Natural Selection is Beautiful

[Roarey Raccoon]

I can't remember the last time I actually made a topic that wasn't staff-related....

Anyway, down to the point XP. This is a topic about evolution (natural selection) and the reason I'm making it stems from all the religious debates I've had in the past, in all of which evolution has been mentioned at some point and I'd view it as a far superior explanation for the variety of life we have on Earth. But then it got me thinking, I hadn't actually read about the whole subject at any length beyond the touching it was given at A-level Biology in college. That, in a nutshell, makes me a layman when it comes to biology and, naturally, evolution and the theory of natural selection.

The thing with me is, science can bore me. I used to adore it as a kid but I had that passion practically beaten out of me, which is a long and frankly unnecessary story XP. I need something to hook me in, I'm not just going to pick up a text book and dive into the world of knowledge, thirsty for more. I need to see a beauty in what I'm trying to learn about, something that instills at least a little passion for the subject. Now nature can be beautiful, just seeing a bit of it confirms that, but how can a scientific theory be beautiful? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say, so I'll tell you the moment when I thought the theory of natural selection was fucking beautiful. The 'fucking' is an important emphasis.

Two words: "ring species". In a book I'm reading called The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins, there's one particular story he calls The Salamander's Tale. Around the California Central Valley, which runs the length of the state, there exists a species of salamander known as Ensatina. Down one side of the valley are salamanders with many spots, on the other are salamanders without spots. The salamanders don't cross the valley as the environment doesn't suit them, so they're seperated by quite a space. These two types of salamander will not breed with eachother, so the conclusion to come to is that they are different species, right? Well, as you follow the salamanders north, observing their population, something interesting happens. Like a fork in the road, the north branches off into two paths as you move south, and these two types of salamander are seperated. In the north you find a species that seems to be between the two, that seems to branch off with the valley as a seperation. The truth is that all these salamanders are technically the same species, that change as you move around the ring of the valley. This little story is relatively unremarkable, but its implications are beautiful.

Giving creatures labels, or species, is only a limitation for the sake of convenience. We're cataloguing the life on the planet with these names. Life itself is far more dynamic. Certainly, different species of creatures truly are seperate organisms, but they are all linked like the salamanders. You don't have parents of one species give birth to a child of another, the process flows and meanders over millions and millions of years. The well-known and clumsy picture of the ape slowly becoming an upright man is a laughable image of the way life really works. It isn't a progression from worse to better, there is no goal involved or reasoning behind it, only the natural selection of DNA, the most suitable configurations of genes and chromasomes are the likeliest to survive and continue to reproduce. It is so simple and yet so unfathomably intricate.

My dad said to me once, mockingly, "If we came from apes then why are apes still around?". It's like holding a mushroom and asking why it isn't a potato, if you don't understand what you're talking about then it's going to sound fucking silly. Not entirely unlike the ring species of salamanders, an ancestral creature's evolutionary life branched off, millions of years ago, like a fork in a road. Down one road, we emerged, down another, emerged the apes. The environmental and genetic factors that influenced these directions is strikingly complex and I'll admit that I really can't talk about it without getting confused. Just haven't read up about it yet XP. When I look at the infinite variety of life on Earth and consider the sheer magnitude of species that no longer exist, that have lost to the game of life, it seems at first unbelievable that all such creatures could have emerged from just one single ancestor, over 6 billion years ago. But when you understand the mechanism it becomes wonderously apparent that this is indeed what has happened, and will continue to happen for as long as life exists. If the history of life on earth were condensed into a single year, we wouldn't have emerged until the evening of December 31st.

That, to me, is beautiful. And this is also why I don't often make topics XP.

Anyway, what do you think about evolution and natural selection? Are you in awe of it or do you just not give a shit?

[Tornado]

Apparently this recent pre-Lisa-humanoid discovery is bigger than big, so I'm actually thinking about cracking a book and looking some stuff up to see why.

[Dr. Good Girl]

This fascinated me, the timeline of human evolution. Assuming that these are accurate studies, that we came such a long way from such simple organics, and look at us now.

[Mick]

Evolution is interesting to me and I totally believe in it. It takes such a long for beings to evolve. Plus you don't see this happening. It's not like something that happens in a year or a few years. There's no way you could take photographs and movies on evolution. It would take forever and ever. It's not feasible. This takes millions of years for this happens.

