On dead ends

There is one argument about evolution that we often find a surprising agreement between most opponents and proponents of evolution. It is argued that natural selection is a cruel or wasteful process. Opponents often use it as an argument against theistic evolution, saying that if God used evolution to create, then he used a cruel and wasteful process.

Most evolutionary biologists who respond to this admit that evolution is a wasteful way to create, but argue that it happens nonetheless and theistic evolutionists still agree it is wasteful but then explain why this is consistent with theism.

It seems to me that both sides are making a fundamental error in thinking. It's surprising that evolutionary biologists would make this error. They are thinking typologically. They are thinking of a species as a real thing that is being created. Evolution just requires that organisms live and die. An organism that passes on fewer of its genes than another has not been a waste. It would only be a waste if somehow it is seen as incomplete, as existing to create the next step. An organism isn't born trying to evolve into something else.

We can think of the world as consisting of several tens of millions of species, or we can see it as trillions of individual organisms with different degrees of similarity and relatedness to others. In many ways evolution is not cruel at all. It uses the deaths that assuredly would happen anyway to produce change.

No matter what your view on evolution, you cannot deny that there are massive numbers of deaths in every species every day. You can't deny that most organisms fail to reproduce. You can't deny that death happens, and often it happens because of differences in the genetic make up of the organisms. Whether you believe in evolution or not, we see the exact same total number of deaths for the exact same reasons. If I or anyone I know fails to pass on genes to the next generation, our lives and deaths are not more or less meaningful, cruel, or wasteful. If an organism does pass on its genes and the next generation is different from the one before, that organism did not exist just for that change.

If an individual that dies is the last member of its species then it is unfortunate that the earth has a little less diversity. But its death isn't more cruel than any other death. It is the end of one particular lineage, just like all deaths are. Creationists believe in typological "kinds" and I suppose they could see it as the loss of a kind, but the essence of evolutionary thought is population thinking rather than typological thinking. It is surprising to see biologists think of species or higher taxonomic categories as real things that are being wasted.

If you believe in God and you believe in a world that is billions of years old, with countless trillions of deaths, those deaths could only be seen as wasteful if you see those billions of years as existing only so that today can exist. It seems much more elegant to me to see those trillions of organisms as existing for their own sake. Evolution is a by product, not the reason for their existence.