evolution is popular among conservatives. The author said, “While I cannot comment on climate-change science, I do have a great deal to say about evolution.” He lists his credentials as organizing the annual science vs. religion debates at Oxford University, which were typically about evolution, and giving Richard Dawkins a good thrashing at another debate for good measure.
But for someone who’s well versed in these matters, his understanding of science seems stunted.

What I learned from these debates, as well as reading extensively on evolution, is that evolutionists have a tough time defending the theory when challenged in open dialogue.

I doubt that, but let’s assume it’s the case. Who cares? Science, not debate, is where our confidence in evolution comes from.
Theory vs. law

[Attacks on evolution do not] mean that evolution is not true or that theory is without merit or evidence. It does, however, corroborate what Governor Perry said. Evolution is a theory. Unlike, say, the laws of thermodynamics, it has never been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be true.

Wow—where do you start?
Evolution is an explanation. It claims to give us the mechanism explaining how life got to be the way it is. The best evolution can hope for is to become a theory, and it has done so. The same is true for germ theory, another explanation, which has also reached that pinnacle and can’t become anything better.
By contrast, a scientific law is a description—how motion works (F = ma) or how gravity works (F = Gm1m2/r2) or how gasses work (PV = nRT), for example.
In Newton’s Second Law of Motion, why is force proportional to the acceleration and not to, say, the acceleration squared? The law doesn’t help you out there; it only describes the relationship. For the mechanism, you turn to a theory.
A theory doesn’t graduate to become a law. They’re two different things. And as for the “beyond the shadow of a doubt” thing, science is always provisional. Nothing is ever certain. A sliver of that shadow of doubt hangs over our most established scientific conclusions, including the laws of thermodynamics.

Richard Dawkins and the late and celebrated Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould fiercely debated basic presumptions about evolution. Gould … argued that the large gaps in the fossil record make a mockery of a theory of gradual evolution, which is why Gould advocated ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ a variation on Darwinism in which evolution takes place in dramatic periods of change followed by long eons of stasis.

You’ve got two scientists arguing about details within evolution. That’s how science works.
The author seems to imagine some great schism within biology, but both scientists accepted evolution. What’s the point?
Evidence of evolution

No scientist has ever witnessed evolution directly and science itself says that this is impossible given the vast amount of time needed for species to evolve.

Witnessing something directly is nice, but science is long past the day when Galileo dropped different-sized cannonballs from the Tower of Pisa to see if the bigger one fell faster. (He probably didn’t, but it’s a nice story.) Science is often indirect now. When we look at a photo from the Hubble satellite or an electron microscope, there’s a long chain of technology massaging bits before the data is in a form that we can understand.
Nevertheless, we have seen speciation happen. My favorite examples are the evolution of a bacterium’s ability to eat nylon (nylon didn’t exist until it was invented in the 1930s) and Richard Lenski’s 20-year experiment in which bacteria evolved the ability to eat citrate.
Evolution is the overwhelming scientific consensus. Deal with it.

Before [we attack] Republican politicians for simply questioning evolution, it would behoove [us] to recall that the very essence of science is to question and that stifling doubt is a sin that religion was quite guilty of in the past and that science should refrain from repeating it in the present.

Yes, science needs to question. The politicians mentioned here, however, are neither Science nor scientists. A non-scientist politician critiquing science is like a non-pilot politician giving pointers to the pilot flying my plane.
Take your seat, pal, and leave the expert fields to the experts.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
— 1 Cor. 13:11.

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/7/11.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Design Hypothesis: DNA and Dysteleology

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Creationism, evolution, and the Design HypothesisDysteleology is the idea that life or nature does not show compelling evidence of design, in contrast to the Christian perception of purpose or design (teleology). Recent discoveries in DNA verify that life looks more haphazard than designed.
Let’s consider four aspects of DNA that make it look not designed.
DNA Size
Human DNA has 3.42 billion base pairs. You might imagine that humans need the most DNA since God(s) said, “Let us make man in our image,” but we’re not even at the top of the list of mammals—cows, mice, and bats have more.
And mammals don’t have as much DNA as other animals. One kind of salamander has 126 billion base pairs in its DNA. Does it really need 37 times more DNA than humans? Or is there a lot of waste?
There’s quite a bit of variability in fish DNA. The longest DNA (for the marbled lungfish) is almost 400 times the size of the smallest (the green puffer fish).
There are grasshoppers, beetles, ticks, worms, and snails that have more DNA than we do. There are plants that have more than we do—the onion, for example, has five times more. The record holder, with 400 times more DNA than humans, is a protozoa.
The wide variability in DNA size is shown in this chart:

