At first Darwin firmly believed that God created every kind of living thing individually. But after travelling the oceans and continents, his detailed observations of nature gave him a completely different picture: He discovered sea fossils on 12,000-feet mountain tops in South America, found close biological relationships among remotely isolated turtles living on the Galapagos islands and catalogued over 1529 species,26 which included groups of finch-like song birds also discovered on the Galapagos islands.
After his return in October 1836, he sent his work to John Gould at the museum of the Zoological Society of London.27 Gould investigated the birds and confirmed that there was no clear separation among these living phenomena: They were uniformly joined in every way. Darwin himself didn’t give them any special notice during his return trip to England. The different shapes of their beaks (see figure 11) did not escape Darwin, but he suspected that these finches represented different species.
Fig. 11: Darwin’s finches
Only after intensive conversations with Gould, Darwin was compelled to make his revolutionary interpretation of the obvious differences of the finch beaks: The birds adjusted to the various food resources that were available to them in their environment on the islands. Only the bird that had the beak that works could eat grains or insects which were available in its environment: big beaks for grains, sharp beaks for insects! Darwin’s finches represent the classic example of adaptive radiation: An original species branches into more specialized species so that it can better adjust to changing environmental conditions. Grain-eating finches, insect-eating finches, woodpecker finches and other species branched from only a few original finches on the Galapagos islands28 (see figure 12). Woodpecker finches use tiny twigs as tools to remove larvae from tree bark. The great distances among these small islands favor the development of new species. In this way, nature is successful in making use of ecological niches.
Fig. 12: Adaptive radiation
But the beaks of finch-like songbirds were just a small part of the jig-saw puzzle of Darwin’s reasoning. Taken together, his findings yielded a picture that refuted all creation biology which was considered to be universally valid at that time: The many biological species are not changeless living things created individually by a God of creation, but they develop gradually through the process of natural selection— from out of their own!
Twenty years went by until Darwin finally published his life’s work in November 1859: On the Origin of Species. 29 He made five revolutionary claims in this book:
– the changeability of all species,
– creation of species in minute progressions,
– propagation of species within populations,
– the common origin of all forms of life,
– natural selection as the pivotal mechanism of life.
To further support these claims, Darwin produced detailed scientific evidence that he had collected during and following the return of his worldwide investigation. In his Notebook B he sketched his idea of the genealogy of life for the first time.30 Beginning with the words “I think…” follows a tree that displays the biological species on the ends of its many branches (see figure 13). This marked the birth of the theory of evolution.
Fig. 13: Darwin’s first sketch of evolution
Darwin does not express any kind of special role that mankind might have in his theory of evolution. So it is immediately clear that even mankind evolved from animal life and can’t have any claim to be a special creation of a divine being. Animal and man are not two—we are one. This caused tremendous outrage with the church at that time. The church had fervently believed that mankind was the crown of creation and that God created man “to make the earth subservient to him”.31 But meanwhile molecular genetics had clearly proven that mankind and the great ape were of common ancestry: 99 percent of all hereditary factors of human beings and chimpanzees are identical.32 Moreover, the genes of humanity are encoded precisely the same as with most living things on this planet.33 Other genetic codes might best be explained by the fact that evolution always seeks new attempts and avenues into forming life.
Nonetheless, other groups of people surface all the time like the creationists who firmly believe that God created every species individually, one at a time. Supporters of the so-called Intelligent Design, a pseudo-scientific variant of creationism, think that living things are far too complex to be able to develop from natural selection. The dramatic increase of varieties of species about 540 million years ago can be explained only with the intervention from a divine source—an “intelligent designer”.34
The truth is, life on earth excels at producing very great varieties of species. How could this come about? Essentially, in addition to Evolution Theory and Intelligent Design, there is even a third answer. Let’s compare all of these and see how everything stacks up. 1) Evolution Theory states that life produces new species again and again by chance. These species must then prove themselves during a process of natural selection in order to survive. Evolution Theory doesn’t need any God who plans, nor does it need an intelligent designer. But this theory runs into trouble because the estimated age of four billion years of life on this planet isn’t really sufficient enough to produce its forms of life in sufficient complexity. 2) Intelligent Design maintains that some God or intelligent designer established well defined rules by which the variety of life would have to be created. So the process of creation would be pre-determined. But this line of thinking runs into trouble, too, because God could spare his creation anyway if all future is fixed in stone. 3) There’s still a third answer to go which will emerge more and more throughout this book: The variety of life is based on a creative mix of both chance and rules.
Let us take a close look at this third answer. There can be no doubt that life always happens spontaneously: Dead matter springs to life. There is no half-way point—matter is either alive or not alive.35 In the chapter Temporal Degrees of Freedom we will learn that spontaneity and chance are precisely the same thing. The rules in this third answer are the true and balanced laws of nature. These laws make sure that complex living things evolve gradually from matter which had suddenly come to life. I can’t think of anything that would interfere with this third answer. It even explains the existence of life on our planet. The conditions on earth that are well suited for life are only by chance: The earth’s distance to the sun, thereby favoring temperatures, and sufficient water for supporting life—are all by chance. And the earth also provides all the other chemical elements necessary for life—again by chance. Considering that precisely under such conditions life developed on earth, however, was not by chance, but the consequence of best thought-out laws of nature. Someone or something has been at work here and has established these life-giving natural laws.
Darwin’s
