- For some reasons that are not important at this stage, I decided to find a short text about evolution in Persian. There were many, but none was to my satisfaction, and many of them were biased! The Persian Wikipedia had also an article on evolution, but I thought it contained too many misunderstandings. I tried to edit the worst of misunderstandings, but it was protected by some “gate keepers” who obviously were the source of misunderstandings. In order to become “eligible” for making changes to that article, I had to go through some hurdles, which I thought was not worth the effort!
- So, I decided to find a short English text about evolution and translate it to Persian. The shortest text that I could find was Wikipedia’s article entitled “Evolution”. The article “seemed” to cover enough number of subjects to give a fair overall view. I started to translate it right away without reading it first! Soon after the start of translation, I realized that even the Wikipedia’s English article on evolution was not balanced, had many misunderstandings and misconceptions, and outright mistakes.
- I did not want to leave it there, so I started adding comments to it. I only commented the parts that I thought it necessary to comment. I just ignored minor issues.
- In other words, I did not attempt to do a thorough review of the Wikipedia article on “Evolution”. Therefore, there aws also no need to check the correspondence between the text and references. However, some of the statements in the text were so much off the scale, that I checked some of the references. In majority of cases, I thought the Wiki writers had done a poor job.
- What you see below in is the Wikipedia text (in black font color) paragraph by paragraph, and my comments to them (in blue font color). My comments are not “systematic”, and on occasions reflect the emotions that the original text invoked in me.
- Formatting of the original Wikipedia text was mainly dictated by Wikipedia’s conversion of the original HTML text to PDF, and how the PDF version was converted to Microsoft Word. However, I made some minor formatting adjustments to make the text more visually pleasing.
- The references and other stuff are reproduced after the main text, without any check or modification.
Because the document is rather long, please download it for reading.
Hossein Jorjani 