So complex and intricate Nature appears,
it's hardly a shock that for thousands of years
our forebears were certain that lurking behind her
there must be a planner, a conscious Designer.
The details would vary from nation to nation,
and each culture told its own tale of Creation,
but all were agreed: "such a finely tuned dance
must be choreographed--it can't happen by chance!"
It wasn't till AD eighteen fifty-nine,
that Charles Darwin dared to suggest the "design"
could be thoroughly explained without need of invoking
divine supervision. "What has he been smoking?"
society wondered; but his explanations,
acutely derived from minute observations,
were made with such force that his "Origin of Species"
changed history, like Luther's 95 Theses.
The theory of Natural Selection he backed
has been tweaked and refined, but its gist is intact.
Opponents who mock it put stress on the random,
but that's half the story--for riding in tandem
with haphazard mutation, selective pressure
preserves the most able and weeds out the lesser.
This process unfolds over timescales so great
that our consciousness, tuned to the short term (as fate
would have it, so tuned by our genomic history),
recoils, and takes refuge in scripture and mystery.
But the facts, found in fossil and DNA chain,
have borne out Chuck's theory again and again:
differential survival (and hence, procreation)
steers life toward an unknown, unplanned destination,
with some mutant genes faring better than others.
Thus each time a variant outlives its brothers,
a new thread appears in the web of "design,"
but the weavers are nothing but life, death, and time.
it's hardly a shock that for thousands of years
our forebears were certain that lurking behind her
there must be a planner, a conscious Designer.
The details would vary from nation to nation,
and each culture told its own tale of Creation,
but all were agreed: "such a finely tuned dance
must be choreographed--it can't happen by chance!"
It wasn't till AD eighteen fifty-nine,
that Charles Darwin dared to suggest the "design"
could be thoroughly explained without need of invoking
divine supervision. "What has he been smoking?"
society wondered; but his explanations,
acutely derived from minute observations,
were made with such force that his "Origin of Species"
changed history, like Luther's 95 Theses.
The theory of Natural Selection he backed
has been tweaked and refined, but its gist is intact.
Opponents who mock it put stress on the random,
but that's half the story--for riding in tandem
with haphazard mutation, selective pressure
preserves the most able and weeds out the lesser.
This process unfolds over timescales so great
that our consciousness, tuned to the short term (as fate
would have it, so tuned by our genomic history),
recoils, and takes refuge in scripture and mystery.
But the facts, found in fossil and DNA chain,
have borne out Chuck's theory again and again:
differential survival (and hence, procreation)
steers life toward an unknown, unplanned destination,
with some mutant genes faring better than others.
Thus each time a variant outlives its brothers,
a new thread appears in the web of "design,"
but the weavers are nothing but life, death, and time.
