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Natural selection on the other hand weeds out the weak and favours the strong thereby enriching the population with a greater proportion of stronger better adapted individuals. Any advantageous mutation would, by this mechanism, be preferred for survival and mark a small step of cumulative evolutionary change. Life itself, argues Dawkins, was simply the result of as yet unknown chemical systems subject to a process of chemical selection. Dawkins adamantly argues for atheism, and "The Blind Watchmaker" had a profound effect upon my own thinking when I got lost on a solitary walking expedition about fifteen years ago.
At that time I was a church going Christian reading a biological sciences degree at university and went by myself to walk in the English Lake District; I had four days of walking ahead of me and packed Dawkins' book on evolution to give me something to read. His cogent writing had my full attention on the long train journey and was often in my thoughts as I grappled with the powerful scenery of the English Lakes. Ironically when I most would have liked the comfort of religion it was the seeming cold logic of atheism that gripped me. Having reached the summit of Helvelyn on the first day, I set off on the second day of my hike to climb up Scafell Pike, the highest peak in England, via the exhilarating high level route of Angle Tarn and Esk Hause and soon found myself marching into the clouds as thick fog rolled down the hills engulfing me. I kept on following ridges and natural changes in the terrain, even sounds can help, until I reached a high plateau; my last challenge before the final leg of my journey and that's when it happened. I was lost on a featureless plateau trying in vain for over an hour to find the way forward as the day ebbed away and a constant drizzle of rain harried me through the dense fog. Realising that I risked spending the night alone, wet and cold on the fells, I decided to turn back and retrace my steps to the youth hostel I had set out from. After another hour of fruitless attempts I was unable even to retrace my path and decided that I must now get to low ground; any low ground! The best looking option was west, so I groped around till I found a west facing edge and searched for an area of shallow incline. I quickly found what I was after and started of down the hill; my spirits rising as I gained hope and confidence until from beyond the limited horizon of my sight I could hear the sound of rushing wind. I edged forward, apprehensively, until I found myself close to the edge of a cliff whose real height I could only guess from the intensity of the howling wind shooting up the rock face. Not wanting to walk off a cliff I turned back. Back to the top of the plateau; a gut wrenching decision, after false hope, because I had to go up before finding another way down with no guarantee of success. At this point a wave of hopelessness came over me and I felt a sense of despair, foolishness and fear. How would I get down? Where would I sleep - would this be my last sleep? Eventually I found my way down, but reflecting upon the origin and purpose of life itself wondered if all my previous hopes were false? If so, then how lucky I was not to have died that night - but what next? My reading companion had been cold comfort, but truths as vital as the origin and purpose of life should always be more important than comfort. I left the Lakes alive, but a part of me was lost and left behind for a while.
Years later I returned to the subject and realised that the case for life's origin by pure random chemical forces had been greatly overstated. I do not wish now to dwell at any length on the discussion of the existence of a creator or evolution per se, but will dwell on just how greatly the case has been overstated.
The subject of life's origin ought not to be so elusive, because life is a reality that we sense and study all around us. Life's capacities: movement, growth and reproduction are evident for all to see; the mechanisms of movement, growth and reproduction are also subjects of direct observation along with the molecular genetic basis of heredity and genetic variation due to chance mutations in the genes of heredity. The key discussion relating to life's origin is possible if centred upon the discussion of life's present reality because life is, if the reader will forgive the reiteration, a tangible reality that we observe today. Therefore, any thinking person has the capacity to decide if life could appear spontaneously from chemical reactions.
One common observation about life: that life alone begets life has been derived from the experiments of Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century on cells: the smallest units of life. The experiments firmly established the dominance of what was called the 'cell theory' and conclusively rebutted the medieval European idea of spontaneous generation of life from stones and water, whereby diseases were attributed to bad 'humours', and established that microbes, though too small for the unaided human eye to see, do not arise spontaneously but propagate in a sterilised culture medium only if it has been exposed to microbes already present in the air.
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