During my regular perusal of The McGill Daily, I chanced upon an article about dark energy by David Zuluaga Cano. To make his point that “many scientific models rest on educated guesses” (which is an absurd claim), he cites three examples, one of them being evolution by natural selection. I was astonished to read that he thinks of natural selection as being “little more than large assumptions.”
First off, scientific models that rest on educated guesses are not called models – they are called educated guesses. If sufficient evidence is gathered, they become accepted as theory. Science is not an ad-hoc process, as the first paragraph disparagingly portrays it to be.
Second, evolution by natural selection is not based on assumptions; it’s based on observation, experimentation, and evidence from a dozen fields of science. The point is not that “experimental observation cannot contradict” evolution, but rather that every single experiment in the past 150 years has done nothing but reinforce its validity.
Robert Aboukhalil
U3 Computer Engineering