The Evolution of Evolution 121Africa has the ostrich, South America the rhea, Australia the cassowary and emu, and New
Zealand the kiwi. This distribution makes no sense in the Noah’s ark story but does fit the
idea that they were closely related when all these southern landmasses were part of the great
Gondwana supercontinent about 100 million years ago. Since the time that these continents
have drifted apart, so too have their ratite natives diverged from one another.
Finally, the fossil record provides the details of how life has evolved and is now the
strongest piece of evidence for evolution. The remaining chapters of this book will detail the
incredible evolutionary stories revealed by fossils, so we will not discuss them further here.
These were all lines of evidence that Darwin mustered in 1859 and they have only grown
stronger in the past 150 years with the accumulation of more details and examples. Each
alone is strong evidence that life has evolved and is impossible to explain by creationism,
and added together they make the case overwhelming. But we have even better evidence:
we can see life evolving today, so evolution is as much an observed fact of nature as the fact
that the sky appears blue.
Evolution Happens All the Time!
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
—Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1973Biologists finally began to realize that Darwin had been too modest. Evolution by
natural selection can happen rapidly enough to watch. Now the field is exploding.
More than 250 people around the world are observing and documenting evolution,
not only in finches and guppies, but also in aphids, flies, graylings, monkeyflow-
ers, salmon and sticklebacks. Some workers are even documenting pairs of species—
symbiotic insects and plants—that have recently found each other, and observing the
pairs as they drift off into their own world together like lovers in a novel by D. H.
Lawrence.
—Jonathan Weiner, “Evolution in Action”If the evidence mustered by Darwin and many other scientists in the past 150 years was not
enough to prove that life has evolved, there is an even simpler test: watch life evolve right
now! Creationists try to discredit evolution by saying that it all happened in the past; they
seem unaware that it continues to happen all around us, even as I write this.
We can see natural selection operating on many different scales and on many different
types of organisms. The details of many of these recent studies are provided in Jonathan
Weiner’s excellent book, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994) or David
Mindell’s The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life (2006). Looking over the shoulders of
the hundreds of hardworking, dedicated, self-sacrificing biologists who spend years endur-
ing harsh conditions in the field to observe evolution in action inspires admiration in us real
scientists. This is in sharp contrast with the creationists who sit in their comfortable homes
and write drivel about subjects they have never studied and do not understand.
The classic example, of course, has long been the finches of the Galapagos Islands
(fig. 4.13). Darwin himself collected many of them when he was there in 1835, but they were
all so different that he did not notice that the diverse birds he had shot were all finches with