I was disappointed in the PBS “Evolution” mini-series. I think they’d had done better to let Dawkins, Gould, and Dennett pass the mic among themselves and recorded the conversation. And then the filmmakers were bending over backwards not to offend the deists. Cripes, didn’t any of these people read Kant: religion in one box, science in other box. The boxes do not mix.
Anyhow, Paul Ford has a great essay on how hard it is to talk about evolution without turning it into a story, with a plot and narration.
I like to think of evolution as a process of erosion, like the one that created the Grand Canyon, not as one of construction. Yes, the human body and the spirals of DNA are miraculously complex adaptions - but the adaptions were not put there; they were not added but left as various things happened.
Each adaptive structure is a compilation of small changes, and each of these changes is what was left when other structures were washed away in competition with other organisms, be they virii or tigers, or by bad weather; all the tigers and bad weather merge into a river of actions and pressures running through time, sometimes trickling, sometimes raging and flooding, but always moving. And that is a process, but it’s eternal, unchanging, like a machine; natural selection is no more a “story” than ice becoming water, then becoming steam is a story.
