We all have heard of Theory of evolution but most of us do not believe in it. Most people think its just a theory and has no relevance to Truth.
After all how can man come from Monkeys? If so why are monkeys now giving birth to Monkeys and not men. And then why has evolution stopped now? Why are men not evolving into some new creature? These are the questions with which most people rubbish the idea.
Another reason they enthusiastically do this is because of its conflict with their religious beliefs. If evolution is true, then where does god come into the picture? And most importantly people think its simply impossible for a super complex being like a man to have evolved by sheer accident?
People explain it as follows. Lets take a watch as an example. Take a hammer and break the watch into bits and pieces.Put it in a closed box and shake it vigorously. Will it ever in any possibility become the same watch again? Never because it is so complex and so intricate that only a creator can fit things in the right way. If a watch with simple parts cannot evolve by accident, how can man who is million times more complex evolve automatically by accident? That justifies the presence of a creator.
Fair enough...
Let me tell you a story. You will be the main character of the story. Imagine that you are a small child living near a river. The river flows behind your house. It passes through rocky contours where you play with your friends. There is a small rock which waters slowly touch and you use it as a sitting area. The rock is a part of your childhood so you remember it well. Now imagine a 100 years have passed from the time, in these years you had grown up, got job, got married, and even became old and have retired but stayed in the same place.
One fine day in your 100th year you go back to the rock and you find some people are looking at the very rock. Viola a very beautiful design has emerged on the rock.
You immediately look at it and say water in 100 years has done a beautiful design, which people do not agree. They say there was never a water in the place and even if it was its too complex for flowing water to do it. They say there has to be a designer because the design is so complex and so beautiful. Now the river dried some years ago and a road has been laid in its place, you simply cannot prove that flowing water had made the design which you were witness to for 100 years. End result is that we have given birth to an unknown rock designer/ sculptor who never existed.
Now, we have just learned a beautiful concept, every complexity is a sum of many small simplicities, greater the complexity, greater will be the no of simplicities that have combined over a period of long time.
Small strokes of water over 100 years can make beautiful, mind boggling structures is a fact, if you doubt it how else do you explain the formation of Grand Canyon and its carved beautiful structures by the flow of River Colorado?
The crux of evolution theory is that simple forms of lives over a very large period of time can evolve into a super complex being not by accident but by a deliberate process called Natural Selection. Evolution like the rock design is simply un-ascertainable and unbelievable at a particular point of time till the design is complete.
Life on planet earth started with a single bacteria which could replicate itself, it slowly developed over a period of time into aquarian creatures like fishes and whales etc and some cells into plankton of sea which lateer developed into plants. Some of the fishes touched the shores and they slowly adapted to the shore and became some other creatures like turtles who can live on both shores and land. The land turtle evolved into forest animals and so on. Finally came the monkeys and viola you are reading this blog, the latest product of evolution is man.
It is extremely difficult to believe the above process but if one looks at the mountains of evidence available today to support this, a man with open mind will be convinced.
To start with, planet earth is 4.61 billion years old and it took 1 billion years for the first bacterial cell to be made by forces of nature, in the next 3.6 billion years, life has emerged in many forms most of it destroyed some of it remains now in various forms.
Evolution happens all the time but we cant observe it because its too slow like the rock design in our example.
Evolution never says men evolve from monkeys, it says we are animals like monkeys and monkeys are our distant cousins because we have evolved from a common ancestors. The Common ancestor was neither a man nor a monkey.
Now how are we very sure about this? Consider for example that the DNA of Human being and a Chimpanzee is 98.6 percent same. Consider that the DNA, which is the simplest form of life inside a cell has similarities in almost all forms of life. Which means a part of a Donkey is Inside me and a part of a banana tree is inside you. Serious.
The greatest similarities are between creatures that had a common ancestors like monkeys and men. Like Cats and Foxes. Like Fishes and various sea animals. This fact is further accentuated by the evidence of fossils which are dead animals that once existed, their DNA if examined completes the mystery of evolution and all things fall in the right place in the tree of life. Each branch leads to a new form of life and it goes without any break.
The idea that an invisible designer created human beings is further made implausible by the fact that we still have tail bones and vestigial organs like appendix an organ used in animals to digest raw grass as a proof of our evolution. To put tail bones in man isn't an intelligent idea to me. The fetus inside the mothers womb develops hairy structures which disappears when the person is born, an evidence of our relationship to Chimpanzees. Tats not intelligent either. The strongest evidence is possibly the vestigial genes found in our cells. Vestigial genes are those genes that serve no purpose in our body but reside inside. These genes are very similar to those found in animals. We today have technology to study the genetic codes inside each gene and they open before our eyes the ultimate truth of life. The codes inside the genes are so similar that one has to believe that all forms of life should have evolved from a single source. Let me explain this further.
lets say there is a gene called B inside a Human being and the code goes like this AATTGG. The code of the chimpanzee gene will be AATTCC. The code in distant creatures like a fox will be AATBBB. Observe the commonalities in the code and one will start believing in evolution
The idea of a intelligent designer doesn't solve the mystery of creation but opens it, if religious zealots claim that every complex thing must have a much more complex intelligent creator, then by the same logic there has to be a creator for that creator also because the designer of such complex things has to be much more complex and intelligent.
Darwin's Theory of Evolution is possibly the strongest and most potent blow to the idea of Intelligent design, today evolution is not a theory, its a fact an irrefutable fact of life, the British museum of natural history has enough fossil evidence to prove the point and so does the evidence from DNA research prove it.
(I shall discuss the concept of Natural selection in the next blog along with the watch question that remains to be answered)
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