It's been a century and a half since Darwin revealed his theory of evolution. All subsequent evidence has supported his idea, so why are we still debating its truth?

I’m sitting in the office kitchen having lunch, when a non-scientist colleague asks me if I too believe that we came from monkeys. She was basically asking whether I, a sensible person, am of one mind with the rest of the ill-informed scientific community. I asked her to do an internet search and look at the hard evidence and not listen to anything I or others have to say about it. It was obvious she had been holding that question in for a long time and was dying to know where I stood.

By this point in the year, most of us have come across a few articles on Charles Darwin. It is the 150th anniversary of his book On the Origin of Species and also the year that would have been his 200th birthday. I thought it would be timely to discuss a few points on why some of us are still not convinced, why even some scientists are adding fuel to the fire of disbelief, and why some see it as an attack on religion.

Through my job as a science advisor, and also through my academic background, I have learned that evolution is misunderstood especially by those who have not studied science. It is not taught well at schools, and not discussed properly in the media.

Evolution is not up for debate, and debating it is equivalent to trying to argue the existence of rocks. There is ample evidence in the form of well-preserved bones, plus plenty of genetic data, thanks to huge advances in genetic sciences, that prove that to get to where we are, we have mutated. This is not the same thing as “coming from monkeys” and this is where most of the misunderstanding lies. It is simply that at a branching point in our evolutionary history, a population mutated into a species that came closer to what we know as monkeys today, and we mutated differently, into something that eventually ended up (after many branching points) as what we call humans today. This branching took place relatively late in our evolutionary history and thus makes us a close “relative” of the monkey. Of course, we’re still talking about hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago.

I think many imagine that scientists are suggesting that we were monkeys not long ago and we quickly switched. This results in problems in the perception of evolution and in its unwarranted dismissal. It is certainly difficult to picture, mostly because we don’t see our predecessors walking about, and of course there are still many questions on the exact changes that took place and exactly when each change happened to get us to our current state. But it is important to understand that we have enough evidence – more than enough – to conclude that evolution is a fact, not a suggestion.

Canada does well for the most part, especially compared to the U.S., particularly in the South. My colleagues who work in those particular regions have completely different battles than I have over here; they are still trying to convince people that scientific research is not against their religious belief system.

However, there was recently a strange development in Canada on this front. Our Minister of state for Science and Technology, Gary Goodyear, a chiropractor, when asked whether he believes in evolution, would not make his views completely clear and was obviously uncomfortable discussing it. This is unacceptable, it is regressive, and we need to move forward.

The most irrational concept of all is the argument that evolution is at odds with religion. I’m not sure who started this debate, but it is a defective one. Some religions see evolution as an attack on their basic principles, some religions more than others. There was no attack or strategy or conspiracy to undermine religion, it is a simple human quality to try and understand where we came from and thus we have, and always will, carry out research to further our understanding. In this path, we have found convincing, blatant, and profuse evidence of how we got to our current form.

Must we pit religion against evolution? Any religious group or ideology that tries to argue against evolution is undermined by going against hard facts from thousands of different sources through hundreds of years of scientific research. It is important to let the two co-exist.

Evolution and religion do not need to be married, nor should one be seen through the eyes of the other; but if we really did want to marry them, couldn’t God have designed evolution?

With a bit of an open mind and an understanding that not everything in religious text is literal, we need to come to terms with facts that at first might seem contrary to one’s beliefs. Give it a moment and think about what it really means – yes, we have certainly mutated to adapt and have become the Homo sapiens we are today.