9 Different concepts about Evolution

 

Evolution

 

Evolution is one of the famous controversial topics that science has. The thing that all kind of organisms has the same or one common ancestor makes this so controversial for persons who follow any religion or believed in God. Because of this controversy, India removed Darwin’s theory of natural selection from its school textbooks because they feel this illogical that the nearest ancestor of humans are monkey. 

But many other things support evolution and one of these things is water. Water is the only common factor that relates to life. Almost all of the life found on planet Earth is dependent on water. Cell is the structural and functional unit of life and all cells have water in their structure (mostly in the form of cytoplasm). Many religious books like Qur'an also support the importance of water by saying that life starts from water.:

Do the disbelievers not realize that the heavens and earth were ˹once˺ one mass then We split them apart? And We created from water every living thing. Will they not then believe? (Al-Quran: 21:30)

Life is complex and difficult to understand. Because of this complexity, it is very nearly impossible to conclude or summarize it in the form of words. Evolution itself has great diversity because it discusses the past and origin of life and somehow predicts its future. According to Maynard M. Metcalf, “There are many points—theoretical points as to the methods by which evolution has been brought about—that we are not yet in possession of scientific knowledge to answer.”

 

Evolution is like a mirror that is clean and has a clear image but this mirror has only one side of the image at once. If we try to see this same image from different sides within the same mirror (I.e evolution) then it is impossible for us as when we saw our face in the mirror then we are unable to see the back side of the body but it is possible if we have more than the one mirror and all these mirrors are connected in such a way that they have the reflection of the same image. We have to understand different aspects of the same thing within the mirror of evolution if we want to understand it.

 

There are many articles written on evolution. Some of them support evolution while some of them deny it (evolution). Some of the articles choose a middle way that they are not ready to accept evolution or deny it but just give a different point of view to understand it. In this article, 

We are going to discuss 9 different concepts of evolution that make it easy to understand. We will discuss:

1. Water (life starts from water)

2. Changes with time in organisms

3. Immunity factor

4. History of nature or life

5. Mutations in the genetic material

6. Common ancestors

7. A relation of simple to the complex form of life

8. Perfection showed by nature

9. Limits of life or life and death cycle

 

Water.

Space agencies and astronomers are very interested in the planets that have water and rock surfaces. Our Mars mission is based on these two things because scientists found water on Mars which has two hydrogens and one oxygen molecule. Many scientists believed that life on Earth comes from another planet because, 

In the early ages, our Earth is very hot like a fireball. But with time it cooled down and many meteoroids fall on it. A big example of the falling of meteoroids from outer space is the presence of iron on Earth because it can’t be formed on Earth's surface. But many of the meteoroids had water and this water is present on our planet in the form of oceans, lakes, streams, rivers, etc may be life comes from another planet in the form of meteoroids. 

The summary of this discussion is to highlight the importance of water for life. Many scientists believed that life starts on Earth from the water that comes from somewhere in outer space. And when any space agency launched its mission in the search for life on other planets, it mainly focused on those planets that have water. This all shows that water is very important for life and life starts from water.

Our earth has more than 70% water on it and this 70% water has a huge number of species. Some of them we know and many of them are unknown to us. We just can assume and make a hypothesis on it. Water is still a mystery for us but it is clear that water plays an important role in the evolutionary process of life. 

Many evolutionists believed that the first cell that is formed in the water is the ancestor of all living organisms and mutation or changes with time make humans (the smartest living organisms on planet Earth). But it is still a mystery how the first living cell is formed. We can relate similarities between different organisms but it's not enough to prove the process of evolution. 

 

Changes with time in organisms.

If we believed that a single cell is the ancestor of all living things then we can draw a map that shows how life evolved or what are the major changes that may be occurred with time. This map can help understand the process of evolution as well as for making a chart that shows life from a simple to complex manner.

· According to many scientists, the first living thing that appeared on earth was some kind of free-floating nucleotide that are not even a cell. These free-floating nucleotides are called the First universal common ancestor or FUCA (in short words).

· These nucleotides are converted into RNA-type molecules that are then transformed into the cell (i.e. structural and functional unit of life).

