I'm reading "The Diversity of Life" by E. O. Wilson; it's a secular humanist's poetic, impassioned defense of the theory of evolution and its ramifications for human activity. It's not the sort of thing I expected to be assigned here at "The Lord's University", but that probably says more about my tendency to be self-deprecating on the Church's behalf than it actually says about the Church.
The book effectively neutralizes some common objections to the theory of evolution--the sort of folksy, common-sense arguments you find in email forwards from the sort of people who still send email forwards: i.e. "there's no way that random chance could have produced complex life"; "the existence of a watch implies the existence of a watch-maker"; "evolution is a theory, not a fact"; evolution's supposed contravention of the law of entropy, etc. And then there's usually like a .gif of a waving American flag or an eagle, or that twisted-steel cross in the wreckage of the WTC towers, or something.
I believe that God can create universes any way that suits Him, and He's told us repeatedly and emphatically that He's not going to give us all the details. So I am theologically and cosmologically cool with it. But I don't think that the theory of evolution as we currently understand it is the final stop; and it's unfortunate that scientists like this author have become so emotionally invested in defending the theory from these shallow criticisms, that they miss an opportunity to criticize and refine the theory themselves, intelligently.
It's a kind of siege mentality, a sense of shared persecution, which inevitably begets the sort of orthodox esprit de corps that is good for some professions, but not for scientists. We like our scientists wildly disunited and doing their best to disprove each other, because that's how good ideas get better (a cultural example of natural selection to which Wilson refers in the book). Still, it's an edifying read, and it raises some interesting questions.
For instance: we observe natural selection as it affects all sorts of individual, immediately-advantageous traits in a given population. The predators with the sharpest teeth, the most efficient digestive system, the keenest vision or hearing, survive to reproduce in greater numbers; and in the long run, that's how species are refined to fill their niche in the ecosystem.
But there are some traits that could only confer reproductive advantage if they were introduced as a system, out of whole cloth. Birds are the best example of this that I can think of. In order to fly under their own power, birds need all sorts of body adaptations that, by themselves, would be an extreme liability to any animal that can't fly. Porous, brittle bones to reduce weight; big, awkward forelimbs with a whole lot of unnecessary surface area; a hyperactive cardiovascular system with a correspondingly hyperactive metabolism, etc.
How could these adaptations have survived for all those millions of years with no payoff? Introduced individually, in the slow, iterative process of natural selection, it's hard to imagine any of those traits even surviving one generation, much less conferring the sort of clear reproductive advantage that leads to speciation. But for some mutant strain of reptile to acquire one crippling mutation, and then another, and then another, and then another, and survive each step for millions of years before finally achieving flight, seems to defy reason.
It's just Bio 100, and I'm sure the question has been asked before, but I've never heard a decent answer. Any Biology majors in the house?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Chickens have wings, but still can't fly. Perhaps larger, stronger animals that could survive on land developed wings and learned to fly, but in time became smaller and weaker out of the lack of need for strong bones and big teeth.
(this is Craig Treadwell)
Post a Comment