Evolution

The creation betokens the Creator. It is by virtue of an admirable art that all the planets dance round the sun. Animals, vegetables, minerals – everything is ordered with proportion, number, movement. Nobody can doubt that a painted landscape or drawn animals are works of skilled artists. Could copies possibly spring from an intelligence and the originals not?

-- Voltaire

The World of a Thousand Rivers spends much of its time discussing points where science and religion agree. Unfortunately, most people who compare those two spend a lot more time worrying about points where they do not agree, at least as assumed within the sphere of public debate. Most common among those points is the question of evolution. The pure science teaches us about something called natural selection, where random mutations eventually become dominant by improving the survivability or mating success of species members that carry them. The mutants simply out-compete the non-mutants and take over. Religions, particularly of the Judeo-Christian/Islamic variety, prefer to ascribe the changes in our species to the mind and hand of God. If you’ve read TWTR, you won’t be too surprised when I tell you that this isn’t a real conflict. As with other so-called disagreements between science and religion, they only seem to be at odds.

It is apparently a built-in goal of all living things to evolve, and yet my book reveals other goals besides evolution that exist for our reality (namely, experience). So, we must ask if the conclusions of TWTR about the universe are compatible with evolution or not. Don’t worry – they are. Once again, the differences between science and religion are mostly semantic. That holds as true for evolution as it does for other concepts that Team Religion and Team Science are fond of debating.

When we look at, say, tropical fish, really look at them, it is difficult for many of us to deny that there seems to be some art involved in their appearance. Even those of us that reject all things not supported by external evidence usually must mull it over a bit before just chalking it up to the wonders of the natural world. And of course it is a wonder of the natural world, but that does not exclude the idea that something may be at work that we do not yet fully understand. All that beauty in so many varied forms, and it is just for survival? Natural selection would favor a single pattern that was most effective at keeping the organism alive, would it not? And yet so very many patterns have developed.

In his book A Secret History of Consciousness, Gary Lachman builds on the work of Henri Bergson to ask, “If the ‘aim’ of life is to successfully ‘adapt’ to its environment, why did it ever go beyond the amoeba, which is practically immortal and has proved the successful adapter par excellence?” It is not somehow unscientific to ask such a question, and while other answers can be offered, the most obvious suggestion is that perhaps adaptation is not the only aim of life.

To rock the proverbial boat just a little bit more, there is a concept observed in nature called “irreducible complexity” – ridiculed by many scientists and proponents of evolutionary science. Much of the reason it is ridiculed is that it has been misused by “intelligent design” proponents that wish to force religion to be taught in public schools. They also wish to cast doubt on an evolutionary theory, really an evolutionary fact, that they find threatening since it appears to conflict with some of their religion’s dogma. This conflict, between some secular and some religious characters, being an emotional one, sadly precludes any general, rational consideration or understanding of the facts.

The diagram below is of a bacterial flagellum, a purely natural, biological device used by bacteria like a little outboard motor to push them around. These flagella are made of numerous tiny components that work together to provide propulsion. Each component alone would seem to be useless, so the very reasonable question is “how would this complex mechanism have evolved if there is no survival benefit provided by any of the components alone, which would have to have come about one at a time?” You are not going to get a wholly formed flagellum by chance mutation, because the complexity is too high, and yet there would be no reason for each piece to evolve sequentially.

It is a reasonable question, though it is often surrounded by unreasonable ones. The response from “team science” has been an exhaustively contrived rationale of how each component could actually have a beneficial purpose on its own. Some members of the faction that call themselves secular have breathed a sigh of relief and dismissed the issue as one more crackpot idea. Yes, all these components developed for their own evolutionary reasons… and then, just by happy coincidence, turned out to work together really well to provide propulsion for the host organism. None of them seems to have stopped and asked, “well, sure this is possible, but is it likely?” Of course it is not likely. To think that it is would defy reason to an absurd degree.

