Evolution, Creationsim, Intelligent Design - Some Random Thoughts

Published on Sunday, 13 September 2009

~ Farhad

The human species has trouble getting a perspective on the sheer immensity of time that plays out through the evolutionary history of life on this planet. Time and numbers are keys in the evolutionary chain that has led from single cell life, to complex multicellular life, to greater complexity in specialized organs within living creatures. We live on this planet less than a century. Ten thousand centuries make up a million years. Life on this planet has been around for more than 2.5 thousand million years. DNA and genes can do a lot of random things in all that time with selectivity from best adaptations to the environment driving the evolutionary process. It's all about giving it the time to work the wonder that has led to the complex life that covers our planet today. There have been many setbacks through catastrophic climate altering events throughout that history. Some have created mass extinctions leading to the opening of new bio niches for better adapted species of life to enter and flourish. We as a species are constrained in our perception of all of this because we have a biological clock that delimits our lifespan to a very small segment in the very big picture. It's like looking at a single pixel and trying to figure out the entire picture.

God is a wonderful concept, a great explanation of things we don't know or understand. I am sure that our requirements for an alpha figure are a construct of our species social nature. We always need a leader. Chimpanzees defer to an alpha female and male. Gorillas do as well. We don't see this pattern in Orangutan because they tend to be loners. Gibbons and other primates also have social constructs with alpha leaders. So God is our ultimate alpha, higher than a President, a Prime Minister or a Queen or King.

How difficult it is for us a species to get outside our "boxed view" to recognize what constrains us from understanding just how rich this universe is in the constructs that have led to the rise of our species on a small rocky planet, rotating around a moderately-sized star, half-way up the arm of one of the pin-wheel arms of our galaxy, a galaxy containing hundreds of millions of stars in a universe with hundreds of millions of visible galaxies.

We are not unique. The building blocks of life, the chemistry is all around us in the galaxy and in intergalactic space. We're just starting down the path of beginning to understand what is in this universe. It is even harder for us to envision other universes in what string theory predicts the multiverse.

When I was a child I used to go to the river near our house and just look at what was in that river, the range and variety of life, the way different plants and animals interacted, how changes in the chemistry of the river altered life. I continue to study even in my backyard as I watch ants organize their social existence, or bumblebees attack my flower garden in search of nectar. The behaviors are not random. They are built on a foundation of millions of generations of life that preceded them, constructing and deconstructing filaments of DNA that have led to creating a sentience that is beautiful to watch.

What an absolute rush to continue to explore this amazing existence, the consciousness of being, the ability to pose questions, theorize, speculate, without constraint, knowing that there is no single entity that governs any of it because you can view it from outside the boundaries of our species genetic engineering. This is not the engineering of intelligent design. This is the engineering of survival based on thousands of millions of years.

It is sad to think that there are so many people who still believe in the existence of a god, one that created the universe and is omnipotent and omniscient. There is absolutely no evidence for this at all. At the moment we do not understand the existence of matter and anti matter, however it is only a matter of time before scientists can both create life from inanimate matter and can fully understand the forces that have created the universe. People who believe in a god have either been indoctrinated into an unsustainable faith or have hope of an afterlife. They cannot face the fact that we are entirely responsible for our own destiny and must determine our own future, not one that is ordained by some nonexistent intelligent designer.