The truth is that only one thing makes people lack faith in evolution; the timescale.
The time scale involves is quite simply incomprehensible. A human cannot understand the time involved in evolution. You can throw the numbers around but the numbers are just digits; understand just how LONG it is is beyond a person’s grasp.
Even the analogies people create for you don’t really do it justice. Bill Bryson uses the old analogy that if you stretch your arms out as far as you can and imagine that the history of the Earth goes from your left fingertip to your right, life starts at about your left elbow, doesn’t become multicellular life until just before your right elbow, dinosaurs appear at your right wrist and vanish halfway up your hand, and human history can be erased with one scrape of a nail file.
Big numbers are just not conceivable, especially when you’re dealing with orders of magnitude. Another fun one; a million seconds ago was twelve days ago. It’s November 17 as I write this, so a million seconds ago was November 5. A billion seconds ago was thirty-one years ago.
If you can’t conceive of the time involved - and you can’t - then the mechanics of evolution can’t be grasped as a whole. The years and years and years involved, and the billions upon billions upon billions upon trillions of living things that have been created and died along the way to evolution, are just wholly out of the reach of imagination. But it’s those billions of years and zillions of creatures that make evolution possible; it’s a very, very, very slow process, for the most part.
Well, it was only through evolution that we humans were able to recognize the pattern that is the Fibonacci Number. How hard is it then to believe that through evolution other creatures “showed” the Fibonacci Number also? Clearly it is a natural pattern. Some species have evolved to have it incorporated in their structure, other species (humans) have evolved the capability to understand its significance through the structure of their big, big brains.
In general, the adaptations that strike me as most incredible are behavioral. Actions that are clearly instinctual and not reasoned, but just happen to result in something advantageous for the organism.
I’m not including mating rituals or anything else that directly leads to copulation. I’m thinking more along the lines of things like how my dog sometimes makes pushing motions with her nose at her food dish when she doesn’t feel like eating just then. It seems clear that she’s pushing non-existent leaves and brush over the food. There are, in fact, no leaves and brush, but she does it anyway, so I assume it’s pure instinct. Perhaps part of what makes it seem so incredible is the simple fact that a behavior like that can be hard-wired. I mean, it’s one thing to have DNA that codes for the existence of a pigment in the skin. But how does DNA cause an organism to engage in a specific behavior in response to a specific stimulus? (And actually, I’m not really looking for anyone to answer that question… I think I have a general idea of how it works. I’m just saying that it strikes me as amazing, just the same way that sunsets strike me as amazing but don’t cause me to believe that there’s some artist saying, “Now let’s put some magenta here…”.)
I can see, touch, smell, and taste clam chowder. How do I do that with evolution?
Of course I accept evolution as a scientific fact. But it’s mainly because I have “faith” in the scientific community. I am not a botanist, zoologist, geneticist, paleontologist, or physicist. I haven’t done any of the primary research on evolution. I haven’t even read Origin of the Species … although I own a copy.
The basic principles of evolution make sense to me – I haven’t come across a better explanation. That could just mean that I am ignorant of the alternatives, but I believe that the scientific community is not ignoring them and has formulated the best explanation.
I know that one of the original objections (by scientists) to evolution was that the Earth wasn’t old enough for so many complex organisms to have developed, and that subsequent research greatly increased our estimate of the Earth’s age and led to a general acceptance of evolution (buttressed by genetic research), but, as **RickJay **points out, the time frames are practically inconceivable, and sometimes, for me, the time seems “too long”. I think though that catastrophic annihilations lengthened the evolutionary process.
The moth story is a good ‘proof of concept’ version.
And relatively rapid change in response to environmental pressures is a part of evolution, as I tried to explain with my wall o’ text. (Sorry, sleep deprivation does that to me sometimes) There is debate among scientist as to how big a part it plays, some think it’s a trivial part of the process, some think it IS the process, but pretty much everyone agrees it’s in there.
The tiny changes x billions of years is a part of the process too, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. I’ve often found that, when someone is having trouble accepting a simple model, it’s better to try the more accurate but more complicated version, rather than simplify it further.
At the very least, it answers some of the more common ‘criticisms’ of the evolutionary model, like ‘why haven’t cockroaches evolved since the dawn age, then?’
Catastrophic extinctions actually encourage evolution. When the playing field is wide open, small changes can allow a big increase in survivability. It’s no big deal if you can reach food 1/4" higher if you’ve got to compete with the longnecodon and the longneckosaur for the extra food you can reach. But if they’ve both just died out, all that extra food is yours, and every extra 1/4” your decendant’s necks reach gives them access to more and more.
As for the ‘Why did we evolve sleep?’ question, that’s another common mistake. There doesn’t have to be a ‘why’ and there doesn’t have to be a direct benefit. Sleep could be a simple side effect of a more complicated brain. If Complicated Brain+Sleep is more survivable than Simple Brain+No Sleep, sleep will happen. While Complicated Brain+No Sleep might be better than either, unless a genetic mutation produces it, it’s never going to turn up.
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Evolution’s not an engineer. It’s a billion monkeys playing with an autocad machine with a pretty decent QC department.