The Thing That Defines A

If We Want To Postulate A Deity Capable Of Engineering All The Organized Complexity In The World, Either Instantaneously Or By Guiding Evolution, That Deity Must Have Been Vastly Complex In The First Place. The Creationist, Whether A Naive Bible-thumper Or An Educated Bishop, Simply Postulates An Already Existing Being Of Prodigious Intelligence And Complexity. If We Are Going To Allow Ourselves The Luxury Of Postulating Organized Complexity Without Offering An Explanation, We Might As Well Make A Job Of It And Simply Postulate The Existence Of Life As We Know It!

The Messages That Dna Molecules Contain Are All But Eternal When Seen Against The Time Scale Of Individual Lifetimes. The Lifetimes Of Dna Messages Give Or Take A Few Mutations Are Measured In Units Ranging From Millions Of Years To Hundreds Of Millions Of Years; Or, In Other Words, Ranging From 10,000 Individual Lifetimes To A Trillion Individual Lifetimes. Each Individual Organism Should Be Seen As A Temporary Vehicle, In Which Dna Messages Spend A Tiny Fraction Of Their Geological Lifetimes.

Humans Are Just A Very, Very Small Part Of The Panoply Of Life, And It Is Arguable That In A Certain Sense, Humans Have Emancipated Themselves From Darwinian Selection.

I Think We Have Got To Start Again And Go Right Back To First Principles. The Argument I Shall Advance, Surprising As It May Seem Coming From The Author Of The Earlier Chapters, Is That, For An Understanding Of The Evolution Of Modern Man, We Must Begin By Throwing Out The Gene As The Sole Basis Of Our Ideas On Evolution. If There Is Only One Creator Who Made The Tiger And The Lamb, The Cheetah And The Gazelle, What Is He Playing At? Is He A Sadist Who Enjoys Spectator Blood Sports? ... Is He Manuvering To Maximize David Attenborough's Television Ratings?

Today The Theory Of Evolution Is About As Much Open To Doubt As The Theory That The Earth Goes Round The Sun.