of Mice and Men - part I

Men and mice are distant cousins.

This, in a nutshell, is the gist of Richard Dawkins' latest book, the Greatest Show on Earth. In the beginning of the book, Dawkins promises to present detailed evidence to educate readers into accepting Darwinian evolution of species by natural selection as an undisputed scientific fact. On that promise, Dawkins definitely delivers.

To a biology/zoology layman like myself, this book is a great read. It raises awareness for the cemented status of the theory of evolution in today's scientific circles.

You see, evolution is no longer "just a theory". In view of the overwhelming amount of evidence piled up over the last several decades, evolution today is the undisputed scientific explanation of how we came to be. It is a fact, in the same sense where the theory of gravity is now considered a fact.

This doesn't mean, however, that evolution is and will forever be the best explanation of how we came to be. In science, you can never achieve absolute certainty. Rather, what this means is that unless someone can topple evolution by presenting a better theory, everyone is entirely warranted in going about their lives under the presumption of kinship to mice.

That new contender theory, let's call it Darwin's Blaster, not only has to explain the truckloads of otherwise-inexplicable phenomena that evolution explains for us, but it also needs to explain why evolution provides an apparent explanation to all these phenomena, if in fact it is flawed.

Darwin's Blaster, in other words, would have to do to evolution what relativity did to Newtonian physics, namely:

• provide more precise explanations to all those observations out there
• explain why for 300 years, an inaccurate theory like Newtonian physics delivered acceptable explanations and predictions without anyone ever experiencing a problem

I doubt that we're going to come across a Darwin Blaster anytime soon, if ever. Those people who promote Creationism or the theory of Intelligent Design, do so out of entirely non-scientific motivations. For this reason specifically, they have no hope of succeeding.

You see, evolution is a controversy among social circles, not among biologists. Creationist arguments have no hope in infiltrating serious scientific circles because they are not theories. Not even hypotheses! They are mere ideas.

Intelligent Design is and idea. It is a proposed story of what happened. A scientific hypothesis, in contrast, needs to contain a coherent chain of cause and effect factors, that amount to an explanation of how what is proposed actually happened. It is the presence and coherence of those how details that distinguish a respectable hypothesis from a mere story like Intelligent Design.

A theory, still, is a hypothesis that passes two very important tests:

• ability to explain those apparently inexplicable observations about the real world that got us looking for an explanation in the first place
• ability to predict the future turnout of events, as can be tested in the lab by anyone and everyone

Darwinian evolution passes all of the above, Intelligent Design doesn't. And, for the moment at least, that's the end of the story!

Ok, Richard, I buy it. Mice are my cousins.

Now the interesting debate starts, the debate that Dawkins seems to have side-stepped entirely:

If mice are on a par with men in evolutionary standards, in what respect -if any- are we then to be considered superior to mice?

There are more mice than people out there. Their genetic code is thriving while our genetic code is producing minds that glorify celibacy or thrive to invent yet more efficient contraceptives. If the name of the game is "duplicate your genes" then we're surely not superior.

The bodies of modern mice have evolved over exactly the same period of time as our bodies. Rather than big and expensive, their genes have adapted a policy of small, agile, and dispensable. It works formidably for them. Mice have conquered every last corner of the world as we have. With all our sophisticated technology we can't even keep them out of our basements. If the name of the game is "build a more successful machine" then it looks like we're not ahead either!

What then is it that makes me so convinced that we're superior to mice? Richard Dawkins leaves this question wide open and I can't live with myself until I take stab at the answer. Surely the being that builds mouse traps and pesticides is superior to the being that falls for them in some respect?

My answer will follow in part II. What's yours?