Half an Eye

Dude, evolution is the coolest thing ever. We basically evolved from protobions, these tiny little lipid spheres that carried out really really basic metabolism and slowly started to attain other characteristics, and eventually developed into cyanobacteria, and then started releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, and then the protobions had horizontal gene transfer and then suddenly there was archaea and eukarya and bacteria, all three, and eukarya went on to become, well, us. Us! Humans! From little lipid spheres! That is fascinating and excellent.

Did you know that animalia and fungi are more closely related than either is to plantae? We're more kin to mushrooms than flowers. What's amazing is that we're kin to either. We're kin to everything. We're kin to chlamydia, since it's alive. And algae. And pygmy marmosets. And slime molds. Have you heard about slime molds? Those things are awesome. They have both animal and plant forms. They switch between having cell walls and chloroplasts and having plain lipid bilayer membranes and no chloroplasts. Did you know that mitochondria, a really crucial part of your cells, have their own DNA? They were once some sort of bacteria. Now they carry out cellular respiration, which is crazy important. If anything is God, it's either ATP or DNA.

Speaking of DNA—that stuff practically exists to replicate itself. It's basically luck that we evolved around it. DNA has caused everything. It's this little structure made up of cytosine, thymine, guanine, and adenine. RNA runs up and replicates it during mitosis, and there it goes, making itself by giving out instructions, and proteins are built, proteins that tell us to do things like digest and release hormones and endorphins. They are units of heredity. And whenever they mess up, whenever they make the wrong protein, sometimes that mistake becomes... us. We are a mistake. Isn't it beautiful? We are beautiful mistakes. We were not meant to be, and yet we are.

There's this really common anti-evolution argument that goes something along the lines of "Well, how did we develop stuff like wings and eyes? I mean, what can you do with half an eye?" My bio teacher, Dr. Panero (awesome guy), made a cool point. He said that half an eye is much more useful than 49% of an eye, or 1% of an eye, and 51% of an eye is more useful than 50% of an eye. Somewhere back down the line animalia developed little pigmented cells that could basically sense light. They developed—evolution!—and became more and more complex. There's this great diagram in my book about how they came about. It's all so simple, only not. It's all so complex. It's all dictated by purest chance.

Science makes so much sense. Maybe God started it all. Probably not, though. If science can explain the beginning of life, I'm sure it'll eventually be able to explain the beginning of the universe. I don't believe in a God of the Gaps, and I think it's sad that people do.