Myth Five: Evolution is Random
Myth Five, Evolution Is Random, clarifies what randomness means, and shows how evolution is not random, yet has the appearance of design without being designed.
An excerpt is found below:
A child pours Legos onto the carpet, making a messy pile of colored blocks, slabs, cylinders, and L-shapes. But as the child snaps them together, order emerges from the chaos. A symmetrical foundation emerges, then walls and towers. Finally, where once there lay just a pile of plastic bits, there now stands a miniature castle, detailed and color coordinated. With great satisfaction, the child has learned that intent can create order from disorder. It is a powerful and profound revelation. From that day forward, the idea that only designers with intent can account for such order is reinforced. How else could the castle come to be? Could the Legos pick themselves up and snap themselves into position? Could random forces, like a tidal wave or a blast of wind, assemble the pieces into a castle? No--that, it seems, demands a designing mind. The order in the universe makes sense to the child that makes a thing; the universe and its living inhabitants, it seems, must also be designed, the product of intent.
But when the child becomes a student, and is first exposed to the concept of evolution, she confronts an apparent paradox. Textbooks state that evolution is the author of the order and the complexity of life, but also that "Evolution is random and undirected" (1). Based on everything the child has experienced, that just doesn't make sense. Thinking back on the obvious order in plants and animals and communities of living things, thinking back to creating order from disorder with her Legos, the student wonders: Evolution is random? Complexity from randomness? How? It seems screamingly obvious that the world of living things is the result of an intent or a designer assembling order according to some master plan. Even Einstein said, "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world," (2) suggesting a creator, some entity with a plan, or at least that the world and its living things can't possibly be the result of a cosmic game of dice, of random chance.
It's at this point, unfortunately, that many part with evolution. They commonly ask: How could something as perfect as the eye, or the wing, come from random evolution? To support their concept of a designer, many often point out the complexity and the order of nature that's obvious in any glance at living things. It's all just too complex to come from chance, from random evolution.
But we know that a glance at a flower or moose or meadow isn’t enough to appreciate all of nature, just as a glance at a book isn't enough to appreciate a whole story. A glance at a living thing sees the here and now, but is blind to the billions of years of life recorded in the fossil record, or even the circumstances of life outside our immediate surroundings. Writhing, splitting and fusing DNA; clouds of fish eggs billowing in the sea; swarms of microbes in a single drop of water--they're all invisible from a simple glimpse of our immediate surroundings, but only the foolish would ignore what they have to tell us about the phenomenon of life. Science allows us to appreciate these worlds. To really understand nature, we have to do more than glance, and we have to think beyond our knee-jerk reaction that insists since we make things with intent, nature must also be made with intent. If we want to understand better than a child, we have to look harder, and think deeper. We can see that silt and sand, carried by streams of melting snow, piles up as orderly cones against mountainsides, and we can see that freezing ice crystals make geometrical snowflakes. We have to keep our minds open to the possibility that undirected, random processes can also generate order, even in the domain of living things.
Both supporters and critics of evolution use the same phrase--"evolution is random"--to support their claims. To really understand the phrase we need to distinguish between how it's used to support these opposing viewpoints.
Notes to Myth Five: Evolution is Random
1. K.R. Miller and J. Levine, Biology, 3rd ed. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995), p. 658.
2. See P. Frank, Einstein, His Life and Times, (New York: Knopf, 1947), p. 209.
Excerpt from The Top 10 Myths about Evolution by Cameron McPherson Smith and Charles Sullivan, pp. 75-77, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books). Copyright (C) 2007 by Cameron M. Smith and Charles Sullivan. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
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