With classes starting up again, I think it is about time to dig up the highlight of my academic career. Yes, yes, I am only halfway through my Bachelor's degree, but I assure you - what lies within this humble internet publication will blow your mind and I shall never top it. I'd like to warn you first that I received an astounding 72/100 on this dissertation. Obviously, all great works are underappreciated since I should have been handed a diploma in return for this work of art.
For as facetious as I am with this introduction, I can only wish I was kidding about actually submitting this as an assignment in an honors course, no less. Enjoy!
Does evolution make big changes? Well, it makes changes - that much we know for sure [1]. “For sure” being a loose phrase because who really knows anything is true “for sure”? And then there’s the relativity of the word “big.” An adult is big to a baby, a monster truck is big to an adult, a shipping boat is big to a monster truck, the ocean is big to a shipping boat, the solar system is big to the ocean, and the universe is big to the solar system, ad infinitum. There’s no denying that each of these things is big in their own way, it just has to do with the scale that you’re looking at.
From generation to generation, the changes that evolution makes are not large at all. It takes years to even recognize that a definitive change has occurred. Not to mention that these changes took place so long ago that the only evidence we have lies in an incomplete fossil record [8]. Even the relatively recent changes that we can more accurately track show incredibly slow progress, such as the transformations in human skull shape [5].
However, jumping across millions of years may show changes so large that some might argue that no change in one species has occurred and the two organisms are entirely different species made by design. It isn’t a perfect simile, but you can look at it in the way that businesses run their operations [7] or in the way one might collect lost change from the street. You have your rules and regulations, employees, marketing strategies, and methods for accountability (among other things) in a business. If you change something in one area, it creates a domino effect and the final product – or most recent evolution – may be drastically changed from the original. Or if you keep picking up pennies and other coins and add them to a jar at the end of the day, eventually that jar will be full. Unless you go diving for coins in the fountain at some mall, that jar is not going to be filled in one day. In fact, there will be many days and even weeks where you might not contribute anything but if you keep at it (much as time keeps on passing no matter how much we might wish for it to slow down or stop) then eventually you will have a jar full of change with which you can invest in a new hobby.
The largest indisputable (arguably, if we’re being politically correct – after all, everything is arguable) change that evolution has made lies not in the changes that have occurred physically in the species of this world and others (it’s possible), but in the cognitive change of the minds of man accepting the theory of evolution. For years after Charles Darwin [2] and other scientists with similar notions began advocating for evolution, nay-sayers have said “Nay!” (as they are wont to do) [3,4,6]. Similarly, neigh-sayers said “Neigh!” and still do because the neigh-sayers are horses and evolution have not yet brought them the capability of speech in a way that humans understand nor has evolution gifted humans with the ability to understand horse-speak. Wow, what a tangent. Can you tell I’m running on little sleep and caffeinated drinks? (To omit or commit to these last few sentences is a decision that will forever haunt me.) Okay, back on topic now. At the dawn of this theory, many people were hesitant to believe in such a blasphemous idea such as anything other than that everything is the way it is because some greater being made it like that. What they seemed to forget is that perhaps this almighty creator meant for evolution to also exist because who would really want the job of creating thousands of creatures all with slightly different capabilities that either benefit or inhibit the creature? No one. This creator would have wanted an auto-fill feature such as evolution. This creator supposedly created everything and so could very well have made such a thing.
