It’s a snow day here in Calgary. Great big sloppy flakes are falling, but it’s not cold or windy and the end result is some very pretty scenery and some very slippery walking. I had a good sleep and woke up in a great mood, and for some reason it’s made me feel very good to be alive.

When I feel like this, I often have random thoughts that burst into my head and make me go on weird tangents. My first thought this morning was a rhyming couplet that will become the basis of a song for my not-so-rockabilly rockabilly band about the day I had my vasectomy. But that’s not the thought that got me to blogging this morning.

I was thinking about the ridiculous arguments against evolution, and how most if not all of those arguments come from a near complete misunderstanding of how evolution works. Now, I’m not Richard Dawkins and don’t have the breadth of understanding that someone who’s spent their life working on the topic has, but I understand and have a working knowledge of the concept.

One of those arguments really started me off today. They say that if evolution was real, why don’t we see it happening? This has always struck me as a ludicrous statement. We don’t see it happening because evolution is a gloriously slow process. It’s not like one morning a monkey had a baby and it was a people, the process is much slower than that.

We are all transitional species. Evolution is a continual and gradual process, and in time our descendents will vary as drastically from what today we call humanity in the same way that we vary dramatically from our ancestors. Some changes occur more obviously to us due to the amount of time between generations, such as fruit flies, brown deer mice, and coliform bacteria. But a generation in people terms is a much longer process, and as such the changes are slower and less noticeable.

Inside all of us is a transitional fossil. In a million years, those of us whose skeletons have remained preserved will be considered another link in the chain of evolution by life forms we cannot begin to imagine. This is a beautiful idea to me, the knowledge that I am a part of a larger tapestry of change. My children and my children’s children are a piece of that, and we have no way of knowing just how those changes will manifest, what adaptations will be successful, and what adaptations will fail.

Remember that video with the guy opening up the jar of peanut butter? And he says that because new life does not emerge when we do so, obviously evolution isn’t real? This¬† is laughable and shows just how little some people comprehend the concept. I consider it one of the greatest benefits of our place in the chain that we are possessed of enough understanding about the nature of life to see the folly in that argument. Every day we see around us the amazing power of random chance and natural selection, and it is breathtaking.

Now it is possible that this thought was put in my head this beautiful snowy morning by Satan from his fiery realm in Hell as a means to trick me into believing the evidence of my senses instead of the absolute truth held in the literal translation of the Holy Bible. But somehow I just don’t think so. Evolution is a tested, validated, and confirmed science. And we are all a part of it in some small way.

Jim