I imagine that you believe the Theory of Evolution in the same way that you believe The Theory of Gravity. It’s is so obvious that that to most educated people it’s reached the level of axiomatic, i.e. something self evident. Something to be so confident about that we can actually build new interesting theories out of its base. Yet, on an interesting point, it has never been mathematically proven. Gregory Chaitin wrote a good book on it called, Proving Darwin.
Let’s recap the theory in lay terms.
I’ve, as an Indian, added my own masala here, don’t be offended. Here’s my omelette with chilis…
We have an environment. It consists of a platform and resources. A platform is a place (a space) to live and resources are the energy and materials to do so. The environment is finite. The environment is always changing. Sometimes slowly, sometimes in jumps.
We have organisms that live in this environment, they are composed of the materials and energy in the Environment. Thus they also form part of the environment collectively.
Organisms are also by extension, finite. In order to grow & survive they take resources (energy and materials) from the Environment. Each organism has a different level of ability to do this, called “fitness”.
A number of finite organisms of differing abilities in a finite environment leads to “competition”.
To propagate through time they need to replicate because organisms die. Just as we have fitness to survive, we have “reproductive fitness” - surviving to the next generation.
Organisms are built upon a plan, the plans are passed on to “offspring” each reproductive cycle. (Genetic Inheritance)
The plans differ between organisms.
Furthermore, on each replication, a slightly modified plan is passed off to the offspring. Replications are not perfect. There are Random Changes. This is a feature, not a bug of the theory. (See Mutation or sexual selection)
As organisms are built on plans. It is the plan that determines the organisms abilities or “fitness”. (Phenotype & Extended Phenotype)
As the Environment is constantly changing (both the physical environment and the populations of organisms within) the organisms with the “best” plans survive to reproduce (replicate) into the next generation.
As the plans get modified in each generation of replication, the best made plans survive for the existing environment.
The plans thus are continuously “updated” and this is called “Evolution”.
All of the above can be summarized as:
“Survival of the Fittest”.
or
“Descent with Modificaiton”
This much is almost tautologically true. Only those that survive, survive. Check. Only those that reproduce, reproduce. Check. The plans in current existence must have survived from the past. Check. The plans of the future are necessarily composed of the modified versions of the present. Check. Plans are updated. Check. Evolution. Check. Check.
The laws of causation and logic dictate this. We need not even look outside outside our windows. We need not travel to the Galápagos to obverse this.
It must be true.
And from this, a mechanical process, relying of randomness and selection we get the whole tree of life and all the behaviors within. Consequently also, we can dispense with God as a designer and progenitor. The laws of the universe suffice.
Or so I thought… Unfortunately, the devil in this case, is in the details.
Objections
The first objections can be found in the study of Biochemistry and Information Theory.
Detailed study of the biochemical pathways seem to contradict the simplistic account given above.
First we hit the blockage of biogenesis itself, and though the Theory of Evolution does not aim to explain this directly. It really does raise the question of “How did these organisms, that are taken for granted in the theory, arrive in the first place?”
They too would have to be created in mechanistic ways.
You no doubt would have heard of the “Primordial Goo” theory. Lightening, hydrothermal vents, raw materials from the ancient crust and atmosphere, amino acids, lipids, the creation of simple replicators etc… a primordial soup. Orcs coming out of the mud, Lord of Rings style. Once we have the Orcs. We’re off to the races.
The problem is that after 50 years or more of study and experimentation we are nowhere close to a viable explanation. Nada, zilch. It’s just a story no better than the Hobbit. Dr. James Tour gives a good introduction to this here.
But let’s set that a side for the moment and grant ourselves some Orcs.
We get beat on the head by “Irreducible Complexity”.
Which basically says, the biochemical and metabolic pathways do not exist for the existing structures that we observe. There is no reasonable path through which randomness and selection can conspire to create the genetic plans we see. What we are asked to believe is that a tornado really went through the junk yard and that a jumbo jet resulted. The explanation is subtle & complex and we will not explain it here. Check out Behe instead. For now, as I granted you some orcs, the least you can do is grant me the benefit of the doubt. Fair, no?
And it gets worse still.
The “plans” upon which organisms are built, is best described as Information. That’s why we talk about the “Software of Life”, the “Genetic Code” etc. It is a linear code. ACGT…. A code that gets unraveled, read and executed. It is the code that gets copied during replication. The code that determines the organisms organization/phenotype.
However, we have no good theory on how Information gets created. No random process in nature creates information. Information necessarily degrades due to randomness. It’s thermodynamics.
Take for example, dog breeding. A case of unnatural selection. What actually happens is that information is lost when creating breeds. That’s why pure bred dogs are sickly. You can get from Wolf to Chihuahua but not Chihuahua to Wolf. Try it. Find an example of it. I challenge you.
Nothing is created, only traits already existing in the genome are whittled down. It’s unfitness all the way down. It doesn’t explain updating, it doesn’t explanation “evolution”, only superficially so. Looks can be deceiving.
But it gets worse still.
We get the problem of “combinatorial explosion”.
The materials we get from the environment need to be converted into proteins, sugars and other thing. The building blocks of the organism. However it turns out that the number of combinations and possibilities are mind bogglingly vast. Vast beyond vast. So vast that jumbo jets magically appearing in junk yards seem easy. There is no mechanism of mutation and random selection that accounts for this. See Doug Axe for further information on this.
And it gets worse than this.
The Environment itself is in question.
No theory can explain it. The Big Bang, cosmology, quantum mechanics, relativity etc. have some skeletons in the closet of their own. A big subject. Things are so out of hand Physicists need to resort to Multiverses, Many Worlds and Infinite Dimensions.
Perhaps you think I am being unfair but I don’t think I am. We resurrected Orcs and banished God to service our theory. We better be able to create the Universe with such confidence.
And let’s not get started on Consciousness or Intelligence. The very substrate upon which you are reading and understanding these words. That’s so out of reach that it isn’t even in the theory. Explained away as something emergent but is it?
So we arrive at this. We had a simple theory that is obviously true. Axiomatically Obvious. Yet on inspection, every premise is built on primordial goo. We resurrected Orcs and wrote the Hobbit. We made a Masala Omelette.
And That’s,
https://burningbright.substack.com/p/the-spider-man-2-effect?utm_source=email
A very pleasant journalist.
If you have read On The Origin Of Species, then the only conclusion you can reach is that it is utter nonsense. It's a continuous echo chamber of self proof.
I have no idea what the absolute truth is, but its not Darwinian.