Evolution and Reality

I learned a song as a child that embodies the ideas and opinions of the adults around me about biologic evolution- "I'm no kin to the monkey. The monkey's no kin to me! I don't know much about your ancestors but mine didn't swing from a tree." It really is a silly song, but it reveals some very strong opinions about the state of mind among the adults that made up my childhood world regarding descent with modification. As a child it was made very clear to me that nothing evolved. In fact some of my friends worried about me because I was taught by my parents, and believed them, that dinosaurs were real. I was raised in an area where almost every rock in the creek bed contained marine fossils, and I was taught that they were present as a result of Noah's worldwide flood. I was drilled with the dogma about origins so that if I saw a fossil I instantly thought of "The Flood", and if I heard anyone speak about millions of years I would automatically translate it to thousands of years in my mind.

I mention all this to explain why this is important for me to state. I am different than that wide-eyed kid in so many ways, and one of those ways is the fact that I can conceive of a universe that is billions of years old, and that gave rise to life in a series of processes that are known generally as "biologic evolution." I now acknowledge biologic evolution as fact, and realize that were I to go back far enough I would find that one of my ancient ancestors probably did look quite bit like an ape, though I really have never really made any effort to determine if the ancestor really did swing from a tree.

So what is this biologic evolution? Evolution as a concept just means change over time, but I choose to describe it with the word "biologic" because this change over time is within systems that involve life. It is important to make this distinction because I was taught as a child that "evolution" entails the "big bang" and origin myths that are described within science labs in hushed, reverent tones. The concept of biologic evolution dovetails nicely with ideas about the origins of the universe since a primordial soup, of sorts, present at the infancy of our planet could have given rise to life if a series of coincidences worked just right. While this is true, biologic evolution does not require a big bang or primordial soup. All it requires is descent with modification, or the passing on of changes from parent to child. Where the original organisms come from, their origin, is not essential to the hypotheses that are now accepted parts of the working models that help humans understand where our species came from and where we might go.

Biologic evolution is not controversial really once we get past the arguments over the origin of life. It is not controversial, that is, unless you include a group of people who insist on interpreting the Christian Bible as a literal historical and scientifically accurate set of documents that present a very specific sequence of events to explain the origin of species. I think I will put this topic off for a bit.

Back to biologic evolution. Charles Darwin is known as the father of modern ideas of biologic evolution, though he certainly wasn't the only one who put forth such ideas. I highly recommend that every literate human spend time reading through his book On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection to understand what scientific research entailed in the days before Google. Darwin went around the world collecting specimens of plants and animals along with their fossils, if available, and writing letters all over the world to be transported by ship to receive more specimens and data from other researchers, It isn't like Darwin had this idea and wrote a book to advance his idea while hoping evidence would support his idea, but the guy did serious research.

Some of what Darwin argued against seems crazy in today's world, but he dealt with the idea that all animals existed in the areas that they were placed at the time of creation. Darwin explored the idea that some species migrated due to geologic, climate, predator, or dietary pressures and changed to fit the new pressures they faced in the new locations. A famous example is found in the beaks of the birds in the Galapagos islands who all obviously shared a common ancestor, but developed variations in beak size and shape based on the food available on whatever island the particular branch of the bird family made home. Darwin didn't know how such changes were passed on from parent to child, but he guessed some sort of particle was tweaked and the particle change was preserved in reproduction. Now we know that Darwin wasn't too far off, and that his vague particles are genetic code that is passed on from parent to child.

The way it works is fairly well established, but nothing in the field of science is written in stone. Let me try to explain this- Suppose we are talking about our friend the T-Rex. Imagine something happened in his exposure to UV radiation that tweaked his genetic code so that one of his genes involved in skin generation caused his baby to be born with a little wisp of a feather present in a certain region of skin. Some genetic mutations, "tweaked genetic code" cause organism death, but others simply result in insignificant changes that may only influence appearance. Over generations this genetic mutation being passed from parent to child could result in an obvious difference between the families of the wispy feathered dinos and the feather free variety. In fact, it is possible to imagine that certain size and colors of feathers made the feathered dinos so much more attractive to potential mates that they reproduced more often, and the differences between the variations of feathered dinos became even more obvious between families where the potential mates tended to like particular variations. Such preferences are seen among animals today.