The flaw that exists on both sides of the debate on evolution is that participants seem to look at it as an all-or-nothing competition – one team is right and the other completely wrong. We have left the realm of rational debate and entered the realm of pure contest, no different from a football game, as tends to happen nowadays when any question becomes political. We fail to remember that simple binary answers are almost never the case – the world we live in is full of shades of grey. Saying that evolution is the only cause of the characteristics we witness in living things is like saying that the only reason flowers grow is that there is the right amount of rainfall. Where would science be if every time we identified a cause for something we just stopped and decided that no other causes were possible simultaneously?

Clearly, evolution exists. Living things evolve. We have observed it. We even know quite a lot about how it works. We can use our knowledge of how it works to tamper with the process and bring about new results that we can predict. There is no better scientific evidence than that. Religions that teach that evolution doesn’t exist are simply wrong. Fortunately, there is very little scriptural support for that idea. The Bible and the Qur’an say nothing at all about evolution. The problem, of course is that human beings who feel entitled to add to scripture and then teach their own preferred beliefs to others, are running most of our modern religions. And so we focus today on evolution being “only a theory” for the mere reason that it threatens so many people that want to continue ignoring it (and because many folks don’t completely understand how the word “theory” is used in science).

The existence of evolution is a fact. But does that mean that evolution is responsible for every characteristic of every living thing that there ever was or ever will be? Should we slam the door shut on any ideas of other influences that might be at work? Well, of course not. That would be unscientific. And yet some very intelligent scientists seem to want to do exactly that. The issue has become too emotional. People have taken public positions on the issue, and there is too much fear keeping them from being open to anything new.

The main reason that evolution is such a sensitive issue is because it says something about purpose. Part of the purpose of life is to evolve, to improve its survivability, to become a more harmonious participant in nature. Team Religion doesn’t like that because they see purpose as their own territory – science is supposed to stick to the “how” of things and not attempt the “why.” Team Science is so caught up in that battle, focusing all their time on getting people to accept what we have clear evidence for, that they tend to overstate their case by assuming evolution has to be the only purpose to the universe, when even the most casual observations show that not to be the case. We have to accept what we know, no matter where it comes from – that much is absolutely true. But there is also an opportunity here, and that is to look at evolution and say “this gives us one purpose of life in the universe, but what about others?” We need to rise above this silly debate and move our attention from the argument over what evolution does explain to what it does not explain.

Time is the very first example. Once we thoroughly explore it, as we did in TWTR, we find that another purpose of life appears to be to generate experience. We find that events would not even occur without the illusion of time to support them by creating the perception of sequence. How does evolution fit with this? Evolution is a word we use to describe a series of events – a random mutation followed by natural selection that weeds out the week and favors the fittest for survival. The illusion of time, created by the motion of the Traveler through a living brain, enables experiences to occur. But those experiences would be pretty dull if nothing ever changed – if all life was stuck in one particular state forever. Evolution supports the richness and variety of experience. It helps to ensure that the river and the world around it look different at the end than they did at the beginning. These aspects of our world are all complimentary.

In the TWTR chapter on Miracles and Magic, we discussed how truly random events, being the most unconstrained, are the most susceptible to influence by human consciousness. Evolution is built directly on top of the idea of randomness, since random mutations are required for it to even get started. Could small but consequential nudges from consciousness itself (God’s, humanity’s or both) be influencing the course of evolution? Is that why there seems to be so much art in it? Is that why complex changes that take multiple steps to deliver improvement can even happen? It certainly seems like an explanation that fits our observations perfectly.

The fact that evolution exists does not mean that there is no “will” at work in the world we live in. The fact that evolution does not fully explain every characteristic of every living thing does not mean that evolution does not happen. Of course it happens. Does that mean that we now know everything and that no other causes can be present? Of course not. By the way, this has no bearing at all on whether evolution should be taught in schools (it clearly should) or whether religious dogma should be taught alongside it (it clearly should not, if we really want to have religious freedom, as we say that we do). If we could put this silly competition aside, we could focus more closely on what scientific observations are actually telling us – “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”