A Happy Accident...

So my father said it again: the reason he can't possibly accept evolution as a working law to the diversity of life upon earth is due to a singular passage in his holy book, which reads as such:

---

Genesis 1:24: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

---

As you can see, his main point of contention is underscored--that is, "after his kind."

It's hard to argue with a man who thinks that "after his own kind" means animals can adapt, but not evolve... And, instead of going into a long dissertation about how adapting is just evolution on a small scale, and that, after enough small adaptations, you end up with a completely different looking animal... And that, throughout the whole process, the creature never once didn't produce not after its own kind... After all, it's own kind kept changing!

You know what? Dissertation will now commence!

Add to that the fact that no creature that produces sexually ever produces it's "own kind." It may be seen as a matter of semantics, but every creature born through sexual reproduction is an "average" of the two creatures that mated. Further, many creatures reproduce across their kinds (though it is by no means the "norm"), thus further having to stretch a literal interpretation of Genesis. Take for instance the wholphin, the liger, the zorse... And while one can twist and squirm and claim "adaptation" over "evolution," it still negates an "of their own kind" clause, most especially in the case of the liger (and occasionally some wholphins)! Two completely different species with completely different amounts of chromosomes have mated to produce a creature that is neither tiger nor lion, but the female liger (and female tigon) are able to mate with both of its parents species--further strengthening evolutionary models of natural selection and the tree of life, and further crumbling a book (and subsequent faith) which claims Mind before Matter...

My father also said something to the effect of "if all diversity evolved, why are there still some creatures who haven't?"

But before I could even begin to adequately explain, he shut me down with a "No!" and the continual shaking of his head...

Despite the fact that evolution happens most times in small, local steps as necessity, chance, and environment dictate--say, that fish with the stronger fins able to flop to the next puddle and survive until the rainy season as opposed to the others whose fins weren't as strong and couldn't make the land crossing... This process ensures that only those stronger-finned fish will pass on their genes (DNA), as well as the learning process of moving over land to reach a more suitable area. The same type of fish on the other side of the forest had no such need to "walk" to another body of water, and thus will change and adapt only as much as it needs to--and thus, separated by maybe only a few hundred yards, you may have the beginnings of speciation occurring and, given a bit more time, other environmental factors, and other causes such as disease and predation, you may end up after only a few hundred years with two completely different looking fish that had the same genetic base--and further, may now not be able to interbreed with one another, thus ensuring that both branches of this tree will survive and continue to grow more branches. Of course, branches that haven't had enough time can still intermingle--maybe due to lack of similar mates, or some sort of quake that separated one from the rest--and some of those changes may then re-enter the original gene pool, but certainly not enough to ensure that all the guppies (or what-have-you) will have super-strong fins, and perhaps may even be bred out of this population as the need isn't present! But trying to explain all this to my father as he continues to state "after their own kind" as if it were some type of magical spell to ward of the real world not only seems an exercise in futility, but ultimately an exercise in patience for people who want to remain willfully ignorant... (sorry, Dad...)

Sigh.

Thus, while my father (and others...) insist on an out-dated mode of thinking which involves a "Mind before Matter" telelogical law, as soon as Darwin put forth Natural Selection as the algorithm by which all life (including man) came to be, Matter no longer needed a Mind to have initiated the movement of energy through life. Such a revolution in societal perspective rarely happens, but when it does, it takes a few years and generations before truth can actually be accepted as truth.... Enter the first proponents of ID, who started trying to chip away at the profound truth which Darwin uncovered mere months after his scientific discoveries were uncovered...

More often than not, then and now, they often end up reinforcing the tenants of evolution and natural selection, thus dooming themselves to a never-ending battle against basic facts of life...


But to get people such as my father to understand the basic premise behind how evolution works, I came across a great passage in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, in which author Daniel Dennett has hit upon the perfect analogy to explain why evolution producing life isn't just the mere ramblings of those blinded by Satan and his evil cohorts, but indeed the only possible scientifically-backable position we currently know about and can utilize! Here are some excerpts:

---

Any elimination tournament produces a winner, who "automatically" has whatever property was required to advance through the rounds, but, as the coin-tossing tournament demonstrates, the property in question may be "merely historical"—a trivial fact about the competitor's past history that has no bearing at all on his or her future prospects. Suppose, for instance, the United Nations were to decide that all future international conflicts would be settled by a coin-toss to which each nation sends a representative (if more than one nation is involved, it will have to be some sort of tournament—it might be a "round robin," which is a different algorithm). Whom should we designate as our national representative? The best coin-toss caller in the land, obviously. Suppose we organized every man, woman, and child in the U.SA. into a giant elimination tournament. Somebody would have to win, and that person would have just won twenty-eight consecutive coin-tosses without a loss! This would be an irrefutable historical fact about that person, but since calling a coin-toss is just a matter of luck, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the winner of such a tournament would do any better in international competition than somebody else who lost in an earlier round of the tournament. Chance has no memory.

