Hi, Delbert. Here, pasted from a msg I posted to Rick on Sept. 14, are some quotes discussing how evolution works-- over millions and millions of years. I'm sure you'd enjoy this book, btw. It's actually a response to an earlier post by Bob Sturgeon.
I am going to answer your post by quoting from
Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, one of my
Top Ten Most Interesting Books Ever and Fun To Read, Too. It's subtitle is "Why We Are The
Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary
Psychology."
He begins this section with a quick explanation of
Darwin's theory of natural selection... then
answers, in effect, the questions you raise about
how marvelous entities came to be.
I am taking the liberty of "bolding" the parts I
think are most responsive to your point. The
argument is much fuller and clearer in the book,
but even this length is going to make everyone
but you click right by it! and look at all the typing
I did...
Quote:
"Fitness" is the thing that natural selection, in
continually redesigning species, perpetually
"seeks" to maximize. Fitness is what made us
what we are today.
...Your entire body-- much more complexly
harmonious than any product of human design--
was created by hundreds of thousands of
incremental advances, and each increment was
an accident; each tiny step between your
ancestral bacterium and you just happened to
help some intermediate ancestor more
profusely get its genes into the next
generation. Creationists sometimes say that the
odds of a person being produced through random
genetic change are about equal to those of a
monkey typing the works of Shakespeare. Well,
yes. Not the complete works, maybe be certainly
some long, recognizable stretches.
...Suppose a single ape gets some lucky break--
gene XL, say, which imbues parents with an ounce
of extra love for their offspring, love which
translates into slightly more assiduous
nurturing...So long as this thin advantage holds,
the fraction of apes with gene XL will tend to
grow, and the fraction without it will tend to
shrink...
...Thus does natural selection beat the odds--
by not really beating them. The thing that is
massively more probable than the charmed
lineages ["charmed" meaning the ones that over
eons proved the fittest, and survived. E.] that
populate the world today-- an uncharmed lineage,
which reaches a dead end through an unlucky
break-- happened a massively larger number of
times. The dustbin of genetic history overflows
with failed experiments, long strings of code
that were as vibrant as Shakespearean verse
until that fateful burst of gibberish. Their
disposal is the price paid for design by trial and
error. But so long as that price can be paid--
so long as natural selection has enough
generations to work on, and can cast aside
scores of failed experiments for every one it
preserves--its creations can be awesome.
Natural selection is an inanimate process,
devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless
refiner, an ingenious craftsman...
Unquote
[Apologies for the length of this. Think millions
of years! E.] |
