In the beginning…

In the beginning, the Earth was cold and the seas as barren as deep space. The primordial tides rose and fell against small, lonely patches of wasteland. The oceans stretched on and on and on, and there was no sound save for the thresh of the wind and the omnipresent roll of thunder rattling in the distance…two billion years before an ear existed to hear them.

And then one day—a day like any before it, a day that seemed almost stupid with its regularity—a very peculiar thing happened. It wasn't an unheard of event exactly, it had happened in other places on other worlds, but this was the first day it happened on this planet. On that day, not far from the surface of the ocean, a microscopic single-celled organism gained the miraculous (?) ability to divide and reproduce itself. Not long after that, another single-celled organism gained the same ability. Then another, and another, and another… The conditions were perfect to permit it. Time passed, and the single-celled organisms became soft, multiple-celled organisms. These, in turn, joined with others to become larger, more complex organisms, eventually leading to the formation of primitive water-dwelling invertebrates.

These creatures were well adapted to the ancient seas, and they flourished. Over a short period of time—perhaps 1 million years or so—they multiplied so many times that hosts of mutations inevitably occurred. The most successful mutations adapted to their environment and blossomed in that place. The creatures mutated further, and again, the most successful lived on, eventually becoming a class of creatures we might today call fish. This was about 365 million years ago.

Mutation and selection worked its magic, and the fish eventually developed better fins for swimming and better jaws for catching prey. The ones we call crossopterygians developed a primitive lung in addition to their gills. By pure chance, some of these crossopterygians were born with mutated legs, which allowed them to waddle onto the land formed by the receding seas, opening up for them a whole new habitat. These creatures existed on the tiny insects flying at the edge of the water. Time passed, and they mutated further into antediluvian amphibians.

So it went that the fish begat the amphibian, the amphibian begat the reptile, the reptile begat the mammal, and from small, ambiguous mammals came the primates, from the primitive primates came the apes and monkeys, from the apes came australopithecus, homo erectus, homo habilis, the Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man, and finally homo sapiens: The modern man was born.

Half a billion years of evolution… and at every step of the way, mutation and selection flowed through life like water through rock, carving away the useless, the inadaptable, the weak. Creatures that were not strong or ruthless enough to thrive did not get a chance to reproduce.

And now, to the surprise of many, modern man has escaped evolution. Survival of the fittest no longer applies to our species, at least not in the manner that it has in the past. Physical mutations no longer affect the carrying on of our genes to the next generation. We now have the choice of whether to reproduce or not. Sex is a leisure activity; children a financial decision. Neither hold the instinctual/survival obligation they once did.

When seen on a scale like this, the worries of our everyday life seem utterly insignificant. Who really cares if this or that project gets done today, next week, or next century? Does it even matter? In the space of 70 years—a human lifetime; a micro-blink of the evolutionary eye—what real meaning could anyone’s life really hold? Who really cares if I do or don’t have children, go to work today or stay home, pay my bills or set fire to my credit cards, live, die, kill, be killed… do anything at all? Does it really matter?

Religion, too, takes on a strange, artificial pallor when seen through the evolutionary lens. Where is there a place for God if life is purely mutation and selection, a set of coincidental circumstances occurring with scientific regularity when the conditions permit?

I’m not the first to ponder these issues, and I’m sure I won’t be the last either. Anyone? Is anyone else out there?