Reply to comment

In Anne’s group on Thursday people felt that the story of evolution from Mayr’s perspective has a comforting affect.  Mayr was able to bring up numerous relevant observations about his case to support his view.  People felt that his summary of observations is comforting because we are able to know more about how humans have evolved and how the world works.   

But today in class, my comforting feeling left me as Paul lectured about Random Variation and how that has played an important role in evolution.  It is hard for me to digest the idea that evolution is run by a chaos theory.  It is less comforting knowing that evolution is a random process because one is not able to control or predict the outcome.  I guess I could understand why people at that time would prefer the idea of essentialism rather than Darwinism, just because essentialism is structured, basic, simple, and stable.  It does give a sense of security and comfort.  Essentialism does have a structure thus resembles more like science (in my opinion, science is structured due to laws and theories) rather than the “playful experiments”/random variation of Darwinism.  It is hard to believe that evolution can be random and unpredictable when science is structured.  Would you rather believe in evolution as a story of disorder and randomness or a more “comforting” structured story of essentialism?