Eureka!

I met a guy months ago. A loyal devotee of Christianity, he was nothing short of interesting, as I was genuinely curious about his sticking to his own guns, undying faith, and what he thought about the existing arguments that could potentially shatter the foundation of his beliefs. One thing led to another, I asked him what he thought about evolution. Not surprisingly, he anchored for a creationist point of view while I, trying to be some sort of smart aleck, attempted to play for Darwin’s team.

He casually shrugged off my question, countering me with another one, which immediately rendered me speechless. “If evolution were true, should we not be seeing some kind of changes on us, biologically? Or shouldn’t there be differences between us and our grandfathers?” I really don’t know. All I know was that it takes time. Thousands of years. But then, why does it take so long? By the time I decided to win this argument by drawing his attention to the less convincing parts of the creationism argument, I am all loaded with more ambiguous questions pertaining to my proposition: How it is even possible that biological beings can evolve? They just “evolve”? Several muted interjections later, I decided to sidestep his questions and abandon my team before my lack of words betray my ignorance for a proposition that I rooted for.

Months later, I went on to read a book called Driven, a book about why humans do what they did. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, I was introduced to evolutionary biology. I was exposed to the concept of natural selection, which I gathered, was made possible by a mechanism called Variety/Selection/Retention. Except much more ambiguities abound and clouded my understanding of Darwinian evolution. Until few days ago where I became much more well informed.

The concept of Darwinian natural selection was, as I later discovered, a simple concept. Suppose there was a group of human about ten thousand years ago. As you know, there are variety within species. This can be validated empirically – we know some people are tall, some are short, etc. Let’s suppose the weather changed and someway, somehow the trees grew taller by day during that period. Naturally, the taller humans found it easier to pluck fruits from the tree, while the short ones struggle to survive. Eventually, many short people die. This is called selection, where nature filtered out those who are unfit to survive in a new environment. The remaining humans, the taller ones, reproduced among themselves. That’s retention. Generations later, humans “became” taller. Humans “evolved”, so to speak.

As I began to dissect my inability to talk about evolution then, I realized that I, as did my Christian friend, had assumed a common fallacy that the evolution of a species was in a linear relationship with time. In layperson’s term, it means I had labored under the illusion that the “biological changes” vs time curve was a 45 degree curve increasing in height over time, and that my lifetime was merely an tiny interjection of the curve, which misled me to belief that I, in line with the shape of the entire linear curve, should see some sort of biological changes unto myself within my lifetime. Why did I have such notion in the first place? Perhaps it was perpetuated by the oh-so-iconic graphic representation of evolution: Silhouette of the shortest primate on the left; towards its right was a representation of a taller primate; this goes on until we see a human-like figure at the far right; between those figures were arrows, signifying a progression, a flow. It seemed intuitive to believe in a linear relationship.

The truth couldn’t be further. If the biological changes vs time graph were to be plotted, it will resemble a stair case. Within a single person’s life time, changes rarely occur (represented by the horizontal lines of the “stairs”). It was only between generations that small subtle changes occurs (represented by the vertical lines of the “stairs”). Thousands of changes later, we see discernible changes – “evolution”.

“Eureka!”