I am always sometimes looking for more refined ways of saying these things. But I still believe that the validity of an argument doesn’t necessarily have to do with it being presented perfectly in the jargon of a specific group of people, but of being coherent, logically ordained, and require no previous assumptions that people don’t somehow know to be true.
1
When we talk about Evolution, our language can be kind of tricky, so let’s define two things before we start: behaviour and adaptative success.
What are we calling behaviour? Basically everything. For instance, the cells behave in a certain way to for the tissues, that behave in a certain way to form the organs, that behave in a certain way to give the individuals a... behaviour. For the lack of a better word.
Now, from unicellular beings to fishes to reptiles, birds and mammals, a lot of new behaviours arose, obiously.
And what are we calling adaptative success? A measure of how much a behaviour was successful, or more successful than other behaviours, in helping an individual to endure over the Earth. Basically, that improves the individual’s chances to survive and reproduce.
So, Natural Selection means that, as the environment can’t support all the members of a growing population, the ones with less adaptative success will die, and the ones with more adaptative success will prosper.
So, I believe it is only natural that we ask ourselves: why then, the unicellular beings didn’t just get better and better in doing things in the old unicellular way of doing things? Where did all those infinite new behaviours, that lead to our current diversity, come from?
2
We are lead to think that, as the Environment itself changed, the old ways a lot of times weren’t good enough anymore. But that don’t asnwer the question: where did these new behaviours came from, if natural selection can only act after they are there?
Of course, the changes must have happenned smoothly. But there is still the mistery of how a system evolved in a direction of being able to slowly start doing something of a totally different nature. For instance, the wings of flying animals evolved from members whose behaviour was to walk. But how natural selection lead them in that direction, if flying is not a natural consequence of walking with more success? The physichs involved are very different.
Let’s try to look at it closer. We believe that some animals started presenting some features that helped them to fall slower, then to glide a little, glide a lot, untill they were eventually flying. But where did this falling slower came from? Not every animal can suddenly start falling slower.
For the smallest seed of this new behaviour to appear, there are necessary previous conditions.
For the evolution of any being to even start to turn in the direction of a new behaviour, there is the necessity of previous conditions that presented themselves in the context of a totally different behaviour.
3
So, we must think that, as the living beings evolved, sometimes, or better yet, countless times, conditions appeared for the seed of a new behaviour to sprout. Like, some features were selected by the environment for a reason A, and then after some point started being selected by the reason B. A new form of adaptative success came out of nothing.
To become good at something new without reason seems to be how all this diversity came to be. Is it a natural consequence of complexity itself, like, complex systems sometimes will just present new advantages, not related to the reasons why they got to their current state?
Look at nature in all it’s small details. All this diversity of animals, of all the parts on their systems, happened because something that is good for something suddenly just happens to be good for something else.
4
That is, a feature of a system that so far evolved in a certain direction because, combined with a certain characteristic of the environment, helps the individual to survive and reproduce more, after a while unexpectedly combines with another characteristic of the environment to help the individual even more.
I think one possible definition of coincidence can be as follows: two things meeting with no reason. That is, two things, not related so far, follow their own separate paths, carried by different circumstances, and at some point they just perfetly match. Like the living system features that somehow, at a certain point, just match with characteristics of the environment after following a path that had no relation with that characteristic so far.
The fact that scientists have names for these coincidences, like “emergence” or “exaptation”, just mean they are studying it, it doesn’t mean they know why it happens.
If we think, as the environments change, and they sometimes change for the actions of the living beings, it’s more likely that this kind of system callled "living being" would become obsolete, than to think that it could endure and prosper beautifully, relying on the chances that complex systems may have to, just left on their own, present a new advantageous relation with some aspect of the environment, a relation that didn’t exist in the past and is not logically contained in the behaviours that allowed it to endure so far.
This would require a more than special and misterious unknown property of the reality of the Universe itself, a property that not only we can’t explain, but in fact we can’t conceive.
P.S: Just to make it clear, my point here is not that it is impossible to conceive complex systems coming to existence step by step. I believe they do, but my point is that it would require big exaptation (when something has always been selected by reason A, then it starts being selected by reason B) in every single meaningful step. In fact, it makes exaptation, and not adaptation, the big law of evolution, which takes us right back to that thing people always felt when imagining a world with no mind: too much coincidence.
Ps of ps: i here therefore cancel all i wrote on physics. Geez, who really knows anyway. I think therefore i am.
