GENS4010 Week 7

As with my journal entry on creationism, I'd like to take a step back from this week's lecture about evolution and jot down in simple laymen's terms of how evolution really happened, so that I can better understand it.

But before the actual explanation, here's a video clip depicting the steps of evolution which I find quite entertaining:

The idea of evolution and natural selection was, of course, proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, which was greeted as a dangerous idea when much of Europe was dominated by Christian thinking. Nobody would have welcomed the thought that humans are no longer special, but only an evolutionised versions of chimpanzees.

The chief ideas proposed by evolution is that, firstly, there are hereditory elements to a species, and the more contribution these elements make to the survival of the said species, the better chance it has of it being passed on to the future generations. If this continues on, then, mutations will continue to evolve with the features that are best suited for survival in their environments as they continue reproduce.

The following is from Howstuffworks website:

"The change brought about by a mutation is either beneficial, harmful or neutral. If the change is harmful, then it is unlikely that the offspring will survive to reproduce, so the mutation dies out and goes nowhere. If the change is beneficial, then it is likely that the offspring will do better than other offspring and so will reproduce more. Through reproduction, the beneficial mutation spreads. The process of culling bad mutations and spreading good mutations is called natural selection.

As mutations occur and spread over long periods of time, they cause new species to form. Over the course of many millions of years, the processes of mutation and natural selection have created every species of life that we see in the world today, from the simplest bacteria to humans and everything in between."

In a nutshell, the process looks like this:

And the history of evolution of animals looks like this:

As for humans, this is how the picture looks like:

Of course, this is a quick attempt to explain the theory of evolution and natural selection in simple, laymen's terms with a few slap of diagrams, which doesn't do justice for the much complicated theory. There're other concepts within the theory of evolution that I have not recorded here such as microevolution, genetic drift, adaptions, and other things. This is because what is principally important here in the debate of science and religion is that, similar to the scientific view on the creation of universe, everything happened through chance. In fact, according to the lecture notes, the chance of matter evolving into what we are now is thought to be 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. A feat that just seems downright impossible to achieve.

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Religion and Evolution

Religion - principally Christianity and Islam - denies that humans are one of the products in a long chain of evolution because the scriptures speak that we as human beings are made in the shape of God. Besides, the chance of us having evolved from tiny matter is so small that it seems improbable.

Once again, I can't help but tinker with the thought that maybe religious view and scientific view can be complimentary here. Perhaps what God created in the first place is not the final product of species, but single-celled organisms, which evolved into what we are now. But that would, of course, make it difficult for Genesis to have a lot of weight on its texts, as the Bible actually depicts Adam and Eve speaking with God. Perhaps the two views cannot be so complimentary after all.

I do remember reading in an article on the Internet that Genesis and the creation of species recorded within its scriptures should not be taken so literally. While we are indeed made in the image of God, it should not be the physical aspects that should be on our mind, but rather the conscience, psychological aspects, such as the ability to make moral judgements, have a soul, et cetera.

In the end, being a non-religious mind, I find myself siding with the theory of evolution. Apart from the fact that there is such a slim chance of it all happening, there seems little dispute on the validity of the theory. Besides, I don't think it's really right to say that, because something is so complex and difficult for it to have evolved, someone must've created it.