In 1859, Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The world really hasn’t been the same since. Darwin’s book laid down the basic principles of evolution. Or, perhaps, it might better be said that he organized existing principles into a unified theory. Evolution wasn’t new with Darwin. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had written on the subject. So had others.
What Darwin did was put it all together. He then sat on it for years, only finally collecting all his ideas into a publishable whole after receiving a manuscript from Alfred Russell Wallace, whose own theory closely matched his own. It has been suggested that Darwin’s tardiness in publishing had a lot to do with his wife, who was quite religious. Concern for his wife’s feelings has also been cited as the reason Darwin was reluctant to make public statements about his own atheism.
If you haven’t guessed by now, this is going to be one of those serious posts. Sex is involved, certainly, for that is the general means through which evolutionary changes are transmitted. It’s just not the main thrust of the essay.
Some people, my own mother among them, hate the very idea of evolution. Their concept of human origins begins and ends with Genesis, so anything that suggests this isn’t how it happened is simply ignored. You can’t entirely blame Christians for this attitude, of course. If Adam and Eve weren’t real people, and the events chronicled in Genesis never actually happened, then there’s no reason for their religion to even exist. The whole thrust of Christian belief in Jesus is that his willing sacrifice served to atone for original sin. If there was no Fall, no forbidden fruit, no garden, no first man and woman, then there is also no original sin to atone for.
Original sin is a weird idea to begin with. It was apparently something Paul thought up, because I’ve spoken to a number of rabbis and they all agree that it’s not a Jewish concept. Neither is hell, for that matter. There doesn’t seem to be any fixed notion of what comes after death, but they all seem fairly sure it isn’t eternal punishment. More of a three-part set of vague possibilities, consisting of heaven (or maybe reincarnation), a one-year or shorter sentence in Gehenna, or complete oblivion and it’s as if you never existed.
Evolutionary scientists today tell us that there was never a first man or woman in the sense of a first male or female member of our exact species. At some point along a scale including millions of generations we gradually evolved from earlier forms. And, while we are presumably a discrete species today, and would be unable to mate with, say, Homo erectus and produce fertile offspring, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some point along the evolutionary trail where the current version of humanity couldn’t have successfully mated with those on either end of the generational trail. There’s no reason, really, to even think that both sexes reached the same stages of development at the same time. As long as they got there within a few hundred generations of each other there’d be no problems with reproducing.
It’s like the chicken/egg question. The only really logical answer is the egg, since whatever chickens were before they became unquestionably chickens was still a bird and still laid eggs.
There are those who like to argue that order cannot arise from chaos. They think of evolution as just a lot of random events, and argue that the odds of them all coming together are simply too high to be possible. The “747 assembled from a junkyard by a tornado” analogy is a common one. But that’s not how it works. Evolution doesn’t just gather up all of these random parts and toss them together. It’s a cumulative process, occurring over thousands of generations. Some mutations prove to be useful and, if they give the carrier a slight advantage over others when it comes to reproduction, they can be incorporated into following generations. If they’re not useful, they tend to die out. There’s none of this X-Men, sudden ridiculous superhuman abilities sort of thing. Several million years ago, our ancestors were as hairy as any modern great ape. Over the generations we lost most of that hair, probably because we didn’t really need it, or perhaps because less hairy individuals were thought of as more attractive and were therefore more sought after as mates.
I can think of several of my female friends who would welcome a genetic mutation that finally eliminated all body hair except what’s on top of their heads. Perhaps, one day, this will come to be. For now, they just have to shave, wax, or use some other technique to get rid of unwanted body hair.
When an anti-evolutionist uses that 747 tale as an argument in favor of “intelligent design,” he’s really arguing against himself. Intelligent Design argues that whatever we see today was made just as it is, by a brilliant designer, who always turns out to be God. The thing is, when they throw in the 747, they’re rather forgetting that if you applied intelligent design principles to the question, you’d expect the Wright brothers would have designed and built a 747 in their bicycle shop in 1903, and not wasted all those years as airplanes evolved from what was, essentially, just a powered glider.
Evolution is a theory. That means it’s been proven about as thoroughly as possible given contemporary scientific capabilities. Theories are, in science, essentially facts. It’s simply that a basic tenet of science is that any theory has to be falsifiable. There has to be something that could prove it wrong, which means that even the most robust theories, like evolution and gravity, are always subject to revision in the face of new evidence. The proverbial Devonian rabbit, for example. This is why God has never risen to the level of a theory. There’s simply no possible way to prove that he exists, or that he doesn’t, because the very definition of God includes being outside of time and space.
By the way, if you get someone telling you a theory isn’t a law, point out that, no, a theory is a higher classification. A law is something that will always produce the same results under the same conditions, so Newton’s laws of motion are laws because they always work, but they’re only a part of the theory of gravity, which includes them and a great deal more. Science keeps getting closer. Einstein modified Newton, Hawking has modified both, and in the future other mathematicians and physicists will no doubt further refine the theory.
Personally, I accept evolution. Notice I said “accept” and not “believe in.” Evolution isn’t a belief, it just is. You either accept that this is how everything living today came to be, or you don’t. If you don’t, then I suppose you can watch a movie such as Is Genesis Real? without laughing your ass off while wondering where the hell these clowns got their PhDs.
I finished a new story a couple days ago. I’m calling this one Sis and Her Friend, which no doubt tells you that it won’t be going to Amazon any time soon. I’ve sent it to 