Chance or the Dance?

[Note: this is a rather lengthy post about evolution, a topic that many of you who read this blog semi-regularly could care less about. It's ok, I don't expect it to be read. This is just a convenient place to store my thoughts as I work through the issue. If you want to chime in, great. If not, that's fine as well.]

Is this world and all its myriad of living creatures the result of random chance or is it all orchestrated by a Choreographer? Science tells us the answer is neither.

Contrary to popular misconception, evolution does not say that we evolved by chance. What it does say is that we evolved by natural selection, which isn't particularly random at all. There is survival of the fittest because the fittest survive. Fittest for what? For surviving in a particular niche in a particular time and place with particular neighbors (predators and prey, as well as vegetation, water, sunlight, etc.) And not just surviving, but reproducing before dying. As Richard Dawkins points out in River Out of Eden, every single living organism today is a direct descendant from a chain of ancestors who all mated at least once before they died. Those who survived long enough to reproduce propagated their genetic material. Those who didn't, well obviously, they didn't.

So, we have a process where some organism are able to reproduce and some aren't. Eventually the traits of the members of a species that contribute to survival/reproduction are dominant in the gene pool, and other traits are not. A change to the environment (migration to find new food, natural disaster, etc.) begins to favor new traits. Over a period of time, a new set of traits become favored. Given enough time, enough changes, speciation occurs: the changes become so pronounced that a group of the same species that migrated to look for food elsewhere can no longer interbreed with the (relatively stable, genetically speaking) descendants of those who remained in the original area.

Randomness does factor in during the infamous "good mutation" story. In this tale, an organism might have a random genetic mutation (don't ask me how, probably cosmic radiation, like the Fantastic Four) that creates a trait that gives it a greater chance for survival/reproduction, thus introducing new genetic material into the gene pool. Note, by our definition this new material will be favored by natural selection.

The problem with this tale is that almost all known mutations are harmful, many are fatal, and several lead to an inability to reproduce. The problem with this problem is that we've only been looking at mutations at a genetic level for less than 100 years! Even if you bought 100 lottery tickets, you still wouldn't have very good odds of winning the Big Jackpot. But if you, J. Random Player wouldn't have good odds of winning, the odds are pretty good that someone will win.

Given that there is a wealth of information in the DNA of any critter, evolution by natural selection says that those critters who have traits that are more conducive to surviving and reproducing will survive and reproduce more than those who don't. But this is all relative to the complexities of the environment, which may be more or less stable, but is also, more or less, always changing as well. At times, dice are tossed into the mix both by large scale environmental changes and mutations (of the latter, most are harmful, likely resulting in the immediate death of the organism, but some very few are X-Men-like).

This is why artificial life became such a big deal in the 1990s. A-life studies computer-generated "life." The archetypical example would be the cellular automata of John Conway's Game of Life. This creates a very simple environment with very simple rules (basically a spreadsheet of square cells with rules about when a cell is shaded in or not), but it results in a large variety of emergent behavior. "Species" of a sort emerge from combinations of shaded cells and rules, as does reproduction and symbiosis. This in no way approaches the complexity of even the simplest biological evolutionary scenario, but it is a sort of "proof of concept" that this kind of theory does play out in some scenarios (the admittedly simplistic digital ecologies of artificial life).

Are there problems with the theory of evolution? Of course. The details are not worked out. By way of comparison we still don't know some very specific things about quantum physics, and even gravity still has some mysteries for us. Mysteries do not mark the end of science, but its beginning. Science is the quest to explain the mysteries of the world around us in terms of natural explanations. Natural selection is a natural explanation. Divine intervention is not.

All of which is good and fine and dandy, but... what if there is a Divine Intervener who is out there? If there is, would we still not be able to put together the best naturalistic theories we can, and continue to refine them to deal with new evidence, and, essentially, be wrong? If there is, for instance, a Creator, then any theory of origins that denies such a creator would be wrong no matter how much explanatory power it had. The Ptolemaic system of astronomy had a certain explanatory power as well. It turned out to be wrong. Could all naturalistic theories of ultimate origins and destiny also turn out to be wrong? If so, how would a system that by design and definition can only see naturalistic explanations ever come to know this?

Perhaps the theistic evolutionists have the best position, affirming as they do aspects of both theistic religion and evolutionary science. But by affirming both, they also deny aspects of both, aspects that both scientists and the faithful are uncomfortable in denying. That is one thing naturalistic evolutionists and creationists often agree on: theistic evolutionists are wrong. Far from being a workable compromise, theistic evolution represents a third position altogether.

Where does this leave us? Well, it leaves me believing the bible and believing modern science (or, more dangerously, it leaves me believing that I believe the bible and believing that I believe modern science. But, and here is the scary part, maybe I don't believe one or the other or maybe neither, maybe I only believe that I believe them. How would one know the difference?) Anyway, none of this is intended as an assault on faith (I still believe in the triune God and salvation through the incarnate Son, at least I believe that I believe that :-), nor does is it a dismissal of the critiques of evolution by intelligent design proponents (I am open to the possibility that evolution could be wrong).

It's only in the last year or so that I've begun to think very seriously about evolution at all. I am not a scientist, but I'd like to understand why so many believe evolution is as true a truth as we know and why others reject it as being either a mistaken theory or a lie straight from the pit. Supposedly it's about the evidence and facts, about what we sometimes call "science," but there's also a lot of talk about theory and the nature of science. Science is rarely just about the facts, but is about explaining those facts (and often this means going to great efforts to collect facts which have never been collected). Is evolutionary biology a proper science? Who gets to decide and how are those decisions made? If it's not, why do so many say it is? If it is, why do so many say it's not?