Evolution (Post 12)

'The fool who has said in his heart there is no God above.'

Now we have thrashed out the issue of the beginning of the universe, let us move to the creation of all life on Earth. What is the alternative if not God? Could it be chance?  Well, like I said in earlier articles, this is a most often quoted misunderstanding; the fact that evolution doesn’t need and cannot have a designer does not mean that it is the action of pure blind chance. The thing is evolution is in itself an absurdity, the oxymoron of nature itself, for while it is indeed filled with random and unpredictable creative events, it is geared by its very nature towards well built and efficient mechanisms so that it looks like these mechanisms were ‘designed’ with a purpose in mind.

Evolution is succinctly defined in the sentence “What works, stays.” What we need to understand is that for every species of living organisms alive today, thousands have gone extinct. Evolution is not magical, it is simply a natural process of refinement, adaptation an d extinction. It is quite like the course of any life, we are born weak and ignorant, we grow, learn, adapt to our environment. Some of us adapt better either by luck or by talent and bloom; others don’t adapt as well and fade either into poverty or ill health or early death. But in the end, we all die. This is evolution; at some stage every species will become extinct just as they were born; it is series of life cycles encompassing species of different life forms.

What Darwin observed when he first began thinking about Evolution was that in the Galapagos Islands was a proliferation of different types of one animal spread across a not too huge area. He wondered why God would go to the trouble of making so many different types of the same animal with different qualities. Over time and with experiments, he realised that it was the difference in their environments that had made that animal evolve into different forms. Living things are quite capable of changing over time and what animals are found in a place or situation is determined by what qualities help them survive in that place or situation – ‘Survival of the Fittest’.

So from the earliest days when life first appeared, it has and still is a random combination of cells in genes that make individual life forms. But what this means is that there is a diversity in make-up of life that there is sometimes one or a few with qualities that others lack. Added to this is the fact that random genetic mutations can occur that give organisms a quality or (handicap) that others don’t have. In the right situation, usually one of stress, the organisms with the right quality survive and pass their genes on to their offspring. Given enough time, they and their offspring become predominant in that area. So evolution which is a blown up picture of the cycle of birth, growth and death is not blind chance even if made up of chance events. It is a trial and error process that picks out every success in hundreds of errors and improves on that success while replicating it. It repeats this process over and over again over millions of years that its achievements though painstakingly slow seem like the work of a Supreme Designer. What is more, evolution has been proved without doubt to be a scientific fact, one that every educated person in today’s world should be quite familiar with.