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Evolution: Do You Get It?
Godless Evolution
Evolution: an exercise in re-education
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Everybody knows all about the theory of evolution. It is taught in most schools, religious lunatics notwithstanding.
However most people's view of what evolution is and how it works is woefully inaccurate.
Here is the conventional theory as expressed in classical Huxleyite terms:-
Everything that happened in the past was working towards the present, purposeful, methodical, systematic. A one way street to the bigger better future.
This is a great vision, it has just one minor flaw, it's utter bollocks.
Darwin did not originate the phrase 'Survival of the fittest', it was Herbert Spencer, the social scientist. The fittest does not mean the one which can run the fastest or furthest, it means the one that is fitted to survive, the one that fits in. Those that fail in the struggle for survival are not the unfit, but the misfits.
“It cannot but happen... that those will survive whose functions happen to be most nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces ...This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.”
Herbert Spencer
“The expression often used by Mr Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate [than Struggle for Existence], and is sometimes equally convenient.”
Charles Darwin 1869 edition of the Origin of Species.
T H Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, was a great publicist of the theory of evolution but he was not such a good pupil. He did not really understand how evolution worked. He knew that it had worked and was more than happy to present the evidence.
The storm of controversy that followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species owed nothing to Darwin's work on the study of the origins of man. Darwin never mentioned the idea that man may be related to, and evolved from, apes. He knew that he knew too little. The other reason he was not responsible for the concept was that it was hardly a novel idea.
It was totally unnecessary for Darwin to do any more than obliquely refer to the evolution of man. This is in fact all he did. A throw-away remark at the end of the book:
“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”
The word ape does not appear in the work. It was not necessary to mention them. The inference was obvious. Within weeks of the publication of the Origin the debate was clearly drawn between those who believed in the unstated theory of evolution from apes and those that preferred the idea of fallen angels or other divine intervention.
Darwin himself did not write on the subject until much later, in The Descent of Man in 1871.
By then it was too late. The myth of evolution had already begun.
T H Huxley had gathered fossils of many "lines of evolution", especially those of horses, and shown then in the now familiar linear model, showing a natural and smooth progression from one small primitive ancestor to the large modern finished article. This was the pattern he sought because it was what he expected, because he sought it, he found it. The natural progress of animals through evolution fitted perfectly into the Victorian English mindset. Progress, constant, smooth, unstoppable, natural. Primeval slime at one end of the process, modern Victorian empire builder at the other end.
It wasn't how evolution actually worked. Evolution is not a driving force, it is the way things happen, it is even more profound than the properties of atoms. It is a way things have to work, there is no choice.
Evolution depends on the differential survival of slightly differing examples of the same species. All individuals are different, these differences are not random, they have a non-random effect on their survival chances. That non-random differential survival, or non-random differential breeding success is what drives evolution.
“Creation scientists”, an oxymoron if ever I saw one, are constantly trying to portray evolution as random. It is the very essence of non-random change. Not every death is caused by a genetic difference but over the medium term the average benefits of your genetic advantages will result in your success at the expense of those who lack those advantages. Naturally the bigger the advantage the shorter the timescale needed to make that advantage count. A genetic advantage that doubled the speed of a cheetah or its prey would very rapidly be spread, one that gave it a 5% faster recovery after a minor infection would take longer to spread through the whole population. But in the longer term that change too would grow to become widespread or universal.
What matters to evolution is the survival of individuals. The good of the species or the long term prospects of the species are never an issue. There is no such thing as a species, it does not have a will or a destiny. A species is the label we put on certain individuals. Because it does not exist, and has no will it has no goal or destiny either. A species is never looking to evolve. To evolve is to change, to be something else. Even if a species did exist it would not want to will itself to be something else, another species.
I have seen lots of predictions about what evolution will do to the human species in the future. How we will lose all our hair, become smoother, shorter or taller, lose our little toes and all traces of a brow ridge. This is all nonsense.
The future will be like the past. We will have children and grandchildren who look like us, smell like us and think like us. We could only possibly evolve if there was some strong evolutionary pressure on us. There is none, or at least less than anytime in the history of life on Earth.
Who dies before breeding age?
Who dies childless?
Who has more children, the people with the better genes?
