Evolution All Around You

The other day I was waiting at the bus stop for, what else, a bus, and I couldn't help but notice the deep grooves that had occurred in the asphalt right at the spot where the driver's side front tire of the large vehicle came to a stop so many times each day.  "That", I proclaimed inside my brain, "is evolution!"  The small changes made to this section of concrete would not be visible to any person, even if they stood there, watching, for days or weeks.  It would take months or years before you'd truly begin to see the grooves that are so deep today. 

This is just a rather simple explanation of how evolution exists around us everyday.  It's the beginning of an object lesson that could go on nearly for eternity.  Evolution is not only the way in which humans or animals or life came to be but how everything has come to be.  All anyone has to do to witness the evidence of evolution is to observe and analyze the world they live in.  Soon it will become clear that everything evolves, everything is subject to the mechanism of natural selection and nothing comes into existence through a single "design".

After you're done staring at the street then look up into the sky.  There you can't see (but I promise it exists) the billions of practically lifeless planets with extreme conditions that scientists are nearly certain could not be inhabited by intelligent life.  But for every one of those planets there are more than a billion more that we can never observe, and there were and will be billions more before the end of time and space.  Based on that we can infer that there also are billions of other universes that do exist and have existed or will exist which humans will never be able to fathom let alone prove.

The universe and universes evolve so slowly, so inefficiently but on such an epic scale (all entirely relevant to us) that we have for our observation the remnants of the "losers" (or future winners) of natural selection floating around us. By exploring the cosmos we get to learn the incredible number of misses natural selection endures for every precious hit.  Exploring the cosmos also makes it easier to try and comprehend on how big a scale, in matters of space and time, the course of evolution is operating.  We are just one species hoping to survive to the end of an infinitesimal epoch on a pre-teen planet that lives among a sea of trillions of floating objects made up of infinite numbers of matter variations. 

The universe is 13.77 billion years old.  Modern humans evolved no more than 300,000 years ago.  Mathematically speaking, there have most likely been at least a million different planets and millions more different species in existence with similar or greater intelligence than humans in just the last two or three billion years of this universe's existence.  On earth alone there will certainly be at least thousands more species of equal or greater intelligence than us before this planet finally dies in about 40 billion years.  I wonder sometimes what they'll say about us.

We've been around for a few hundred thousand years and so has perhaps our most identifying trait.  That is why the origin of language is so hard to define.  It is also why language existed for exponentially longer periods of time than English as something many people would not even associate with spoken words today.  But even from what we do understand about the history of language we can see proof that language has evolved and not only that, but that it has evolved without any single driving force or design. 

Every language today, regardless of how young or old, has evolved from the same utterances spoken in East Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.  As humanity spread across the globe, so did language.  Language adapted to its environment and to any new obstacles it faced.  Many more words and languages have been discarded than are in existence today and some hold on by the thread of cultural identity for their survival.  As time goes on the ones that survive for even a short period are those that are the most effective, the most adaptable or simply the ones which can best fill a specific niche.  There is no design, and no superior being, each language happens naturally and every language (including English) becomes inferior or irrelevant over time.

Language can evolve quickly because it is not a physical thing.  Physical things have been known to evolve much more slowly, but that trend has changed significantly since the Industrial Revolution.  Like the Cambrian (an epoch of great variation in the evolution of life) did for life, the Industrial Revolution led to an exponential increase in the number of new physical objects that humans could use to make their lives apparently easier and more comfortable.  Often history prefers to attribute each of these objects to a single inventor, but like language, no single person has ever invented any physical object in the history of humans. 

Even objects that seem to almost blatantly have a single designer can always be attributed to scores of minds that existed at the time of its "creation" or in the centuries of logical thought that had previously elapsed.  When he "invented" his engine in 1893, Rudolf Diesel didn't have to first design the wheel or the cylinder.  He didn't have to develop a method to cast iron or drill for petroleum.  Regardless of whether Rudolf Diesel lived or not,  a device would have come into being to fill the same mechanical niche that the Diesel engine continues filling (however inefficiently) to this day.  Innovations are not the inventions of individuals but the inevitable fillings of voids created by our ever evolving environment by the amalgamation of ideas and innovations from an innumerable assortment of minds.

That leads us to the greatest evidence of evolution before our eyes of them all.  Fully aware of how few Americans, or humans in general, to be fair, ever ponder the cosmos or etymology or even contemporary history, I present to you an opportunity to understand the nature of evolution by doing what you are forced to do every day.  The human environment is about 99% society.  Society is a product of evolution.  Society, and when I say society I mean everything physical or metaphysical that is uniquely human in nature, evolved along with humans.  Humans could not have evolved into the beings we are today without society as we know it today, evolving right alongside us.

Skinny jeans are a product of evolution.  No one invented skinny jeans, no one declared that skinny jeans are the hottest trend and no one will be able to save skinny jeans from their inevitable extinction.  That is evolution.  Everyday, all around us.  Society, skinny jeans and all, exists to fill a niche and adapts as quickly as the environment that is a result of it.  Society does not create the environment and the environment does not create society, they each adapt to each other mutually like a flu virus and an immune system.  Their only drive, their only purpose, is survival.  The skinny jeans will appear to hold on for as long as they can but one day, without notice, flared jeans may one day take their place, imploring us all to ponder why we ever wore skinny jeans in the first place.

Purpose is the purpose of society.  As humans evolved the ability to comprehend our own existence a great niche was created.  This niche was the necessary (far more necessary back then than now) distraction from the, for all accounts, pointless nature of human existence.  Out of this void grew the great and unfathomable complexity of human society.  Every aspect of it exists to distract each and every one of us from the fact that no true purpose can ever be known, no origin can be discovered, to distract us from our absurdly small existence in the scope of all things, let alone the scope of what has just come into being by the expansion of countless universes since I began writing this sentence.

While some may find this depressing, personally, I find it amazing.  This apparent nihilism is not a reason to shut our eyes.  That's what people do when they say that we were designed by some unknown intelligence.  Instead let's ignore the artificial distraction that has evolved alongside us.  Let's do the unthinkable and buck evolution (which is not what we'd be doing, we'd merely be evolving further) and proclaim ourselves no longer in need of the adaptation to ignorance that is society.  Let's exist not for now but for tomorrow.  We are capable of passing down so much more than genetic material to our progeny.  If you really find evolution to be so offensive than stop letting it determine who you are by going through life semi-conscious and start evolving on your own into the person you know you can be.