Week 4 - Essays

    The theory of evolution is important in understanding how human being behave because it provides an explanation why certain species exists over time and why certain features of them remain while others didn’t from a scientific perspective. According to Charles Darwin, the mechanism of evolution is through natural selection. Sean Carroll also summarizes the process of natural selection in this way: “evolution occurs when accidental mutations create features such as spots or stripes that impart an advantage for attracting mates, hiding from or confusing predators, or gaining access to food. These accidents are then preserved as small changes in the DNA.” Indeed, natural selection is not a dominant selection process but rather one developed over time through adaptations in various new environments. Moreover, one key debate between science and religion lies in how human consciousness arises. The beauty of science is that it is a catalog of successful and failure cases so that by empirically testing and verifying them, it could eliminate less successful theoretic conjectures, somehow similar to the mechanism of evolution, while religion emphasizes certain simulations and go all lengths to give to them a sense of transcendent nature beyond physical testing. According to evolution theory, consciousness is in fact “brain’s way of making chance/chaos more plastic, more pliable, more beneficial to the host organism.” In other words, it offers us an opportunity to pre-experience the various situations without the threat of any real dangers so that we could perform better in the real world. In this sense, consciousness works by the same mechanism as natural selection. Therefore, if this were correct, basically all human behaviors and philosophies could be explained on a neuroscientific level in a certain and unified way.



    Evolution theory is wonderful because it is able to explain many phenomena around us with empirical evidence. The major difference between science and religion is that science is based on testing and evidence so it is unique and universal while religion gives certain facts some transcendental values to eliminate their testing so that there are various religions in the world. One of the major breakthrough in science or evolution theory is that it has developed to a stage that it could possibly start to explain how consciousness works, which is largely limited to the spiritual explanations from religions in earlier times. Consciousness is the function of the brain, as evolution theory states, that enables humans to pre-imagine various situations without threat or danger so that they could benefit in the real case. Such simple explanation makes sense and reveals why we still ask why and dream. However, I think one thing evolution theory has not yet been able to explain is how the brain wires its circus to create certain functions. The big picture seems to be clear but we have yet to find out the details.