Barry Goldman
2001
sow_thistle@yahoo.com
Some thoughts on why people don't like the theory of evolution
Brian doesn't, can't comprehend where all this form comes from.
Can't imagine that the form of gloeotrichia, lichen, coprinus is the
product of arbitrary forces. (but they aren't arbitrary.)
That's what bothers them. Lichen ascocarp is obviously a work of
art; composed, balanced, spiced with color, harmoniously functioning...
And how can all that be a product of arbitrary evolution? It's got to be
designed by a mind.
(But look here: how does a planet keep from flying off into space?
Ain't some INTENTION got to be pulling it?
We are so full of our own story of consciously willed acts. And this
is a fairy tale all of us self puffed up baby Gautama Buddhas tell
ourselves. We want to think that human mind is the only source of
creation in this universe.
So why do we want everything beautiful, structured to come from the
human mind? Are we so bent on a myth that human mind is alien to this
world that it ought not be tainted by mud, wet pussy, mosquitoes and
decaying flesh of a grandmother? This is the impetus to fight a theory
of evolution, we want our souls to be immortal and evolution is a story
of the cycling through death. Creation out of death.
Miraculous coming together of pattern and then eventual dissolution
of pattern is the way of the universe unless the patterns are simple
tautological developments of physical law.
So why can't an intricately carved and behaving stentor be the
product of mud and random forces? Look, not many poeple have the
slightest clue as to the immense hierarchical complexity of the city of
molecules that makes a stentor behave.
To say a stentor is the activity of molecules is to say nothing to
the average man on the street. They just have no training in the levels
of complexity involved. Even after a few years of biology in college!!!
Why not? Don't people stop to think how a language functions, a
nation functions, forest functions? But not necessarily with the agenda
of looking for interacting parts!
M. Scott Peck says life is hard, life is complex. Too know this, to
act upon this knowledge is to become as God. To act in this way is to
act with a great burden of responsibility. Most of us shy from it.
To take the time to learn how a theory of evolution by natural
selection on molecular driven metabolism and structure can create life is
to do a lot of hard work and once this hardwon knowledge is won, you got
the opportunity to be responsible for creation yourself. You realize
that you might actually be able to create life, redesign life. We fear
this.
Are you serious Bar? That's the fear? Sure, if you leave stentor,
human mind, the ability for such to be created in the FUZZY realm of a
Michaelangelo in the sky to paint with some brush strokes you aren't
really taking responsibility for understanding how this creation works.
You are not SERIOSLY asking how it's possible!
Look, if you subscribe to the story that some mind created - poof -
stentor AND directs its steps, you are living in delusion. You
shortcircuit the need to understand, the possibility of understanding,
even the DESIRE TO LOOK AT THE COMPLEXITY YOU WISH TO REMAIN IGNORANT ABOUT.
That story keeps you from doing the hard work of experiments in
physics, chemistry to learn how parts can make wholes over many levels of
complexity. Years of leaning and doodling that takes to hold in your
mind an image of the humongous circus that is a stentor on the molecular level.
Only after you have accepted this task of learning are you even
eligible for the right to decide wether stentor is cooperative mechanics
or mind of God.
Of course just the act of saying, "mind of God" throws out the whole
question of structure. Even throws out any questioning at all. So, yes,
denying outright a theory of evolution, in most people is probably just
shear laziness!
And in the Practical realm? Obviously! People listen to topical
events and personalities on the NEWS every evening but to act on that
information as a citizen in a polity requires wending the complex paths
of human, economic... interractions and understanding how complex
interractions of parts works.
As I stated in MONSTERS, people want to take the easy way out and
instantiate horror in a monster, beauty in a god, instead of thread
through what is in reality the complex set of interractions required to
understand how the horror comes about. I.e. how tanglingly complex the
damm structure was that makes it look like horror as it comes apart!
Easy way out is to invent a simple monster instead and kill it. But that
doesn't heal. Healing requires patience and untangling.