intermediate fossils as having inherited their common pattern from
the earliest recorded ancestors of the vertebrate
line”-Danchekker’s voice rose to a crescendo-“from the first boned
fish that appeared in the oceans of the Devonian period of the
Paleozoic era, over four hundred million years ago!” He paused for
this last to take hold and then continued. “Charlie is as human as
you or i in every respect. Can there be any doubt, then, that he
shares our vertebrate heritage and therefore our ancestry? And if
he shares our ancestry, then there is no doubt that he also shares
our place of origin. Charlie is a native of planet Earth.”
Danchekker sat down and poured himself a glass of water. A hubbub
of mixed murmurings and mutterings ensued, punctuated by the
rustling of papers and the clink of water glasses. Here and there,
chairs creaked as cramped limbs eased themselves into more
comfortable positions. A metallurgist at one end of the table was
gesturing to the man seated next to her. The man shrugged, showed
his empty palms, and nodded his head in Danchekker’s direction. She
turned and called to the professor. “Professor Danchekker . . .
Professor . . .” Her voice made itself heard. The background noise
died away. Danchekker looked up. “We’ve been having a little
argument here-maybe you’d like to comment Why couldn’t Charlie have
come from a parallel line of evolution somewhere else?”
“I was wondering that, too,” came another voice. Danchekker frowned
for a moment before replying.
“No. The point you are overlooking here, I think, is that the
evolutionary process is fundamentally made up of random events.
Every living organism that exists today is the product of a chain
of successive mutations that has continued over millions of years.
The most important fact to grasp is that each discrete mutation is
in itself a purely random event, brought about by aberrations in
genetic coding and the mixing of the sex cells from different par-
ents. The environment into which the mutant is born dictates
whether it will survive to reproduce its kind or whether it will
die out. Thus, some new characteristics are selected for further
miprovement, while others are promptly eradicated and still others
are diluted away by interbreeding.
“There are still people who find this principle difficult to accept
-primarily, I suspect, because they are incapable of visualizing
the implications of numbers and time scales beyond the ranges that
occur in everyday life. Remember we are talking about billions of
billions of combinations coming together over millions of years. “A
game of chess begins with only twenty playable moves to choose
from. At every move the choice available to the player is
restricted, and yet, the number of legitimate positions that the
board could assume after only ten moves is astronomical. Imagine,
then, the number of permutations that could arise when the game
continues for a billion moves and at each move the player has a
billion choices open to him. This is the game of evolution. To
suppose that two such independent sequences could result in end
products that are identical would surely be demanding too much of
our credulity. The laws of chance and statistics are quite firm
when applied to sufficiently large numbers of samples. The laws of
thermodynamics, for example, are nothing more than expressions of
the probable behavior of gas molecules, yet the numbers involved
are so large that we feel quite safe in accepting the postulates as
rigid rules; no significant departure from them has ever been
observed. The probabifity of the parallel line of evolulion that
you suggest is less than the probability of heat flowing from the
kettle to the fire, or of all the air molecules in this room
crowding into one corner at the same time, causing us all to
explode spontaneously. Mathematically speaking, yes-the possibility
of parallelism is finite, but so indescribably remote that we need
consider it no further.”
A young electronics engineer took the argument up at this point
“Couldn’t God get a look in?” he asked. “Or at least, some kind of
guiding force or principle that we don’t yet comprehend? Couldn’t
the same design be produced via different lines in different