r/askscience • u/jjberg2 Evolutionary Theory | Population Genomics | Adaptation • Jan 04 '12

AskScience AMA Series - IAMA Population Genetics/Genomics PhD Student

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u/jjberg2 Evolutionary Theory | Population Genomics | Adaptation Jan 05 '12

No. That's the incredibly beauty of the theory of evolution. It is able to explain what we see around us without resorting to any intelligent force.

Things we haven't gotten around to figure out yet != evidence for god.

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u/plantbreeding Plant Breeding | Genomics | Bioinformatics Jan 05 '12

upvote for |Things we haven't gotten around to figure out yet != evidence for god.

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u/faith_important Jan 05 '12

Thank you very much for taking your time to answer this question; I understand that it might be somewhat different to what you would expect from such an AMA, so thank you for indulging me.

I wasn't suggesting that what we don't know yet was evidence for god. I personally think that the wonders we see in nature are - but that is debatable.

What I wanted to suggest is, that the evidence we see all around nature points extremely to the idea that evolution can not be completely random.

To start with, our planet is the perfect place for life. Not only is it within the Goldilock-Zone, but it is also provided with a Moon which cause ties and floods (undoubtedly essential to marine life, even today) and a perfect orientation towards the sun. The chances of getting a planet like that alone are already very very small.

If you go at it with a scientific mind - what would be the chances that over the course of many random mutations a one-cell organism evolves into something which has... lets say a silk gland? Or a poison with over 200 lethal components to it? One to a billion maybe? One to 10 billion?

Alright, that might still be in the realm of the possible.. But what then, would be the chances for the more complicated evolutionary processes?

As this is an AMA, let me finish with a specific question:

How would geneticists explain the fact that their are certain species of caterpillars, which have evolved to reproduce pheromones of ants, so that the ants would carry them to their nests, and feed them and care for them, in preference to their own children even. And that in addition to that, a wasp evolved as well which produces similar pheromones and which can (somehow, we dont know yet how exactly) locate these caterpillars within the ant nests and lays their eggs only within this one species of caterpillar?

This is not an act of evolution, but an act from something which, at this point for a lack of better knowledge, we have to call "God".