As an atheist, evolution has always been my friend. When ever one of the god squad starts banging on about ‘immaculate detail’ and ‘the design of life’ it’s so easy to say ‘Yeah? Well it’s evolution mate. Deal with it.’ Trouble is, it turns out that my ‘faith’ in the Origin of Species is probably just about as blind and misguided as Roy Keane’s in Sunderland. The thing that recently shook my belief system was the National Geographic channel. Did you know that if a bat heard its own sonar then its ear drum would burst? It’s true apparently. Clever little sod gets around this by using a tiny muscle to disconnect bone from drum in the instant that it screeches and then puts it back again in time to hear the echo. What?? How the hell does that evolve? How many bats have to hit how many trees (blood pumping from their furry little ears) before nature fixes that one? And what’s more, shouldn’t the solution have been more straight forward, more sensible? I mean, why the hell wouldn’t bats have evolved night vision or better still, a bloody alarm clock and get up with the rest of us? Now I am not admitting defeat on the old who created what debate, but I must admit, I am beginning to think that there’s something else going on here; that perhaps mother nature isn’t simply throwing dice and getting the odd six. The laws of the universe tend to try and quiet things don’t they? Stars cool, pressure hisses into vacuum, mountains crumble and waves, well you get the picture. It’s all to do with entropy I think; the state of disorder. The more chaos, the higher the entropy and the scientists assure us that the universe doesn’t like it so everything is cooling and slowing to a cold black death. That is, everything except life. According to evolution, life becomes more diverse with time, more complicated. Against every other trend, evolution creates chaos. It’s as though it’s going backwards. We should have started out as a mass of swinging, walking, swimming, fluttering things then slowly evolved back to a mush of single cellular organisms shouldn’t we? Okay, rules are there to be broken but in this case the question would be, who by?
Recycling Jimmy
Thursday, January 24, 2008
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