How to close the escape clause

In my last post I discussed how people use the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution as a means to safely compartmentalize evidence for evolution that might produce cognitive dissonance. In this post, I will address how this can be addressed when teaching or discussing evolution.

It helps to be aware of some theory in education. Constructivism in education holds that learning is an active process in which the learner constructs new knowledge to account for new phenomena. People will usually try to fit new information into their existing framework. Thus their previous knowledge and suppositions influence how they learn new material. Often it is necessary to show that the previous framework is faulty in order for them to create a new framework. If the old framework is not addressed, they find ways to fit the new information into the old framework. Thus they are able to learn facts and details yet fail to learn the over riding picture.

One way to overcome the microevolution escape clause is to explicitly discuss the distinction and to point out the historical relationship of the ideas, as I did in my last post. Historically, macroevolution came first and has been more strongly supported. The mechanisms of microevolution have always been more controversial. Macroevolution is definitely not an extrapolation of microevolution.

It is also useful to know that there is one area where people never use the microevolution escape clause: human evolution. They are willing to define a lot of change as microevolution--they do not hold a strict definition as change within species. Answers in Genesis has even suggested that all whales might be one "kind" and have evolved by microevolution. But the one group that all opponents of evolution agree is a different kind and could not have evolved by natural selection is humans. It is common in the classroom, especially at the high school level, to avoid discussing human evolution, since it is more likely to bring up controversy. This avoids using the best example to force people to confront the evidence for evolution.

When discussing fossil evidence and transitional fossils, the human fossil record is as good as any. It has relatively few gaps and many great examples of transitions. When discussing the similarities of organisms and shared derived traits or similar DNA, a comparison of humans to apes and monkeys is an excellent example. Students will be more familiar with these and their similarities and differences than for example the relationships of perissodactyls and artiodactyls.

A third way to break down the distinction is to show how the kinds of evidence at one level are exactly the same as at a higher level. This could be done with several kinds of evidence, such as morphological, but it is easiest to show and most effective using molecular evidence. You can look at the nested patterns of similarity that is produced by a clear example of microevolution, for example the changes produced during an HIV infection or the relationships of different HIV strains, or other examples of short term evolution of microbes. The patterns that are produced in this microevolutionary change is exactly the same patterns produced when you compare the DNA of different orders of mammals, or kinds of primates, etc. The programs that determine evolutionary trees are exactly the same in both instances. There is simply no logical or methodological distinction that can be made between analysis at the microevolutionary and macroevolutionary levels. In fact, the programs we use to analyze microevolutionary change were originally used for studying macroevolutionary change and were based on principles of macroevolutionary analysis, not the other way around.

The distinction between microevolution and macroevolution is only one way that people are able to escape the dissonance produced by the evidence for evolution. The other most common way is to avoid seeing the forest for the trees. For each particular example of evidence for evolution, creationists have come up with sometimes laborious ways to try to explain it away. They need a completely different means to explain away another piece of evidence, and yet another way for the next. Once each piece of evidence is dealt with, they can file it away as non threatening. They avoid seeing the bigger picture, that it is not each individual piece that is proof of evolution, rather it is the cumulative affect of millions of pieces of evidence pointing in the same direction that supports evolution. The fact that their criticisms do not make a coherent whole is also not dealt with, as long as they avoid looking at the big picture. The fact that there is no single "proof" of evolution should be emphasized, and the congruence of all of the lines of evidence emphasized.