"Ever-buddy's Owe-pin-yun . . .

. . . is jus' as good as ever-buddy else's."

I have gotten this opinion from a wide variety of people, on a wide variety of subjects, from Evolution to Bible interpretation. It seems to be very common in the U.S. -- an expression of the ideal of universal equality that used to reign here. (Nowadays of course, there are several categories of people who are more equal than everybody else -- but I'll leave that discussion for another day).

Trouble is, it just ain't true.

Oh, if two people know most of what can be known about a subject, or know nothing at all about it, yeah, their opinions are one just as good as the other. In the latter case of course, their opinions are equally worthless.

The sort of uneducated Pithecanthropoid who maintains that "Evolution is just a theory" is the sort who comes up with with the "Ever-buddy..." argument -- and I recently ran into one of those. They show lack of knowledge about what science does and how it goes about it, as well as how one judges between opinions.

A scientific theory is a precise (or as precise as possible, given the data) description of how one corner of the Universe works, together with a set of testable propositions. The propositions are essentially questions that the scientist is asking of the Universe, and must be capable of being false. Propositions which are true under all circumstances are not useful for anything but elocution lessons ("The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly On The Plain")

The arguments I have seen on-line against Evolution all boil down to: "I don't think that's right, and my opinion is as good as yours." Factual arguments from this crowd are either risible or groaners -- "How can anybody be that dumb?!"

I admittedly do not read the peer-reviewed journals, so my opinion of the specific content of modern evolutionary models is less than stellar. I do read the general scientific press -- Science News, and occasional issue of Scientific American, and WWW.CNN.COM. Nothing I am seeing there contradicts the general idea of Evolution -- that living organisms on earth are the descendants of earlier organisms, and that one can validly reason that presently complicated (read: US) ones are descended from less complex ones in the past (Homo Faber, Homo Erectus, Pithecanthropus, Ramapithecus, etc.)

The philosophical roots of this idea lie in the science of geology in two ways:

1) The idea of Uniformitarianism -- that the geological processes we seen now are the same processes that prevailed in the past, and that the type of rocks and sediments being laid down now are the same as were laid down by the same processes in the past (e.g. the process of limnification, which lays down limestone in the bed of lakes .) We see some instances of catastrophic change in the geologic column, and continental drift has recycled much of the Earth's early crust through volcanoes, but in general, the processes are steady and continuous.

2) It is this very steadiness which gives us the means to assign relative or absolute dates to objects found entombed in various sorts of rock. Merely by noting layers, we can assign relative dates to two objects found at different depths in the column. With modern radionucleide analysis, we can often give approximate (within a reasonably well-understood margin of error) absolute dates, Cross-correlating dates given by different tests (Radiocarbon dating and dendro-chronology, for instance), we can be much surer of their accuracy. We ask Nature the same question in different ways, and look at what kind of answers we get.

Now, as to the Evolution of humans, we do not find evidence of anything that looks like us more than a half million years ago. We do find things that look a little like us, and a little like our cousins the chimpanzees (except that they stand upright). Between 50 and 100,000 years ago, we begin seeing evidence of organisms that look a lot like us (Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Faber, some early Homo Sapiens). From about 20,000 years ago, we don't find any (even Neanderthal) cousins closer that the Chimpanzee, Gorilla, and Orangutang. We seem to have out-competed or killed off our hominid cousins.

Genetics, too, give us answers that accord with the idea of Evolution. Similar-looking organisms have similar genetic structures. Having recently decoded the human genome, as well as that of the chimpanzee, we are within a very few years of being able to specify exactly which genes control the aspects of our bodies that differentiate us from the chimps.

Similarly, well-informed estimates of the rate at which mutations occur allow us to estimate how long ago we diverged from our cousins the Great Apes -- the current figure is somewhere in the vicinity of 5 million years ago. I.e. the nearest common ancestor of humans and chimps lived about 5,000,000 years ago. At that point in the geological record, we do not find evidence of either modern humans or modern chimps, but of organisms that might be ancestral to both.

Scientifically, we have evidence of Uniformitarian processes -- things happening now, that were happening as far back as we can see. We have (admittedly spotty) evidence of a series of increasingly human-like organisms from several million years back. We have the evidence of genetics, which shows how closely related we are with, other living things, past and present.

All of which adds up to consistent evidence of the evolution of modern man.

None of the competing ideas (Creationism, "Intelligent Design") deal with the range and specificity of evidence which supports Evolution. None of them present data or hypotheses which can be tested, and none of them are falsifiable. They are simple, circular tautologies.

Science is a process of careful and methodical experimentation, theorizing, and presenting evidence for testing by one's peers. "Peers" are people who have studied the subject at least as deeply as the scientist presenting evidence has -- and their opinions of the matter are of value.

People who have _NOT_ studied a given subject do not have useful or valid opinions on it. PhD Geologists and astronomers are not allowed to make random comments about biological results, and vice-versa. Certain noted scientists need to be reminded of this occasionally -- people pontificating outside their own specialties are as silly as redneck semi-illiterates doing the same.

As between a competent scientist and a ranting redneck Creationist, there is no doubt which I will choose.