Objections to evolution
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution, the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection, initially met opposition from scientists with different theories, but came to be overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community. The observation of evolutionary processes occurring (as well as the modern evolutionary synthesis explaining that evidence) has been uncontroversial among mainstream biologists for nearly a century and remains so today.
Since then, most criticisms and denials of evolution have come from religious sources, rather than from the scientific community. Although many religions have accepted the occurrence of evolution, such as those advocating theistic evolution, there are some religious beliefs which reject evolutionary explanations in favor of creationism, the belief that a deity supernaturally created the world largely in its current form. The resultant U.S.-centered creation–evolution controversy has been a focal point of recent conflict between religion and science.
Modern creationism is characterized by movements such as Creation Science, neocreationism, and Intelligent Design, which argue that the idea of life being directly designed by a god or intelligence is at least as scientific as evolutionary theory, and should therefore be taught in public education. Such arguments against evolution have become widespread and include objections to evolution's evidence, methodology, plausibility, morality, and scientific acceptance. The scientific community, however, does not recognize such objections as valid, citing detractors' misinterpretations of such things as the scientific method, evidence, and basic physical laws.
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