"Reply the tape a million times ... and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again" (Stephen Jay Gould from "Wonderful Life", 1989 p. 289, Harvard University Press.).
With his standard panache, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould argued strenuously that evolution had no inherent directionality. It was a cosmic crapshoot - in no way destined to produce anything complex, self-conscious or human. We are mere accidents; a "tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree" ("Wonderful Life" p. 291). Highly fortunate indeed! Eons ago, a dinosaur-dominated earth held little promise for mammalian ascendancy (let alone primates or humans). Our distant ancestors might have remained little more than scurrying nuisances nipping at the feet of giants if not for a most unlikely calamity - a massive meteor strike which swept away the dinos and forever altered the earth's bio-saga. Who would have guessed?
Evolution's capricious nature seemed to represent a severe stumbling block for the Abrahamaic religious traditions. In their narrative, humans represented the culmination of God's creative work - the very purpose for creation itself. But evolution is an awfully shoddy way of enacting a divine plan. Gould delighted in annoying the faithful by emphasizing this very point:
"Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce" ("The Panda's Thumb", 1980, pp. 20-1).
Theologians, however, were quick to point out that the chance element in evolution was neither new nor necessarily contrary to the Judeo-Christian view of God. Human history was replete with chance; evolution only extended the theme. Moreover, chance allowed for freedom - a virtue high on God's agenda. However theologically sound these retorts may have been, their force was often lost on the average believer. The accidental nature of human existence provided just another reason to reject evolution altogether in order to preserve God's special concern for humanity.
Gould was a talented science writer, but he overplayed evolution's whimsy. Increasingly, science is showing that the evolutionary process has many built in constraints which limit its possibilities and bias its pathways. Take, for example, the ubiquitous phenomenon of convergence - the tendency for highly diverse species to independently evolve similar adaptive (analogous, not homologous) traits. Most of us are familiar with the saber-toothed tiger, the scourge of our hominin ancestors. Less familiar are a group of South American marsupials called the thylacosmilids who independently evolved similar protruding saber-teeth. Convergence can also be seen in a number of specifically human traits. For example, we share a mode of locomotion, bipedalism, with birds, kangaroos, and some dinos. The lateralized and convoluted structure of our brains can also be found in octopi, this despite the fact that vertebrates and cephalopods diverged from one another over 450,000 million years ago.
In his book "Life's Solution" (2003, Cambridge Press) Cambridge Palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris documents scores of examples of convergent evolution from insect body designs to the social systems of dolphins and chimpanzees (both fission-fusion). The important lesson is that there are only a limited number of ways that evolution can solve the adaptive problems posed by the earth's ecosystems. Time and again, evolution stumbles upon the same general design features from which to fashion adaptive traits.
Now add to this the Baldwin effect - an idea originally proposed in 1896 wherein organisms are posited to actively shape their own selective forces. For example, suppose some fairly intelligent primates begin fashioning tools, giving them access to new resources and a competitive advantage over non-tool users. Any genetic predisposition facilitating tool use would also be positively selected.
A severe limitation on Baldwin effects has always been the unpredictability of genetic mutation. For any heritable genetic changes to occur (so the thinking has always been) our tool wielding primate would just have to wait around and hope for a lucky "tool use" mutation to pop up. But maybe not. Two recent books, Jablonka and Lamb's "Evolution in Four Dimensions" (2005 MIT press) and Kirschner and Gerhart's "The Plausibility of Life" (2005, Yale University Press) discuss connections between recent work in genetics and Baldwinian processes. What if the primate's tool use actually raised the probability that a tool-relevant genetic change would take place which could then be passed along to offspring?
Recent genetic research (in a field called epigenetics) shows that experiences occurring over one's lifetime can produce heritable genetic changes. For example, mice exposed to two weeks of environmental enrichment (more social interaction, activity, novel objects to explore) show evidence of enhanced memory function (not surprising). More surprising is that their offspring also show evidence of enhanced memory even though they were never exposed to environmental enrichment (Journal of Neuroscience, 29, p. 1496). Thus, the increased environmental stimulation created a genetic change in the parents that was then transmitted to offspring. This change appears to involved altered patterns of gene regulation (how genes are turned on and off during development). Similar effects have been noted in humans (see European Journal of Human Genetics, 14, p. 159).
Convergence, epigenetic inheritance, and Baldwin effects are only a few of the mechanisms serving as directional constraints on evolution's pathways. In his review of the various factors affecting the evolutionary process, anthropologist Melvin Konner concludes:
"There are no intrinsic driving factors in evolution, but there are intrinsic constraints and canalized paths along which either evolution or development may more easily proceed" ("The Evolution of Childhood," Harvard Press, 2010, p. 59, italics in original).
Of course, none of these constraining factors guarantee our arrival on the evolutionary stage. They do, however, raise the odds that in time a complex, rational, self-aware creature capable of entertaining both scientific and religious ideas might emerge.
The more we understand evolution, the less it seems like either the bogeyman creationists fear or the universal God-dissolving acid some atheists crave.
