In the beginning, there was … a big explosion.
Which came from … nothing?
Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses.
In order for evolution to make sense, we must accept its explanation for the genesis of all life.
Magical thinking
So let’s start there: Everything that has ever supposedly existed came from this gigantic explosion from a single subatomic point of origin.
And over time, this entropic inertia of particles from the explosion eventually somehow created stars and planets.
Now, most planets are barren wastelands of nothingness. But ours? Ours is different. We are teeming with life.
But how did life come into existence here on this tiny, blue planet? Well, according to our brightest minds, we don’t exactly know. But from what we can gather, after hundreds of millions of years of particles sloshing around in this primordial soup of water, nitrogen, carbon, and some other random elements, the first protein was magically created!
And from there, it was only a matter of time before a protein magically became a single-cell organism, which eventually magically turned into a more complex organism, and so on and so forth.
Fast forward to now. Trees and animals everywhere.
Then you have us. The most complex life forms in the known universe. We have bones, muscles, organs (each with its own specific function), eyes, ears, noses, and brains.
It’s kind of funny how all of this life came to be so incredibly complex, multilayered, and perfectly symbiotic in its structure.
But there’s obviously no way any of this could have been purposely designed by an intelligent designer, because we know that this all happened by a random and chaotic process of particles smashing into each other over millions of years until they eventually began building themselves into fully functioning organisms.
OK, that’s the end of my sarcastic rant. Time to get serious.
Theory or guesswork?
My general thoughts on evolutionary theory?
To put it simply, it’s too broad, general, and discombobulated of a theory for it to be considered a serious historical account of our universe.
The process of simply recording human history is one that involves making sense of specific moments in time involving specific historical figures with the hope of compiling a coherent story of humanity.
This consists of finding primary evidence, like documents and artifacts, of those moments in time. And then it takes teams of scholars to interpret what the evidence means; to connect the dots.
And that process is never 100% accurate. It is, much of the time, guesswork. It is excruciatingly hard — in fact, damn near impossible — to know to a full extent the full scope of detail for a single moment in history. And that’s only for a single moment.
Evolutionary theory asserts an assumption that is applied to the entirety of history. That life has uniformly and unquestionably progressed to this point in time according to its rules.
The problem with that is that it attempts to cover way too many data points across time and space and yet has no real way of doing so. We’re not talking about a team of scholars debating the political motivations of Napoleon during one of his military campaigns; we’re talking about the development of all life everywhere throughout all time.
It is the epitome of theory having no evidence to back it up.
Seeds of doubt
Personally, I think our ideas on evolutionary theory need an update. We need to see it through a new lens.
Evolution asserts that nature selects the set of genetic traits that are to be passed on to the next generation of organisms. But what we have to understand is the role the thinking man plays within the evolutionary model.
As conscious beings, we humans have gotten to the point where we have direct influence on what and who gets chosen to live on. We have the power and the conscious will to change the genes of an unborn child or abort the baby before it ever gets to be born.
On a simpler scale, we plant flowers and trees in a garden in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. We hold the power of life and death in our hands, and, therefore, we essentially construct and shape our world.
A few questions arise from this. How does evolutionary theory account for this journey of “biological construction” man has been able to embark on for quite some time? How much weight can it really hold if it does not?
My initial impulse is to be skeptical of the supposed immovable object that is evolutionary theory, only because it seemingly does not possess an historical account, and therefore predictive analysis, of the times when ecosystems have been and continue to be constructed by man.
What I mean by this is simple. Take the invention of agriculture for example. Every time people fashion a wooded forest or an empty plot of land into a farm of crops, a new ecosystem is born.
This would not have happened naturally. The forest cannot evolve into a garden. It can only happen through human intervention. It needed to be constructed. Keep in mind, I’m not saying the evolutionary traits that have been passed down to every species of plant and tree don’t remain, which is why hedges need to be trimmed and branches need to be pruned or else it would grow wild.
But that’s also exactly my point. The farmer must intervene and choose how this ecosystem operates. He chooses what plants stay, what plants get uprooted, and what the arrangement of the crop looks like. He decides what things get to live on and what things must go.
