warning: this might not make sense

I was sitting in my evolution class today. First, I was awake. Second, I was paying attention. That's a miracle in and of itself.

My professor was quickly moving through here powerpoint slides on natural selection and adaptation. Blah blah blah. Then, she came to a slide with a picture of a haggard, old woman. The slide was titled "Senescence."

She said something that I can't quite get out of my mind. "Why do we age?"

Let's think about that for a moment.

First, what she's really asking is that natural selection should favor the fittest organisms. If organisms are continually being selected by fitness, should we not, over the last million years or so, have become fit enough to be free of the ravages of time?

Now is the good part. This is where I get to call my professor a moron. Why?

Here's the deal...

The concept of time is fairly basic. Time is a measure of change. Without change, time does not pass. This seems slightly crazy, I know. However, it's only crazy because we can't imagine a situation where things are not changing. We'll come back to this concept.

Evolution, as generally defined by my "learned" professor, is the study of the change in allele frequencies from generation to generation over time.

Now back to time. Time is an entity much like nature. It just happens, regardless of anything going on in our lives. Because things always change, time is always moving forward. I hope that I've made this clear enough.

Here's the real reason why I get to laugh at my professor. If we were somehow able to remove ourselves from change, time would no longer have any hold on us. However, she suggests that we should have somehow evolved to a state of perfection, where change is no longer necessary.

It is not possible for the finite to become infinite. There is no way to use change to come to a point where change is no longer necessary. One my object that given time and skill, a masterpiece like the Mona Lisa can be perfected. However, the Mona Lisa was painted by a man with a separate consciousness with an ideal in mind.

To quote my professor, "Evolution does not strive for an ideal. Evolution is change. There is no plan to it. It just sort of happens."

Without that separate conscious plan, the Mona Lisa would not be a masterpiece. To expect that an organism would become perfect requires consciousness because a plan and goal must be sought after.

We are subject to time because we cannot escape it, regardless of fitness, selection, or evolution.

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