I wonder what's going to happen next. Like who will be the next species to view humans like we view apes. I can definitely imagine something like "Oh wow, humans are now the apes of this generation." What is going to come after mankind? I wonder about this sometimes.

[Diogenes]

It really is amazing. Explaining the insane variety of living creatures seems like an impossible task, but natural selection gives a simple and elegant structure that explains almost everything about it. Ironically, thinking about it for a while makes me feel something very much like what I'd expect from a "religious experience"...

[Patticus]

The way I (and, ahem, David Attenborough too) look at it, every single living thing on Earth today is but the latest link in a vast, unbroken chain of life stretching back some 4-odd billion years into the past. That, to me, is true beauty. Excellent post by the way, Roarz, a great read.

[Wyde]

Ah, evolution. It comes up quite a lot in my psychology class actually, since it's quite relevant in a number of areas (eg. the module I'm studying at present, relationships -> human reproductive behaviour. :3).

From a psychological study perspective at least, evolutionary theories are used to reason why certain traits may have lingered to this day. There are all sorts of examples where it can be used, but I can only be bothered with a couple that I've been specifically presented in class:

~ The hairlessness of humans could be be due to the fact it allowed cooling through sweat, and somehow gave them an edge in hot weather. Or, perhaps it advertised cleanliness, which was more difficult with excessive hair, thus seeming more attractive to a potential mate.

~ Why is it human babies are so dependent on outside care and for so long, compared to newborn calves who can be up and running in a matter of hours? Perhaps this is to do with the size of the human head, in order to account for the comparatively massive brain. If a woman's gestation period was too long, the head would likely keep growing to the point where it was completely impossible for the woman to give birth without gross injury/fatality. In this case, you could say potential independence was sacrificed in order to actually allow the birth.

So yes, evolution seems like a sound theory on how life has come to be, and all sorts of studies seem to have helped support evolution. It does have its problems fundamentally as a theory though: it's horrendously difficult to scientifically test, and a standardised experiment seems pretty much impossible to fruitfully analyze in one human lifetime. Additionally, it can be considered a rather reverse method of explaining life: we already have the "effect", so evolutionary theory often appears to make up a "cause" that seems reasonable. Usually though, commonly established theoretical causes tend to seem quite logical, and are likely correct anyway. This element of the theory could still be considered a fallacy though, I reckon.

So in answer to the opoening post's question, I don't believe evolutionary theory is without its faults. However, I do much appreciate how solid it is as a theory, and for me it's definitely a more reasonable explanation for the existence of life on earth than anything religion has ever really offered me. i.e. it's all cool, brah. In fact I'd like to delve into this more by discussing why genes that may be considered "maladaptive" still exist, and whether or not they're really detrimental to the existence of a species, like my own reasoning as to why homosexuality is still prevalent in all sorts of species. But I think I've typed enough for now.

[Arrow]

I'm interested in a lot of things. And, most of those things are more than casual interests but they stop short at obsessive because I don't find gaps in my knowledge and desperately need to fill them.

All of my interests, bar my interest in evolution.

I've always loved animals, but not in a "I'm a vegetarian and I give money to WWF!" kind of way. In an almost cruel kind of way that made me want to chase pigeons and watch them scatter. To me, animals are fascinating, and the beauty comes from being fascinating... and being one of them.

I feel that evolution suffers a problem other scientific theories don't. When I, or anyone else, doesn't know every detail about the theory of gravity we don't dismiss it as as "just a theory". With evolution, we're taught that we can dismiss it as just a theory. How sad. Unfortunately, you have to be very interested in such a subject to learn why that's disgusting. I've never met a denier of evolution who understood it. I don't blame people for not being interested, I do blame them for thinking it matters. Evolution is a fact, as much as gravitation is, anyway. There could be other reasons for what we experience as gravity, and some people, such as those in The Flat Earth Society, have theorised what they may be. But we laugh at these people. But we don't laugh as hard at Creationists. Why? There is no good reason.

Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne is a bloody good book. I've also read Dawkin's The Selfish Gene and I'm listening to his new The Greatest Show on Earth in audio book form. His new book is really good. Dawkins is a great, intelligent man, it's just a shame he's so angry because it puts some people off. So Coyne's book is a good alternative.

I'm one of those annoying people who walks around zoos and aquariums naming species and waffling facts about them. And on the Darwin centre tour at the Natural History Museum I make the tour guides fell useless. (Mostly because they are.)

Edited October 9, 2009 by Arrow