Where is the mechanism?
The poor breed. The ugly breed (with the poor). The diseased breed. The crippled breed. The homosexual breed. Even some of the dead are breeding!
Everybody is breeding. Everybody is surviving. The population is enormous and represents a huge mass of evolutionary inertia. Evolution among Homo sapiens has, to all intents and purposes, stopped.
Not of course that evolution ever had any intents or purposes in the first place. It is a natural and unavoidable phenomenon that simply happens. Like erosion or the building of volcanic cones around holes in the crust of an active planet. No choice but to happen.
Evolution has simply stopped for the reason that it is no longer happening, because it is no longer being caused to happen.
This is true in rich countries. In poorer countries this is less true but it is heading in the same direction. It is not your genes that determine your survival, but where you were born and how rich your parents are.
Neanderthal man did not live in caves, at least not predominantly. We found them in caves because we find lots of undisturbed things in caves.
Neanderthal man had prominent brow ridges, we do not. Why have brow ridges disappeared? Because the men who had them have disappeared. Well, some of them. Brow ridges are trivial artefacts that don't hinder men becoming intelligent, as can be seen by modern Australians, New Guineans and Africans who can pilot a 747 or teach in a secondary school just as well as a European. Man did not evolve into an intelligent animal by changing the shape of the skull, but by evolving a better brain and a better culture.
Who had the biggest brains in the Homo family? Neanderthal man.
Who was the tallest? Many Homo erectus were just as tall as modern Homo sapiens sapiens.
Evolution is true. Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is supposed to make sense. Evolution has its own logic. It works on individuals but can only be seen across groups.
Not every difference between individuals is heritable, either genetically or in any other way, such as learned behaviour. But any difference that is heritable and does affect survival chances will form the basis of evolution. There is no choice, evolution must occur.
Consider the testicles of farm animals. They are always impressive in size, why? Do large testicles give farm animals a chance to produce more progeny by drowning out the sperm from competing males? Hardly. That is very poor farming practice. The farmer chooses which male will impregnate which female and there is never a competition. That explanation works for animals in a sexual free-for-all, like chimpanzees, who also have very big testicles. The reason that farm animals have large testicles is that they have been chosen. Farmers choose which males to use for breeding. Allowing a male to reach sexual maturity costs a farmer money in feeding the animal and forgoing the income from selling the meat sooner, or from reaping the benfits of castration (more muscle, smaller wedding tackle, like bodybuilders). He has to choose the best looking animal, it is hardly surprising that as the only job the bull, ram or boar has is to inseminate that the farmer will notice which ones seem to have the appropriate tackle in large quantity. Over time an evolution towards males with large testicles and females with plenty of mammary glands will occur. Farmers are looking for other things too, but on a number of occasions the only criteria to choose between one bull calf and another who are otherwise identically well presented might be a slightly bigger pair of testicles, it need not be a big effect but over many generations it cannot fail to influence the nature of the breed. Was the farmer looking to make the testicles bigger? No, that is not the point, as long as the size of the testicles mattered sometimes, however marginally, however rarely, it must drive evolutionary change.
A similar thing happens in markets. Not every product can survive in a market. Over time the factors that drive the competition begin to shape the results. In North America cars developed to be big and comfortable for long straight roads. In Europe cars developed to be relatively small but with excellent road holding and handling. On both continents cars became cheaper to buy relative to average wages and faster and much better equipped for comfort and entertainment. Some features evolved in parallel, some diverged as the different environments designed the cars to suit themselves. The markets (and the government regulations) designed the cars. That is evolution. It is inevitable in any form of competitive environment, if only some can survive then the process of competition will change the character of the things that are competing. They become better at the competition. For cars they become better at being bought, for animals they become better at not being caught, or better at securing a territory, or a mate, or a better mate, or having more progeny survive, or at encouraging farmers to want to feed and eat their progeny.
Designers are superfluous. The Edsel shows that, the most carefully and expensively researched and designed product in history. The designers gave the market what the market said it was asking for, but unfortunately for Ford what the people thought they wanted and what they actually wanted were wide adrift. The universe I see is not an Edsel universe, it is designed by a better designer than any god or design committee. It is designed by its users.