- How did complexity originate? By chance?
What made the brain capable of becoming more complex?
Evolution by chance is not the only theory of evolution nor is it the most convincing.
Evolution isn’t chance.
You must read this page to understand:
ebonmusings.org/evolution/evonotchance.html
Quote: “…To conceive of evolution as nothing more than blind chance and randomness is the most serious conceptual mistake one can make. Evolution does contain a component of chance, but there is far more to the process than that, and it is precisely the existence of the non-chance components that allows evolution to work. The process of evolution is driven by the engine of natural selection, a filter that extracts order out of chaos according to a fixed and non-random set of rules. It is for this reason that many of the most common creationist caricatures of evolution fail. Evolution is not like an explosion in a print shop producing a dictionary, a tornado in a junkyard producing a 747, or DNA in a blender producing a human being, because all of these lack a component of non-random selection…”
So, evolution contains components of chance:
- The child inherits characteristics of his parents. Eye-color, skin tone, height etc. Some characteristics from mother, some from father. But which characteristics from mother and which characteristics from father is decided BY CHANCE.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heredity
- There are mutations, spontaneous or caused by mutagens. This is CHANCE number two. The overwhelming majority of mutations have no significant effect on an organism’s fitness. But sometimes mutation can be harmful or beneficial (improving reproductive success). Fore example. 5%-14% of Europeans carry mutation CCR5-Δ32, which provides strong protection against HIV infection. Africans and Asians rarely have this mutation. But one third of sub-saharan Africans carry sickle-cell disease, which is mutation providiong resistance to malaria.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutagens
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#CCR5-.CE.9432
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease
Heredity and mutation are random processes. They do not evolve population in any way. But if you add a third component - selection, then evolution starts. This is the order.
3. “Under selection, individuals with advantages or “adaptive” traits tend to be more successful than their peers reproductively—meaning they contribute more offspring to the succeeding generation than others do. When these traits have a genetic basis, selection can increase the prevalence of those traits, because offspring will inherit those traits from their parents. When selection is intense and persistent, adaptive traits become universal to the population or species, which may then be said to have evolved. Scientists who do experimental genetics employ artificial selection experiments that permit the survival of organisms with user-defined phenotypes. Artificial selection is widely used in the field of microbial genetics, especially molecular cloning.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection