“Freaks” Inherit the Earth—Eventually

All living species have evolved from “freaks” that lived in prior ones. Webster defines the “freak” as “…something very queer or unusual: A green leaf growing in the middle of a rose would be called a freak of nature.” Children are fascinated and adult jerks laugh when they see “freaks” of nature. However, the jerks would be surprised to learn that without chance environmental changes and “freaks” we humans would not be here (see my essays, “What Is A Human Being?” and “Evolution In A Nutshell: Survival Of The Fit Enough”).

Evolutionary biologists tell us that 99% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. All species have had to compete with other species for the available resources and space needed to survive long enough to reproduce and pass on their genes to a new generation. Over time, the successful ones acquired a set of genes that produce the most efficient traits for their particular environment. The scientific explanation for the process by which this is achieved is called the theory of evolution. An overwhelming majority of biologists say that except for still to be resolved details, the theory has no “weaknesses” or plausible alternatives.

Each population of a species has a large majority of its members with the most efficient genes, but a minority of members have genes that produce less efficient traits. I’m sure that if plants, lower animals, and microbes could think, a majority of them would consider the ones who sported the less efficient traits to be “freaks” of nature. The population of any species will maintain the ratio of efficient to less efficient genes until the environment in which they live changes. The change could be a change in climate, in the number and type of predators, in the number and type of competitors for food and water, or in modifications of the landscape.

Before the DNA molecule was discovered in 1957 and its implications fully understood, scientists thought living things changed their traits as a response to a change in their environments and, therefore, changing environments were the “cause” of evolution. Now they know that the traits living things would eventually need to adapt to a change in their environment were already present in the population—a few “freaks” had them—but in small numbers because the freakish traits had not yet been needed. When the environmental change did occur, as it ALWAYS does, it gave the “freaks” a competitive advantage.

Snakes, having no limbs, evolved from a type of burrowing lizard that had four limbs. These particular lizards became increasingly restricted, due to predators, to places that required them to burrow smaller and deeper holes, and move through smaller cracks and crevices in rocks. Lizards in the population that had smaller front limbs, “freaks.” found it easier to operate under the new conditions, which allowed them to more easily elude predators and, therefore, their numbers and genes increased in the population. In time, all of the lizards’ limbs became increasingly shorter, eventually disappearing altogether. This is the process by which snakes evolved from “freaks.” In other words, most of the genes of the shorter-limbed “freaks” survived to eventually inherit the space formerly “owned” by their long-limbed ancestors.

Evolution, then, is a change in the traits of a population of living things that can be inherited over several or many generations by a change in the possible variations of a gene and the frequency of these variations within the population; or, simply put evolution is a change in the gene pool of a particular population of living things.

Over enormous periods of time, this process is responsible for the development of new species and life forms from preexisting ones. With the exception of the first bacterium, all life forms on Earth developed from preexisting ones!

Should you want to know more about how scientists believe our universe formed, how life began, and how “freaks” have struggled to survive and pass on their genes to us, read my other essays and my book, Settled Science.