Now Playing: "Tom Violence" by Sonic Youth
I went and saw that new movie about penguins this past weekend and it was very interesting. Not so cutesy-poo as I had anticipated, either, but much more of a real National Geographic-caliber examination (because that's what it is, actually) of the life cycles of the emperor penguins of Anarctica. It was also visually fantastic.
Anyhow, it occurred to me at some point during the movie that what I was watching was a perfect explanation of the principles of evolution ---if only dumbasses will have it.
Why does the emperor penguin travel as far as 70 miles inland from the water's edge ---at the risk of starvation and utter peril at every stage in the process--- to mate, gestate, give birth, and care for its young? For that matter, why is a flightless bird ---who's vastly more adept at hunting for its food underwater--- hanging around in the coldest place on Earth? These are incredibly patient animals whose awkwardness of ambulation is so severe that you can almost imagine them thinking, "Yah, fuck this nonsense!" as they fall forward onto their bellies and body-surf across the ice.
All of which is to ask, why would an intelligent designer think of such a weird arrangement? Isn't it far more logical to believe that the reason why the emperor penguin exists as he does is because he made a niche for himself in a place where he either had to behave as he does or cease to exist? It is, as Dawkins would put it, a positive feedback loop between the animal and its environment: if you can get away with what you're doing in a place like this, the successive rewards will be that you're going to keep making babies that will grow up to keep doing the same thing ---and maybe even better, generation by generation. But if you can't maintain what you are in this environment, you will cease to exist because the brutal cold and the fragile birth process and the danger of terminal hunger would be too much to overcome.
Species exist because they adapt, which, in different locations and under certain circumstances of isolation and degrees of influence, accounts for all of the variation we see among the same basic ideas that animals represent. Another way of putting it is that every being is becoming. Perhaps not, in the way of evolution, as an individual, but in his serving his role in a longer process ---a process so unimaginably long that individuals cannot comprehend its span.
We are all self-made then. The only arbiter is Necessity, which ---as we all know--- is the mother of invention.
That isn't the same as God, now is it?