(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Evolution According to Contemporary Science." Beginning with "How Has Life Evolved?," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World.")

Evolution According to Contemporary Science: Major Points

• The modern theory of evolution is not only a fact (thoroughly tested and true beyond reasonable doubt as far as it goes), but more worthy of belief than any single one of the multitude of lesser facts or observations that support it.



• The Neo-Darwinian or "Synthetic" theory of evolution holds that the adaptive evolution of living organisms results from the interplay of two basic processes: mutation and natural selection.



• Although mutations in the genetic material occur by "chance," the anti-chance factor of natural selection ensures that evolution as a whole is anything but random.



• Adaptation is only to present conditions, since natural selection—narrowly focused on short-term advantage—cannot foresee the future.



• Competition is pervasive; an individual cooperates with another only when (and only to the extent that) this promotes its own interests better than any other option.



• Each living organism, even the simplest, consciously or unconsciously seeks (in competition with others) to maximize its own share and control of the available energy and resources, and to apply these to its own survival, growth, and reproduction.



• Neo-Darwinian theory insists that natural selection tends to maximize individual, rather than group, advantage. It thereby enforces selfish, or self-centered, behavior on all living things, although cooperative strategies often offer the best way to attain individual goals.



• Physical life as we know it would simply not work in the absence of pain, suffering, and death, which play essential, constructive roles in life.



• Inevitable aging and death are a price we pay for having evolved to a certain level of bodily complexity.



• What is truly fundamental about DNA, and potentially immortal, is the information that the DNA encodes.



• Culture, presently our major means of adaptation to our environments, is an artifact of our brains, which are collections of somatic cells as opposed to germ cells. This reflects a radical shift in the relative importance of somatic and germ cells as media of information innovation, storage, and transmission.



• Science cannot address the philosophical question of why anything at all exists; so when the theist asserts that God is necessary to explain the very existence of a physical world, authentic natural science is simply unable to comment one way or the other.



• The absence of a "purpose" within the evolutionary process itself need not mean that purpose is absent from the totality of all that is; we must simply not look for that purpose in the wrong places.