Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm Shane Morris.

There are plenty of things to critique about the working theory of evolution.

For instance, there is the problem of irreducible complexity, which refers to how living things are elegantly built using an apparent minimum of parts and could therefore not

have evolved step by step from simpler forms. There's also the problem of the missing

transitional forms in the fossil record, especially in layers like the Cambrian, where there is

an apparent explosion of new life forms without ancestors. Charles Darwin himself was flummoxed by the uncooperativeness

of this part of the fossil record for his theory. And then there's the problem of information in DNA,

which is at the heart of all life. For evolution to happen, vast new amounts of information

would be needed. Yet as philosopher of scientist Stephen Meyer has argued,

our uniform and repeated experience teaches us that information comes only from a designing intelligence,

not from unguided natural processes. All of these are real problems with the real theory

of evolution as it is currently understood by scientists and taught

in classrooms. And each problem deserves to be widely explained and taken seriously rather than

evolution being treated uncritically as settled science. Yet in the age of social media and now

artificial intelligence, there is another problem. What many people

think is Darwinian evolution isn't Darwinian evolution at all. Instead, it is a mashup of popular

depictions, viral videos, and even advertising that bears little resemblance to what evolutionary

scientists actually believe and defend.

And this matters, because the first step to debating a theory's merits is, in fact,

understanding the theory.

If the version of evolution in people's minds owes more to pop culture than paleontology,

...