thumb|upright=1.25|Mosaic medallion in the floor of the main hall of the Jordan Hall of Science, [[University of Notre Dame]]

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" is an essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, criticizing anti-evolution creationism and espousing theistic evolution. The essay was first published in American Biology Teacher in 1973.

Dobzhansky first used the title statement, in a slight variation, in a 1964 presidential address to the American Society of Zoologists, "Biology, Molecular and Organismic", to assert the importance of organismic biology in response to the challenge of the rising field of molecular biology. The term "light of evolution"—or sub specie evolutionis—had been used earlier by the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and then by the biologist Julian Huxley.

As he had said in his earlier presidential address, "If the living world has not arisen from common ancestors by means of an evolutionary process, then the fundamental unity of living things is a hoax and their diversity is a joke." The concept has become firmly established as a unifying idea in biology education.

The phrase

The notion of the "light of evolution" came originally from the vitalist Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom Dobzhansky much admired. In the last paragraph of the article, Dobzhansky quotes from de Chardin's 1955 The Phenomenon of Man:

:(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow. (p. 219 of The Phenomenon of Man)

The phrase "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" has come into common use by those opposing creationism. While the essay argues (following de Chardin) that Christianity and evolutionary biology are compatible, a position described as theistic evolution, the phrase is also used by those who consider a creator to be unnecessary, such as Richard Dawkins, who published The Selfish Gene just three years later.

See also

  • Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth R. Miller
  • The Language of God by Francis Collins

References

  • PDF as published by The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Mar., 1973)