Amy-Jill Levine and Douglas Knight: Biblical Views of God
Karl Giberson, Ph.D: Why Evangelicals Are Fooled Into Accepting Pseudoscience
David Carr: How Science Helped Us Read the Bible
Evolution and Religion Can Coexist, Scientists Say
Darwin Debated: Religion vs. Evolution - Pew Research Center
applying the death and resurrection of Jesus to your life of sin within the
quietness of your bedroom tonight. As an unrepentant sinner myself, I made
this decision around 15 years ago. This is the most important decision that you could ever make.
- Romans 10:9-10
‘More surprising is that their offspring also show evidence of enhanced memory even though they were never exposed to environmental enrichment’
On that point, would this go some way to explaining increasing rates of infertility in humans? As people reproduce less, are genetic variations occurring to make their offspring less fecund. Possible?
Professor Rossano wrote: "In their (The Abrahamic religious tradition's) narrative, humans represented the culmination of God's creative work - the very purpose for creation itself.
It was just this "creaturliness" of us humans that I was addressing.
But, I never stated what I myself do not believe, namely, that God is mysterious, and therefore incomprehensible! He is certainly not incomprehensible to us who know Him.
What is so incomprehensible to me, is why so many today don't know Him, when, as Paul said in Romans chapter one, "in the world that then was, they [our ancestors] "knew God" (see the research papers on antiquity of Humboldt, Hislop et al).
I spent many years studying a vast amount of these research papers, and its a well-documented fact that early modern humans of the Antediluvian civilizations(before the Flood) were well aware of the Creator God in their daily life, as well as they understood that God created man for [His] glory.
I thought that somebody ought to say that out loud, and so I did...
I welcome your thoughts.
Yes, ontogenic restraints...which happens to be part of the "whimsies" Gould talked about. The Hox genes developed early in animal evolution and play an important role, so it's very hard to do something entirely different with them.
Convergent evolution is actually a proof of natural selection, again, something that Gould did state time and again.
Epigenetics are interesting, almost something that Lamarck would pride on, buuuuuut the range in which epigenetics acts is, in general, limited.... Soooo, nothing really new under the Sun in this blog.
Alas, along comes the savior, Darwin. Help us escape from this hold, the masses screamed. No problem, Darwin smiled- - kill God and you kill the problem. Good idea, the masses roared. Freedom, alas, true freedom. Oh-- one thing is needed though, to recieve this freedom you need to give up on the idea of everlasting life, because you cannot have it both ways.
hmmmm -- the masses are in great turmoil now,, but maybe it will be worth it. We can distract ourselves, they reason, by acquiring a new god. This new god - we shall call it....science. And-- this god called science will make this life so wonderful that we won't care that we will miss out on everlasting life-- which is a long way off anyways and you have to be so good to get it. Okay -- sell the soul and cancel the trip -- we are in!
To clarify, the Bible appears to suggest that when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they felt new shame regarding their nakedness. Perhaps, this emerging perspective can be reasonably interpreted to suggest that they lost their innocence of perspective and/or gained new, distorted perspective.
Adam and Eve’s covering themselves with fig leaves might possibly be reasonably considered to represent humanity’s first resorting to human means or science and technology to replace God’s provision which they had rejected.
He concealed his selfish ambitions to gain control over the human race by appearing to be a benefactor of Eve. And he then became a "father of the lie" by lying to her, slandering God and making himself in opposition to God intent on swaying others to join his rank. This he does by enticing each one of us with our own selfish desires. Some want wealth, some want power, some want plaques on their walls, some are greedy for any excess, some want others to be in awe of them.
Really, can we have a serious intellectual debate about the Cat in the Hat next?
It's not as if atheists co-opt evolution because of their hatred of fictional gods.
Prior to the 19th century, it was an unknown question how life got where it is, as diverse, as complex, etc. Hence the success of the teleological (design) argument for God. Even educated people, who entirely rejected religion (like Jefferson and Paine) had to accept some form of deism.
Darwin took that god-of-the-gaps argument away from religion.
Even the great Charles Darwin glosses over the subject of where humans came from in his book Origin Of The Species, leaving only a cryptic message at the end of his book.
Let not forget also that Darwin published more than one printing of On the Origin. How he phrased certain things in certain editions changed with the pressures put upon him by others and society in general. Treastises have been written on this subject.
And one of the most satisfyingly, epistemologically, truthful arguments I ever heard was made by a Bible student of mine sitting in my livingroom, who was most recently sitting in a mud hut with a rag wrapped about his loins, and he said: "when I really found out just how huge the Universe actually was, what that said to me, was that size of the aquarium us humans live in, demonstrates the greatness of God Who built it.
There was a time in the not-too-distance past when our own ancestors glorified God when they finished counting some two thousand or so stars in the heavens. "look, what God has wrought" they exclaimed!
Of course, they couldn't see the 100 billion stars in our galaxy, still, they thought our aquarium was huge!
But, even with our best cutting-edge telescopes, just from what we can see, there are estimated to be from 200 to 400 billion galaxies in the Universe.
And, yes, as I have said, it is a magnificent theater of God's glory.
Yes. It's been well known for quite some time that the Abrahamaic religions are inconsistent with reality. We get stop worrying about non-existent creatures right now and get on with out lives.
Isn't that older than the universe?