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What with everybody celebrating Charles Darwin’s 200th, I find myself musing once again on the mystery that is evolution. While creationism has always seemed ridiculous to me – the equivalent of holding a double-barrelled shotgun to your head and pulling one of the two triggers – I have to say that the randomist view of evolution that irritatingly self-satisfied men such as Richard Dawkins witter on about also offends me.

Why is that? I’m sure you, like me, have sometimes contemplated the sad bundle of fur or feathers in a heap of roadkill or a sprung mousetrap and thought the usual appropriate thoughts… ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’. And yet if we step back from contemplation of the religious question (whether some or all of us are animated by something resembling an immortal soul), and if we look more objectively at the question of life as such, we are immediately struck by three things…

First, why life? I mean, how did living things ever come into being? How did something as counterintuitive as negative entropy ever get started? Second, why are so many living beings so very alike? If, that is to say, evolution really is predicated on the inherently random process of natural selection? Goodness knows, highly intelligent science fiction writers are constantly imagining beings with completely different structures from our own. Why don’t they exist on Earth? There are radically different classes of creature, of course, but look how neatly they are ordered… bacteria, jellyfish, insects – different as they appear to be at first sight, just look how much they share!

And third: our perceived taxonomy of cause-effect is just that: a perception. We have this amazing ability to convince ourselves that our intellectual perception of the Universe is somehow valid – on a large scale, possibly even absolute – rather than being the limited thing (on a ridiculously limited scale) that it is. Goodness knows many animals can see much further into the infrared than we can; can hear much higher/deeper frequencies than we can; can smell much tinier concentrations of odour than we can. We know how limited our physical senses are – why do we presume that our intellect is somehow unfettered by such constraints?

I find the fact that even arrogant and ultimately rather triumphalist scientists like Dawkins don’t have any totally convincing answers to these questions quite reassuring. How dull the Universe would be if somebody with the intellect of a Dawkins could justifiably claim to understand a large part of its mysteries. Scientists are now beginning to argue that given the constraints inherent in our physical/chemical make-up, perhaps it is inevitable that life should have developed within the relatively narrow parameters we are familiar with today. Yet every time I look at an animal – amphibian, reptile or mammal – and see the same vertebrate structure, the same four legs, neurological system, digestive system, arrangement of two eyes, nostrils, mouth and so on, I wonder very much that this should have become the evolutionary "norm" of what we like to consider "higher" animals (mind you, I sometimes wonder if bacteria aren’t having the last laugh, because in actual fact, perhaps they’re the "highest" animals of all…).

Pace Dawkins, incidentally. My goodness, I do find the great man very, very irritating, but at least he does believe in thinking for himself…

Essential links

You’ll find more about Professor Dawkins here.

This site has quite a nice little discussion of developmental constraints. I can’t find, unfortunately, the fascinating reference I was reading to contemporary thinking on physical/chemical constraints. But I’ll post it up here if I find it.