Probably the most provocative idea to come along in the past couple of centuries is the idea that some sort of natural (that is, random) process is at work in the world which accounts for the living things that we are surrounded with.
The frustrating aspect of this is the elusive nature of the process. In spite of many years of study, no clear definition of this process exists. Like religions everywhere, there are a large number of proponents of various views about this, but none seems to have any real credibility.
Some of the troublesome facts that persist to confound proponents of the various theories are:
No matter how far back one goes in the geologic record, no one has discovered any "primitive" or simpler forms of genetic material. DNA seems to have popped up intact at the dawn of life on earth, and, except for the codes on the DNA which produce the diversity of life we see now and historically, it is still the double helix with its staggeringly complex structure and absolutely astounding data storage capacity.
Chlorophyl, another compound necessary for the processing of of sunlight and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen in green plants, has also not "evolved" as far as we can tell.
No one denies the complexity and diversity of life forms that are here now. Also, no one can deny that this diversity did not always exist. The farther back one goes in the geologic record, the fewer and simpler are the organisms. The true "smoking gun" of the evolutionary theorist who intends to show that life arose through some sort of random, that is not outside-directed process, would be the mechanism by which the DNA code morphed over the past millions of years to produce all of the species that we have now. The "mutation" theory put forward falls short of explaining this phenomenon because the number of mutated instruction sets required to produce a new species is not one or two but billions. Much is made of the observation that man shares 95% of his genes with the higher primates. The instruction set contained in the genetic material of man differs by billions of characters, not just a few as is claimed. It is too much of a stretch to think that a single mutation (or even many of them) could have taken place that got all of these data correct at one time.
The true missing link in the evolutionary theory that intends to show that some random process produced all of the creatures we now see is the primary driving force of purpose behind natural selection. Creatures which are "struggling to survive" must first know that they are supposed to survive. By definition, this purpose would have had to precede the process. Since purpose seems to be ethereal, it does not seem to be accounted for in this version of evolutionary theory.
We have all seen the highly touted pictures in biology textbooks showing life proceeding from the primordial slime millions of years ago culminating in the Wall Street trader. The problem with this vastly simplified religious statement about man is that modern man did not go through any such process; man seems to have popped up around 10,000 years ago with his vast intellectual powers intact. In fact, a case could be made that man has lost some of his intellectual prowess since ancient man accomplished many things that we cannot duplicate today (like moving 40 ton rocks around with relative ease.)
My question is: What happened here?
No comments:
Post a Comment