Animals are complicated things. This should not be surprising to anyone with even a cursory understanding of how an animal functions in order to maintain its state of life. In fact, we animals are more complicated than any other thing in the known universe. Take any random, functioning human body, and it will make even the best Boeing 777X look like nothing more than a jigsaw puzzle. We are not perfect machines- otherwise we would have been able to survive without food, water, or any external energy source- but we're still pretty well-designed machines, nevertheless.
However, this begs the question of how this complex design came up in the first place. Who, or rather, what, is responsible for the complexity of the human body? What are the forces of nature that have interacted for so long, and so well, that life was the result? We and every other animal with a functioning brain are independent thinkers who can make decisions and think for ourselves. We are not just lumps of meat-- we are machines that can come up with ideas, put them into action, and learn from our mistakes to produce better ideas. What was the idea, then, that came up with us?
Let's go back for a moment to my previous example of a Boeing 777X- or let's just say airplanes in general. Anyone can say with confidence that airplanes are complex things, with several working parts joined together that let them take off, fly through the air, and land. They are complex enough that they require multiple people to study them and understand how their different parts work before joining them together. One person alone cannot design an airplane from scratch- a wing specialist will have to build a wing, an engine specialist will build an engine, and several other engineers will build different working parts of the machine, so that they can be put together as one object later on.
That being said, it should be appreciated that we know where airplanes come from. Their origins are not a mystery to us. The same can be said for other complex manmade things, such as cars, refrigerators, microwaves, and such. However, we do not yet know for certain where animals and complex biological machines came from, mostly because time travel hasn't been invented yet.
Something else that should be appreciated is that our origins are important and deserve a special explanation. No one should read this article and think, "But who CARES where we come from?" We should care, because it is important. Biologists who study evolution make it their business to do so, just as I'm doing so by writing this article. We are complex, but who designed us? We know where cars come from, so who or what was the engineer who made us? The Reverend William Paley explains this quite beautifully in his writing, from which I have quoted below-
"In crossing a beach, suppose I hit my foot against a stone. Suppose I were asked how the stone came to be there. I might possibly answer that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever. It would be difficult to show that this answer is absurd.
But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be asked how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given--that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there--would be an acceptable answer."
Paley, here, is basically telling a simple object apart from a complex object- a stone from a watch. He shows that he can explain the stone's existence by saying, "It's always been there!" But that's not the case with a watch, because he understands that watches are complicated. They are made of several small parts that work together to do something- in this case, tell the time.
Now, some of you might say, "But stones are complicated too! They're made of atoms and molecules which we hardly understand!" I agree with that; we don't understand small particles. However, we must appreciate here that any construction of small atoms and molecules could be easily called a stone. It doesn't matter HOW the atoms are arranged- any arrangement could be called a stone just as easily as any other. However, in a watch, it DOES matter.
Most of the time, you cannot just throw different parts of a watch together and get a functioning watch. However, you can get a stone if you throw its atoms and molecules together. The stone will look different but it is still a stone. This is NOT the case for a watch! A random assembly of a watch's different parts will not be a watch, most of the time. It will just be a random assembly of a watch's parts.
Paley understood this, and I have tried to make you understand it as well. Watches are complex because their parts need to be put together in a certain way to make them. Similarly, we animals need to be built in a certain way to be called animals, and to be able to do everything we can do. Our hearts need to be within our ribcages, our brains need to be within our skulls, and so on. To understand how we were constructed this way is the root of all our origins.
The current theory, of course, is natural selection. The naturalist Charles Darwin suggests that there is no engineer who designed us-- rather, we were simple materials that combined together to survive and compete against each other to continue living. We are not products of design; we just came into existence because we competed and evolved against other living creatures. No one said, "Okay, now will assemble some parts together to make humans, who will then make other humans." No one designed us- we just evolved to be this way.
Natural selection did not design us for any specific purpose. We only evolved to survive best, in our own different ways and in different places. However, natural selection is not random. We did not evolve a hundred different ways for no reason at all. We evolved to survive, and it is survival that we partake in.
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