timeimmortal

A friend of mine once put to me an example concerning the orientation of hypothetical magnetic dipoles in a hypothetical box. From within the box, it appeared that the orientation of the dipoles was randomly shifting; from the outside of the box, it was apparent that no such thing was transpiring, as one could plainly see the small toddler with the magnetic toy playing on and near the box.

I tend to think of this example when people talk of evolutionary developments as being unpredictable products of mere chance. I do not contest that such things are unpredictable; I contest, very sharply, the notion that pure chance alone had a hand in the developments. We are inside the box; we cannot see if anyone is playing with a magnet outside of it. Perhaps, on that basis, we can be forgiven for reaching the wrong conclusion. Nevertheless, it’s still the wrong conclusion.

I say this to preface a mention of this rather fortunate discovery of direct evidence of evolution in action, because while I lament the attribution of the event to purely random chance, I nevertheless acknowledge that it’s an exciting discovery, and a bit of a shot in the arm for those who oppose the theory of evolution on some principle (especially my fellow Christians who do so):

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

…

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

…sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

…Lenski turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations. These allowed him to replay history from any starting point he chose, by reviving the bacteria and letting evolution “replay” again.

…The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.

Discoveries like this affirm my faith in God, I find, because they carry with them a profound sense of wonder and amazement at the subtle, yet profound, intricacies upon which all of creation is constructed. In a sense, I pity those who assert that God must have made things in the exact manner suggested in the Book of Genesis, because the God of such a literalist interpretation of the Bible is so much smaller, so less magnificent. The God who knows each created thing down to its tiniest detail, and (moreover) who envisioned and breathed into being each such detail is so much larger, and so much more personal as well.

And it is staggering, to me, to think that God still so loves the world that He is willing to again make the processes of His creation apparent in even the tiny bacteria of the lab; indeed, His love is poured out on them too, and they respond in magnificent ways to it.

Discoveries like this, to me, don’t speak of chance; they speak of revelation — natural revelation, to be specific. They speak of a God who continues to desire to reveal His ways and mysteries to an inquiring, open human mind. As David Warren and others have pointed out, the whole ideal of science — that rational inquiry will be rewarded by way of evidence and discovery — has at its core a very Christian sensibility, echoed in the words of Christ: “And I tell you, Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”