3 billions years is a really, really long time
I just read a great comment by Joe Kilner on a post over at Good Math, Bad Math. I'm taking the liberty of quoting it in its entirety, but click on over to Good Math, Bad Math if you want to see the rest of the excellent discussion.
Natural selection is basically a tautology, which is why denying it as a mechanism is "not even wrong".The argument (although many on both sides seem to miss this) is whether the mechanism of natural selection is sufficient to describe the variety of living organisms on earth. Anyone who thinks that it isn't hasn't spent any time suffering, I mean studying, invertebrate palaeontology (apologies to all fossil bivalve lovers out there).
Proper appreciation of the massive chains of development, the enormous time scales and the huge variety of life both past and present is hard and boring, which is why a lot of people don't really do it and which so many see ID etc. as a viable alternative - because they can't imagine how you get from bacteria to horse. Seeing in detail even one section of the journey is enough for you to say "Yes, OK, I give up, the evidence is overwhelming, please don't ask me to identify another brachiopod". But without the detail to make it real you are just left with the limits of your imagination, which is actually a pretty restrictive limit.
People forget how god damn long 3 billion years is. The Earth has been here for 4 billion years. They estimate life got started about 1 billion years later, or about 3 billion years ago. Just for reference, if you consider a human generation starts every 25 years or so, that is 120 million generations. By contrast, Jesus lived only 80 generations ago and Adam only 240 generations ago. Anatomically modern humans first showed up about 4000 generations ago. That only gets us back 100,000 years or 0.003% of the way back to 3 billion years ago.
The point being, you and I can't conceptualize how long that is and our intuition fails us when we try to contemplate what is and what is not possible in that time frame.
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I come back to this over and over. We have not evolved the mental capacity to be able to comprehend the temporal or spacial scales of the universe in any meaningful way without some serious Fermian acrobatics. I've read some good descriptions of some of these numbers in Sagan, Hawking, Bryson, Diamond, et al. Every time it knocks me on my ass and forces me to try to grasp it, as feeble as that grasp may be. One of the best is the mapping of the history of the universe (or spacial dimensions of the universe) onto a 24-hour day, 365-day year, or some linear spacial distance. Here's two of them:
“So if we imagine the history of the universe represented by a line which is roughly 24 miles long, human life would occupy only the last inch. Or if we imagine this history of the universe represented by a single year, humanity would emerge only in the last few seconds of the last minute of the last hour of the last day of the year. So for something more than 99.999 per cent of the history of the universe, the very creatures which are meant to be the jewel of creation have been absent from it.”
http://www.strongatheism.net/library/atheology/argument_from_scale/
And this last inch, this last few seconds is unfathomably long itself. Almost all of us have no experience or memory of anything beyond the last few decades. The vast majority of the population considers any year that doesn't begin with 19 or 20 to be in the misty dark of ancient history, while it was actually somewhere around the last breath. He's not talking about the few hundred years since the enlightenment. He's not referring to the 2,000 years since the beginning of Christianity. He's not referring to the 6,000 years since the beginning of Judaism. He's not talking about the 12,000 years since the agricultural revolution. He's not talking about the 40,000 year since we reached central Asia. He's not talking about the 80,000 years since humans left Africa. He's talking about the 200,000 years since the appearance of homo sapiens.
These are scales for which we have no reference point that will get us anywhere near understanding it on an intuitive level. These are scales at which patterns can't help but emerge. Instead of focusing on "how could randomness bring about all of this complexity?" people ought to ask "over that much time and given the abundance of matter and energy, how could complex patterns _not_ emerge?" If you just randomly combine matter and energy in random ways over and over and over and over again the vast majority of those ways will amount to nothing. But every once in million blue moons, a particular combination will result in something rather interesting--something like, say, a fractal--something self-referential--something self-reproducing. And when it does, how could you expect it to do anything _but_ reproduce? Math is naturally selected. Pattern is naturally selected.
Once you have something reproducing itself and interacting with matter and energy (and being bombarded by radiation), you will continue to get variety and in exactly the same way, some variations _can't help_ but be better suited than others.
Oscar Wilde said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” More people need to stop looking at our tiny little temporal and spacial gutter and instead take a gander at the stars long enough to realize that the universe is exactly as it is with defiant disregard for any wishes to the contrary and is, in fact, infinitely more profound and beautiful than any fairy tales we can dream up in a charming attempt to fit its vastness into the meager confines of our inherited network of neurons.
How nicely put, Mike, I am glad I dropped by. Further, what I don't get is how many otherwise intelligent people cannot see the parallels to the complexity that exists around us even on human timescales, and get a little humbler about their ability to control even little bits of it, let alone understand it all, and to therefore seek to optimize human processes using the most natural mechanism possible (other than their limited brains), self-organized competitive evolution, to question its results less, and to recognize that each step away from it in any social or economic process, though perhaps consensually necessary, is treading on pavement of good intention, but not Nature's path.
b2b