It seems to me that we can defend evolution without having to cater to the faithful at the same time?

First, notice that you use the word "defend" twice in your post! That alone is an admission that the strategy of simply standing on the strength of the science, and ignoring the relentless attack of evolution by religious creationists that has been going on for decades, is an endless and unwinnable battle. So it is worth really analyzing whether it is a *necessary* battle.

Evidence will not end this war! Ever! Why? Because you cannot win a war of evidence when the people who are attacking you simply CANNOT bring themselves to view evidence at all! You need to address the root causes of WHY evolution is such a direct affront to faith that they will maintain a steadfast and blind refusal to even LOOK at that evidence. They can't even allow themselves to UNDERSTAND evolution accurately, much less evaluate its evidence.

So the rightness of the science, and the evidence in its favor, are utterly IRRELEVANT, until we can analyze this problem.

I took some time to read Coyne's essay. And I could not disagree more.

I am a Catholic, and a firm supporter of evolution, and I can tell you why the attitude of Coyne and Dawkins are understandable but wrong, while the position advocated by the NAS and the NCSE (and biologists like Eugenie Scott, Ken Miller, Francis Collins, and the late Stephen Jay Gould) is correct.

For many people of faith, this is an absolute deal-breaker. Atheists and agnostics have a tendency to underestimate faith as just some sort of irrational belief, a "delusion" as easy to outgrow and abandon as a belief in Santa Claus. They fail to realize that for many people of faith, letting go of God is not just a letting go of an *idea*, but walking away from their culture, their family, the trust of their parents, their ancestry, their church community, their friends, their understanding of the world... and a huge part of their very *identity*, This isn't just Santa Claus. This is a BIG DEAL.

Trust me (as someone who has been on both sides of that discussion), you CANNOT break through that wall with logic or evidence. A person who believes in their heart, that acceptance of evolution is a rejection of EVERYTHING they know and believe, and everyone they love and trust ... is actually being perfectly *rational* rejecting everything you say with every fiber of their being. They will not even allow you to *EXPLAIN* evolution, much less show *EVIDENCE* for it. They simply, logically, MUST fight you with everything they have.

This *rational* resistance is what leads to the *irrationality* of creationism. To bad arguments, bad logic, bogus evidence, and bad science. It is what leads to the quote mining, the spreading of crap information without verification, to deception, and to outright lies. You have to analyze where that comes from! What could possibly produce all that? These are people who feel they are fighting you for their very souls.

And it is not just futile to fight theists on their religious beliefs ... it is logically unnecessary. It is no more necessary to give up one's religious beliefs when accepting evolution, than it is to give them up when accepting the science of human reproduction and childbirth. People CAN learn to harbor both ideas simultaneously.

Believe me, I know.

So it is not "kowtowing" or "catering" to the faithful to tell them that they can have their cake (faith) and eat it too (science).

It is true. It is genuinely and sincerely true.

It is true by evidence of devoutly theistic biologists like Collins, Miller, Ayala, Dobzhansky, Roughgarden, S.C. Morris, Lamoureaux, Falk, R.J. Berry, and many others. To even imply that they are just "catering to" the theists would be a terrible injustice to them ... and to question their sincerity either of their faith, or of their acceptance of evolutionary principles as core to their profession as biologists.

My own experience tells me that Coyne is dead wrong in this regard.

You are going to have a hard time with that!

Many creationists have shown that they don't give a damn about the evidence for evolution, even if they know about it. And most creationists are abysmally ignorant about it because they get their misinformation from lying creationist web sites and books.

@Jonathan: "1) A new viable species is created on a macroscopic level that decends from an existing species. This new species must be significantly different than its parent species and not inherently compatible with its parent species via hybridization methods. A different number of chromosomes would be nice too."

How about this:

About fifty years ago, when it was first noted that apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans have 23, the creationists subsequently pounced upon that as evidence against the evolution of humans from a common ancestor with the apes. The evolutionary scientists, however, using evolutionary theory and an understanding of genetic modification, proposed that two of the chromosomes must have joined together in the line that led to man from the common ancestor, thus reducing the chromosome number.

That prediction has been verified with the results of the recent human and chimp genome projects. It was found that human chromosome 2 is the result of the joining of two chromosomes that have homologues in the chimp. The decoding of the genomes revealed that human chromosome 2 has a stretch of non-functioning telomere coding in the exact place it should be if the two chromosomes had joined in the human line from the common ancestor with the apes, and there is also non-functioning coding for a centromere in the exact location where the extra centromere would be as it occurs in one of the homologous chimp chromosomes, as well as a functioning centromere in the same location as in the other homologous chimp chromosome.

Long before the genome projects verified it, this article contained an example of the proposition that two of the ancestral chromosomes joined together to form human chromosome 2. (The link is to an abstract of the article. The full article is available for a fee. Sorry)

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/215...

The following site (which is an NIH human genome site), however, does have this statement: "Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes - one less pair than chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and other great apes. For more than two decades, researchers have thought human chromosome 2 was produced as the result of the fusion of two mid-sized ape chromosomes and a Seattle group located the fusion site in 2002."

http://www.genome.gov/13514624

These sites explain the finding of the genome projects.

http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_chromosome_2

http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html

No creationist pseudo-scientist could make a before-the-fact prediction like that. All they can do is to make up pseudo-explanations after the fact of the finding.

@tax_senior2002: "For a cow to turn into a whale, for example, it requires more than 50,000 morphological changes (mutations). All of these must be beneficial for the cow to develop into a whale."

