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Despite its--and other--scientific advances in the 20th Century, evolution is under assault in America. People with thinly disguised religious and political agendas are demanding that alternative "theories" with euphemistic names such as "creation science" and "intelligent design" be given the same or greater weight than evolution in our textbooks and classrooms.

But thanks to people like Mayr, there is a big difference between these theories and the theory of evolution. That difference is science. Mayr took Darwin's abstract theory of evolution and turned it into the science of evolutionary biology.

During his nine-decade career, Mayr wrote or edited 20 books and more than 600 journal articles, yet that was just a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of papers and books that have been written detailing experimental and observational studies supporting evolution. Through studies of diverse organisms ranging from viruses to plants and animals to humans, Mayr and others helped evolution itself evolve from its early incarnation as an incomplete and abstract theory into a rigorous science drawing on genetic principles, mathematical tools and some of the most sophisticated experimental methods known to modern science.

Conversely, proponents of alternative theories such as intelligent design cannot produce a single testable, repeatable experiment to support their position. They want us to take it on faith. They argue that some things in nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher being and that there is some greater purpose in the universe.

Pre-Darwin religion

They're especially fond of tired examples and arguing from analogy--the old "watch must have a watchmaker" kind of fuzzy logic familiar to 18th and 19th Century minds. That doesn't sound like science to me; it sounds like religion before the age of Darwin. And here's the irony: While they would like you to believe that their arguments have the support of current mainstream religions, they do not.

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