The World Is Too Complex

Forelimbs Of People, Porpoises, Bats And Horses Provide The Classic Example Of Homology In Most Textbooks. They Look Different, And Do Different Things, But Are Built Of The Same Bones. No Engineer, Starting From Scratch Each Time, Would Have Built Such Disparate Structures From The Same Parts.

All Organisms Vary, And It's Just Folk Knowledge. You Just Have To Look Around A Room Of People, And Everybody Knows That It's True. Darwin Didn't Know The Mechanism Of Heredity, But You Don't Have To. You Just Need To Know The Fact Of It.

Perhaps Randomness Is Not Merely An Adequate Description For Complex Causes That We Cannot Specify. Perhaps The World Really Works This Way, And Many Events Are Uncaused In Any Conventional Sense Of The Word. Perhaps Our Gut Feeling That It Cannot Be So Reflects Only Our Hopes And Prejudices, Our Desperate Striving To Make Sense Of A Complex And Confusing World, And Not The Ways Of Nature.

[g]enes Make Enzymes, And Enzymes Control The Rates Of Chemical Processes. Genes Do Not Make "novelty Seeking" Or Any Other Complex And Overt Behavior. Predisposition Via A Long Chain Of Complex Chemical Reactions, Mediated Through A More Complex Series Of Life's Circumstances, Does Not Equal Identification Or Even Causation.

But Our Ways Of Learning About The World Are Strongly Influenced By The Social Preconceptions And Biased Modes Of Thinking That Each Scientist Must Apply To Any Problem. The Stereotype Of A Fully Rational And Objective Scientific Method, With Individual Scientists As Logical (and Interchangeable) Robots, Is Self-serving Mythology.