When you use a ridiculously ignorant example about evolution such as cows evolving into whales, all you are doing is showing that you got it straight from a lying creationist web site.

Whales did not evolve from cows. And steps of evolution of the whales from land animals are available in the fossil record.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetacean...

http://www.talkorigins.org/features/whales/

The rest of your arguments against evolution also show a basic ignorance of fact and are also the result of getting your information from lying creationist web sites.

But since you place so much reliance on what creationists say, click on this link to one of my answers and see what CREATIONIST Todd C. Wood, a Research/Associate Professor of Science at the Christian-based Bryon College, says about evolution. It is quite relevant in regard to what all of the creationists here on Yahoo!Answers who say there is no evidence for evolution and that it is a failed theory. The excerpt of what he says is about half way down in my answer. And you should pay particular attention to the second paragraph.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201011...

I will continue to believe Evolution is nothing more than a modern creation myth until presented with such evidence as follows:

1) A new viable species is created on a macroscopic level that decends from an existing species. This new species must be significantly different than its parent species and not inherently compatible with its parent species via hybridization methods. A different number of chromosomes would be nice too.

2) That above evolution tested repeatedly with many different animals and eventually, a human evolution.

After that, I will be satisfied that the Theory of Evolution is fact. After that, I will take a closer look at Intelligent Design and compare it with my own beliefs.

Paleontology had long been aware a seeming Contradiction between Dar wins postulate of gradualism,confirmed by the works of population genetics and the actual findings of paleontology,following phyletic lines through time,seemed to reveal only minimal gradual change but no clear evidence for any change of species into different genum,or for the gradual origin of an evolutionary novelty.

Anything Truly novel always appears abruptly in fossil record.

This does not constitute truth for evolution on a macro scale.

that is true, but understanding evolution means you understand that we are still evolving and that we need to realize that the planet was not put here for humans to abuse. the planet can't sustain human life on the track we are on. it cant just adsorb our waste and swallow our toxins. we are making the planet less and less hospitable for humans and eventually we will reach a tipping point. I hope I am not alive for that point but I hope more that we will recognize what we are doing and start acting like this planet owes us nothing and we must start taking care of it. If people continue on like the earth was created so humans could torture the land, torture the animals, and get away without any consequences, we will have a rude awakening. It's dangerous to live by the bible in that respect.

Because the theory of evolution is incomplete, it is not a rigorous theory scientifically speaking, it lacks explanatory power for the observations in the fossil record, etc.

It's a good start for a theory, but it does not rise to the level of scientific theory yet. Macroevolution has NEVER been observed. Mutating viruses stay viruses in all the laboratory experiments to date.

Evolutionists use the "chance of the gaps" theory. They see a mutation, and then extrapolate that mutations must be the cause of speciation. Why must this be the case? It is not self-evidently the case. The Gallapogos Finch's beak is actually bounded and cyclical, increasing and decreasing in length, which Darwin mistook for macroevolution.

It lacks any quantitative rigor. For a cow to turn into a whale, for example, it requires more than 50,000 morphological changes (mutations). All of these must be beneficial for the cow to develop into a whale. Nostrils must move from front of the head to the bottom of the back of the head. Spinal columns must be rearranged. Pectoral muscles must change shape and number, and the location at which they attach to the skeleton. 2 tons of oil needs to be stored in the whale's head in order for it to dive, necessitating a larger head. Hooved or clawed feet must convert into flippers, the skin needs to be impermeable to salt water. The eyes need to move and develop a protective covering in order for it to see underwater and to last in the corrosive salt environment. Lactation systems must be changed so that a whale can feed its young underwater. The tail needs to flatten. The mouth, teeth, and all other parts of the digestive system must change to adapt from eating grass to eating plankton. Hearing must change so that they can hear underwater. All of these changes are 100's of genetic mutations EACH. This is despite the fact that nearly ALL genetic mutations are deliterious (harmful). And we're to believe that ALL of these changes happened independently of each other, randomly, over long periods of time.

I'm sorry, but that is the largest load of horse manure I've ever heard. It does NOT fit the fossil record. We might have 5 or 6 specimens of this transition. Where are the other 49,994 fossils? It's not a matter of having a few "gaps" in the fossil record. It's a matter of having less than 1% of the fossil records to document so many gradual changes.

Further, the fossil record shows that hundreds of thousands of species come on the scene suddenly, without a common ancestor, last for millions of years, and then go extinct virtually unchanged. Or like crocs or sharks, they remain unchanged for millions of years to date.

Evolution is a fine bedtime story. As a scientific theory, it's full of holes, incomplete, lacks rigor, has virtually NO power to explain the fossil record, and has never been observed at the macro level. It is not repeatable in a laboratory, and scientists often dodge the quantitative aspects that I've described above when challenged.

It stinks as a theory in its current state. It needs an overhaul, and I think the piece that is missing is design.

The fact that evolution exists is wasted on many of the fundie faithful. It is important to try to explain evolution and rational ideas to these people only because there is such a big push for incorporation of their beliefs into our government.

"Theists are believers in myth and deniers of truth."

that is your opinion. there are many of the faithful that completely understand and agree with science in almost all it's aspects - including evolution.

sounds to me, that it isn't theists that you need convincing. i mean, if you know it - who cares what someone else says or thinks?! if you put so much energy in proving something like this, it only proves to me you don't believe it in the first place.

Evolutionists have been catering to the faithful? Since when?

The battleground is the popular media and the prize is the hearts and minds of society's next generation.