This is a logarithmic chart of the weight, or c-value (a proxy for DNA length), of the DNA of many categories of animals. Humans are in the “mammals” category at the top.
Either DNA is all useful and length is proportionate to the complexity of the organism—and many animals are much more complex than we are—or there’s a lot of waste in DNA. That’s not a clue to a designer.
Pseudogenes
All mammals synthesize vitamin C. They produce it internally and don’t have to eat it. All mammals, that is, except a handful, such as humans. We get scurvy if we go too long without eating vitamin C.
When you look in human DNA, you find a pseudogene (a broken gene) for vitamin C production, right where most other mammals have a functioning gene. Apparently, ancestors of humans (and a few other primates) once ate a diet rich in vitamin C so that a random mutation that broke the gene didn’t convey a selective disadvantage. The pseudogene spread through the population, and here we are, with every cell carrying a useless gene.
Smell is another area where humans have a lot of pseudogenes. Of our roughly 100 odorant receptor genes, most don’t work. Many other mammals have working versions of these pseudogenes. At the other end of the scale is the dolphin, which has no working odorant receptor genes. They’re all pseudogenes.
Overall, human DNA has 20,000 pseudogenes—again, not evidence of the hand of a designer.
Endogenous Retroviruses
A virus can’t reproduce by itself and must force a cell to do it, which causes disease. Where it gets weird is when the virus infects a germ cell (egg or sperm). Then the viral DNA, usually inactivated by mutation, is passed on to succeeding generations. Becoming part of the genome is the “endogenous” part.
DNA keeps a record of these invasions. Human DNA has thousands of endogenous retroviruses, mostly just fragments, which compose 8% of our genome. One, the 5-million-year-old “Phoenix virus,” was intact enough within human DNA that it has been reconstructed.
Atavisms and Vestigial Structures
Birds don’t have teeth, but their ancestors did. In fact, the ancient genes for teeth are still present in bird DNA. Scientists have been able to tweak chicken DNA to turn on these genes and get chickens with conical, dinosaur-like teeth.
When archaic genes are switched on in nature, those are called atavisms. Snakes can have legs, dolphins can have a hind pair of limbs, and people can have tails.
Vestigial structures are those that have lost most or all of their ancestral function. Note that they’re not necessarily useless (Creationists delight in pointing out the value in the human appendix or tailbone); they’re just not used for what they were originally used for. For example, ostrich wings are vestigial because they can’t be used to fly (that’s what wings do).
Other examples are eyes in blind mole rats or cave fish, the pelvis (for nonexistent legs) in the baleen whale, and goose bumps (to raise nonexistent fur) in humans.
None of this proves that God doesn’t exist. What it does make clear is the difference between complexity, which we do see in DNA, and evidence of a careful and skillful designer, which we don’t.

Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true.
If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record,
the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof
of our relatedness to all other living things.
— Francis Collins, evangelical Christian and head of NIH

Photo credit: U.S. National Library of Medicine

Nazi Soldiers Indoctrinated with Darwin? Yeah, Right.

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Koukl apologetics evolutionWhy were the Nazis so unpleasant? Because they were force-fed evolution, of course! Christian podcaster Greg Koukl thinks that he’s uncovered the missing link.
In a 2011 Stand to Reason podcast (starting at 5:00), Koukl spoke of being informed that all German soldiers during World War II were issued two books, Goethe’s Faust and a German translation of The Origin of Species. And it was Hitler himself who insisted that they get them.
About the logic behind Hitler’s assigning these books, Koukl says:

It’s because the ideas in The Origin of Species served [Hitler’s] purposes well, and if a person actually believed what Darwin taught, then they would make good Nazis.

My first complaint is that Koukl accepted the story uncritically. This story nicely supports his worldview that evolution is both harmful and wrong, so he passes it on with no fact checking. I do my best to take the opposite approach: when I find a delicious story that skewers an opponent (either a person or idea), I want to make sure that I have strong evidence so that I don’t look ridiculous after passing on flawed hearsay.
In doing my own research on books issued to German soldiers, the only page I came across was a post in another atheist blog who’d heard the podcast and asked the very same question. That blogger raised a great point: Why issue those two books but not Hitler’s own Mein Kampf?
And remember that Nazis liked to ban books. Or burn them. The official Nazi library journal in 1935 listed twelve categories of banned books. One category was:

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism.

