Evolution is one of those items that is hotly debated. Let me lay out what seem to be the contentious aspects of evolution and see what can be said about them.

There are three claims made by ‘evolutionists’ and these are as follows:
• evolution occurs through sheer chance and as a result there is no need for God.
• there is no teleology in evolution;
• evolution explains the origin of living organisms and their development.

As far as claim one goes, I think most of us have seen or experienced chance in our lives and in the events of the world. But the crucial thing here is that there is more than chance operating in the world. Chance on its own gives a falsely limited view of reality, including the biosphere. Natural selection operating on random mutations may be part of the story but it is definitely not the whole story as is often claimed. An illustration may explain this.

Suppose you were to take a novel such as Lord of the Rings and do a complete grammatical analysis of the book. Would that give you a complete understanding of the book in question? Certainly not. There are many other components of the book such as plot, characters and so on. The rules of grammar are important and they add to our understanding and maybe, appreciation, of the book but they are not complete because they leave out material essential for our larger understanding of the book.

Random mutations and natural selection are akin to rules of grammar but they leave out much that is important in talking about organisms such as you. They are essentially historical considerations of the way the world developed. Suppose, as another example, that random mutations and natural selection were responsible for every single part in the body of your favorite dog. Would this give you a complete explanation for the dog? Again, certainly not. You see, what something is and how it got there are not the same thing.

When you, as a fetus, grew your ears and eyes, for example, this did not occur through a process of random mutations going on in your cells. It was something that had a definite goal – to create these necessary structures. You could argue that the plan for your body parts had already been laid out in the genetic code and you could argue that this code came about by chance, haphazardly. This seems somewhat of a stretch and is offered because of the desire to maintain that there is no order nor purpose in the actions in our world. Randomness may operate at certain levels but it cannot be claimed as a universal explanation of phenomena. Chance, more often than not, is a declaration of our ignorance of what is really going on.

One of the reasons why there is much acrimony in discussing evolution and the role of chance in the process arises from an important principle that is forgotten or ignored. An effect can be the product both of causes that directly produce it (purpose) and causes that merely happen to produce it as if by chance and randomly. Thus eyes can be both the products of causes to produce eyes now and also the product of past chance events without which eye-producing evolutionary preparatory causes would never have arisen in the first place. In other words, we must distinguish historical ‘causes’ from ‘constitutional’ causes.

Another illustration will be helpful.

Consider that pesky weed, the dandelion. We have all seen the furry plant as it releases its halo of white particles into the air. What a battle we have with this every spring. These particles (seeds) fly randomly and some land on fertile soil and produce additional dandelions. There is chance involved here because the original plant did not know where the fertile soil is and it is releasing its seeds randomly. But its goal was to reproduce so it scatters the seeds and through this mechanism it propagates itself. So the weed itself uses a random distribution of its seeds to attain a specific goal – the propagation of another dandelion.

Another example would be with you in a dark room unknown to you and you attempt to locate the light switch on the wall. Your hand moves randomly over the wall but there is purpose in what you are doing – you are trying to locate the light switch.

To the second point, teleology – the study of and search for goals or purposes – has become anathema to mainstream biology. There is to be no mention of goal and purpose because these do not exist in nature and are present only in the fertile imaginings of humans. So, the materialists fervently claim.
This seems so contrary to what we observe around us that it is hard to believe that this position is held. But it, in fact, is the default position with most biologists and this idea is propagated in biology textbooks.

Our world is permeated with purpose and goals and even in the processes of evolution there are indications of it.

As we learn more about evolution, we see that there is contingency operating and convergence. Contingency focuses on chance and underlines the role of chance in evolution – things could have been different from what they are. This, in a nutshell, is what contingency speaks of. But convergence speaks of something else. Complex systems can arise from very different starting positions, but time and again converge on the same evolutionary solution.

There have been elegant experiments carried out involving e-coli bacteria and their adaptability to deal with maltose. Maltose is a sugar different from glucose but e-coli depend on and utilize glucose – they cannot use maltose. Various populations of e-coli were separated and allowed to go through over a thousand generations (they reproduce very rapidly). Then these various aggregates of e-coli were studied as to their strategy to adapt to maltose use. When faced with a dearth of glucose the various fractions of e-coli adapted to using maltose. The strategies used by different populations of the e-coli converged onto the same solution thus providing experimental support for the existence of convergence.

There are two principal forms of eyes that exist in nature – the compound eyes in insects such as flies and the camera eyes that humans and other mammals have. Camera eyes are much better. A conservative estimate of the size of a theoretical human compound eye is that it would have to be at least several meters in size in order to give us an equivalent capacity for vision. Camera eyes are very important for us and yet, the evidence is that camera eyes have formed in various mammalian species at least seven times, using different routes to get to the same desired outcome. Again showing the ubiquity of convergence in the biosphere.

In giraffes and moles, the length of the respective necks could be hardly more different and yet, they both number seven cervical vertebrae. Why? It seems that if the number is varied from seven, the likelihood of certain cancers arising, in the early development the animal, increases, thereby limiting the ability of the species to survive.

Many other examples can be given but an exhaustive discussion of the reality of convergence is not my goal. Suffice it to say that the evidence for convergence is widespread and strong.

What is the significance of convergence? Evolutionary convergence shows that we live in a constrained world where all may not be possible. We see that the same ends may be arrived at along various, and sometimes, wildly different routes. The world is wonderfully varied but it is also underpinned by a deep commonality. The phenomenon of evolutionary convergence indicates that the number of possible alternatives to achieving a goal are strictly limited.

There is also a moral component to reality that we ignore to our peril and tragedy because morality plays a crucial role in how we relate to our neighbors and to the world at large. Failure in this area can lead to catastrophic results. The importance and ubiquity of morality was wonderfully stated by Chesterton.

Reason and justice grip the remotest and loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’

With this admonition, I will end the letter but we will continue to explore the important topic of evolution and how it impacts on how we see the world and how it affects our views on faith. Until then, I remain

Yours truly,
Bar-Abbas