So what is the evolution argument?
I am an engineer, nor a paleontologist or a geologist, so please bear with me.. At times I may oversimplify and the tone may be a bit condescending. This is not the intention. I am just trying to make the subject a bit more fun. Promise I will do the same to the creation account!
A LONG time ago (many billions), there was a singularity. A small speck of dust with almost infinite density. At some point the spec had one hell of a headache and exploded in a Big Bang. Matter was ejected from this central point at extreme speeds in all directions. At this point all the matter was in the form of hydrogen: the smallest, most basic element. Along the way, some of the hydrogen clumped together, somehow forming stars where a the hydrogen was squeezed real hard to form some more useful elements. These elements became planets and comets and the other cool stuff we see in the sky.
At one point, the earth happened as a big blob of molten rock (not exactly sure how), orbiting a smallish star we call the sun. The blob took some millions of years to cool down. Luckily there was water on the planet, some say it came from a comet. After the molten rock cooled down enough to allow water in its liquid state, it rained on the planet off and on for some time. (Lets say some millions of years). The water made oceans and lakes. At some point in time, there happened to form a pool of water that had just the right chemical components nicely suspended in the water (a chemical soup, if you will). A bolt of lightning or something hit the water, jolting the soup in just the right way (not unlike the jumper cables they use to shock a dead guy on hospital TV shows). Life started!
This first soupy critter was pretty basic stuff as life goes. I mean a moment ago it was only soup. Amazingly, right from that first moment of critterdom, it was complex enough to copy itself. Pretty amazing soup. Of course this is as improbable as anything ever was, but then again we have had LOTS of time for this to happen. Over a period of more billions of years, these little critters were copying themselves, humping like crazy, making babies and filling the earth.
Every now and then, the copy process got screwed up just a little. Call it a typo. Clever guys insist on calling it "genetic mutation". Of course most of these copy errors result in dead, useless or infertile critters, but it just so happens that these critters were humping for billions of years, and along the way, some of these typos were bound to result in a critter that was by pure chance actually fitter, faster, or cuter than its boring single-celled parents. Sort of like when typing a few random characters while copying your buddy's homework is bound to eventually get you a better result than your buddy, if you do it billions of times.
The faster and better critters probably chose each other as humping partners, since the rest of the single-celled dating pool was just too dull. (Yes I realise that single-celled organisms do not have gender and they do not hump, but the story is way cooler this way.. )
Anyway, copy errors that resulted in better critters tended to stick around from one generation to the next, while the not-so-lucky copy errors tended to go nowhere and die. As the critters tended to spread out across different environments and climates, they changed and improved in different ways, to better suit their surroundings, giving us different species. In the space of another billion years or so, life on the rock became way more complex, and we have millions of different types of critters all over the show. One particular group of apes tended to fare particularly well, and at some point, they became just a little more clever than the rest. Slowly but surely their copy errors resulted in what we today call Homo Sapiens. This was a couple hundred thousand years ago. Some say that since then not much has changed for us. For some reason we were now so perfect that no copy error could improve us any more, and our improvement grinded to a halt.
That's more or less the story. Comic-book style. There are some variations on some of the points. We did not discuss the more interesting points of darwinism vs neo-darwinism and a few others. But most experts will agree that the gist of my story is sort of accurate, if a bit simplistic..
Comments?
Next up is the creation story..
Thereafter the real fun begins..
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