Evolution

In school, nobody told me about evolution. I find it odd that a lot of people learn biology without studying the theory of evolution.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." - Theodosius Dobzhansky

I like to know how things work and why they are the way they are. So, asking why do trees exist, most people would answer: "because God created them". If I asked: "why did God create trees as they are?", the answer would be: "misterious are the ways of our Lord". Or, maybe, their answer would be: "trees exist to climb them" or "trees exist to have wood for fire, or to build houses". Of course, all this is childish, but I think there is no such thing as stupid questions.

The evolutionary reason why trees exist is that plants compete for sunlight, so being tall gives you an advantage over other plants.

I've read a lot of books about evolution and they always amaze me. Of course, I still can't explain everything about life, but I understand it much better. I still have questions about things but I never try to explain them by supernatural means, because supernatural answers are no answers at all.

A few days ago I was wondering how could evolution create hollow teeth in venomous snakes, which are similar to hypodermic needles, so they can inject the victim with venom. As anyone knows, evolution is gradual, but a half hallow tooth would not help at all, as far as I can tell. I did encounter a solution to this problem. A fossil was discovered which had teeth with grooves. Evolution made the groove deeper and closed it to form hollow teeth. So I did find an answer to this rather difficult problem. If you search hard enough, a lot of questions can be answered.

The way eyes or wings evolved is amazing. You might think that half an eye is no good, but half an eye is better than no eye at all. You might think that half a wing is no good, but there are gliding animals and that seems to be better than no wings. Bats have evolved from creatures similar to gliding squirrels.

What always made me laugh is "unintelligent design", like birds with wings which cannot fly or eyes that cannot see in the case of cave dwelling animals. Even our eyes, which are extraordinary complex organs, are pretty badly made. No smart designer would put the cables between the sensors and light source, yet this is exactly how eyes are, the nerves cross the surface of the retina and gather in the blind spot. We are not aware of our blind spot because the brain does a good job of cleaning the image.

A funny example of "unintelligent design" is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which makes a detour before arriving at the destination, in the case of the giraffe, that detour is 20 meters. It should go from the brain to the larynx, but the detour is near the heart.

With evolution you can understand why the repartition of animals on continents is the way it is, why there are no frogs on islands (they can't survive in salt water, so they can't travel through the ocean). We can understand why the fossils show increasing complexity in organisms over millions of years, we can understand why diseases exist. To think that God created diseases because two people ate a fruit is silly.

We have many examples of evolution in our own yard. The apples you buy are very different from wild apples. Dogs are different from wolves and when you see a Chihuahua and a Saint Bernard side by side and you know they have a common ancestor, how can you still doubt evolution? All domestic animals and plants have evolved (by artificial selection) from wild varieties and they have been drastically modified.