A topic that has come up in a comment thread on another post seemed worth bringing out in a post of its own. It is a common misconception that evolution is a matter of complex organisms coming about through a random process. That is ancient Epicureanism, not modern biology. There certainly is an element of randomness to evolution, but the same could be said or pretty much any natural process.
But the objection that “Complex organisms could not come to exist through a random process” is both correct and uninteresting, since evolutionary biology does not claim that random mutations in DNA can alone produce the complex life that we see around us and that we are.
What is missing from such objections is an inclusion of intelligence in the equation. Not, I should emphasize, the intelligence of a supernatural or alien Designer, but the intelligence (ranging from the rudimentary to the sentient) of the evolving biological organisms themselves. Even before we have anything that can be called intelligence, we have organisms responding to stimulii. That is decidedly non-random, and it affects the evolutionary process. As intelligence evolves, increasingly complex behaviors become part of the evolutionary process.
To mention a classic example, peacock tail feathers are unlikely to have ever come to have their present form purely through random processes. But peahen preferences (apparently size matters to them) are not “random,” but a form of sexual selection that mirrors precisely what dog breeders do in choosing traits and breeding the animals that have them.
And so of course the evolutionary process, once we get to animals with some form of rudimentary intelligence, seems intelligently designed. It is, in the sense discussed above, and which biologists have long known about. While our conscious choices and behaviors do not, as a rule, affect our genes directly so that our offspring inherit them, our conscious choices and behaviors emphatically do affect the course of evolution. But in the case of certain species, it might literally be called “bird-brained intelligent design.”
Let me close by adding once again that I would much prefer that those interested in topics such as this one turn to a biology textbook rather than expecting a religion professor to point these things out. And so I would value input from any biologists who might read this and offer suggestions on what I might improve, and clarifications about anything that I have misunderstood or misconstrued.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In