evolution again

Suppose I show you this tree, right.

Suppose I show you this tree that grows watches.

I'm not going to show you a tree that just has a lot of watches hanging off it or fastened around the branches or anything. That's no big deal. You could hang watches off any tree.

Suppose I show you this tree and we sit there for a while, couple of sandwiches, maybe a little whiskey, and we keep an eye on things. We see the little buds form, these solid gold leaves. Every once in a while we pry one open and we can see tiny little gears growing inside. Springs sprouting and coiling up. Those gears shift and grow and converge in a gear train. After a period of time, although we saw each piece growing in turn, somehow we're still startled to see a complete balance oscillation system. Hey look at this, the escapement is growing. Holy shit, now it's a whole fucking watch. When we sat down for lunch, it was just this little bud.

That's a pretty cool tree.

A couple hundred years ago, archdeacon William Paley used a metaphor to "prove the existence of God," which has since been adopted by Creationists:

"In crossing a heath suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But supposing I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there."

GET IT? A rock is just a rock, it's no big deal, but if you trip over a watch you trip over evidence of a watchmaker. The watch by its nature implies the existence of a watchmaker.

Except there's this tree, right.

Because Paley was writing before Darwin, before molecular biology, before paleontology, before DNA. He correctly identified one of the mysteries of biology -- how did all this shit get here? But his solution comes up wanting given what we know now. To be fair to Paley -- because it's not his fault what people do when quoting him -- it's very unlikely he would make the same argument today.

There's this tree, and you can watch the watch, man, you can see the watch forming now. It's not some crazy complicated object you tripped over crossing a heath, some magical watch from the ether. Our science got better. We have more data now and better tools for looking at the world. We've figured out germs and meteors, and the moon turns out to be this big dusty rock that we can fly to. We don't cling to our pre-scientific understandings of astronomy or medicine, and there's no value in clinging to Paley's inability to explain a watch.

Rejecting evolution requires freezing your scientific knowledge in the 18th century. Ignorance is the kindest word for it. If you believe in a God who's responsible for the universe's existence, how on earth do you justify remaining intentionally blind to the way that universe works? Especially when it comes to something as awesome and impressive as evolution -- the miraculous workings of which surely count to God's credit, if you really do believe in God.

Am I questioning the legitimacy and sincerity of the faith of people who can only believe in God by dismissing science, people who are so certain that scientific understanding threatens faith and belief in God?

Little bit.

The problem isn't just the Creationists, it's the fact that even religious people who accept the truth of evolution -- and really, Americans in general regardless of their ism -- tend to shy away from any specifics about evolution. I don't think I could get an overview of the modern synthesis out of many of the the graduate-degree-holding people I know, at least the non-biologists. I'm not certain how many of the people I know could even recall the term "modern synthesis" without prompting. And I know a lot of smart, smart people. This is not about not being smart. This is about avoiding certain streets without good reason.

Evolution is the biography of life. It's literally our heritage, and certainly as important to understanding the story of ourselves as the shot heard round the world and Joseph's technicolor dreamcoat. Deliberate ignorance is never an acceptable thing to make sacred, but ignorance about this, about the functioning of the world and life itself? Fuck that.

Meanwhile, it turns out that insects are evolving into watches, so hang that from your fob and wind it.