From Australia -- Shaheryar Sufi on Evolution

I have a lively life online (and some in realspace) all over the map, literally, but while I wrestle with too many constituencies and too little time, I may do so finding life in arts and letters never more democratic--so I log on from an apartment by a patch of woods here in western Maryland, USA--nor possibly more exciting.  What follows I consider a gift from a young gentlemen writing, so I presume, from Perth, Western Australia (may he correct my guessing if wrong).

The Facebook thread topic (I've provided a URL to it at the bottom of this post) had to do with use of scientific findings by religious minds, sometimes zealots, to prove the validity of their intuited or bannered god given prognostications.  As such topics do, that one drifted off into the familiar form of a debate about evolution.  Never mind my input on that: this considerate response speaks brilliantly and eloquently on the matter.

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Gentlemen, thanks to you all for your participation in this conversation. I now take the liberty to share my own thoughts on the subject of creation vs evolution. Although many arguments can be formed against the account of creation as narrated in Genesis, I think these arguments are largely trite and unsurprising for the biblical creationist, so I will dispense with the task of going into them. Besides, I am more interested in demonstrating the validity of evolution as opposed to demonstrating the invalidity of creation. Experience suggests that when most people speak of evolution, they generally don’t know what it actually is. While I am not implying that we have such participants in the present conversation, for the benefit of those that lack awareness, I take the liberty to provide a basic overview of what the heck evolution actually is, how it began, what evidence it's based upon and why it is reasonable for us to believe it.

So. Evolution is the idea that all living species originated from a common ancestor and gradually evolved over time in accordance with and often in response to the topological, nutritional, climatic and geographical circumstances in which their subsistence occurred. The evolutionary journey kicks off over 3.5 billion years ago with the emergence of single-cellular organisms (eukaryotes) through abiogenesis, and very slowly grew into multi-cellular organisms (prokaryotes), and later into different species. These then branched off into further species, and so on, all changing over time to better suit the environment in which they settled. The ones that survived best, got to reproduce and leave behind their offspring thereby resulting in gradual change overall.

Think of it this way, you have a bunch of mosquitos buzzing around your face, you react with clapping your hands together rapidly out of annoyance and two get squashed and die in the process, the rest run away. The ones that get trapped were the slowest. The faster ones who survive will reproduce and become responsible for passing their fitter genes down to their offspring, and from their offspring to their offspring, and so on. The future generations of mosquitos will thus be born naturally more agile. This gradual 'improvement over time' is essentially the backbone of the evolutionary theory.

So, where and when do ‘we’ fit in? We are Hominids, which only start to emerge about 4 million years ago, when our ape ancestor branches off into two streams: Chimps, and the Australopithecus which lived for about 2 million years until evolving into Homo Ergaster and Homo Habilis, which went extinct, while Homo Ergaster proceeded to evolve into Homo Antacessor and Homo Erectus, which went extinct, while Homo Antacessor evolved into Homo Heidelbergensis, which then evolved into Neanderthals and the co-existent Cro-Magnons, and eventually, Homo Sapiens Sapiens - the modern human in our current form. Neanderthals went extinct some 30,000 years ago, just leaving behind modern man. This is the crux of our phylogeny.

The evidence for evolution is derived from a wide range of sources. First, there's the chronology of our evolutionary stages embedded within fossils found, there are transitional species now extinct suggestive of a 'middle stage' of evolution across phylogenetically related species; there's atavism, the survival of obsolete traits in dormant genes – ie. birds with genes for making teeth, whales with genes for making legs; there's animal camouflage – ie. living species' ability to alter its aesthetic appearance so as to adapt to its surroundings and become less visible to predators; there's the survival of vestigial structures, eg. the human appendix once used to digest cellulose in our vegetarian ancestors; the wisdom tooth used to grind up tough plant matter before our diet changed and jaws shrunk accordingly, the tailbone which once helped our ancestors climb trees, body hair as means to keep the ancestors warm in cold snowy climates, goosebumps used to raise the hair on the skin of our ancestors when in fear of attack so as to look vicious in front of the attacker and scare it away, and the thirteenth rib another remnant of our chimp roots; there's the development and spread of antibiotic bacteria which, like the spread of pesticide resistant forms of plants and insects is evidence that evolution from natural selection is still an on-going process in the natural world. The evidence is quite literally everywhere!

The DNA encodes all these phenotypic characteristics acquired as a result of genotypic interaction with the environment. Given that DNA changes over generations through natural selection and/or mutation, it follows that characteristics also change over generations. There then reaches a point where a new species starts to emerge, who cannot reproduce with distantly related phylogenetic species. Though 96% of our DNA is like chimps (greater proximity than between horses and zebras) we cannot reproduce with them because they have 24 pairs (48 chromosomes) and we have 23 pairs (46 chromosomes). If the numbers don't match, it's impossible to interbreed. This isn't proof against evolution, it is proof for evolution – that both humans and apes are evolving branches of the same tree that have come to be so different from one another gradually over time. Geneticists are able to estimate when chimp and human lineages separated by measuring differences in our genes, and the estimates match the dates when early hominids start to appear from the fossil record.

So, putting it all together, my conclusion is, the evidence for evolution by far outweighs the evolution against it. In the words of Thomas Kuhn, “to be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted”. I welcome criticism and/or counter-arguments. Thanks

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Shaheryar Sufi serves as an advisor to Western Australia's Department of the Premier and Cabinet and Treasurer of the Swan Division, Divisional Young Liberal Committee, Liberal Party of Australia.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

Facebook thread address: https://www.facebook.com/#!/shaheryar.sufi/posts/2683884931587

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Comments

[Tammy Swofford]

Jim,
I have enjoyed catching up with your online journal. I must toss out the title of an excellent book, since the post is on evolution v. creationism.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0761819614/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=drbenmcarter-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0761819614&adid=05YZCRJDA386VJ2EN5X0&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.drbenmcarter.com%2Fbooks.html

Dr. Benjamin Michael Carter was a dear friend. I knew him simply as "Mike". But he wrote very well in defense of intelligent design.

Tammy

[James S. Oppenheim]

Hi, Tammy -- I'm glad you stopped by although I haven't had much in the way of profundity, much less news, to post of late. For any bumping into this thread while web surfing, the title of Tammy's book recommendation is _The Defective Image: How Darwinism Fails to Provide an Adequate Account of the World_. By publishing Shaheryar Sufi's observation, I've well suggested the direction of my thinking on this large subject.

Those with a general interest in evolution theory, its revelations and challenges, might enjoy this site (which today features Christopher Hitchens on its cover):
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ and within it: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/bibliography.html

[Tammy Swofford]

Jim,
I am currently reading Paul Auster. Some of his writing regarding memory, consciousness, etc. is similar to the thoughts of Dr. Carter, as expressed in some of his
unpublished manuscripts and papers which I am currently reading.

But I am thoroughly enjoying Paul Auster too. So regardless of the personal view, enjoying the thoughts of other writers is a distinct pleasure.

R/Tammy