entropy not mentioned once

The Origin of Species Notes

It isn't for nothing (or mere lack of imagination) that I'm ripping off the title of Darwin's famous treatise. This is this indeed the next step after the origin of life on the twisty road to the origins of Text. It's also important to realize that Darwin's work continues to have a profound impact on our view of the concept of the evolutionary development of life. This is right and appropriate: Darwin's seminal, visionary treatise is a work of genius that deserves its place on the Essential Shelf of science. But one should not forget that it was written a long time ago. We know many many things now that are inconsistent or at least wildly tangential to Darwin's original conceptions of evolutionary development through natural selection. Genes, chromosomes, the double helix and DNA, jumping genes, viral vectoring of genetic information, the evidence that important cellular components developed through seperate genetic/evolutionary pathways and entered the modern cellular structure in a symbiotic relationship through mechanisms unknown, carbon dating and the establishment of a partial geological timeline based on the finer points of radioactive decay physics, theories of fast intermittent evolution, introns, all these and a hell of a lot more have complicated the picture long since Darwin shuffled off the mortal coil and became part of the fossil record. This doesn't even approach some of the wierder arenas of thought, the possibility of the seeds of evolution, like the seeds of life, coming from outer space, for example. And as always, divine intervention, in the form of the evolutionist/creationist fusion of divinely guided evolution, lurks in the margins, for some religiously minded scientists (or scientifically minded believers) an answer to the teeming questions that life creates.

Even so, when trying to apply the principle of evolution to very complex issues like human development, it is not unusual to see people behaving as if the question of evolution was still as simple as in Darwin's day, a slow, progressive, and continual process of development through chance mutation, "selective" breeding and survival of the fittest. I'm no biologist so I can't give you the cutting edge of current thought. Barring some harrowing advance in the prevention of aging, I don't particularly expect to see the core question of the thermodynamic basis of the development of a complex and constantly transforming global network of interacting living systems out of a presumably non-living prehistoric earth answered in my lifetime. But a failure to recognize the complexity of the question and the interconnectedness of the issues involved leads to an pseudo-scientific interpretation of human history that is as fantastical and crude as the most primitive examples of the religious, spiritual, or metaphysical interpretations of the same, for which most science-fixated observers have so much contempt. That is to say, it's not to say there isn't an element of the truth in it... But it hain't the whole picture by any stretch.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.