Reply to comment

I do agree with you, Mayr’s story of evolution does seem to have a comforting aspect.  Mayr attempts to explain why organisms are the way they are and how they got to be this way.  I guess I did not really think of this as comforting until Professor Grobstein told us about the complete randomness of random variation.  I seemed to have a revelation for the first time in my life about how random the whole process is.  This seems really silly to me obviously random variation is random I have been repeating that on every biology test since fourth grade, so then why was this lecture such a shock?  I guess deep down inside I still believed that random variation was moving towards and more developed or more evolved organisms, after all if we are going to have evolution I just though it would be in a better direction.  During Professor Grobstein’s lecture I started to realize that this “chaos theory” could have serious implications in the rest of my life, all of my accomplishments and all accomplishments of our species flashed before my eyes as simply random—did this take their value away?

I think Mayr addresses this when he includes the quote by individuals who support the contingency principle “man is nothing but an accident.” (p.230)  This is really a scary idea and an idea that I think I was starting to form during that lecture.  This does seem to give a little of a grim out look on life, maybe this is why the “chaos” of randomness is not more firmly stated in elementary evolution studies.  Teachers want children to feel special, not simply a random creation.  However I think this idea of being a random accident can be looked at through many lenses.  If we are a random accident that it was quite an amazing accident indeed!  Perhaps if we realize that we are only an accident than we will look and treat other organisms differently realizing that it is only by accident we are not in their position.