In Darwin's Image

Although a simple "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on reproductive success might seem an impossibly crude tool with which to fashion and detail life’s delicate complexity, that is how even the most hi-tech plant or animal breeders finally obtain their impressive results. For in this difficult and dangerous world, new life must acquire its competitive organization and basic operating skills from previous life.

The world should therefore be grateful that your ancestors were unfailingly amongst those naturally selected to reproduce in each of many hundred billion consecutive generations. Small wonder that your mind and body remain so attuned to reproductive concerns.

The fossil records of Earth’s first two billion years reveal only bacteria and single-cell life forms. Later strata include increasingly complex plants and animals. Worms show up before fish, amphibians before reptiles, Lucy and other pre-human primates before creationists.

Upon careful examination of this progression, it becomes evident that the cooperative hierarchical organization of present-day multicellular life is an inevitable outcome of competitive and informational pressures rather than a reflection of unique ancestral circumstance or divine design. Indeed, life is just one example of a fact-dependent competitive enterprise that must remain on top of its ever-expanding information base or die. Commercial and scientific endeavors are similarly information-driven.

Regardless of whether an important discovery emerges from your garage or some world-famous laboratory, it adds to the knowledge base from which future research and invention will grow. Thus a chance observation led to careful studies of radioactive decay that soon provided enough evidence about atomic structure to initiate modern Atomic Theory and make possible the atom bomb.

Scientists then honed their newfound information and skills until they could produce and measure various products of radioactive decay with sufficient accuracy to determine the age of Moon rocks and Martian meteorites, illuminate the history of Neanderthal campfires and the Shroud of Turin, and reveal which parts of your brain would guide you home. And the waves of derivative discovery from that early chance observation continue to spread.

Most scientific findings fit appropriately within the currently accepted view of reality. However, an occasional divergent discovery - or surprising verification of some controversial hypothesis - may bear such revolutionary implications that it takes one or more generations to become widely understood and accepted. But whether ordinary or outrageous - widely accepted or initially rejected - every bit of amply confirmed scientific evidence bears at least potential value for scientists or entrepreneurs.

Of course, important new information that alters human belief or behavior may initially benefit just a few, while degrading the lives of many who have successfully adjusted to the status quo. This unequal distribution of costs and benefits naturally causes controversy. Yet even the most controversial observations or ideas develop and replicate so rapidly upon release that they can never be recaptured, controlled or withdrawn from human memory.

Scientists of all nations, cultures, backgrounds and beliefs obsessively elaborate upon, pore over and reconsider huge quantities of old and new information as they seek to understand our natural world. Atomic Theory, General Relativity, The Laws of Thermodynamics and Modern Evolution Theory are important outcomes of this collaborative effort. And ever since it was recognized as the organizing principle for life on Earth, Evolution Theory has guided and enriched all relevant investigations.

Every human society treasures an ancient explanation for life and the universe that once glorified and sustained its early culture and traditions. Not surprisingly, modern science has revealed all of these conflicting creation tales to be outmoded fabrications or incorrect conjectures rather than pure primitive perceptions of some underlying reality.

Even Genesis, the world’s most widely revered creation myth, is clearly false in every particular. Yet the incurably devout - and those who profit by keeping them so - reject much of modern science merely because it contradicts religious beliefs created for Bronze Age shepherds by their priests.

Nonetheless, large numbers of carefully studied fossils bear silent witness to life’s long history and gradual progression. And investigations in every field of science support and enlarge upon those fossil findings. That life is an outcome of ongoing physical and informational processes set in motion at the big bang is now beyond reasonable doubt. Indeed, this broad new scientific consensus about life’s origin and development represents a major watershed in the history of human thought.