Thursday, April 28, 2011

Evolution-Expanded

As you are no doubt aware if you have perused this blog at all I have opinions and I talk about them on the internet.

Not only here, either. I've reduced many of the frequent commenters on a certain fairly liberal sci-fi blog to incoherent keyboard pounding and name calling on more than one occasion. They will tell you it's because I'm stupid, a jerk, and won't see reason. I'll tell you it's because they didn't agree with my opinion and were enraged that I did not join them after a bit of platitude spouting on their part. Fortunately I never reduced the blogger himself to such rage. We were always professional and courteous in our differings and are still at least friendly acquaintances.

So here's a hot button topic. Evolution.

Believing in evolution as settled science is like believing that not only could a million monkeys have turned out the works of Shakespeare but that they actually did.



Notice, please, the phrase 'settled science.'

The basic mechanisms for evolution to have taken place are clearly present in our real world. (And I'm not just talking about natural selection either, which should be a separate issue but which gets conflated with evolution constantly by both sides of the argument) Random molecular and atomic events take place all the time, whether it's a cosmic ray slamming into another particle or lightning energizing some random collection of primordial sludge, they happen. Since molecules and atoms are real, and random events can in fact change atoms and molecules, and life is made of atoms and molecules, evolution is, in theory, possible. No argument.

The problems I have with evolution arise when a line is blithely drawn from those random atomic and molecular incidents to, say a housefly, with no real steps in between.

See, pointing to a random event that produced a molecule used in life as proof of evolution is like pointing to the word ' a ' on  a monkey's typewriter as proof that they produced all of Shakespeare. Sure that word is used in Shakespeare but it's a far cry from Hamlet.

Which brings us to the next question. Where did they get the typewriters?

See, in order for evolution to bring us from the primordial ooze to a housefly there have to be some intermediate steps. Each of those steps had to select for itself, promote its selection in future generations of...whatever. Of course, in order for that to happen, there had to be some mechanism by which the choice could be remembered beyond the one event. Some mechanism by which it would be perpetuated. Today, life uses DNA to remember and perpetuate the choices that have been made.

Currently there is no explanation for how choices were remembered before DNA, or RNA, its predecessor, came about. None. Some scientists say they think it could have happened given the right conditions in the primordial soup but they are still mum on what, exactly, those conditions would have been or why they can't reproduce the conditions and the results in the lab.

This still doesn't 'prove' that evolution didn't produce all life on Earth through random action on random collections of base particles. You don't even have to resort to the old 'you can't prove a negative' axiom here. It could have happened, it's just that no one knows or can even come up with a likely guess, how it did yet. And without even a reasonably detailed guess at the earliest, and necessarily simplest, bits of the process, I submit that we can't call evolution settled or even likely, just possible.

But let's drop the question of the typewriter. We'll take it on faith that the monkeys had typewriters just as many proponents of evolution take the rise of RNA on faith.

Now the monkeys have to produce a script, with a typewriter. Why should they? And how will they know when they've got something worth keeping?

Both questions are answered by 'natural selection' or 'bananas', depending on the paradigm. The monkeys must understand that if they produce a script they get bananas and bananas must also be provided for good words that could be part of a script. Fortunately, once you get past the DNA typewriter, natural selection neatly provides the bananas on the evolution side of the house.

Start with the simplest 'thing' capable of 'remembering' the completely random 'choices' it and its ancestors made by passing them on to the next generation of thing. RNA, DNA, doesn't matter, the remembering is the important bit. The drive, or even just plain ability, to reproduce is the banana for banging on the typewriter. Without it the 'thing' ceases to be, no housefly, no script. Those things that reproduce, by definition, got a banana.

Now we ask, does remembering the past choice of its parent promote the thing's survival and capacity to reproduce? If so, it  also get's a banana, if not, no banana. It and its kind starve to death and pass from the Earth.

Notice I used the singular in the above paragraph when referring to the choices made. I did that because a banana must be granted at every, single, step. Every one.  If the bananas are withheld, even a page identical to one from Othello would go out with the poop like all the rest because, hey, no banana. If a random 'choice' that does not promote survival and reproduction, or even is detrimental to it, is foisted on a creature, that creature, and the choice, die out and does not continue to evolve.

None of this, except maybe the bananas, is questioned by the proponents of evolution. They're a heartless lot. Adapt or die is their motto. And the opponents to evolution as settled science freely grant that there is no way to know what actually happened to bring about houseflies.

What the proponents of evolution as settled science have failed to do to my and many other's satisfaction is illustrate what the chain of strictly random choices that led to even the simplest part of a single-celled organism might have been, even hypothetically.

So sure, evolution is a possible explanation for life.

I, however, will continue to give the Shakespeare theory at least as much credence as the monkey theory until someone shows me all those bananas.

 

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