The Big Three

So I went swimming the other day (I’m getting to swim pretty much every day now) and, when I was coming back to shore, I saw a spider. (Did I mention I was swimming in a pond, not a swimming pool?). And as I watched it build its web, the thought came to me, as it often does, “Just how insane is evolution?”

For this post, I am going to boil down an argument against evolution, one I call ‘The Big Three’. I am going to boil all of the various changes that would have to happen to one species to evolve it into another, all of the building up of incremental changes needed to produce some effect, into three baskets: Anatomy, Physiology, and Psychology.

Anatomy

Often when someone tells you a grand evolutionary fairy tale, they focus on, in the first instance, anatomy. The giraffe’s neck, they tell us, got longer and longer over succeeding generations. Or the fish that moved to land, ‘grew legs’.

So it is important when we think of evolutionary changes, to ask ourselves what anatomical changes would be needed to make this new thing. An extra leg, a longer neck, a penis… these would all need to come with anatomical changes.

Physiology

Just having a long neck doesn’t mean your long neck works. Physiology is the ‘how it works’ part of biology. So, one has a long neck, and longer veins with more valves, a different way of breathing (so you aren’t just breathing the same air in and out.) etc etc.

So the feature has to be there, and it has to work.

Psychology

Probably the wrong word, but you have to work it. So if a bird lays an egg, and then flies off and leaves it… well, the anatomy worked (the egg came out), the physiology worked (the egg was formed and is presumably alive), but the psychology not so much.

So a spider must have a hole in its posterior, a thread-making process, and a brain with ‘how to make a web’ already imprinted in it.

The Big Three

So this, right away, tells us that evolution is a pipe dream invented by people smoking fairy dust. Even if we were to boil all of the thousands, probably millions, of genetic changes needed to go from ‘no web making’ to ‘web making’ down into just three things: changes in anatomy, physiology, and psychology… it would be utterly impossible.

First of all, because the actual rule is ‘just one’. There are a lot of board games whose rules say, “You can choose one thing to do each turn: buy, build, or act” or somesuch. Well, evolution is like that. Basically, “You can choose one incredibly impossible thing to happen with each ‘step’ of evolution”. But even if I boil all those changes down to three, there are still three.

Imagine a spider precursor, who wanders around disconsolately trying to find flies to eat. And imagine that, due to some random genetic accident, he ends up with a hole in his posterior. That’s it. Just a hole. Evolution might have in mind (remind me to write a post about how Evolution is not a thinking being) that someday, after a couple of thousand more changes, that hole will be where thread will come out. But right now, it just has a hole.

What good is that hole? None at all. Literally none. In fact, as a break in the skin and thus immune system, probably just a vector for disease.

Or, hey, let’s go all the way and give the creature 100% of the web-spinning anatomy. How much good would it do him without the physiology and psychology? Zero. And as it would be an expense, energy-wise, it would be a detriment. Without the instructions in the brain to squat her, send out a thread, move here, etc, etc, etc, etc (it’s a really involved process), the entire system is worse than merely useless.

Psychology

And it’s worse for the psychology. The bird who has a nesting instinct, but no eggs. Nothing to lay eggs with, and nothing functioning to create them. But who wanders around and finds twigs and things. Poor thing is wasting its time before retirement.

Leaving aside the rather problematical issue of, ‘How did the bird get there in the first place?” (Do some research on how we got to eggs, I dare you) you have the problem of psychology. Which comes first? The anatomy to lay eggs, the physiology of egg laying, or the psychology of egg laying.

The only possible path is anatomy, physiology, psychology. And yet, you can’t have one without the other. Without anatomy, you literally get no egg laying. Without physiology (and its accompanying anatomy), you have to have eggs to lay. Without anatomy, you can’t lay them. And without psychology, they just die.

One Enchanted Evening

And the problem gets worse with more complex systems. Remember, in order for the egg to be fertilised, the daddy bird and the mommy bird have got to have their enchanted evening. Which again, involves a whole bunch of anatomy, physiology, and psychology. (Face it, who understands a mommy bird?)

The proposed solution is that the system existed with self-reproduction first (a problem in itself), and then moved to vive la difference. But la difference involves so many differences, and ones that are flatly contradictory to self-reproduction, that the idea is insane. Like, call the boys in the white jackets. You just can’t get there from there.

Fairy Tale

Which brings us back to our fairy tale. Co-pilot, trained on large volumes of evolutionary work, spouted some nonsense that any genetic change will automatically (he used a bunch of big words, but in the end they meant automatically when they didn’t mean ‘were designed to’) produce anatomical, physiological, and psychological changes simultaneously. Just because. And the right ones, too.

I like the story of the elephant’s nose better. It makes a lot more sense.