I don’t remember the exact day when I actually understood what the term “Evolution” means in the Darwinian sense. But I remember that it was a day.

Unlike the other pieces that constitute the largely incomplete knowledge baggage that I carry, understanding Evolution was not a graduate process. It was literally a click; a sudden revelation before which everything about this theory was ridiculous, dark and even sinister.

And then one day: Eureka! If there is a handful of men that could be described as the greatest scientist minds of all times, Charles Darwin is definitely one of them.

As a child growing in a non-secular society where superstition still rules over people’s intellect, Charles Darwin was introduced to me in an atmosphere of rather bad publicity: there was the deluded man who believed that once a monkey gave birth to a human baby from whom we all descend. Put in these terms, his ideas felt of the type that could only be preached by a crazy and wicked ignoramus.

Until I was old enough to read about them myself.

Then I understood the three simple elements that when put together, can elegantly solve the greatest mystery of all times; Life:

1. Growth with Reproduction and Inheritance: the process by which a certain form of life creates copies of itself to ensure its own growth and continuity to at least one more generation.
2. Variability: the imperfections in reproduction through which inaccurate copies of a given form of life are introduced into the next generation (mutations), thus creating diversity.
3. Struggle for Life and Natural selection: the process through which those forms of life that are better equipped to succeed at reproduction are the ones that get preserved through generations at the expense of those that are the least.

How brilliant!

A very simple principle yet powerful enough to explain that from star dust consciousness can arise!¹

The many elaborate and diverse ways of adaptation that can be witnessed in Fauna and Flora, were for so long mistaken for being carefully and purposely designed by a supreme being. And for a good reason; almost every feature of every living creature is useful in some way to its bearer. As amazing and mysterious as it may be to think of a higher order that pulls the knobs and puts the clockwork into action, it is by far more inspiring to ponder the fact that the higher order is but a set of simple laws of Nature.

And not only Life is explained, but also Death. No form of life could have ever been made so perfect from the first attempt: that would indeed be very unlikely and highly improbable. Death has to occur because it is Nature’s way of trying again, in order to come up with the best designs through a continuing cycle of trials and errors. The most brilliant engineers on the planet can certainly appreciate the power of this technique!

To allude that the sheer complexity of life is a proof of an unnatural aspect in the process of creation is to seriously underestimate Nature.

And not only biological life is concerned. Think of life as an abstract concept, a dynamic system that can exist in different levels of complexity; as long as its “design” is constantly subjected to some form of a “goodness” test, natural selection is bound to guide its evolution. Once I was able to grasp this, I could start to imagine the wide range of disciplines to which the Darwinian principles may apply.

Our human language, our sense of beauty, our political, economic and social systems, our culture in general and even our religions, if examined closely, all exhibit aspects that can most rationally be explained by Darwinian-like evolution.

To cite but one example, social studies have shown that local groups of people tend to come up with their own unwritten set of rules in order to organize common interests among each other, often ignoring the state laws². This can be explained when we realize that under certain conditions the interest of the whole group is favored by a ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy of cooperation among its members. The question remains how this has become intuitive to humans? Some of it may be encoded in our DNA and constitute our natural inclination to altruism, but most of it can be understood through a tradition of trials and errors or the so called “lessons from those who came before us”. People learn, through their interactions with each other, what works and what doesn’t, and those ideas that work are passed along and become part of the traditions.

It is awe inspiring to contemplate how such a principle is so simply formulated and yet so powerful in its consequences and so general in its capacity to explain a wide range of phenomena spanning across many disciplines.

As Charles Darwin said in the closing statements of his famous book that started it all:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. […] Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, […], from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”.
Charles Darwin — On the Origin of Species, 1859

1. Research suggests that in early Earth, Life would have spawned from autocatalytic networks of increasingly complex chemical reactions. In a nutshell, these are chemical reactions that produce their own catalysts and therefore are able to self-regenerate. We can think of these networks as the ancestor of Life, and the process that led to DNA-based life from rudimentary self-sustained chemistry to resemble the process of evolution by natural selection. ↩︎
2. See for example: Robert C. Ellickson — Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes, 1991 ↩︎