Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times editorial board points out that, in the debate over evolution versus creationism / intelligent design, we sometimes lose sight of how very, very, very long natural selection has had to do its work. Excerpt (paragraphing edited):
. . . [T]he difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary
scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.It’s
been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first
originated on this planet. That is not an unimaginable number in
itself, if you’re thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or
grains of sand.But 3.5 billion years of biological history is
different. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by
one. They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all
the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time.That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in
which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved. It is time that
has allowed the making of us.The idea of such quantities of
time is extremely new. Humans began to understand the true scale of
geological time in the early 19th century. . . .
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