Similarly, on a larger scale, man has waged war with man and with nature. He has erased entire genetic pools from the face of the earth. Now, is that evolution? I thought “the survival of the fittest” was a random and automatic process, one that was out of our control? How is it possible then for man to logically and consciously choose to initiate a “random” process of genetic elimination?
It would make sense if he were merely an animal, for animals aren’t conscious beings with agency. Animals are in bondage to their instincts.
(If this were the case, if man were merely a cog in the evolutionary process, then genetic elimination via anthropogenic climate change should be considered one of the forces of natural selection, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
Obviously, man also can be a slave to animalistic instincts. But he has the ability to overcome them and be a freely thinking man. And this thinking man is what shatters the paradigm of the routine-like progression model of evolution. Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses. In this very manner and for this very reason, I am arguing that evolutionary theory is deficient.
Show me the fossils
The current model of evolution is a reductive approach that meagerly attempts to “predict the past” per se by observing biological subjects in an atomistic fashion. It doesn’t attempt to take into account an organism’s past and present relationships with its ecosystem.
What’s meant by that is that the way an organism behaves in the present day (genetic traits and all) is obviously a product of a complex history of events through generations. And what evolutionary theory lacks is an exhaustive account of generational history relating to its subjects of study.
What this means in simple terms is that there is not enough evidence to justify the acceptance of the evolution model. The biggest red flag in the evidence department is the absence of transitional fossils.
You see, evolutionary theory traditionally holds that species undergo evolutionary change via a process called phyletic gradualism, wherein species branch off into different species gradually over time. And if this were to be the case, there should have been thousands, if not millions, of fossils showing this transition.
The problem is just that. There’s a gaping hole in the transitional fossil record. Some of the most famous evolutionary theory proponents, like Darwin and Dawkins, even admit the glaring absence of this evidence. The evidence is so severely lacking that some scholars have had to come up with entirely new models of evolution to explain the phenomenon.
Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould, contrasting phyletic gradualism, came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium, wherein he asserts that speciation actually occurs in short bursts in between long periods of evolutionary stability.
This new model should be able to help verify the validity of evolution, in theory. It should at least narrow the timeframes for genetic mutation down to specific time periods. Suddenly, data now theoretically does not have to be gathered from all time periods in all of history and all locations in all the world.
Needle in the hay
However, it also puts the pressure on evolution advocates precisely because it narrows down the field of view. In a weird paradoxical way, it has broadened and complicated the quest to validate evolution.
Now, not only is there a search for evolutionary change in specific times and locations (a proverbial needle in the haystack), there must also be some account for and definition of what exactly “evolutionary stability” looks like to appropriately contrast the short bursts of change.
By abandoning the search for transitional fossils, evolution advocates have doubled their work. They must be able to explain the properties of the long-term routine the biosphere experiences as well as the drastic short-term chaos that intervenes in order to produce such kinds of changes.
There’s that word again: intervene. It seems as though genetic change can only occur when there are specific instances of intervention.
And who is the only variable in the biosphere?
Mankind.
Random rules?
Make no mistake, only mankind is capable of consciously exerting its authority over nature enough to change nature itself. Because as tempting as it is to gloss over generations of history with a single doctrine like “survival of the fittest,” we ultimately don’t have any transitional fossils of ancient plants, fish, or kangaroo, but we do know about the one conscious agent who had the ability to deliberately intervene in nature’s business.
The point is that evolution implies this sort of random process whereby species unpredictably vie for survival, but what it misses is how conscious will intervenes in this process. And there’s no shortage of this human intervention.
We construct our world today in too many ways to count. Look around you. Most things didn’t evolve to be there. They were fashioned. Crafted. Placed.
The more interesting question to me is, what exactly emerges when we deliberately choose which genetic traits to proliferate and which traits to leave out?
Make no mistake, issues like the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate serve as examples of our struggle with evolution and eugenics.
We are currently shaping a new evolutionary pathway because of our tendency to intervene, whether we know it or not. Who’s to say what the effects of these practices will be?
Garen christopher kaloustian, Evolution, Big bang, Science, Faith, Scientist, Polemic