As climate and food pressures changed smaller animals survived more often to reproduction age so that eventually the great, great, great, and so on, grandchildren of these dinosaurs look alot like emus and chickens. This is the part of my silly blog post that made some of my friends shake their heads vigorously. I had you until the animal species changed. If we rewind far enough such changes could mean that we could imagine prions coming out of the primordial soup. That's a bit much for some of my dear friends. Note that I didn't say who would be responsible for these modifications, and many Christians point to God's hand at work in biologic evolution.

Now for the Christians who just said, "God did not twiddle with some primordial soup". There you are dear one! I came back to you. Your version of the story is very simple. God said- "Let there be light, and it was so. And it was good." What does the long explanation above do with the history lesson related in Genesis 1-3? That is a problem that I will not solve, but Google can help you, or Bing, if you so choose. I've never been a fan of Bing, for the record. Let me tell you that making this your proof of a good Christian pushes more godly youth away from the Church than should happen. Try this for size- "Evidence points to species changes with biologic evolution, but God tells a different story in the book of Genesis. God's point is that He is the Creator and has the right to dictate to His creation. I don't know why reality and the story of Genesis does not mesh, but I will trust God in this and ask Him when I get to Heaven." Oops, I did present a possible solution. It is a very effective method for dealing with some touchy subjects. Try this- "I don't know why God commanded genocide in the Promised Land, but He obviously had a reason. We don't do that anymore, but we can ask God why in Heaven." Or how about this? "I don't know why God commanded his people to kill unborn children in the Old Testament, but I know God doesn't want us to kill them today. We can ask for an explanation in Heaven. I still trust that He is good." See how that works?

This doesn't work so well- "Yes, bacteria change species, and evolve constantly, and we have documented similar genetic changes that are recorded in species that are unrelated, and there is a pretty clear fossil record of biologic evolution, but we must believe that the Bible is true, and all these evidences of evolution that keep building in quantity are false. The truth will out someday." It will happen too many times that the student will decide that either God creates lies to deceive scientists, or the biblical literalists reject reality and deserve to be rejected. I won't even deal with redshift in stars and the Capulin Cinder cone evidence against Noah's Flood.

Now here is the meat of the matter. Some of you want to argue evidence and conspiracies back and forth. I'm not going to do it. Some want to talk about how kinds or species are immutable, but I see a bunch of evidence to the contrary. Remember that what differentiates between "kinds" could be tweaked with a bit of a genetic mutation that's exaggerated over generations. "Kinds" or species are often differentiated by visual morphology that is dependent on hidden genetic code. Change the code and the baby and great grandbabies look a whole lot different than great granddaddy many generations before. One little change and a species changes. It's not really all that far-fetched, and happens in bacteria and viruses all the time. These are the only organisms that reproduce fast enough that one can directly observe evolution in one lifetime.

Some of my friends state that faith in science has replaced God in our culture. Science is not a thing in which to have faith. Science is simple a collection of processes to evaluate evidence and create hypotheses to test. What my friends mean is that all men must have faith in something. This is a concept interpreted from a passage in Romans 1. As annoying as this idea is, I don't mind. The idea that someone worships, or has faith in, science betrays a poor understanding of science. Nothing proposed in the process of science is immutable. Biologic evolution itself is simply a collection of hypotheses (or theories if you like) that are constantly being modified as evidence is discovered. The idea that scientists are in a conspiracy to deny God with conjured evidence is laughable since scientists who get their names recognized are the ones who challenge accepted concepts and support their challenge with unimpeachable evidence and/or data. It is true that scientists or groups of scientists have pet theories that are hard for them to let go, but eventually such pets die.

Now for the inevitable call for proof that species evolve. I have no problem doing that, but remember? I believe Google is your friend for such things. Start there and I will meet you later.