---

[Emphasis through underlining mine.]

---

Imagine the Earth in the very early stages of its development--radiation, the sun, chemical reactions happening right and left... And fundamental Christians going to tell us it's easier to believe god sneezed and created life than that, at some point, those billions and billions of chemical reactions eventually crossed some type of relational threshold that we consider to be "life"? Really?

Dennett continues:

---

[...] In contrast to tournaments of pure luck, like the coin-toss tournament, there are tournaments of skill, like tennis tournaments. Here there is reason to believe that the players in the later rounds would do better again if they played the players who lost in the early rounds. There is reason to believe— but no guarantee—that the winner of such a tournament is the best player of them all, not just today but tomorrow. Yet, though any well-run tournament is guaranteed to produce a winner, there is no guarantee that a tournament of skill will identify the best player as the winner in any nontrivial sense. That's why we sometimes say, in the opening ceremonies, "May the best man win!"—because it is not guaranteed by the procedure. The best player—the one who is best by "engineering" standards (has the most reliable backhand, fastest serve, most stamina, etc.)—may have an off day, or sprain his ankle, or get hit by lightning. Then, trivially, he may be bested in competition by a player who is not really as good as he is. But nobody would bother organizing or entering tournaments of skill if it weren't the case that in the long run, tournaments of skill are won by the best players. That is guaranteed by the very definition of a fair tournament of skill; if there were no probability greater than half that the better players would win each round, it would be a tournament of luck, not of skill.

---

And thus, there are many species who not only aren't the "best" adapted, there are some who were well-suited to environs whose branches were cut short regardless. Thus, random chance plays a huge part in which species have changed, which have survived, which have died off into evolutionary dead ends... A lot of ID proponents like to imagine that all creatures were formed thus, and have so remained, and therefore cannot account for not only a lot of the fossils in our past, but a great deal of the geology, biology, physics, and other sciences in which evolutionary law has been strengthened. They are forced to think up arguments against such facts and truths, and then find the necessary data (albeit, ill-used data) to back up such fantastical claims--unlike traditional science which simply takes the facts and truths as we know them, and see what answer we end up with.

To continue with Dennett's analogy:

---

[...] Skill and luck intermingle naturally and inevitably in any real competition, but their ratios may vary widely. A tennis tournament played on very bumpy courts would raise the luck ratio, as would an innovation in which the players were required to play Russian roulette with a loaded revolver before continuing after the first set. But even in such a luck-ridden contest, more of the better players would tend, statistically, to get to the late rounds. The power of a tournament to "discriminate" skill differences in the long run may be diminished by haphazard catastrophe, but it is not in general reduced to zero. This fact, which is as true of evolutionary algorithms in nature as of elimination tournaments in sports, is sometimes overlooked by commentators on evolution.

[...] We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. This confusion has been fostered by evolution's friends and foes alike, and it is parallel to the confusion of the coin-toss tournament winner who basks in the misconsidered glory of the idea that since the tournament had to have a winner, and since he is the winner, the tournament had to produce him as the winner. Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us. The main conclusion of Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989a) is that if we were to "wind the tape of life back" and play it again and again, the likelihood is infinitesimal of Us being the product on any other run through the evolutionary mill. This is undoubtedly true (if by "Us" we mean the particular variety of Homo sapiens we are: hairless and upright, with five fingers on each of two hands, speaking English and French and playing tennis and chess). Evolution is not a process that was designed to produce us, but it does not follow from this that evolution is not an algorithmic process that has in fact produced us.

---

I happen to believe that this is the main contention in the on-going "argument" between those who accept the valid science behind evolution, and those who wish to make up fantastical numbers and "science" in order to find another way to explain everything: WE ARE NOT SPECIAL, as in, we are not blessed in any particular way by any particular deity, nor are we the end-all, be-all of the evolutionary process. Especially considering like many other things in "life," we are but an accident (albeit to us a happy one) in a never-ending process... It's not only a bit humbling, but also a bit of a bummer, especially if you are looking forward to the never-ending praise orgy in the afterlife...

And while we could sit here and bemoan the fact that there isn't any "specialness" about us, and that, with or without us, life will go on in some form or another, I bask in the randomness of it all, the meaningless of it all.

While some (like my father) seem to think that even just wanting to enjoy life is somehow "a meaning" that I am "desperately seeking," I am content in the fact that, while I may not be special, I am evolved enough to appreciate truth when I see it, facts when they are presented, and have the wherewithal to take my chances in the skills and luck that produced me, even if it was...

A happy accident...