When the Wildly Improbable Happens, Isn't that Considered Miraculous?

Peter Wood cuts through the fog of the evolution debate:

A good place to start is to distinguish between the theory of evolution (without the capital E) and Evolution as a grand and, apart from a few rough edges, supposedly comprehensive account of speciation and genetic change. Small-e evolution is an intellectually robust theory that gives coherent order to a huge range of disparate facts. In contrast, capital E Evolution, is a bit illusory. Like a lot of scientific theories, on close inspection it is really a stitched-together fabric of hypotheses. Some of them are central and well-attested, while others are little more than guesswork. Some phenomena such as natural selection and genetic drift are on solid ground; but others like late Stephen Jay Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium," in which evolution proceeds in widely spaced bursts, are pretty speculative. Evolution (with the capital E) is today far from being a single comprehensive concept. Gould's last work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, was an attempt to repair that situation with a brand-new synthesis. The jury is still out on whether he succeeded.

While I am a proponent of small-e evolution, I recognize that it doesn't provide satisfactory answers to some key questions. We don't have compelling answers to how life began on earth, whether the self-organizing stuff that we recognize as life depends on earth-like chemistry, or whether nature's profligate complexity is inevitable. Earth was home only to complacent bacterial mats from about 3.5 to 2.5 billion years ago. That's a run almost as long as Madonna's career, but it did eventually give way to more complex organisms that could thrive in the presence of oxygen.

We also don't have any really convincing explanation of why nature split so many organisms into two sexes.

And above all, evolutionary theory hits a wall in trying to explain what happened with the emergence of fully modern humans about 150,000 years ago. We have a tissue of tiny clues, some of the most intriguing of which come from genetics. The picture accepted by most (by no means all) anthropologists is that a tiny population of modern humans — no more than a few hundred — emerged in east Africa and eventually dispersed over the entire world.

What set these people off from our older ancestors, however, is crucial. It wasn't their thumbs, which, like most of their anatomy, were essentially the same as their immediate predecessors. Give or take some fine points of the cranium, we were human before we were human. But the version of humanity that appeared abruptly on the scene about 150,000 years ago had some strange new quality.

It may have been a mutation that gave rise to fully articulate language; or it could have been a leap in capacity for symbolic or abstract thought. These are the likeliest scientific guesses. The material facts are that the newly emerged form of human being was a prolific inventor. The stone tools made by his predecessors remained unchanged generation to generation for hundreds of thousands of years. An 800,000 year-old hand-ax looks identical to a 200,000 year-old hand-ax: and everyone used exactly the same tools. Intellectual property rights were not at issue. Then suddenly these new humans began to invent new tools and new ways of making tools at an unprecedented pace; different groups of them made different tools; and, before too much longer, began to trade group from group.

Now before the atheists start howling "God of the gaps", keep in mind that it is those trying to advocate Big E Evolution as the answer to all questions regarding the origins of life who are attempting to fill an enormous void with nothing but bloviating ego.

If one is positing Evolution as the secret to life, then it would seem to me that you'd better have some pretty comprehensive and compelling evidence, especially if you claim to be doing so on the basis of scientific fact and not faith.

But then, I'm a religious whack job, so what do I know?