Most religions have a creator God. This creator God is the one who is believed to have created this world. If you are a believer, you just accept this without asking questions. But the modern Atheists like Richard Dawkins don’t agree that any such God exists. In that case, how did this world come into existence?
Richard is an Evolutionary biologist. He firmly believes that Darwin’s theory ‘almost’ explains the complete creation and how we arrived at our present world through successive stages of evolution. Richard insists that this evolution is not some random process but a self-guided process of natural selection which went on for billions of years.
Beings evolved over a period of time to best suite themselves to a given condition. Every being passes on its experiences to its next generation through its genes that gives rise to a better suited progeny. Occasionally there could be random changes or mutation that could chart an altogether new path. Overall, it is a self-guided process without needing any overseer like God.
Richard is so enamored by this evolution theory that he brushes aside questions like how did it all start in the “beginning” before any ‘being’ existed. Where did the first ‘being’ come from? After-all, evolution assumes the existence of some ‘being’ to start with. How did the process really start?
Richard considers it as a small problem which may be relatively easier to figure out. But the real big problem, he says, is to explain how a complex world as this one came into existence over a period of billions of years without being guided by any external agency like God.
Questions like what existed before the world came into existence, does not mean much to Richard. He honestly admits that it is not his domain and he is sure that some Physicist would figure it out some day. He conjectures that some primitive DNA like living form existed in the beginning and that one replicated itself till there were chance variations in them. That is when the Darwin’s theory stepped in. From then on, the entire process is well defined and clear - according to Richard.
There are lot of things which are fuzzed out in this entire explanation. Firstly, what constitutes a living form? How is it different from nonliving forms? Did this primitive living form emerge from some nonliving entity?
Let us assume that some living form came into existence somehow, from somewhere, and it replicated itself. These multiple living forms competed with each other and through a process of natural selection they evolved into more and more complex beings that we see today. But does even this evolution theory explain the present state completely?
What is involved in evolution? Competing forms, learn by their experience and pass that information to their progeny to come up with a better suited form. This refinement goes on in successive stages till those which are the “fittest’ survived. This evolution is aided by occasional mutation to bring in a random change. So, learning aided by occasional mutation and survival of the fittest is at the heart of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This definitely explains many things. But does it explain everything as Richard confidently says?
I am no evolutionary biologist like Richard. But my observation of the world around, tells me that this theory of evolution is too simplistic to explain many of the wonders that we see around.
Look at a tall coconut palm for example. These palms can grow several tens of feet tall. The fruits of such palms, when mature, naturally drop down from a great height. When they reach the ground they rarely crack, given to their hard shell and soft cushiony exterior. How did the original palm learn that such a design of the nut has a better chance of survival? Obviously, it cannot be through a closed loop of trial and error since no such loop exists. The tree has no idea about what happens to the fruit once it detaches itself from the tree. So, no direct learning is possible. The only way is mutation.
As part mutation process, let us assume, various types of nut designs emerged and only those palms that accidentally produced nuts with hard shells with cushiony exterior survived. Just imagine how many designs have to be rejected before a palm succeeds in arriving at the right one? There are just infinitely many. Such a purely mutation driven evolution is not very convincing. There seems to be something else that guided the evolution. But what was that? Darwin’s theory does not have any other means!
Look at a thorny tree for example. How did the tree come up with thorns to protect itself? Each thorn is such a wonderful device that it looks unlikely that it came up just by mutation alone. The tree cannot learn how a specific structure of the thorn can keep away grazing animals. And there are just too many shapes to bank on just mutation!
And there are many plants that produce special thorns with hooked tips. Any animal that comes in contact with these hooked thorns gets trapped and struggles to free itself. Even when it succeeds, the hooked tip detaches and gets embedded in the body of the animal, inflicting great pain for several days. How did the plant know that it has to produce such special thorns that not only hurt the animals but also have long term effect on the animal that it would never again come anywhere near the plant! How was such a thorn shape evolve? Just by mutation? Isn’t it too simplistic explanation?
Thorny trees amaze me more. There are many thorny trees, that have thorns only when they are tender plants. Once they grow tall – beyond the reach of grazing animals, they stop producing thorns! How did the tree learn that? Or was it also by chance?
How does a flowering plant know what fragrance to produce to attract its pollinators? There can be infinitely many fragrances that have to be produced if only mutation were the guiding force. How did the final evolved plant arrive at one specific fragrance among all those infinitely many and became the fittest in the survival race? Was it just a chance?
I can go on and on, giving examples where just learning, passing the genes, occasional mutation, survival of the fittest cannot explain most non trivial cases. Anyone who observes the world keenly, can see that Darwin’s theory is not that magical that it can explain everything as Richard believes. It may explain broad happenings. But saying that Darwin’s theory eliminates the need for any other lateral ways of thinking is just being a bit dogmatic.
I am not trying to push for a creationist view of the world. I am aware that there are many who do that. I am only wondering whether a simple theory of evolution such as Darwinian is enough to explain all those miracles, we keep seeing day in and day out. Probably, I would prefer to admit that “I don’t know”, rather than pull down the edifice of religious thoughts as illogical and “enemies of reason”, as people like Richard often tend to characterize them.
No comments:
Post a Comment