Editor�s Page
Evolution � Accidentally on Purpose?
There is a card trick in which the sucker is allowed to call each card � red or black � in a 52-card deck, which are placed face down after each call in a red or a black pile � by the trickster of course. When all the cards are turned face-up, the sucker is astonished to find that he was right 100% of the time, thereby violating the law of averages. He should have been wrong approximately 50% of the time. It�s done by simple sleight of hand which anyone can accomplish with a little practice. And no, I�m not going to tell you how.
If you flip a coin a hundred times, you can be sure that heads will come up very close to 50% of the time and tails the other 50% - despite the fact that the result of each toss is random. You would be very surprised if it were otherwise, for it is the nature of things. The odds on each flip are 50 � 50. Although it is possible that heads or tails will come up three times in a row, it will equalize more and more the more times you flip. �
Yes, a �law� is involved � the law of averages or probability. The accidental result of a flip becomes an inevitability once the number of flips reaches a certain threshold.
Where did this law come from? No one invented it; it was discovered as a built-in part of the nature of things, as were so many other discoveries about nature. It fits seamlessly into the anthropic principle (if the world were not exactly as it is, we would not be here). Analogically, if the law of averages did not exist, the world would be chaotic indeed. What if all humans were male � or female? No progeny.
That evolution exists is undeniable. The questions are how and even why. (Science, it is said, only investigates How, and not Why.) Natural scientists claim that it is the result of the oxymoronic �natural selection�, i.e., random (accidental) mutations, the result of which is that the fittest examples of a species survive and the weak die out. Now let�s analogize an original mutation with our first random coin toss, which turned up heads � and project it hundreds of millions of years into the past and make it contemporary with the first mutation. With each subsequent mutation another coin is flipped. We know the result of the millions of coin flips: fifty percent heads, fifty percent tails. We also know the result of the mutations: the human being : fifty percent male, fifty percent female. �������
If that imaginary boy who started the flipping hundreds of millions of years ago had been aware of the probability effect, he would have known that the result is inevitable; if the cell that mutated had known that his progeny would be humans he might have pressed the self-destruct button. But he didn�t and I, sitting here typing, constitute living proof of the fact that both the law of averages and the theory of evolution are true � and that their results are inevitable. Of course a big difference is that the coin flipper achieves his goal in a hundred flips, which takes about five minutes, whereas evolution requires eons and countless mutations to achieve man .
The two more or less competing theories on evolution are �intelligent design� and what I would call �philosophical Darwinism�. (I trust the advocates of fundamentalist creationism � �God created the world in seven days� � will not be too unhappy at being omitted from the shortlist, for they at least avoid ridicule.) In order to determine which has the most punch, let�s return to the coin flipping experiment and flip it into an analogy. The result of the first flip seems random, or accidental. On the other hand, it is the first step on the journey to a hundred (or more), and as such is an integral part of �the law�. In this sense one could say that it is not at all accidental; nor are the following 99 � for the outcome is inevitable. Yet philosophical Darwinism would have us believe that the simplest form of life, the cell (which, however, isn�t really that simple), which came into existence by an accidental mixture of chemicals, then accidentally flipped itself countless times over the eons to result in thinking beings such as Plato and Einstein and Darwin, and artistic minds such as Mozart, Rafael or Shakespeare. This, to me, is at least as absurd as fundamentalist creationism.
That a coin will land 50% heads and 50% tails, that a randomly dealt deck of cards will be 50% red and 50% black, that the human race (as well as all the other living kingdoms) will be 50% male and 50% female � not to mention all the other laws of nature and the cosmos � were pre-conceived, is as obvious that everything built by man, be it house or a nuclear warhead, were pre-conceived�by him.
Some will certainly object that by using the flipping of a coin as an analogy for the very complex multi-millennium process of evolution I am over-simplifying, and being, as it were, flippant. They have a point. However, I would like to point out that perhaps I too have a point. Jorge Luis Borges writes in The Zahir that:
In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or penknife has scratched the letters N T and the number two; the date stamped on the face is 1929. (In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, Zahir was a tiger; in Java a blind man in the Sukarta mosque who was stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah ordered thrown into the sea; in the prisons of Mahdi, in 1892, a small compass, wrapped in a shred of cloth from a turban that Rudolf Karl von Slatin touched; in the synagogue of Cordoba, according to Zotenberg, a vein in the marble of one of the twelve hundred pillars; in the Jewish quarter of Tetuan, the bottom of a well.)let us then imagine, then, that the coin in our thought experiment is a twenty centavo one which, by the way, is no longer in circulation, but still exists, if only in Borges's story and our experiment.
And later, in the same story Borges says:
In the deserted hours of the night I am still able to walk through the streets. Dawn often surprises me upon a bench in the Plaza Garay, thinking (or trying to think) about that passage in the Asrar Nama where it is said that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil. I link that pronouncement to this fact: In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing anymore. I long to travel that path.
Perhaps I will succeed in wearing away the Zahir by thinking and re-thinking about it; perhaps behind the coin is God.Perhaps...or perhaps it's the trickster who, like the magician who makes black and red playing cards equal, makes many things seem to be other than they really are - a kind of Mephistopheles of modern materialism.�� ���������
Frank Thomas Smith�
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