Consider two common exclamations, which differ by exactly two letters:

A)  “Mom, please help me!”

B)  “God, please help me!”

Who might utter the first one?  A child, of course.  It is not a stretch in the slightest to assert that only a child would give voice to such a statement.  Furthermore, only a child lucky enough to have a living mother would cry out in this manner to supplicate her warm, compassionate reassurance and perhaps assistance.

What if a child has no mother?  Lost to cancer, or in a car accident, say?  Obviously, the child quickly realizes exclamation A is now futile; it becomes a meaningless response to his or her predicament, whatever it may be.  At this point, an important transformation takes place in the child’s life.  The child is forced to fend for itself, or to accept aid from other sources, perhaps even from total strangers – who may not have the child’s needs at the top of their priority lists.  Put simply, the child is compelled to leave its mother’s “nest,” because the nest no longer exists.  One might claim a process of maturation ensues, one exploited frequently in military boot camps:

“Grow up, soldier.  Your mommy isn’t here to help you anymore.”

What about the second statement?  Who says things like B?  Religious people, to be sure, and all people who believe in a God or higher power capable of interceding on their behalf in the physical world.  Is there a maturation process for this case, too?  Of course there is.  The only mother we all have is Mother Earth, and she is all we will ever have.

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Evolution by Natural Selection is a simple yet immensely powerful idea, which is unfortunately misinterpreted by many as being just “random chance.”  Actually, Natural Selection is just as random as casino profits:  lots and lots of dice-rolling, but somehow new, fully-functional (and often superior) casinos keep sprouting up every year.

The analogy to follow is stolen from The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, a book which masterfully explains the most beautiful and inexorable facts of life first observed by Charles Darwin in the 1830’s.  It uses the familiar anecdote of monkeys typing on a keyboard, and it clearly demonstrates the key difference between what is random, and what is not random, in Evolution.

As the saying goes, give a monkey a keyboard and enough time, and it will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare.  Let’s make it much easier on the monkey.  All we ask, is for our monkey to employ a restricted 27-character keyboard (the 26 letters of the English alphabet plus the space bar), and type out the following 28-character sentence:

METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL

If the monkey is genuinely a random typist, it will probably produce something like this, on its first few efforts:

UMMK JK CDZZ F ZD DSDSKSM

S SS FMCV PU I DDRGLKDXRRDO

HZQZDSFZIHIVPHZPETPWVOVPMZGF

RCDFYYYRM N DFSKD LD K WDWK

In fact, if the monkey’s efforts are truly, mathematically random, the odds against it typing the correct sentence above are 1/27 multiplied by itself 28 times, which equals odds of about 1 in 10,000 million million million million million million.  We’ll be waiting a long time.

Here is how the process of Natural Selection utterly changes the game of random chance.  Imagine the sentence ‘methinks it is like a weasel’ represents the genetic code of human beings – the desired end product of our simplified game of evolution.  The “primordial soup” (or one of our long-ago ancestors, including plants and amoebas), is represented by the initial, completely random monkey code:

WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P

How does evolution work on this collection of primitive, non-human nonsense?  It duplicates or “breeds” the exact same sentence, which is perfectly analogous to sexual reproduction by mammals (you share more than 99.99% of your mother’s DNA, after all), but it also allows a small chance of perturbation due to genetic mutation, which we will model by changing one character at random, in each of four “children” :

WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCX P

WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P

WALTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P

WDLTMNLTUDTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P

In the first sentence, the ‘O’ character in the 26th position was changed to an ‘X’; in the second, ‘K’ in position 14 was changed to ‘S’; in the third, ‘D’ in position 2 changed to ‘A’; in the fourth, the space in position 9 became ‘U’.  It should be understood here that the number of offspring doesn’t necessarily need to be fixed, and neither does the number of mutations occurring in a particular scion, although in real biology the mutation rate is quite low.  Everything modeled up to this point is essentially random, however.

Nature itself now performs the crucial, completely non-random next step.  The “fitness” of each candidate (or child) is evaluated or selected, by determining which string of letters or characters most resembles the target sentence.  (Please don’t be confused; Nature has no idea in advance what the target sentence looks like.  We are reverse-engineering the problem, and conceding that our targets – human codes – do indeed exist, and we postulate they are the most highly selected, highly adapted “sentences” on the planet.  If one could rewind the evolutionary "tape," other evolutionary paths and end products are certainly feasible.)  Evaluating the fitness of each candidate collection of characters is analogous to the environmental demands placed on any living creature in its own natural habitat.  For instance, if most of the food in a certain bird dwelling consists of hard, thick-shelled seeds, fragile-beaked offspring will likely not survive to reproduce.  Natural Selection tends to favor mutations which increase a particular bird’s ability to survive, and statistically eliminates unfavorable mutations – along with the individuals who manifest them.

Such a facile step!  And not one bit random!  The need for food, water, and shelter, as well as the need for avoiding predators, has nothing to do with luck.  These are matters of life and death.  Let’s see how the non-random process of Natural Selection affects our sentence “creature.”

Comparing the candidates to the target, we find that the second child most closely resembles it:

METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL

WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P

Nothing earth shattering here (we have three characters correct), but if the reproduction-mutation-selection process is repeated for ten more generations, we obtain something like:

MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P

After 20 generations, we get:

MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL

After 30:

METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL

After 40 generations, only a single character is off:

METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL

43 generations later, we arrive precisely at our target.  If the initial monkey-sentence is changed, the number of generations (and hence, time) required to evolve successfully can increase or decrease considerably.  This simple game can be easily programmed into a laptop computer by a high school student.  The important concept here, is that Evolution by Natural Selection builds upon its previous generations, via incremental steps, and never simply “starts over” by randomly jumbling the elements – our genes, for instance.

If there is a God, or an Intelligent Designer, “He” understands Evolution perfectly, because “He” himself is an evolved being, whose origins remain as much of a mystery as our own (i.e. what did "He" evolve from?).  There is no alternate path to homo sapiens, or godhood, other than juvenile explanations founded on religious whimsy.  Evolution is the mature approach to comprehending our place in the Universe.

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