Evolution: Misconceptions

This post is just a random list of realizations I had over the course of changing my mind,  realizations about my misconceptions of evolution. They are the last of the main points that influenced me and shifted, in my mind, the probability that evolution, rather than YEC, best accounted for the world we see today.

As with all of my posts, I value correction and discussion.

Evolution can’t be true because some creatures, like trilobites, haven’t changed

Sometimes a new creature out-competes its ancestor for its old niche, causing its ancestors to go extinct. But other times newly evolved forms fill new niches in the ecosystem, leaving their ancestors to continue to reproduce un-changed.

Evolution is just random chance; and it’s ridiculous to think random chance made us

Evolution is not random. It it guided by the laws of chemistry, physics, natural selection, etc. An individual mutation might be random chance, but which mutations are selected for and which become dominant in a population is not.

Also, The process of evolution has no goal. It wasn’t striving to create us, or any other specific end product. If there was a goal to create a specific structure or creature, the likelihood it would appear is small. But evolution wasn’t trying to make our modern eye when the first light sensitive cells were formed. The things that happened to be beneficial got passed on, changing into what are today.

Evolution: Irreducible Complexity?

I was taught that the complexity of life must mean there is a creator. I was very familiar with the argument, “You wouldn’t find a watch in the desert and assume it formed itself. Its complexity shows there was a watchmaker.”

I loved this argument as a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) because it exemplified what seemed obvious: design necessitates a designer. The problem with the analogy is that a watch has no mechanism to form or change itself, whereas a reproducing organism does. Chemistry, math, and natural selection offer a way for life to form and change, and comparing that to the creation of inanimate objects is irrelevant.

Eyes and bacterial flagellum are two examples of complex structures that many YECs have claimed are irreducibly complex (i.e. only functional in their current complex state and evolutionarily pointless/non-functioning if any one part is removed). However, I no longer find these claims to be convincing. Below are some articles and videos explaining why.

Evolution: Residual Effects

Lots of vestigial organs exist. In our own body, examples include our appendix, erector pili muscles, body hair, palmaris longus muscle in the forearm, and the auricularis muscles around the ear. Other examples include fake sexual activity in Whiptail lizards, the collapsed eyes of the Astyanax Mexicanus fish, and the residual hind leg bones in whales. See more here (1).

Vestigial doesn’t mean these organs or actions are completely devoid of all function today, just that they’re remnants of something that used to be larger or more useful in the past. And while I’ve read the YEC rebuttals, to me they sound like excuses. To me it makes the most sense to acknowledge vestigial remnants as tributes to our evolutionary past.

Footnotes:

(1). http://www.livescience.com/11317-top-10-useless-limbs-vestigial-organs.html

 

Evolution: Niches

One of the reasons I started considering theistic evolution is because animals didn’t make sense to me outside the niches they filled in the ecosystem.

The idyllic image of every animal living in harmony in a tropical paradise makes a nice story, but it doesn’t make sense ecologically. I could picture the lion and the lamb together. But I couldn’t picture the polar bear, the anglerfish, the vulture, the T-rex, the kangaroo, and the panda all thriving in Eden.

These animals co-exist with their environments. Their physiology, habitat, and diet are intertwined. So it seemed reasonable to accept that maybe God designed these animals by letting them grow and evolve alongside the provisions and pressures of their habitats.

Evolution: Unexpected Animals

As a young earth creationist I thought “intermediary forms” didn’t exist (outside the fictional artwork of atheistic textbooks, of course). So I was shocked to discover the actual existence of animals like the Mudskipper (1).

Image Source

This is exactly what I would expect to see if evolution was true. I thought it only existed in the cartoons and imaginations of atheists. But it’s real. It’s freakin’ real!

And there are so many animals like this, unfathomably strange, some beautiful, some horrifyingly repulsive and disgusting. They were arguably the result of a blind process, existing because they “work”, not because they’ve been specifically and individually designed. They survive long enough to reproduce, and that’s all that the laws of natural selection care about. It was hard to imagine these creatures being the purposeful creations of God. Rather, they were what I expected to see in a world formed by evolution (still including theistic evolution).

Evolution’s Tree of Life (Part IV)

A lovely, explorable, expanding fractal tree of life:

Here’s their website: http://www.onezoom.org

Please explore. It’s really fascinating and beautiful.

Evolution’s Tree of Life (Part III)

I was familiar with the usual animals: dogs, cats, horses, cows, fish, whales, lions, tigers, etc. They were easy to mentally separate into kinds. But I didn’t think much about the African wild dogs and the kiwis, the okapi and the manatees, the tapirs and the fossas; these animals made the lines between “kinds” seem fuzzy.

Here are some connections between animals I had never explored or expected as a young earth creationist:

• Hippos and Whales

Evolution’s Tree of Life (Part II)

In the last post I talked about how, when I looked out into the world, I didn’t see the clear dividing lines predicted by YEC’s interpretation of biblical “kinds”. As with dogs in the last post, so with birds.

In the Aves class, there are (approximately, depending on your source) 28 orders, 170 families and 9845 species of birds (1).

If one supposes that kinds are equated with families, since some bird species can interbreed, then there would be approximately 170 bird “kinds”. But the ancestral relationship seems to reach farther back than families.

Take, for example, the order Ciconiiformes, which contains the bird families Ciconiidae (containing 19 species of storks [2]), Ardeidae (containing 64 species of herons [3]), and Threskiornithidae (containing 30 species of ibises [4]).

Image Source

Evolution’s Tree of Life (Part I)

In the Bible, God tells animals to produce “after their own kind”. The idea of kinds closely matches the definition of species: a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. However, some species, such as wolves and domestic dogs, are capable of interbreeding even if they do not typically do so. Creationists thus define “kind” a little more broadly than species in order to capture this, placing it somewhere between the family and genus taxonomic divisions (1).

Wherever the line is set in any given case, Young Earth Creationists would presumably agree that these kinds should not be able to interbreed, nor should we see any ancestral relationship between kinds, because one kind shouldn’t, by definition, produce a different kind.

If this view is correct, then I would expect to look out into the world and see clearly delineated groups (kind A, kind B, kind C etc.). There might be great diversity within each group, but each group itself would not be related to any other group in any way. Each group would also retain the ability to interbreed within its group (otherwise, it would have branched into animals that couldn’t produce “after their kind”).

But when I look out into the world, this isn’t what I see. I see no clear dividing lines. No clear groups. Just one big beautiful branching tree of ever-changing variety.

Evolution & The Bible

Well, here goes.

First I’d really like to emphasize that accepting evolution did not affect my belief in God. Let me explain.

Growing up I went to numerous Young Earth Creationist [YEC] conferences. I heard more sermons than I can count on the topic and read supplemental texts, encountering innumerable arguments for YEC. They made good sense and they made evolutionists sound the fool. Knowing only their side of the story, I believed them.

However, through the course of time and many small observations, I discovered valid opposing arguments and contradictory observations. I firmly believed the Bible was true, yet I saw evidence that evolution was also true. In an attempt to reconcile these two perceived realities, I was forced to re-evaluate YEC and the way I’d been taught to interpret Biblical text.

I found that evolution needn’t be at odds with my belief in God.