That Origin of Species supported Nazi thinking seems unlikely.
Let’s move on to Koukl’s ill-informed ramblings on evolution. One of Koukl’s favorite ploys is to try to tie eugenics with evolution.
First off, Darwin himself rejected eugenics. In The Descent of Man, he said, “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that [not culling the inferiors] must be highly injurious to the race of man.” Creationists enjoy quoting just the paragraph that contains this sentence and ignoring the very … next … paragraph where he overturns this argument. (I’ve written more on Creationists taking Darwin out of context here.)
Darwin rejected eugenics, Greg. Of course, you’ll quickly backpedal and argue that Darwin’s own personal opinions say nothing about the validity of evolution. Agreed! Which is why whether or not Hitler kept his copy of Origin under his pillow or had an autographed photo of Darwin on his night table says nothing about the central issue here: Is evolution the best explanation of why life is the way it is?
Which is why this entire topic is simply mudslinging.
“Hitler was bad, and Hitler and Darwin were BFFs! And Darwin was ugly! And … and he probably ate babies! And didn’t recycle!” Whether true or not, this is irrelevant.
This is what one does when one doesn’t actually have a real argument.
Science is not policy. Evolution is science (the domain of scientists), and eugenics is policy (the domain of politicians). Any scientist who advocates eugenics has left the domain of science and jumped into policy. Eugenics isn’t science, and criticism of eugenics is no criticism of science.
Which brings up the last point: Did Hitler base his eugenics policies on evolution? Koukl seems to imagine a sweet and gentle Adolf Hitler, picking up litter and helping little old ladies cross the street, being turned to the scientific Dark Side after reading Darwin. But we don’t need to imagine any such nudging. Germany had plenty of anti-Semitism around already. In fact, Martin Luther himself wrote the violently anti-Semitic On the Jews and Their Lies.
This bypasses the issue: Is evolution correct? Bringing up eugenics is not only flawed but irrelevant.
It’s the white flag of surrender.

[Jews are a] base, whoring people,
that is, no people of God,
and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law
must be accounted as filth.
— Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies, ch. 4

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/24/11.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia

Who Cares About Darwin?

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It’s more or less Darwin Opposite Day—the day half a year from Darwin’s birthday—so it’s a good time to ask the blasphemous question: Who cares about Darwin? More precisely: Who cares about what Darwin wrote?
Of course, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species revolutionized biology. In the history of science, he’s a god.
Darwin may be a god, but in biology today, Darwin’s writings don’t count for anything. No one checks their results against Darwin’s thinking. No biologist says, “That’s an interesting hypothesis, Chuzzlewaite, but let’s compare it against the Great Darwin to see if it holds up.”
By contrast, consider how Aristotle was elevated during the medieval period. What Aristotle said, not what experiment showed, determined science.

Aristotle’s views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. (Source)

Creationists seem to put Darwin into the Infallible Sage bin along with Aristotle, and they love to quote him as if biology today were constrained by what he said. But, of course, what Darwin wrote about evolution is important today only for the history of science, not biology. Even if they could make him look bad (and I say they don’t), so what? That would have nothing to do with the validity of the theory of evolution.
A popular Creationist tactic is to twist Darwin’s The Descent of Man to argue that he supported eugenics. Ben Stein’s “crockumentary” Expelled correctly quotes Darwin from this book:

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Ah, so Darwin was rabidly in support of eugenics, right? Nope. The very next paragraph clarifies. He talks about our instincts for compassion and says,

Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

Unsurprisingly, Expelled just quote-mines the first passage out of context to completely misrepresent Darwin’s views.
Here’s another excerpt popular among Creationists, this time from Origin of Species.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

A frank admission by Darwin of the inadequacy of his theory? Not really. The very next sentence explains how evolution could account for it.

If numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist … then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection … can hardly be considered real.

Creationists out there: do your research into what Darwin actually said and don’t quote him out of context. It makes you look like a liar.
In the hope that humor can make the point where reason can’t, let me modify a popular Christian joke. Here’s the Christian version: A flood drives a devout man onto the roof of his house. A boat comes to take him away, but he says, “No—God will provide.” The water level keeps rising. Then another boat comes, and then a helicopter, but the man sends them all away. The flood water continues to rise, and he’s swept away and drowns.
He goes to heaven and he’s furious at God. “Why didn’t you save me?” he says.
“What did you want?” God says. “I sent two boats and a helicopter!”
Now: imagine a fundamentalist in heaven. With his new heavenly wisdom, he realizes that science was right all along, and his literalist take of the Bible was laughably wrong.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demands of God.
“What did you want?” God says. “I sent Charles Darwin and 100,000 evolutionary biologists!”

