The Evidence for Doubt. For the Skeptics.

If you look at the sunset, you think how perfect and amazing this world is. The simple elegant beauty of it astounds you. Then you look down and a mosquito is biting your leg. Well there went that perfect moment in time, but hey that is life. Many people believe in god. A god, or several. They believe that this world is just too perfect for all of this to be a random event. An accident, or fact of some selection process. Well then lets have a look and see how perfect our world is.

It starts back in the Cambrian period. 50,000 species of Trilobites. Each of them from one extreme to

another. Some with eyes in the front, others with a line of eyes. But the guy that got my attention was the one who has 5,000 eyes. Now they were not eyes like ours. They were small crystals that let him see a blurry image of light. So he was aware of predators. So imagine what would have been the drive to make 5,000 of them. If you need that many eyes, there must be serious competition. Also there must have been an early need for evolving them.
As you can see each of them is a lenses and while not like ours, it is still a leap forward for early creatures. After all this guy lived about 542 million to 488 million years ago....plus or minus one million years.

Our next guy was in the works for quite a while. After all his ancestors lived in the ocean, and then evolved to land animals. Then possibly due to competition being so great on land he went back to where he evolved from. The whale has the remnants of a pelvic bone. Something not necessary for a sea creature. In fact it might even get in the way. It is one of two signs of his evolution. The other is the blow hole on top of his head. When you live in the sea it is better to have gills and lungs that can filter out oxygen, but these guys kept the lungs anyway. We know that there is no reason to develop air breathing lungs in the ocean. Sure it is probably possible, but if your successful in breathing water, there would be no environmental pressure to change. Only if you went back to water but continued using the only method you had for breathing would you have air filtering lungs.




A flounder is no lucky guy. Some of them have one eye on the bottom and the other on the top. This guy is confused. He has both eyes on top. He is flat, and his mouth goes from the top of the body to the bottom. If you look closely it is like a puzzle with the pieces jammed together. That is because evolution does not pick and choose. If it works, it survives. If it survives, then it breeds. And without a reason to change, well we have this guy. Natural selection did not just pick out the pretty and sweet and keep them. This guy might not be the best looking, but he survives, and that is all natural selection does. Weather we like to face it or not, it picks out the weak, and only the strong survive.


This one is popular for all the wrong reasons. It is the wasp that stings the caterpillar. It then lays its eggs inside of his body so when they hatch they can feed on live flesh. Though the caterpillar can not move he is alive for the whole thing. Down to the moment when they are almost done with him and he dies. It is not pretty, but it is part of nature. The wasp wants to survive and so does the caterpillar, but this guy did not get lucky. So he will be the Host for many tiny wasps that will chew his flesh while he is paralyzed and unable to do anything about it.


If you live in a third world country, then you are probably aware of the problems that first world countries do not face. Those are parasites. In many countries they still face human infections of horrible intestinal worms. That is if you are lucky they will only be in your intestines. This is a picture of a lung worm. Humans are part of the animal kingdom and as such do, in some places face the possibility of stray worms. Since we are not their regular host they can find their way into places we never thought possible. Including our lungs, our bladder, our skin, behind they eye. Most of us will never face this, but for those that have it is not a pleasant situation.




This is a parasite inside of a human brain. What could be more devastating. Yet it exists. One can only imagine the damage that could be done by something eating away at your brain tissue or sucking blood from your brain. The outcome is not likely to be good.

This is just a small sample of what is out in nature. There are leaches, blood sucking moths, venomous snakes, deadly spiders, and frogs. I might be more safe in my home, but that is because outside of my door survival of the fittest is hard at work. This world was not created for us. We have adapted to it the best we can, and as a species done the best job we can.

When people say this world was made by a god, and everything works out perfect I hate to have to point out how wrong they are, but they are. It is in everything we see. There is no power balance in the universe like life and death. Everything is in constant competition. We are not surviving because we are the best, we are just the best suited for now.

That is not to say that other species can not some day dominate, or microbes will not win. The future is not written in any book or on any stones. It is up to how we can cope with the changes of our world, and fit in with our competition. Sure we feel like the winners now, but so did the Egyptians, and the Mayans. What we have seen is competition, and sometimes there is no winner and evolution has to start from scratch again. If there was a global extinction tomorrow it is hard to say what might evolve. But from what we see now it could be anything and everything.

So I have to give great credit to doubt and skepticism. Because either there is no god at play in this universe or his apathy is so great that nothing can sway his will. Either way leaves me without a deity. Because I can believe a god would play dice with the universe, but I won't give him credit for  snake eyes.























Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The power of Neurons and what makes me, ME!

Image
The power of Neurons and what makes me, ME! Inside of our skull there is a whole world. Interactions so fast moving, we don't even know they have happened before we react. Professor Gerbig once told me that a neuron can fire off 25 times in one second. Yet it does so faster than I can think about what it is doing. In fact as I think what to write my neurons have already fired out commands for my fingers to move and my eyes. The brain is a well organized machine. So mysterious and complex, that studying it often leaves us more perplexed than when we started. Neurons are a mass of Dendrites, and Axons. They all group together and fire off in the same direction. It is by having these specialized cells we are able to think, and be aware of the world around us. They are hungry and hard working cells. Just a few minutes without air leaves them dying. They are faster than any computer and work from birth to death. In fact scientists are starting to find that when neurons do not fire...
Read more

Why I am thinking of leaving activism.

I must say, the last year or so has been a wild ride. Meeting so many wonderful people, getting so many hugs, showing and being shown so much love. It warms the heart, it makes me proud and feel like this is what life should be. Lately though, those feelings have turned to a kind of sadness that I just can't explain. One that haunts and disturbs me. When I first came into activism, it was just a passion. One girl with a blog, a vocabulary that was utterly passionate, and a dream. I was charged, and madly, deeply driven by passion I had gotten from the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens. I could see the way I wanted life to be, and how oppressive religion was, how it tore men down and broke their spirits, and destroyed the very natural fabric of man. Now almost two years later, I sit at my kitchen table thinking, how do I go on? How can I do this, when the fire is dying inside. I don't feel inspired, worst of al I don't even feel like writing, or doing a podcast or standing ...
Read more

Be Inspired: Hitchens Last Message.

Image
It has not yet been a year since the passing of Christopher Hitchens. Every time I hear his words I am inspired. His contribution to humanity will sustain mankind for thousands of years to come. His whit and candor brought fear to his foes. His splendid knowledge was like a well versed and worn book. Every page was some sparkling overlooked detail of history. He shined a light on the hypocrisy of religion, and shouted it from every podium or arena he could find. In his final message, in Texas, to the freethinkers gathered there, he said "Be inspired." He looked to the future that he would never see. A future where we solve the mysteries that lie awaiting our discovery. Discoveries he could have never dreamed of, for his lifetime. On the eve of his own departure from humanity, he knew that our choices will effect the certainty of our existence. We as a species, and a group, and societies, countries, families. He had come to terms with his own human frailty as an organic...
Read more