The Theme is: Random
Reading back over the posts that I made for Just Science week, it seems like I had a theme going (unintentionally), which is that biology is a lot more random than most people seem to think.
For one thing, molecules don’t act like robots. They don’t whir and click into perfectly aligned machines that do everything smoothly. Molecules jiggle, they backtrack, they pause, they drift away, they snap apart, they even do things wrong. A lot. A ton of our evolution has been oriented towards controlling (or harnessing) the randomness of the molecular world in which we live. Though we speak in the language of determinism, that is simply a metaphor for a much more random reality. I think biologists sometimes do the world a disservice by hiding behind these deterministic metaphors.
On a larger scale, not everything in biology need be from adaptation. Evolution is quite random; it is a tree of historical accidents that has been pruned and shaped by natural selection.
Sometimes random is just random. Our bones aren’t white for a good reason; it just so happens that white is the color of the molecules and minerals in our bones. In the same way, I’ve tried to argue that some phenomenon in cell biology and molecular biology may just be historical accidents with no adaptational or functional meaning. I think that that should be the default theory for any phenomenon that biologists discover.
After all, if the intelligent design community is pushing for a default theory of a purely functional world, in which everything was specifically made by a greater being for a purpose, then (since they’re wrong) the default theory for real science is the opposite: the history of any species is a series of historical accidents, a tree grown with its roots buried deep in the rich soil of randomness.
