Why Evolution Just Makes Sense: Part 2 – The Pyramids, Skyscrapers and Evolution

One common argument of the Intelligent Design crowd is that things like the eye, the brain, even the cell are too complex to have arisen by chance.

They say there’s too many moving parts. Too many things to go wrong. Too much infrastructure.

And you know, they’re absolutely right! There is absolutely no way a cell could arise randomly out of nowhere. (Well, ok, there is a finite probability that it could happen, but it’s probably much less than the previous article’s number of die-rolls we arrived at of about 1 in 8x10⁶³).

Allow me to introduce a Pyramid, and a Skyscraper.

What do these have anything to do with evolution?

Well, the argument that it requires a lot of infrastructure misses one very important point.

Scaffolding.

In case you’ve forgotten what scaffolding is, here’s a picture:

It’s that stuff that lets you build buildings. You put it up, along with all of the other machinery and structure that you need to make the thing. You know, thing like cranes. Diggers. Pile drivers.

And what do you do when you don’t need it any more?

You get rid of it.

Here’s the trick with randomness. I already gave you a pretty straightforward argument as to why things get more complex – and more efficient – in their environments as they exhaust resources. (Namely, because if they don’t, they die off, and it’s the end of the line… so it’s do or die).

Randomness doesn’t care which direction it goes. The only thing is, in a competitive environment, only the efficient solutions will survive.

Nature doesn’t care how long it takes to arrive at a solution though, as long as it doesn’t radically hamper the efficiency/survivability of a random change. And don’t forget, we’re still dealing with a huge number of possible random changes. Most of which, by the way, we’ll never see – again, there’s that efficiency criterion coming into play here. The bad solutions are fleeting – they only last one generation. The good ones? They persist.

But once Nature finds a solution, that solution will stick. It can take as wandering a route as it likes, and the moment it builds that better mousetrap, that solution will take over rapidly. It’ll grow exponentially, killing other things in its niche.

What happens then?

Well, we have an interesting situation. We’ve already got the best of breed. But it has all that nasty scaffolding. It doesn’t need it any more.

But carrying around all that dead weight has a cost – it’s not as efficient as it could be.

You can probably guess where this is going.

What we have here is a gradient. If the random changes get rid of the advantage, then it won’t survive – it’ll get eaten by the other entities. But it’s going to change anyway – it’s not as efficient as it can be. So…

The scaffolding comes down. It has no choice but to. The only changes which make the entity more efficient are those that get rid of it. So slowly, over time, randomly, the scaffolding is taken away. What you’re left with is the building.

Pyramids have a lot in common with evolution. There are those out there – crackpots – who believe that aliens built them. Because there’s no way any human could have done it.

But that’s wrong.

And so is Intelligent Design, for exactly the same reason. The scaffolding has been taken away. All you’re left with now is the end result.

Why Evolution Just Makes Sense

A lot of Intelligent Design proponents believe that cells are too complex to have arisen randomly. They point to the micro-machines of the organelles and say that there is no way this could happen randomly.

This is a total fallacy.

Here’s the trick:
You only need to create ONE reproducing structure for it to multiply. At that point, things are self-sustainable.

Once you have one thing that reproduces, it’ll reproduce like wildfire. Every time it reproduces, you now have two things which can reproduce, until they exhaust their environment.

Now in a small environment, you’ll quickly exhaust the source of raw materials needed to make new things. Which means that unless you provide more raw materials, that particular strain of life is gone.

There is another solution though – more random changes. Until you end up with something that more effectively uses those resources – or can cannibalize the other entities.

This, in and of itself, pretty solidly ensures the direction of evolution – the pressure to more efficiently cannibalize resources form the environment ensures that complexity will increase in the long term. The only other alternative is the whole system stalls and dies out.

So that first guy happens randomly. Pure chance.

And it has millions of years, and changes on the orders of milliseconds within which to do it (chemistry works fast).

That's just for the first one. Once you have one, you can have random variations. But the one that works still exists. And it can change any way it likes, as long as it keeps making new ones that reproduce and compete better. Otherwise, again, something else that competes better will win. And that will gain the upper hand instead.

By the way, on the timeline of the Earth, a million years is nothing. If you have one variation per millisecond, that's about 31,536,000,000,000,000 opportunities for one combination of chemicals to turn into something useful.

Cool it down, and long-range low-entropy effects take hold, allowing some protein machinery to work differently - forming interesting configurations which are necessary for life. (A guy did an experiment a while back with some chemicals in ice (sorry for the pay-only NewScientist link); after 25 years he checked back, and he had amino acids in there. And RNA can replicate without its usual need for enzymes if it’s cold).

But let's ignore the cooling for now. That 31,536,000,000,000,000 opportunities? That's in one place. If we allow one of these experiments to happen per square meter on the earth's surface, the changes we can have over a million years start looking like 6,312,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Or 6x10³⁶.

The universe started - as best as we can tell - about 1.37x10¹⁰ years ago. So if you want the number of chances you have for life to randomly happen in its simplest form, it’s more like 8x10⁴⁰ opportunities. That’s per Earth-like planet. Assuming that Earth-like conditions are required for life (which they probably aren’t).

There are roughly 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 1x10²³) Earth-like planets in the universe.

So let’s run that experiment again. We now have 8x10⁶³ chances for life to happen. While you were reading this blog post, life had the chance to spontaneously arise approximately 1x10⁴⁰ times.

The question you should ask yourself is not how unlikely is it that life would arise purely by chance, but rather, why don't we see it everywhere we look?

Next time… The Pyramids, Skyscrapes & Evolution. I promise you that all these things really do go together - like Peanut Butter & Jelly.

Why is the Bible written in Parables?

[This came out of a discussion I was having with someone online... it's a little out of left-field, so please bear with me].

The reason the Bible is written in Parables is fundamental human psychology, and keys into our unique ability to craft a long-term history for our species.

It's basic human psychology; you want to teach someone something? Wrap it in a narrative - it sticks much more than dishing out the facts ever will. In fact, if you make it a story about someone else, it gets an automatic authority that a story about you never will.

Humans like story. It's the way we passed on information from generation to generation for... well... generations. It's the only thing we had that would stick before we had the written word. So it's not surprising that the Bible is metaphorical; it has to be, otherwise it would have been washed away by the passage of time.

It's also why we like entertainment. From a socio-evolutionary perspective, humans who enjoyed telling stories, and listening to them learned how the seasons changed. They learned how to work with one another. They learned how to avoid childbirth when it was too dangerous. They learned how to work together. Any humans that didn't enjoy storytelling died out quite quickly because they had no method for long-term data storage.

The Bible in the form it was written, and Hollywood Blockbuster movies ultimately exist because of the same psychological trait. Metaphor is one of the most defining human traits we have.

Unfortunately, marketers now know how that machine works, and are fine tuning it. They can seed ideas, and they can seed desires with amazing effectiveness and efficiency. And we're soaking in it all the time.