Why do this you may ask? Well, I’ve come to realise that there is little point attempting to get anyone to abandon their belief system for the sake of (what appears to them to be) a minor intellectualist point. And anyway, I don’t want to be that guy. If your god makes you happy, and your not hurting anyone, I’ve got no issue there. I can, however, appeal to every bit of human reason and logic that you have to demonstrate to you that belief in evolution is not ‘the same’ as belief in divine creation. Evolution is a rational, logical process, not a superstition.

So, here goes…

Oh, one more thing. I am just a layman, my understanding of the subject comes solely from GCSE science (about 10 years ago) and a few popular science books. I welcome any corrections or further discussions.

So, again, here goes…

Evolution requires two basic assumptions: a population of replicating entities (we’ll call them Blobs), and some non-random selection process for stopping some Blobs from replicating.

These blobs simply clone themselves, we’re not going to bother with the intricacies of sexual reproduction, or the artificial randomisation in evolutionary algorithms. The selection process must be non-random as this is the guiding force of evolution, a farmer selecting for larger cows will get larger cows, an algorithm selecting for optimisation will achieve higher efficiency.

As no copying process is perfect, there will occasionally be a Blob that is slightly different from it’s parent. Over time, a population of Blobs will eventually show variety across the board. The selection process (whatever it may be) will eliminate some blobs, preventing them from replicating. The remainder of the population will continue to clone themselves (with the occasional error), and the population as a whole will move towards the ideal defined by the selection process. If only the fastest are selected, the population will get faster. If only the smallest are selected, the population will get smaller.

That is evolution in a nutshell.

…which may seem a bit far removed from “the reason for the diversity of life on earth”, but it’s not really. In the natural world, the selection process is the attainment of resources, If you don’t succeed in getting food, you die. And there are many different food resources out there each requiring specialist abilities to take advantage of. The natural world allows for life* to diversify and specialise in surviving on some of the resources available. Don’t forget too that life too is a resource to be consumed, which inevitably some organisms evolved to take advantage of. so there are actually many different ‘selection pressures’ driving evolution in different directions.

Evolution is also useful in fields other than the natural sciences, the basic principles of evolution have been knowingly put to use in industry, creating optimisation algorithms for complex machinery; like aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and nuclear reactors. These control systems have far too many variables to exhaustively explore all the configurations, so evolutionary principles have been applied to find the settings for optimum operation.

I don’t mind that you don’t believe that evolution ‘actually happened’. I don’t mind if you choose to believe that it was all made by some divine being,  I don’t want to take that from you. But evolution is not impossible. I hope to have shown that from a few basic assumptions, what logically follows is a powerful, beautiful, creative process.

*if you haven’t worked it out by now, that’s the Blobs