Motivation
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is a seemingly ridiculous theory that explains the origins of human beings and almost all life forms on earth and yet it has gained a massive consensus among scientists. Most importantly, it uncovers a strange phenomena and has huge implications for designing new guidelines for personal and social life.
Content
How life and humans came to be is a topic that almost every culture has explored. Creation myths around the world have come up with some imaginative stories to explain something that each of us has wondered about atleast sometimes in our lives. These stories are as contradictory as they are diverse but almost all of them have one thing in common, a creator. A creator is an active agent who brings order to chaos, light to darkness and life to a lifeless world. Even among these dozens of imaginative stories, order without a creator is literally unimaginable to our ancestors. That is until Charles Darwin.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species, a book in which he proposed a seemingly ridiculous idea that different species of life evolved by the random process of Natural Selection. At first this theory was not widely accepted but as evidence mounted in its favor from various disciplines, it was no longer possible to deny that all life, including humans, evolved from simple organisms by a random process without the active help of any creator. (See Technical Note below for more details).
It has been nearly 150 years since this discovery but we seldom stop to think about ourselves as products of a random process. Indeed,most of the time, we continue to live life like we were created for a purpose or that we have some sort of a destiny or that we have some God given rights. Even in personal life we act as if we ourselves are perfectly rational or that we know how to take care of our bodies and in social life we follow and enforce social rules about right and wrong and good and evil. All these notions are remnants of the time when our ancestors genuinely believed that humans were created by a God, who had given each of them some kind of a test and some rules to do well in the test.
Much of the society is still ignorant about this, while a significant portion is in active denial. But for those of us who have accepted the truth of evolution, we have a task on our hands. We have to dig into the implications of this momentous discovery and design new guidelines for personal and social life for humanity going forward or re-validate old ones. An incomplete list of implications is below, please help complete this list by adding your candidates to the comments.
- God : Most likely, if there is a creator of the universe, it does not intervene in the daily lives of earthly species.
- Purpose : Most likely, life has no inherent grand purpose.
- Happiness : Evolution has “designed” us to spread copies of our genes but that does not mean that it has also “designed” us to live happy, fulfilled lives. Therefore, when necessary and possible, we need to work around our biology to live happier lives.
- Body : Most likely, our bodies have evolved for daily routines very different than our current daily routines and hence new guidelines are needed to help us adapt to this new environment. For example in the past food was more scarce, physical activity was higher
- Minds : Most likely, our minds have evolved for daily routines very different than our current routines and hence new guidelines are needed to help us adapt to this new environment. For example in the past the nature of dangers and distractions would have been different than today.
- Morality : Most likely, notions of right and wrong need to be re-evaluated in light of the fact that all of us a products of this blind process and hence have the equal right to act as we please as long as we do not harm others.
- Social Structure : The current social structure has evolved out of random process analogous to the biological process. For example a child born into a rich family does not deserve it any more than a child born into a poor family but we act like they do.
Technical Notes
The concept of complex things being designed by a random process is very alien to most of us since most things around us are made by somebody and for an explicit purpose. We cannot imagine a complex system like a computer creating itself randomly, even if we put all its required components in a box and shake it a million times. Therefore, we will try to make this complicated topic as intuitive as possible with a bit of oversimplification. Consider the following three simple rules
- Any species has some variation in features and qualities among its population, for eg not all giraffes have the same neck length and spot patterns.
- Some of this variation seemingly serves no purpose but some of it confers an advantage or disadvantage to the survival and reproduction of that particular animal of this species under a given environment.
- Some of these variations in a particular animal are inheritable by its offspring.
Now consider a hypothetical example of two varieties of giraffes , those with 15 feet necks and six-sided spots and those with 5 feet necks and 8-sided spots. They live in the same forest and both have 100 individuals each. Now this situation can remain like this for many centuries but assume that one year a plant disease wipes out all plants shorter than 10 feet. Now the giraffes with 5 feet necks are at a disadvantage for survival and hence their percentage of the giraffe population starts falling and maybe one day they go extinct and all giraffes left are with 15 feet necks and six-sided spots. Note that the 15-feet neck was not inherently superior, it just happened to be well suited for the new environment due the random accident of the plant disease. Also the six-sided spots added no advantage to survival but they just came along and became the only surviving spot pattern.
Species change is just an extension of this phenomenon over millions of years. Fossil records show the intermediate ancestors of fishes who became amphibious and then reptiles and then birds and mammals and these are always found in the right time period layer of the earth. We can also see body parts being common among wildly different species with common ancestors, for eg the five fingered hands of humans, wings of bats and fins of whales.
The strongest proof for evolution in our view is the discovery of the DNA. When Darwin had proposed that variations get inherited by offsprings, he did not know how it happened. It was only a hundred years later that we found an actual mechanism in the DNA. Imagine what a strong proof the theories of heaven or rebirth would have had if people found a mechanism to reliably capture a soul and this could be replicated all over the world. The discovery of the DNA is that strong of a proof for evolution.
References
Crash Course on Natural Selection : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTftyFboC_M
