This is one of the reasons I get such joy from studying evolution. This kind of science is amazing and sexy.
It’s survival of the good-enough.
It’s survival of the hang-in-there’s, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs.
We can become a great generation that leaves our world – our home – in better shape than it is now while raising the quality of life for people everywhere. This will not be easy. We’ve already loaded the atmosphere with enough heat-trapping gases of various kinds to cause our planet to keep warming for many, many years to come. But the situation is far from hopeless.
A quantum is the smallest amount of energy there is. So when you hear someone say such and such a thing was or is a “quantum leap,” he or she is actually talking about the smallest possible leap of any kind found in nature. It’s an ironic use of the phrase. However, I’ll grant you that the quantum leap represents an enormous step in thought. In a quantum leap, a particle is either here, or it’s there – in an instant. This discovery changed the world.
Our ancestors who did not have a fear of heights, who did not have a fear of eating something poisonous, who did not have a fear of venomous snakes and spiders, who were not afraid of drowning, well – they’re dead.
Most of the living things on our planet are microscopic, and those microscopic organisms are less like you than you are like a cabbage.
Earth is currently reckoned to be 4.54 billion years old. Based on fossilized mats or layers of bacteria, we figure life got started here at least 3.5 billion years ago.
Evolution, and the selection of reproduction-worthy genes that drives it, is the opposite of random. It is a sieve that living things have to pass through successfully, or we never see them again.
You and I can be a part of the Next Great Generation. We can save Earth – for us. Let’s get to work.
We can change the world. I’m sure of it. Let’s go.
The possibility of genetic modification reminds me of the need for a scientifically literate electorate. Please stay tuned and vote!
Since the landmark 1972 paper by Gould and Eldredge, many studies have been done both with real populations and with mathematical simulations. The results explain why evolution appears both fast and slow: It is both fast and slow. Large populations tend to stay genetically about the same. Paleontologists say populations tend toward stasis. Small ones can diverge quickly into new species.
As fascinating and just plain weird as the deep-sea geothermal vent ecosystems are, they have a great deal less diversity than we find in ecosystems that receive direct sunlight. At deep-sea vents we’ve counted about 1,300 species so far. In the Amazon rain forest, we can find 40,000 species of insects, just insects, in a typical square kilometer. Couple that with trees, monkeys, spiders, and snakes, and the rain forest has thousandfold the diversity.
That line of reasoning also leads to questions – but they’re the exasperating kind. If there was a designer, why did he or she or it create all those fossils of things that aren’t living anymore? Why did the designer put all these chemical substitutions of radioactive elements in with nonradioactive elements? Why did a designer program in this continual change that we observe in the fossil record, if he or she assembled the whole system at once? In short, why mess around with all this messiness?
That’s how things are in nature, where there is no deliberate designer who can take things apart, redesign them, and put them back together if they don’t work. Instead, every step has to be “good enough.” Every generation has to survive lest that species or type of organism will disappear from our world.
The creationists press on, looking for ways to isolate their kids as much as possible and to indoctrinate them so thoroughly that no matter what the world throws at them, the children will grow up to do their best to accept a 6,000-year-old Earth. All the while, the whole lot of them have no issue embracing modern information technology, medicine, and food systems that enable them to conduct their extraordinary business. As.
When religions disagree about just creation, there is nothing to do but argue. When two scientists disagree about evolution, they confer with colleagues, develop theories, collect evidence, and arrive at a more complete understanding.
The solution to feeling like an imposter is to be authentic, and the path of authenticity is the path to a better world.
We cannot predict the behavior of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However, we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity.
The less we do to address climate change now, the more regulation we will have in the future.