Beauty and the Plausibility of Evolution

When I was younger, I resisted the idea of biological evolution very strongly.  There were several reasons:  

• my upbringing, specifically the environment in the church and school I attended,
• the fact that the most vocal proponents of biological evolution seemed to be insisting not only that it did happen, but that it could not have been otherwise because there is no God, and 
• the apparent absence of plausible alternative understandings of the first few chapters of Genesis. (Such alternatives do exist, but I was not exposed to them.)

Another reason, though, is that the common representations of life on Earth before the advent of man tended to be drab, boring, and ugly, as lampooned in Science Made Stupid.  The real world is too interesting and beautiful for this to be plausible for me. 

Today, documentaries like Walking with Dinosaurs have made great strides in making the pre-human world seem lively and realistic, and dinosaurs today are more likely to be represented as colorful, like the Swiss Guards, rather than dull green or gray, like cheap plastic toy WWII soldiers.


My first exposure to the potential for beauty in the prehistoric world, though, was Disney's Fantasia.  The dinosaurs were still drab, but the context provided the beauty.