A Backyard Lesson in Evolution
When I was talking with my friend Rob, we got into a deep conversation—one of those wandering talks about life and how it works. We touched on something debated for centuries: Is life the result of a grand design, or does it all come down to natural processes like adaptation and survival?
This question goes back at least as far as 1802, when Reverend William Paley wrote Natural Theology. Paley famously compared living things to a watch. He argued that if you found a watch on the ground, you’d assume someone made it—a watchmaker. So why not assume the same about life? To Paley, all the complexity and beauty of living organisms was proof of a designer—God.
His words were strong:
“There cannot be design without a designer… That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD.”
But about 50 years later, Charles Darwin shook that idea to its roots. In his view, nature didn’t need a conscious designer. Evolution worked through natural selection. Random changes (what we now call genetic mutations) sometimes gave organisms a slight advantage—better eyesight, a thicker coat, a clever escape trick. If those traits helped them survive and reproduce, they got passed on. Over time, those beneficial traits piled up, shaping the species—not by design, but by nature’s quiet filter.
That brings me back to Rob.
Rob had cats, though I never saw them. He’d let them roam his yard, but only when he was around to keep predators like coyotes or bobcats at bay. One thing he noticed: a cat would grab a lizard every now and then. In a flash of desperation, the lizard would drop its tail and run. It might look a bit silly, stubbed in the rear, but it lived to fight another day.
Soon enough, nearly all the lizards in his yard were tailless. Not because they were designed that way, but because the ones that couldn’t drop their tails had already been eaten.
That’s natural selection. It wasn’t part of a plan. The lizards didn’t “choose” to evolve that way. But those with the tail-dropping reflex survived more often, and if they went on to have baby lizards, that trait spread.
In Paley’s time, imagining something so complex as life not being intentionally built was hard. But what Darwin showed—and what Rob’s yard seemed to prove in its small way—is that nature doesn’t need a blueprint. It just needs time, variation, and a bit of pressure to sort out what survives and what doesn’t.