It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly)
that direct arguments against Christianity and theism
produce hardly any effect on the public;
and freedom of thought is best promoted
by the gradual illumination of men’s minds
which follows from the advance of science.
— Charles Darwin

Photo credit: Wikipedia

World Premiere: The Magician’s Twin

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I attended the premiere of the Discovery Institute’s video The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society. It’s the first of an anticipated 3-part video series on C. S. Lewis and science.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Discovery Institute, they’re a Seattle-based think tank whose Center for Science and Culture (CSC) is dedicated to undermining public support for evolution. Though evolution wasn’t a main theme for this video, rejection of evolution will be the theme of video #2 and a positive case for Intelligent Design in video #3.
Before I review the film, about which I have some good things to say, take a look at the organization that created it. The budget of the CSC is reportedly $4 million per year. The agendas of foundations and wealthy individuals who contribute include the goal of “total integration of biblical law into our lives” and commitment to “the infallibility of the Scripture”—acceptable goals in a free society but incompatible with the scientific goal of following the facts where they lead without crippling it with an agenda.
In a reasonable world, an organization dedicated to exposing the weaknesses of biology would be staffed with, y’know, biologists—people who actually understand the science and who are capable of evaluating it. But, unsurprising to any observer of Creationism and related fields, there are very few here. There are lots of doctorates among their 40-odd fellows, but as for relevant ones, I could only find these two:

  • Michael Behe has a doctorate in biochemistry. Though he proposed the clever concept of irreducible complexity, he accepts common descent (the idea that all life has a common ancestor), a view rejected by most in the Creationism/Intelligent Design movement.
  • Jonathan Wells has a doctorate in molecular and cell biology, but Wells has made clear his agenda: “[The words of Rev. Sun Myung Moon], my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism.” (While this agenda is at odds with science, I do applaud his honesty.)

The approach of the Creationism industry is similar to what, in the computer industry, was called Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Back in the mainframe computer days, IBM’s product was more expensive. IBM salesmen were said to soften up reluctant customers with, “Keep in mind that no one was ever fired for buying IBM.” In other words: you pay a little more and you get a reliable product, but you cut corners and you may find yourself out of a job.
The Creationist version is to acknowledge the fruits of science but then mention hoaxes (Piltdown man, the Cardiff giant) or errors (ether, geocentrism) or dangers (radioactivity, surveillance) or embarrassments (eugenics, Tuskegee syphilis experiment). Are you really sure about this whole science thing?
Creationism saying that science is valuable is a bit like Mark Antony saying, “Brutus is an honorable man.”
And that approach colored The Magician’s Twin. It was a mixture of sensible cautions against a thoughtless acceptance of all things scientific—“if it comes from science, it must be worth adopting,” or “if science says so, it must be true”—and a subtle undercutting of the credibility of science.
The word scientism was used often. I’d heard it defined as the universal application of the scientific approach to inquiry, the claim that only evidence-based knowledge has value, and/or the use of science in areas where it doesn’t apply. However, the word was expanded (beyond its normal definition, I thought) to include the demand that morals must come from or be filtered through science.
Lewis felt that science and magic are twins in three ways.
1. Science as religion. Consider the crowd of atheists that attended the national Reason Rally, science giving meaning to people’s lives, and Darwin Day celebrations.
Is that all religion is? Community, meaning, celebration? That supernatural thing seems important—no, fundamental—to religion. Indeed, this caricature of religion seems insulting to believers.
I attended the Reason Rally, and yes, that sort of community is a valuable thing. Religious people and atheists find value in community, meaning, and celebration, but they don’t share belief in the supernatural. Science is quite plainly not religion.
2. Science as credulity. Science discourages skepticism and encourages gullibility. And what is it built on? C.S. Lewis said, “If my own mind is a product of the irrational, how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about evolution?”
If evolution were true and your mind were honed by natural selection (those minds that understood reality well being more likely to survive than those that didn’t), we’d expect it to give you a fairly trustworthy account of reality.
As for skepticism and gullibility, I’ll grant that public science education is poor, science is dangerously misunderstood within society, and some politicians fall over themselves to dismiss the scientific consensus when unpleasant. Let’s work together to fix these problems, but don’t pretend that religion is on the right side of this issue.
3. Science as power. Much of science is devoted to power over nature. Unlike magic, you actually can control people with science. Eugenics, drone aircraft, bar codes, transhumanism, and surveillance cameras are some of the many technologies that have downsides.
Does science have downsides? You bet. But let’s first get clear on who does what. Science does its best to tell us what is true about nature, and policy decides what to do with this information. You don’t like eugenics? Fine, but don’t blame science for it. “We should sterilize population category X” is a policy statement, not a scientific statement. “Here’s how optics work so that a video camera will work” is from science; “We should install surveillance cameras in public places to reduce crime” is from politics.
In the Q&A afterwards, the video’s director raised concerns about groupthink within biology. Something to avoid, to be sure, but is this really a major problem? It reminded me of a powerful story Richard Dawkins told in The God Delusion about a senior lecturer in the Oxford zoology department. The professor believed that one feature of the cell was an artifact and didn’t actually exist. One day a visiting American lecturer presented evidence powerful enough to convince even this skeptic.

