Religion 3.0 - Evolutionary beginnings

Evolution is a simple idea. So simple it is frequently misunderstood. Although usually thought of in biological terms, of species and genes, the general principle has been found applicable on many scales, from entire socio-eco-politico- systems to the firing patterns of the neurons in our own brains (examples here).

Whenever there is a population of entities that tends to increase in number, in an environment that tends to decrease their number, evolution will occur.

The genius of Darwin and Wallace was to see the sine wave in the symphony. Nature is a mass of intersecting populations, of parasites and predators and preys, all mixing together in the chaotic dance of birth, living, and death. Unlike for a symphony tho', there is no score, and there is no conductor. We are having to learn and play as we go.

Proponents of intelligent design, and even more so of raw creationism, believe otherwise. Ironically, should these ideas make their proponents "fitter" in the evolutionary sense, then they will indeed prevail! [Aside: those of faith do tend to have more offspring than secularists, p'raps due to their rejection of birth control methods. Sperm Wars may yet happen...] Personally I find these ideas as absurd as any other form of determinism.

Before Newton, the standard answer to any "why?" was "God's will". As if we were children, not yet grown enough to understand. Then Newton's laws of motion etc. offered the promise of knowing how everything worked; and thus the hope of controlling everything. In the 19th century, with railways and factories and empires and all, our Promised Land seemed only a few more technological breakthroughs, and another imperialist conquest or two, away. The completion of physics was confidently predicted.

Einstein too, who destroyed that confidence, was nonetheless a Determinist, famously declaring that time is an illusion, and that God does not play dice.

Oh yes He does; at least genetically. Why else does a human male produce 3,000,000,000 sperm for every female egg? In Nature, about 1 in a million creatures born manage to survive to sexual maturity: the rest are eaten. Compassion, Mercy, Justice; these are human inventions: not "natural" at all. The "natural" way is a brutal gamble, a lottery with truly appalling odds.

Determinism is bunkum. In a few artificial circumstances, such as the surface of a billiard table, it is possible to make predictions to an apparently arbitrary accuracy. But there probably is a limit to the accuracy of real measurements. Einstein took advantage of the then recent experimental discovery that light has a maximum speed. Physicists today (e.g. Ilya Prigogine) are predicting that we will find space to be granular; in other words that there is a minimum distance between any two points: that there is a absolute physical limit to the accuracy of measurement. One effect of which is to make the Universe irreversible. Time, which is just another mathematical dimension in Newton and Einstein's equations, becomes a derivative of probability rather than of trajectory. Which implies the Future, although structured, is not determined.

We can make a difference.

In fact, we have no choice. Whether by the will of God or the gamble of Evolution, we have become junior partners in the act of Creation. We, the Human species, are now responsible for what happens next.