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Evolution and Pure Chance

A student and I had a discussion in class about the results of the evolutionary process as byproducts of pure chance. I initially addressed the following issue:

Whether the current debate about evolution and intelligent design has been framed as pure chance vs. intelligent design.

Based on what I said in class, my answer was “Yes.” The student also recognized that that’s how it has been framed by others. But she ended up addressing a different issue:

Whether it ought to be framed as pure chance vs. intelligent design debate.

The student’s answer was “No,” because evolutionists, according to her, do not think that evolution has anything to do with pure chance. Based on my understanding of what she said, it cannot be a byproduct of pure chance, since the evolutionary process, which aims for the survival of the fittest, involves some forms of necessities. I am assuming that what she meant by that is that it was naturally necessary that some animals would develop certain bodily features that would be more conducive to their survival. I expressed my worry about such claim. How could one account for such natural necessity to survive? Does nature somehow demand that some animals ought to survive or is it just the case that some animals happened to survive? If nature somehow demands that some animals ought to survive, I was worried about the question of “why” and the seemingly inescapable introduction of teleology in the evolutionary explanation.

But I was worried about another issue:

Whether it can be framed as pure chance vs. intelligent design debate.

My answer was “Yes,” since there are major evolutionists who framed it in that way. For example, even in the mind of Darwin, he somehow framed the debate in the same way. According to Stephen Jay Gould, Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist and a contemporary and a defender of Darwin, was worried that “Darwin’s view left no room for rule by law, and portrayed nature as shaped entirely by blind chance.” [See Kenneth H. Miller's Finding Darwin's God.]

Here’s Darwin’s response to Gray in May 22, 1860:

“With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful for me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the …[wasps] with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”

In addition, Jacques Monod, who was a French biochemist and Nobel Prize winner (physiology or medicine), stated the following claim about pure chance and evolution:

“Chance alone is at the source of every innovation of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact.

Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the 'prebiotic soup'.”

Ernst Mayr, a Harvard zoologist, in his response to the question about the role of chance in the process of selection, stated the following:


“The first step in selection, the production of genetic variation, is almost exclusively a chance phenomenon except that the nature of the changes at a given gene locus is strongly constrained. Chance plays an important role even at the second step, the process of the elimination of less fit individuals. Chance may be particularly important in the haphazard survival during periods of mass extinction.”

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