At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said—with passion—“My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red.

Wow—talk about a teachable moment.
The video does raise appropriate cautions about science. But how do we constrain science as a force for good without taking the nonsensical path of encouraging citizens to decide their scientific truth for themselves? My suggestions:

  • Don’t confuse the debate of scientific ideas within Science with the debate within the public. We laypeople can debate what we think of science, but we don’t decide scientific truth. Science is not a democracy, and we’re stuck with the scientific consensus. Skepticism doesn’t mean, “I get to decide my own scientific truth.”
  • Don’t confuse science (a decent approximation of what is true) with policy (what to do about it). Science is the domain of scientists; policy is the domain of politicians and the society to which they answer.
  • Understand that science can get it wrong and that its pronouncements are always provisional. Science can get railroaded by powerful interests with an agenda–corporations, grant makers, or politicians for example. To minimize this, let’s encourage transparency and motivate science in the direction that’s best for society. When a study of the safety of phosphorescent zucchini is funded by the company that wants to sell this new vegetable, that doesn’t invalidate the research, but make this funding known.
  • Demand public scrutiny of policies with downsides. The European Union puts the burden of proof that a new policy is not harmful on the proponent of that policy. This is the Precautionary Principle. Do we need to go this far? I don’t think so, but we must have our own standards that find the right balance between reckless application of new science and immobility.
  • Demand strong science education in schools and ridicule politicians who reject the scientific consensus when it is uncomfortable—for national competitiveness if not for self-respect.

Yes, it is rare that one disputant in an argument convinces another. 
Thomas Jefferson said he had never seen it happen,
but that seems too harsh. 
It happens in science all the time.
— Carl Sagan

Photo credit: Wikipedia
Related links:

Word of the Day: Survival of the Fittest

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What Would Jesus Say?The term “survival of the fittest” did not initially come from Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, though later editions did use it. It was first coined by Herbert Spencer, after reading Origin.
While a convenient phrase, it can be confusing. “Fit” in biological terms doesn’t mean what we commonly think (strong, quick, or agile, for example) but refers to how well adapted an organism is for an environment. Think of it as puzzle-piece fit, not athlete fit.
Creationists sometimes use the phrase to mean that might makes right or that the most savage or ruthless or selfish will survive. On the contrary, rather than might makes right, cooperation can be the better approach. And even if evolution did have some bloodthirsty aspects to it, how does that change whether it’s an accurate theory or not?
NewScientist magazine says:

Although the phrase conjures up an image of a violent struggle for survival, in reality the word “fittest” seldom means the strongest or the most aggressive. On the contrary, it can mean anything from the best camouflaged or the most fecund to the cleverest or the most cooperative. Forget Rambo, think Einstein or Gandhi.
What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy. Indeed it has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life. Complex cells evolved from cooperating simple cells. Multicellular organisms are made up of cooperating complex cells. Superorganisms such as bee or ant colonies consist of cooperating individuals.

Note also that evolution is descriptive, not prescriptive; it simply says what is the case and doesn’t provide moral advice. “I’ll model my morality on evolution” makes as much sense as “I’ll model my morality on the fact that arsenic kills people.”
Creationists sometimes twist Darwin’s The Descent of Man to argue that he favored eugenics. Darwin’s damning paragraph said, in part, “hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” In the first place, whether Darwin ate babies plain or with barbeque sauce says nothing about whether evolution is accurate or not. In the second place, the very next paragraph clarifies Darwin’s position about denying aid to the helpless.

Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

“Survival of the fittest” is a handy description of natural selection as long as all parties understand what it means.
Photo credit: EvolveFish
Related links:

  • “Survival of the fittest,” Wikipedia.
  • Michael Le Page, “Evolution myths: ‘Survival of the fittest’ justifies ‘everyone for themselves,’” NewScientist, 4/16/08.