When speaking with fundamentalist creationists, plenty of whom are in my very family, they truly, earnestly believe the Bible is the literal, infallible word of God. Therefore, the Earth and our entire universe cannot be older than ten-thousand years or so, in their minds. Not only is this wrong, it’s wrong by orders of magnitude, yet believe on they do. Their viewpoints often result in a bombardment of questions the likes of, “Where did everything come from if God didn’t speak it into existence?” “If Evolution is so scientific, why can’t we ever seem to witness it happening?” and my personal favorite, “If we evolved from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist?”
To say I find this frustrating would be an understatement, so I’ve decided to provide some sweeping answers and explanations to this apparently difficult-to-understand concept. First off, a theory in the scientific community does not carry the meaning many would imagine and commonly use. There is currently a Theory of Gravity which describes why we are pulled towards the Earth, Radio Wave Theory is used for cell phones and other such devices, Germ Theory of Disease is relied on in modern medicine, the Theory of Refraction is utilized by contact lenses and glasses, Theory of General Relativity is accepted by physicists and the aerospace industry; there’s even a Theory of Heliocentrism, related to the Sun being the center of our solar system. All of these are now obviously factual, and are taken advantage of by modern technology and public practices every single day, yet they are ‘just theories.’ This is because they all have an abundance of evidence to support them, and are readily accepted by the entirety or vast majority of the scientific community. The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is exactly this kind of ‘just a theory.’
In other words, it isn’t “just” anything, Evolution is a profoundly well-established framework for understanding a variety of fields within and related to the biological sciences. Over a century of research, discovery and debate has gone into establishing, developing, tweaking, and understanding the complex and amazing story of life on this planet. There is no longer a debate among the wider scientific community as to the legitimacy of Evolutionary Theory, just as there is no debate regarding the existence of gravity, atoms, bacteria or radio waves. While the latter items may be more obvious in our day-to-day lives, the preponderance of evidence supporting all of these concepts are of very similar quality. One simply conflicts with an established religious doctrine, and is thus contested.
To top it off, our school system does a generally poor job of educating kids in what natural selection is, why Evolutionary Theory matters or just how much evidence there is in support of the framework. There are a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings I hear on a regular basis, and many are fairly easy to explain. First off, Evolution is a process through which life slowly diversifies into a huge variety of niches, creating complex and co-dependent eco-systems, like forests, jungles, savannas or oceans. For example, phytoplankton creates its own energy through chemical reactions using the power of the sun, while fish feed on the plankton to survive. Fish become food for predatory species, such as sharks or dolphins, and when these predators die, their bodies give needed nutrition for plankton. This is extremely simplified, but think back to the Circle of Life analogy from The Lion King and you have a pretty good idea of how these ecosystems work.
Secondly, the phrase ’survival of the fittest’ is a misnomer; the diversification of life is better described as ‘survival of the good-enough.’ So, imagine we have a dense forest, and an arriving species of bird is the first of its kind to make its way to this place. Let’s say there are insects living within the bark of the tree, leaving only small openings from which to catch them. Meanwhile, there are nuts which have fallen to the ground bellow, but the shells are tough and require notable strength to crack. The smaller birds with thinner beaks will be better suited to catching the insects, while the larger, stronger birds with stocky beaks will be better at breaking open nuts.
Now, picture these birds fifty generations later, when the larger, stocky birds breed with those similar to them closer to the ground, while smaller, thinner-beaked birds breed with others similar to them higher up in the trees. Imagine this trend continuing for hundreds; thousands of generations, and what you eventually get is birds which have adapted to the environment which allowed them to best survive. These birds slowly become so physically and genetically different, they can’t even breed together any longer, and as such are no longer considered the same species. This, my dear viewer, is Evolution by Natural Selection at work.
So the reality is, we do see Evolution happening before us, we simply don’t often realize it or know what to look for. In today’s world, when a horse and a donkey breed, they produce a mule. While still able to produce offspring themselves, their mules are born infertile and are unable to breed. This is because horses and donkeys are growing closer to a final stage of genetic diversification, that of finally cutting ties with a closely related species and not being able to breed together at all. Given enough future generations, horses and donkeys will no longer be able to produce mules, and will then be considered entirely different species. This is Evolution happening before our very eyes.
Humans, for our part, have also descended from such a line of diversified species. We have not evolved from monkeys, nor even other modern great apes such as chimpanzees or gorillas, yet all of us have a common ancestral species if we go back far enough. The differences between us come down to the niches we fill. Gorillas are large, strong and forage on the ground, while lemurs are small tree-dwellers with eyes better suited to operating at night. We homo-sapiens are omnivorous pack hunters native to grasslands, yet our niche, and how well we fit into it, has allowed us to become much more successful and diversified than most species could imagine.
So, we exist alongside monkeys and other great apes because we are not competing in the same niches. The so-called “missing links” between humans and chimps or bonobos are largely if not entirely extinct because they directly competed within our niche, and our species is the current winner. Jellyfish, trees and bacteria have all existed since long before humans were around, and continue to exist because they have remained the most successful at surviving within their specific environment. Evolution does not require what may seem lower level lifeforms to die off so others higher on the food-chain may live, it is in fact the opposite.
Life is built out somewhat like a pyramid, from the bottom up. At the base are single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, fungi and protozoa. They are required for everything above them to survive, as they are very often symbiotic and assist in biological function such as digestion, immunity, and decomposition upon death. Next up are lifeforms which can produce energy themselves, such as plants and phytoplankton, which feed herbivorous, plant-eating species like blue whales and cows. Then we have the meat eaters, or carnivores, which consume creatures feeding on plants. Finally, we have the odd species which don’t fit neatly into one specific category, often being insectivores or omnivores, and this is where humanity finds itself.
We have greatly benefitted from being able to consume many different types of foods for energy, and being able to survive and thrive in so many different environments. Our social skills, use of tools, and relative environmental flexibility have all led to our species breaking many of the traditional rules of natural selection, but we are by no means exempt from them. We find ourselves at the top of our food chain, and as many predatory and even herbivorous species before us have discovered, if our environment changes too drastically or our food supply runs out, we too will join the list of extinct species.
The bottom line is, we’re not entirely sure where our universe and all the energy within it originally came from. It may have been divinely orchestrated, or it may be through naturalistic processes we simply don’t fully understand yet. What we are pretty damn sure of, however, is our universe, the earth and life on it are all far older than ten thousand years old, and life on this planet is constantly changing and adapting. One generation at a time, one species at a time, earth has played host to a brilliant and incomprehensibly complex dance of life which is still carrying on before us.
We humans are a powerful player in this current world, yet we are still but one part, one cog in a massive machine we have little control over. We would do well to remember just how fragile our position truly is, and do everything we can to understand our place; how our world around us truly works, without the willfully applied blinders of ancient books preaching supernatural origins. We only get one shot at life, as people and a species. Let’s make it count.
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