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WHY DO TREES, FROGS, AND PEOPLE EXIST?
by
Tom Horn

It’s a miracle that we are here at all. Our very best researches tell us that the whole world has been going down the tubes from the very beginning. It’s true. As far as we can tell from examining processes that we can understand, the whole of existence is sliding into formlessness. This can be demonstrated by thinking of a snooker table with all the balls set up in their initial pattern. The cue ball is struck and all the coloreds are scattered. If three wound up in a straight line, we would call it ‘a fluke’. If several wound up in some kind of pattern we might call it ‘a chance in a million’. If they all wound up in their original complex arrangement we would feint with disbelief. What generally happens, of course, is that all the balls will wind up in a pattern-less state. So it appears that cause and effect processes, operating under known scientific laws, invariably lead to a more random grouping of their parts. If any patterns do occur, these are chance events that are quickly reabsorbed into the march towards a featureless condition.

Now imagine that you put some chemicals in a jar, shook them up and then waited. Eventually, when all interactions had occurred, the mix would have wound down into a dead state with a temperature everywhere the same. Is the universe like this? Are we really on the road to a dead featureless condition? This trend has been going on since the world began and yet trees, frogs and people have come to exist. Recognizable patterns of living structure, together with routines of behavior, are everywhere. Is each of them simply a ‘chance in a million’? What are the chances of finding say a transistor radio by the side of the road that, by some lucky clash of materials, had somehow made itself? The chances are pretty slim I’d say. And yet we, as human beings, are much more complex than a transistor radio. How come we exist?

Enter evolutionary theory. First there was a blob of living protoplasm floating in some primeval swamp. How it got there, the theory cannot demonstrate. However, Darwin’s theory has a lot to say on how blobs of protoplasm turned themselves into recognizable living things. The whole trend towards increasingly complex pattern and structure is said to have occurred through the mechanisms of ‘the survival of the fittest’ and ‘cumulative natural selection’. Let’s join the evolutionary chain at some arbitrary point. A gene within an animal suddenly mutates. It is a chance event that may have changed an ear or an eye or a leg. The change may have improved the chances of survival for that animal. This being the case, the genetic mutation would be passed on to offspring and they too would be better equipped to survive. Those without the genetic modification would tend to become extinct. Further chance genetic mutations may occur and those that furthered survival advantages would be added to those that had gone before. So here we are today with a complex bodily structure attributable to the sum of uncountable chance mutations within our ancestors. Without these random mutations, I would still be a blob of protoplasm, possibly dreaming of a future time when I could write computer articles.

So evolutionary theory makes our existence all very explainable – provided you sweep ‘time’ under the carpet. If you could liken the history of everything to one hour, then living things have been in existence for some seconds only. Would there have been enough time for random genetic mutations to add up from protoplasmic formlessness to our complex bodies? Well, I’ve heard it said that a sober monkey tapping randomly at a typewriter would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare, provided bits of matching type were added to previous bits. However, we know that the whole process would take longer than the age of the universe. Since we are more complex than the works of Shakespeare, I think we can safely say that there would not have been enough time for evolutionary theory to be the sole explanation for complex living structures.

We are left with the unavoidable conclusion that parts of the world of everyday life are unexplainable, unknowable. The fact of trees, frogs and people is surprising and will remain so.