Each and every one of us is a transitional creature. That’s one of those thoughts that changes how you think about evolution. As a kid I understood as most do that we had evolved from apes, but I didn’t, as I think most don’t, understand that the process wasn’t finished. Its easy to look at the wonder of human society and believe that we are the end product of everything; evolution, culture, understanding, you name it, we do it best. Or at least we do from our perspective. But as with all things, we can always do it better.

I used to teach a class in Systems Analysis to students who were studying computers, and one of the important tenets of systems analysis is that any system can always be iteratively refined and made different. The hope, of course, is that the system is made better, but anyone who has ever worked in the field knows that this is not always the case. Evolution is the systems analysis of life, with refinements happening in perpetuity on a tiny scale, but lacking an analyst who directs the changes.

The goal of evolution isn’t to get somewhere, achieve some perfect creature. Far from it, evolution is a process, not a path. Random minuscule mutations happen, and if they help then they may get passed down to future generations. That’s all there is.

Me, I was born without wisdom teeth. My mother never had them, my dad did. That trait passed on to me and not my sister. Now, this variation isn’t necessarily one that will make me more effective at procreating because the presence or absence of wisdom teeth does not need to disfigure the face, nor does it really present the potential for death anymore, but it’s entirely possible that when the trait first appeared in my blood line, not having those wisdom teeth may well have been a legitimate genetic improvement. It’s also not known conclusively if the presence or absence of wisdom teeth is controlled by the genes, so it’s possible that this isn’t a perfect example.

At any rate, assuming that this is was once a genetic mutation, nobody in my ancestry made the decision. They were simply born with a mutation that resulted in their not getting wisdom teeth. They did not choose to pass it on, they simply had children, some of whom possessed the trait and some of whom did not. But we don’t think about evolution like that.

I regularly hear creationists claim that evolution can’t be real because we don’t see it happening. This is a ridiculous point. It would be like saying that plate tectonics aren’t happening because we can’t see it happening, even though we can bear witness to the effects of it through mountains, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions.

Misunderstanding evolution is easy to do. We don’t see it directly happening, and that might lead us to conclude that it isn’t. Arguments like this one about peanut butter, the tornado in the junkyard, “why are there still monkeys” or the famous Kirk Cameron Crockaduck argument are perhaps to some proof enough that there cannot be evolution, but in reality they simply show off the fact that the person talking does not understand evolution. All the evidence that we have witnessed cannot persuade these people because their basic understanding of the science is flawed. They imagine an ape having a human baby, which is ludicrous at best.

I suppose the only way to directly see it in action would be to take a mommy and a daddy and a baby and completely map their genomes to determine what had taken place. But that does seem, at least to this layperson, like a rather lofty goal we’re probably not ready for.

The point of all of this is to say that we are not the end all be all of evolution, we are merely small and seemingly unimportant parts of it. To me, that’s a really profound idea.

Jim