Perhaps because Evolution was my firmest remaining grasp upon a belief in non-spiritual, non-supernatural origins, I sought to learn more about it. In fact, I began learning more about all of science. I have always found these things fascinating, but had never really taken time to learn the details and concepts of the scientific study of the universe.
Ironically, this new passion led me, again, in the last direction I expected…
As I learned more about the concepts behind Evolution, I certainly understood that these complicated processes would take time. Then, as I understood better, I realized that the complexity of it all would take even more time to develop into what we see today.
The concept itself did not bother me. We know mutations happen occasionally, and it was conceivable that a succession of such incremental changes could add up to be more than pocket change over millions of years. Probability brings up the “reality” that even if something has a billion-in-one chance, it’s still possible. Given enough years, enough chance happenings, enough changes could occur…
I worried not, because I knew that not only did pretty much every scientist believe in Evolution (and who am I to doubt a scientist?), but many concepts of Evolution were observable (which a willing mind translates to “provable”). We could see moths and fruit flies “evolve,” and scientists had “created” amino acids in a test tube. We had this long string of skeletons “showing” human Evolution in all its steps… It all seemed plausible.
Much later, I was reminded that these things we can observe are not Evolution, per se – they are natural selection, which is but a small part of the whole Evolutionary theory, and is the least controversial part of it. It’s the skin on the outside of the controversy, yet it’s often used to shield the big, mushy center of the theory. The fact remains, we do not see one species morphing into a distinctly different species in the course of our observations. I also did not realize (refused to believe) that scientists had faked or used lots of imagination in presenting us with some of those skeletons along the Evolutionary ladder to humanity.
Eventually, each detail about Evolution I discovered added another rather large component of required time – more and more millions of years. No, it’s not impossible for two mutations to happen right after one another, but it’s increasingly unlikely that three, or four, of five positive, survivable mutation/adaptations will happen in a sequence that takes less than a few thousand years. Multiply that by all the different things that need to change for an organism to truly improve itself – including many changes which really must be accomplished in the exact same generation, because one potentially positive improvement, absent its synergistic second or third positive improvement, actually becomes a liability to the organism – a reason to be excluded from the gene pool by natural selection.
Naturally, increasing complexity of structures of life results incontrovertibly into increasing numbers of years. I doubted, but did not let go. I kept the faith. After all, we’ve got millions and billions of years to play with, right?
Then, two things happened which argued against each other, but in concert argued against Evolution. The Genome Project was gradually uncovering the deeply complex components of life, starting with the easiest organisms to study. What they found was incredible – an irreducible complexity within even the simplest of organisms. Now, I began to realize that the time I might have expected it would take life to evolve was growing vastly longer.
At the same time, astronomers were coming back with new observations which indicated that the galaxy and universe were actually younger – by a factor of a billion years or more! – than they’d originally thought. And galactic origins are inextricably linked with human origins – they each had to have come from somewhere, and each would have to take a long, long time without a creator.
While, logically, I could not conclude from the vastness of googleplex probability that Evolution was impossible, I was forced to conclude, as a reasonable person, that Evolution was seeming more and more improbable.
(to be concluded next… )
