Darwin

We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. This confusion has been fostered by evolution’s friends and foes alike………. Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us. The main conclusion of Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989) is that if we were to “wind the tape of life back” and play it again and again, the likelihood is infinitesimal of Us being the product on any other run through the evolutionary mill. This is undoubtedly true. Evolution is not a process that was designed to produce us, but it does not follow from this that evolution is not an algorithmic process that has in face produced us. ~ Page 56

Darwin, as we noted in the preceding chapter, never hit upon the utterly necessary idea of a gene, but along came Mendel’s concept to provide just the right structure for making mathematical sense of our heredity. And then, when DNA was identified as the actual physical vehicle of the genes, it looked at first (and still looks at many participants) as if Mendel’s genes could be simply identified as particular hunks of DNA. But then complexities began to emerge, the more scientists have learned about the actual molecular biology of DNA and its role in reproduction, the clearer it becomes that the Mendelian story is at best a vast over simplification. Some would go so far as to say that we have recently learned that there really aren’t any Mendelian genes! Having climbed Mendel’s ladder, we must now throw it away. But of course no one wants to throw away such a valuable tool, still proving itself daily in hundreds of scientific and medical contexts. … ~ Page 58