Date: 30 September 2003
Subject: Evolution

One of the longstanding debates is whether or not evolution has direction. For one thing, from the beginning there were those like Darwin’s American associate Asa Gray who claimed that God was using the mechanism of natural selection to create new species in the direction he chose just as he uses the mechanisms of geophysics to "create the winds". More recently, there have been the claims of the late Stephen Jay Gould that when we look back at the very early Burgess Shales (in the Canadian Rockies) we see all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures any one of which could have happened to win out in the competition to provide the basic design for the dominant future organisms (and the vertebrates eventually won). Now two article in Nature (vol 424, 931-938) argue that there is limitation in the kind of mutations which occur. In the first, a study of the old favourite, fruit flies, "The same gene is involved in a whole bunch of diverse patterns across the whole Drosophilla group." The second argues that regulatory evolution of shavenbaby/ovo underlies multiple cases of morphological parallelism. What this means is that it can often be the same genes which alter to form a particular type of new structure.

It is, of course, dangerous to jump from conclusions about particular genes in particular species to conclusions about a whole macro process. But if it were accepted to apply on a more basic level would this have any theological implications? Probably not. Christians may differ as to how far they believe that the details of species change, just as with everyday life, are under direct divine direction. Clearly God must act in some way in his created world, or else he is just a subjective feeling and not an actually existing person as portrayed in the Bible. But as concerning "everyday life" most Christians believe that God "acts" both through the regular forces of nature and in some special ways. How far species change is "constrained" by the set up of genetics itself, and how far it is not obviously predictable, may simply be a similar question – and neither rule out the ultimate internationality of God.