This is going to be an anything but scientific frolic through some things that have bugged me when people talk about evolution. Things that don’t add up. I am cool with being proven wrong, because I don’t try to hold any beliefs strongly enough that I threaten my identity letting them go. If there is a higher power, I am me. If not, I am me. If space aliens are the higher power, I am me. If this all loops in upon itself and we end up creating this past for ourselves a gazillion years from now, I am me. I am still me cuz this avatar and its guiding energy are sittin’ in front of my computer typing this up.
Primordial Soup Theory
There’s been a lot of discoveries in the “origin of life” sciences. Things I am ill-equipped to explain, but it still seems to me that science hasn’t settled on how we get from some collection of “pre-organic” molecules to these wildly complex single celled organisms which constitute the beginning of biology as we know it. There’s molecules, and then, bam, at some point there’s RNA and DNA. By the time we are at RNA/DNA, even in the simplest of life, life is hugely complex.
The door is ajar there, and for me, that’s where the cosmic designer stepped in to nudge things along. Again, science might find the bridge from molecules to DNA and that will be interesting, but right now, the random leap from inorganic chemicals to microbiology is a leap too far, imho.
Ergo, I believe there was a cosmic designer, and I hope Tim Gunn finds this entity and gets them on a season of Project Runway: Origin of Life. I certainly do not believe this designer is anything like the “engineers” depicted in “Prometheus”, but, spoiler alert, that probably means they are exactly like that. Who does their hair?
Darwinian Evolution
Like so many things in life, I need to read more on the theory of evolution. As of right now, I am not a subscriber to evolution as it has been explained on all the nature shows I watch, but maybe Darwin does a better job explaining his theory in his own book.
We have this theory of evolution that gets portraited on television as “animals adapted”, but these are adaptations which take…what… 5 million, 50 million years to “randomly” show up? It is my understanding that genetic mutation is random, and then the ones that are successful long enough get passed on. Alrighty, keep that in your mental hopper and then watch some nature shows.
Examples include monkeys that adapted to extreme cold so they could hang out in the hot springs during the winter. They didn’t wake up one day with the fur to handle that. Where and how did that adaption happen? Flowers that match the beaks of specific birds. Again, if any bird could pollenate any flower, how did adaptation to a specific beak occur, and even more fun, if I bird could get a meal from ANY flower, why would its beak change, generation by generation, to fit only ONE type of flower?
If the first humans showed up in Africa, we presume they had round eyes. . . then a chunk of them end up in Asia, where eye shape changes over a few hundred thousand years because people with narrower eyes can see better in the snow. But King Arthur didn’t have this mutation and neither do any of the other white walkers from the north – plenty of snow there. Asian skin tone is different from European skin tone – same brutal weather.
I could go on and on with adaptions that don’t make sense either because the conditions they adapted to happened overnight (monkeys that can’t survive in the cold magically sprout fur for the cold), conditions that seem to reduce the success of a species (birds limited to one flower now), or changes that should have happened more broadly only impact a smaller group (humans in the snow. . .and where is their warm fur)?
Almost every nature show will expound upon evolution as though it is irrefutable science, but they don’t answer how these adaptations manifest in a way that makes practical sense to me. In my world, Christopher Columbus was a black man with narrow eyes, winter fur, a beak adapted for gathering honey from snozzleberries, and webbed feet with a necrotic venomous spur. Oh, and lasers.
Divine Evolution
I am broadening this beyond flavor of religion – in this category, some entity (celestial, supreme, super smart, our future selves, etc) did some coding (did they use Python?). Maybe they did the “Promethean DNA dance” (I really disliked that movie, but the concept of ancient aliens is interesting. The rest was proverbial “filling our minds with crap”, so don’t watch it just for the aliens). Maybe it was a giant DNA salt-shaker that came out of left frame like a Monty Python animation. Something happened.
And, to be honest, it is a little too convenient.
[Roll the Liberty Bell March, by John Philip Sousa (1893) . . . the theme music from Monty Python]
Q: How did…
A: DNA Salt-Shaker.
Q: But what about…?
A: DNA Salt-Shaker.
Q: Male birds that twerk like strippers to attract a wife?
A: DNA Salt-shaker.
Q: Ants that can turn their bodies into kegs for football night?
A: DNA Salt-Shaker
Q: No dragons or unicorns!
A: Darwinian Evolution
Oh well. I am opting into “Divine Evolution.” I am not religious, so I guess that makes me an agnostic, but for me, there is too much evidence of design to chalk it up to random mutations proved via survival of the fittest. I am just not there, yet. I know, this is the least scientific explanation. But it gets my vote for now, especially if they actually played the theme music while operating the DNA salt-shaker.