· FUCA itself is not a cell. It was just some free-floating nucleotides but with time it forms LUCA (i.e. last universal common ancestor) which is a complete cell and it is expected that it may be a unicellular prokaryotic cell.

· The first cell that appears on earth must have an asexual means of reproduction.

· DNA or genes were the genetic material (as seen nowadays), so it is very important to protect this genetic material and this need may lead to the formation of the nucleus in the cell. 

· With time the asexual means of reproduction are changed or evolved into sexual means of reproduction.

· In sexual means of reproduction, changes occur from one generation to the next (i.e. by the process of meiosis).

· With time these single cells learned to live in groups and then form communities.

· When they started to live in communities, some cells started to depend on other cells forming a symbiotic and parasitic relationship between these cells.

· At the same time, mutations occur between them continuously and only the fittest can survive.

· Single-cell organisms were then started to live in the form of communities and different kinds of unicellular organisms may show a need-base relationship with other unicellular organisms and this leads to the origin of multicellular organisms.

· As time passes, things become more favorable on Earth with time because cyanobacteria (which can perform photosynthesis) had evolved at that time and a good amount of oxygen is present in the environment.

· The numbers and varieties of different organisms increased or can be said as population size increased in water which also increased the competition for food and survival in water.

· Life then started to move toward land. Some of the living things had started to use oxygen as food because of its excess amount in the environment and this evolution started to divide life into aerobic and anaerobic organisms.

· The organisms who moved from water to land could survive in both conditions through the process of evolution as crocodiles and many species of turtles can do at present time.

· The dependency on water is reduced with time by evolution but it is not completely removed from any kind of life.

· Life is then evolved from autotrophs (can prepare its food) to heterotrophs (dependent on autotrophs for food).

· Maintaining the needs with time for the survival of life changes according to conditions and available resources and the hungriness to fulfill the needs of any kind of life leads to the process of evolution and results in unexpected mutations. 

This is the simplest concept that how life evolved and move from water to land. But there are many unknown or undefined points like:

1. How the way of reproduction is changed in organisms?
2. What is the major source of such large mutations that cause such a kind of evolution?
3. How can the mutations so perfectly occur that we saw some kind in almost every living creature on Earth?
4. Why and how producers changed into eaters (heterotrophs)?
5. How do the chromosome numbers change? 
6. How life is so perfectly evolved?
7. What is perfection and what the limits of it?
8. Why there is death?

The answers to these questions are unclear because it’s the time of very early stages and it is nearly impossible to tell the exact thing that what will be happened billions of years ago? 

Many scientists give their hypotheses and theories to answer these kinds of questions but as we discussed earlier that life is so much diverse that our words are unable to explain it.

However, we made the classification of different groups of life and presents a five-kingdom system that covers almost all the life on earth. The five-kingdom system is subdivided again and again and this subdivision is very helpful for the understanding of evolution but with some questions. We can classify life as:

1. Life

2. Domain

3. Kingdom

4. Phylum

5. Class 

6. Order

7. Family

8. Genus

9. Species

This classification helps us to understand the complexity of very diverse life and give a road map of evolution based on similarities between different organisms. Even a human body has such type of complications that nobody can claim that he has complete information about the human body. An estimated calculation tells us that the human body has about only 43% of its original cells, the other kinds of cells that are present in our is mainly bacteria, fungi, archaea, and some viruses cells.

Our nervous system and brain are so perfectly designed that it may be difficult to believe on that thing that microbes are our ancestors. If it is true then it has to be said that "life is continuously moving towards perfection and evolution is one of the most perfect systems that nature has". And this kind of perfection is seen in almost all kinds of lives according to their respective environment. But with a question that what is perfection and what are the limits of perfection.

 

Immunity factor.

The immunity factor is one of the most impactful factors that can cause evolution. The ability of an organism to adapt changes in itself for survival and when it transmits this ability (or changes) to the next generation, this leads to evolution. If we define evolution based on natural immunity in living organisms then it can be defined as, “the process of entering of mutations in the germ cells of next generation and they successfully survived in the environment is called evolution.”

The natural resistance in any organism against diseases or anything that harms that living organism is called the immunity of that organism. It can be seen in any kind of life like microbes, plants, animals and humans, etc.

Excessive use of insecticides makes the insects more resistant to these insecticides and this is evolving a new generation of insects that may not be killed by the insecticides. If we use more and more toxic insecticides then maybe after some years insecticides did not harm insects anymore and this may be a good example of evolution.

In the same way, excessive use of antibiotics makes our immune system weak because our body starts to depend on antibiotics while on the other hand, producing a strong generation of bacteria inside us because of the ability to survive any organisms in harsh conditions.

Immunity is the natural gift or power, it can be made strong by facing the difficulties of life and can be weak by making our dependency on other things. Many surveys show that the immune system of poor people is more active than that of rich people because the body of poor people adapted itself according to the harsh and difficult environment while the body of rich people never faced this kind of difficult conditions so they never adapted itself. 

The fact is that the human body is not designed for just living a life, it is designed for hard work, making things better with its problem-solving abilities. Our brain is much more powerful than we think. It can be a piece of advice for philosophers and can be a suggestion for humans and can be a medicine or way of treatment for thinkers.

 

History of nature or life.

If we begin our story from the beginning, then our earth is too hot and life is not possible on Earth in its earliest days. With time, it cools down and life starts developing on it. It's still a mystery how the first living cell appears on it and how life starts on Earth but the diversity of life nowadays tells us that its one of the greatest miracles of nature that countless numbers of species of organisms lived on Earth and they all are connected with each other in many ways. Life is very complex and difficult to understand nowadays but it may be very simple in the past it had.

All living and non-living parts of the earth are connected and every food chain starts from the nonliving things. For example, producers like plants take water and sunlight to make their food. Both water and sunlight are nonliving in nature but plants are livings. 

So the history of the earth is connected with the history of nature or natural processes and the history of nature is connected with the history of life (i.e. the beginning of life) because life is very dependent on the nonliving parts of nature.

In the same way, evolution is nothing but just the complete history of nature (how it begins, how it works, etc.) The geological timeline of the reference to the evolution of life can be divided as:

1. Precambrian period (earliest life timeline)

2. Paleazoic era (age of invertebrates)

3. Mesozoic era (age of dinosaurs and ends with their mass extinction)

4. Caenozioc era (age of humans evolution)

   

Mutations in the genetic material.

Mutations or changes within the genetic material are a very important factor that leads to evolution. Mutations can occur naturally or can be induced by humans. An example of natural mutation is the red and white colored-eye fruit fly which was observed by Thomas Hunt Morgan also known as the father of experimental genetics. 

Fruit flies commonly have red colored-eye but one day Morgan saw a fruit fly that had a white eye color. He named white colored- eye fruit fly a mutant fruit fly. He did experiments on these fruit flies and concluded that the white eye color is only seen in male fruit flies and it’s a recessive character. His experiment proved Mendal’s work also. The concept of induced mutations was introduced by Hermann Joseph Muller. He used X-rays to induce mutations in the fruit fly. 

Mutations are very important for evolution. Mutations may be good or bad also. The mutations that cause the death of an organism is termed lethal or bad mutation while the mutations which do not cause death or help to improve the organism to adapt to the environment is termed good mutations.

 

Common ancestor.

Evolution is all about the one common ancestor of all the living things that are present in the world’s present time. We made classifications of life, we made a historical map of our world, and many more things like that. All of these things are based on the thing that we all have one common ancestor. 

In the earliest age of our world, the earth is not suitable for any kind of life. The theory of evolution tries to answer how life starts and develops in our world. For this purpose, many scientists believed that a single prokaryotic cell is the ancestor of all known living things on Earth. 

The fact of how this prokaryotic cell appears on our earth has also interesting answers. Some scientists believed that life came from another planet. When our earth was born it was very unstable and hot. Water came to Earth from somewhere in space and with time our Earth moved towards stability and here life begins on our planet.

 

A relation of simple to complex forms of life.

A kingdom has the number of phylum, families, species, etc while a specie has the number of organisms that can interbreed between themselves freely. The way we relate a single organism with its higher and lower-level organisms is very interesting to understand. 

This relation is based on similarities. For example, we have a kingdom Plantae. This kingdom is divided into five different subgroups i.e. algae, bryophytes, pteridophytes, gymnosperms, and angiosperms. We will consider these five groups to understand how we make a classification and closely two very different kinds of life are related to each other.

1. Firstly we have algae. It is a thallus-like structure means we can’t differentiate its body parts. The gametophyte stage is more dominant in algae (which means they produce gametes).

2. Secondly, we have bryophyte. It is also thalli but more modify than algae. Its body parts are more differentiated than algae. The gametophyte stage is also dominant in bryophytes (the main body is gamete-producing).

3. Thirdly we have pteridophytes. It is next level to bryophyte because it has well-differentiated body parts like stem, roots leaves etc but there is no seed formation on these plants. Their main body is sporophyte in nature and they produced a special structure called sporophyll. This sporophyll produces spores in pteridophytes. It was the first time in nature that the main body of a plant is sporophytic and it was a great evolution for gymnosperms and angiosperms. However, seed is not formed in pteridophytes but a seed habit is developed in the form of sporophyll.

4. Fourthly, we have gymnosperms. These plants can form seeds but their seeds are naked (means no outer protective covering is present on their seeds). the main body is also sporophyte.

5. The last group of our plant kingdom is angiosperms. They are also seed-producing plants and have a well-protective covering on their seeds. Mostly flowering plants are included in angiosperms. They are also sporophytic plants (which means produce spores).

The purpose of this story is to show a relation between the different sub-groups of the plant kingdom. 

• Algae is the most simple in this group because of its thallus-like body. 
• Bryophyte is more modified and has less thallus than algae. 
• Pteridophyte is a well-differentiated and complete plant but unable to produce seeds. 
• Gymnosperms can produce seeds but their seeds are naked. 
• Angiosperms are the most modified group in the plant kingdom because they are well differentiated and had a well-protective covering around their seeds too. 

That’s why angiosperms are most abundant than any other group of plant kingdoms because they are more modified and well-adapted plants.

 

Perfection showed by nature.

Nature has so much perfection that it is difficult to believe the thing that they evolved and start from a single cell. Every organism, no matter if it is unicellular or multicellular, less advanced or more advanced, every single organism has some kind of perfection in it according to its respective environments.

For example, life starts from water and without no water, there will be no life. But what about the organisms that lived in deserts? Desert areas can be the most barren areas of the earth where the diversity of life is not as much as in watered areas but xerophyte plants are present in that areas. 

The ability to overcome photorespiration and save water in xerophytes plants is more than in any other plant. We can see perfection in both plants that grow very near to water and plants that grow very away from water according to their respective environments.

This kind of survival ability makes organisms perfect and very suitable according to their environment. This thing can be against evolutionary theories or it can be the real evolution that nature has. But this kind of perfection is not an accident or it is not possible by any accident. As Allah says in The Holy Quran:

Who created you, fashioned you, and perfected your design, 

(Al-Quran, 82:7)

 

What kind of perfection do we have? If we noticed both living and non-living things in this world, then we observed a serious kind of perfection. For example, perfection in the water cycle, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, seasonal cycle, migration cycle, breeding cycle, sleep-wake cycle, birth cycle, death cycle, aging cycle, food chain cycle, and formation of soil from rocks (rock cycle) and many more cycles that run in our environment. Even we look at the smallest thing in our universe, we observed how perfectly it is working and designed by its designer. The Holy Quran says that:

 

Who has perfected everything He created. And He originated the creation of humankind from clay. 

(Al-Quran, 32:7)

 

It's not a possible thing that we have a perfect world, we are living a perfect life, perfect nature, and it's all by accident. Evolution is not a fact, it’s a theory that helps us to relate life.

 

Limits of life or life/death cycle.

Although life is very complex to understand and perfect to see there are limits of every living thing. We learn about evolution and we know which things cause the evolution. But still, we are unable to answer why there is death in every living thing. As The Holy Quran says:

 

كُلُّ نَفۡسٍ ذَآئِقَةُ ٱلۡمَوۡتِۗ

 

(Every Soul will taste Death).

 

This is an amazing Quranic verse that tells us every single living organism has to die. According to this verse, life may not be moving towards perfection because if it is moving then there must be control over death by any single organism. This verse is also denying the hidden point of evolution that life is evolving because he wants to live.