Friday, May 01, 2009

Blind hand of evolution

This is a common phrase biological circles that is used to indicate that the course of evolution cannot be predicted and is driven purely by chance.

This phrase grates against my senses. Natural selection as envisaged by Darwin is driven purely by random chance and hence the phrase blind hand of natural selection makes sense. But, evolution is driven not just by natural selection. I think lots of species have intelligence and consciously work towards goals. This also contributes to evolution and this is not driven by random chance (unless you are going to trivially reduce the organism to a collection of particles).

No comments: