Say what?

Sometimes I think I flunked out of Evolution one too many times. Last night at dinner, we were having a lively discussion of evolution (we have lively discussions regarding just about every subject, truth be told) and it turns out, I'm not smart enough to understand evolution after all. It all started when my brother brought up wolves, and how they're getting more dog-like as the years pass (darker fur, I guess), and little ol' me says something about evolution and breeding, and next thing I know, my dad's educating me about evolution, and how it "really" is just a series of complicated breeding patterns, after all.

I'd never really given it much thought, actually, about the process in and of itself. I usually get hung up at the very beginning of this totally nonsensical process, somewhere between the "big bang" and "protein soup" that we somehow all came out of.

But we weren't discussing that. My dad was trying to get through my thick skull the concept of advantages. As I currently understand it, evolution goes something like this: one generation gets the gene capable of creating a mutation, and a following generation gets the actual mutation, and if that sticks, then further generations get the actual change implemented within them.

But where I got hung up was the whole "if it sticks" part. I guess for the mutation to be passed along it has to have an advantage.

Here's where I asked such questions as "How does the body decide if it's an advantage or not? How does it know what to pass on?" And I'm pretty sure my parents decided right then and there that I must have flunked out of comprehensive thinking, as well.

Anyhow, I guess the advantage causes the newly mutated creature to live long enough to pass along their genes to the next generation. Oh. How was I supposed to know?

I guess that doesn't sound like a very big discovery, but it took about an hour and a half for me to understand all of that.

Well, most of our suppers take an hour and a half (eating, talking, and Bible reading all combined), but this one seemed extra long, due to the high level of confusion on my part. The only parts I understood for the first hour or so was our discussion of bacterial flagellum, thanks to some science-y video I saw that was somewhere along the lines of this.

When all was said and done, all I could do was thank the Lord that I know I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I was created by the Lord, and His handiwork is all over me. I'm not the product of some random mutation, I am a work of art.

Now, isn't that a whole lot better?

PS, I'm not saying that mutations don't happen in people (I mean, we've got all those hereditary diseases that the Lord sure didn't program into us), I'm just saying that we're not the product of cells mutating into frogs, and frogs into raccoons, and raccoons to monkeys, and monkeys into humans. I come from a long line (6,000 years or so) of humans. We started out this way, people, and we're messed up only because of sin. We're not upgrading as we go along. Seriously.