1 post tagged “evolution”
Many if not most of the people who oppose evolution have little or no real understanding of how it actually works. One of the greatest misconceptions is that evolution is random. Often they will argue that evolution is like expecting a fully operational 747 to assemble itself out of a pile of scrap. This argument is only impressive to those who misunderstand how evolution works. If they understood a bit about how evolution really works they would be embarrassed to utter such nonsense.
Evolution isn’t random; it is guided by natural selection, a process that doesn’t need any intervention. As its name implies natural selection is just that, natural. Animals survive or not depending on how well they are adapted to their environment. If you have two hares and one has a white winter coat and another one doesn’t, the one without will be much easier to catch by predators. It is unlikely that such a hare would leave many baby hares that share the dark winter coat. The result is that over many generations the frequency of hares with dark winter coats is reduced significantly. As you can see intuitively there is no need for human or divine intervention for this kind of selection to happen.
The random part comes in genetic mutations. Mutations are errors in our genetic code. When copies of our genes are made during cell division errors occur, these errors are mutations. If these mutations occur in the cells that generate the sexual gametes, (eggs and sperm), the mutation can be passed down to our children. As you can imagine, most mutations are harmful, even lethal. Changing things at random hardly ever results in an improvement, the key is that sometimes it does. The mutations that are lethal or maladaptive get selected out, again without the need for intervention from man or god. The mutations that are apparently harmless or helpful have a better chance to get passed on to future generations. If these mutations help the bearer survive or better adapt to it’s habitat, the chances are higher that the helpful mutation will spread through the population.
Another reason that people misunderstand evolution is that it takes place over very long periods of time, thousands and millions of years. You can’t sit there and watch evolution happen before your eyes. Evolution is a process of small changes over time in a population. Unless you are playing close attention to an animal or plant population for extended periods of time and looking at the variation of the distribution of genes, you are not going to notice evolution happening. In a sense humans have been tinkering with evolution for thousands of years. We have been breeding animals or plants since we first domesticated wolves and started planting crops. That we can breed animals is testament to the fact that natural selection works. If it wasn’t possible for a species to change over time, we would not have been able to breed so many varieties of dogs, cats or crops.
Another reason for misunderstanding about evolution is that some people think of the human body as the pinnacle of creation. They seem to think that it is perfect. To put it as simply as possible, it is far from perfect. There are many imperfections in to be found in the human body that would have been obvious to any intelligent designer. To begin with, our eyes are badly designed. You might have heard that our eyes are the only places in our bodies where blood vessels are directly and plainly visible, this is true but it means that the blood vessels as well as the nerves leading from the rod and cones sit on top of the cornea, in the direct path of the light. Not even the cheapest digital camera has a sensor in which the wiring blocks the light. To make matters worse the nerves and vessels have to exit the eye and in order to do so they have to go through the cornea, which leaves us with a blind spot in each eye. Any engineer that designed a digital sensor so poorly would be fired immediately. The funny part is that squid and octopus have better eyes than us “superior” humans. The blood vessels and nerves in the eyes of squids sit behind the retina and thus don’t block the light impinging on the retina. God must really like squid.
As many other people I suffer from back pain. In fact most people experience some sort of back problem in their life. The reason for so much back trouble is that our spine evolved on animals that had a horizontal posture. The mass of most animals hangs from a horizontal spine. Since our ancestors started walking erect our spines have been subjected to an amount of stress that they didn’t evolve to support. Instead of our weight being distributed over the length of our spine as it hangs between our shoulders and hips, the weigh of most of our body is borne by the vertebra of our lower back. This stress leads to all sorts of problems like herniated disks. As you can see this looks more like the result of random mutation and evolution than of though out design.
I could go on to talk about nipples on men, the appendix, aging, auto immune diseases, birth defects and other obsolete structures and maladies that cause humans trouble, pain and early death, but that would be piling on. Evolution is not a mere theory that is up for argument. Evolution is accepted scientific fact and it is no more in doubt than the theory of gravity or the theory of relativity. There is no controversy about evolution among real, serious scientists. A few people with an agenda manufacture false controversies hoping to change public policy for their own personal greedy motives. It reminds me of the cigarette companies who for so long claimed that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer. They would trot out these “scientists” who quoted numerous “studies” proving that there was no link between cancer and smoking. These so-called scientists who claim that there are doubts about evolution or global warming, etc., are no more credible than the liars and thieves parading as real scientists who allowed the cigarette companies to continue to sell their cancer sticks. These “scientists” are no more than shills who will say anything to anyone as long as there is money in it for them.
The lesson of this post is simple, if your personal religious beliefs make it hard for you to accept reality, don’t blame reality. Maybe you should instead take a closer look at the superstitions and legends that you are holding on to. Maybe these irrational beliefs are the problem and not science.
