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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