I’ve always had questions that I’ve wanted to ask a real evolutionary scientist, and hopefully one day I’ll get to sit down and have a conversation with one. Someone who is actually hands on, and is actively researching and studying the topic. Maybe some of you who are reading this meet these criteria; if so, please reach out, because I am genuinely curious to learn more than what the school textbooks talk about. In any case, this post is going to be 3 questions I have about evolution that I don’t have an answer to, but that seem to me to be big issues for the theory as a whole. I have many other questions, but for the sake of time and simplicity, I am just going to ask 3 for now.
First one is:
Even though the earth is considered by scientists to be over 4 billion years old, is that really enough time to go from a single celled organism to a human being?
I know 4 billion years is an extremely long time, but I when I think about it statistically, it seems almost impossible to get all of the different species we have today. And not just the species we have today, but also the millions and billions of species that scientist claim have existed since the earth has been here. One of the things that boggles my mind is the fact that somehow, as mutations happened, and natural selection took place, that a male creature mutated successfully while also being near a successfully mutated female version so that they could procreate. I might would be able to understand how certain species, when separated on different continents, could gradually develop in a way that keeps them from being able to reproduce with their old counterparts, but I can’t wrap my head around the odds of a sea creature developing lungs, and the ability to walk on land, and then getting up on land to miraculously discover that there has also been a female that has evolved at the same time, and location, that he can reproduce with. Not to mention the fact that they are also able to eat off of the land, and that food has evolved and is readily available for them. Again, I’m not a scientist, but I would love to see if someone has created some sort of simulation that tries to mimic the evolutionary process over 4 billion years starting from a single celled organism. Maybe someone can point me to some good sources or articles on this.
Second on is:
Why do creatures have this desire to live and spread our genes?
I know it sounds crazy to ask why we should want to live, but if we live in a purely material world, it is odd to me that humans have this strong desire to stay alive. If our universe came into existence from absolutely nothing, and is slowly working its way towards heat death, why would a system come about that is all about survival and spreading genes? It seems to me that it would make more sense for the universe to take the path of least resistance and just stay in a state of eternal nothingness. I talk a little bit more about this here for those interested.
Third on is:
If entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics is true, then why would things evolve and get more orderly and complex over time?
When observing the world, it is easy to see that things are always falling apart and degrading over time. It doesn’t seem obvious to me that random selection moves things to a state of order and complexity. Let’s use the computer program Windows for example. Say you took the code from Windows 7 and randomly deleted or added letters and numbers. For instance, sometimes you randomly generated full lines of code, and sometimes you just generated a couple different letters and numbers to replace some letters and numbers that were already there. How long do you think it would take to go from windows 7 to windows 11? How long do you think it would take to “mutate” Windows until it turned into a Mac operating system? I’m not a statistics expert, but I imagine the odds would be astronomically low for that to happen in 4 billion years. Also, keep in mind that we could randomly change windows thousands of times a day to try and generate something better (and I doubt in a billion years you would have anything better), but genetic mutation may only happen a few times a year, or a few times in a hundred years. It seems that things always tend to move towards disorder and chaos.
What are your thoughts on this?
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