In a Hot Tub of Evolution
Just to show you how divided evolutionary biologists are in regards to how to approach the evolution-creationism debate, I present you with Marck Changizi's The Jacuzzification of Evolution (Jacussification apparently means being so comfortable in the jacuzzi that you don't realize how crazy that thing is. I think you all know how much I love hot hot saunas, so no comment there).
In particular, we get used to evolution. We scientists, especially. We’re so accustomed to evolution that when we find skeptics of evolution, we think of them as poor, blind, close-minded saps who can’t see the most obvious truths.I'm basically of the complete opposite opinion. Evolution is obvious, it's ALL AROUND US. It's not abstract or crazy or obscure. Darwin saw artificial selection in his pigeons and every year we see natural selection with the emergence of new flu strains. Where do you think those things come from? It seems quite obvious to me.
Let’s start with the obviousness of evolution. First and foremost…evolution ain’t obvious! Evolution is perhaps the craziest true theory ever! "Let me get this straight: Add a teaspoon of heritable variation, a ton of eating one another, and epochs of time…get yourself a superzoo of fantastically engineered creatures. Yeah, that’s not crazy!”
The only reason most of us scientists don’t find evolution crazy is that we’re jacuzzified to a wrinkley pulp. And this level of comfort with the bizarre theory of evolution can be counterproductive when trying to explain evolution to the uninitiated.
3 comments:
Hi wrinkly Resolute Vagrant,
What's crazy is not that evolution is going on. We do indeed see that all around us. What's crazy (but true, and overwhelmingly so) is the idea that, with enough time, blind evolution can add up to exceedingly highly designed creatures. Here's a quote from the comments at ScientificBlogging...
"I agree that there is a shear-amount-of-time difficulty for our minds, but to me that is not the problem. For the Grand Canyon, I can see how more and more erosion, with self-organizing drainage networks, leads to deeper and deeper and wider and wider etc., etc., etc.
But imagine that I told you that, after all that erosion, the result wasn't the Grand Canyon, but a modern football stadium, with seats, bathrooms, flat field, fake grass, box seats -- the works. That is, imagine after more and more blind activity, one gets a highly engineered complex structure that *does* amazing stuff."
What's amazing is natural selection's ability to not merely evolve -- in the weak sense of randomly varying over time -- but to *design*, i.e., appear to have an intelligent designer behind it. (But, of course, not to have an intelligent designer behind it.)
All the best,
Mark Changizi
Mark:
Thanks so much for leaving this comment. In that sense it certainly does seem crazy. But that's only bacause "blind" is such a big part of it, and that biological constraints are left to wayside.
The grand canyon analogy wouldn't be appropriate because one would use people, sitting in the proto-seats and using the proto-bathrooms as the analogy to biological constraint and gradual modification. Geological phenomena do indeed change over time, but when we talk about evolution, we are referring to living organisms, so let's stick with a biological analogy.
How about this: Imagine every generation, a small amount of mutations accumulated in a given population. Some of those mutations would have some functional consequence. The important thing is that those mutations occur in a background of what was already present, and could modify only pre-existing structures. For example: It's likely that I could make the arm of a human longer, but not spontaneously make a third arm. Or a mutation would change the type and pattern of hair growth, but not prompt feathers to grow.
Evolution is simply change, and that change works in the context of what is already present. That's isn't so crazy is it?
Hey. Thanks for the response! I'll try to stop by at intervals.
You wrote, "Evolution is simply change, and that change works in the context of what is already present. That's isn't so crazy is it?"
Nope, that's definitely not crazy; I agree. One can, indeed, easily wrap one's mind around how arms can get a little longer each generation, or how hair patterns can modify a little each generation.
What's crazy is the idea that many of these simple little changes-from-what's-already-present could add up -- blindly -- to the most sophisticated machines in the universe. ...machines that are way, way more sophisticated than the computer you're reading this on.
Our minds can't truly wrap around that because it requires running through the intuitively simple case many millions or billions of times. And even if we *could* run through that kind of calculation, we might *still* find it miraculous that at the other end of the computation one gets fantastically designed creatures, rather than just horrid freak-show animals, or goo, etc.
All the best,
Mark Changizi
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