Why do humans have hearts?
I can see it already – you’re rolling your eyes thinking, “Well duh…because we need a way to circulate oxygen, hormones, immune cells and other signals, and transport waste compounds and gases.” Ahh, but you would be wrong. For the above describes only what a heart does – not why we have one. As I wrote a few days ago, evolution pays no attention to “needs.” Species don’t evolve because they “need” to adapt or change some trait. Natural selection is blind to all intention and desire. Before Charles Darwin (and his buddy Alfred Russell Wallace) gave us the theory of natural selection, the above “necessity” explanation would have sufficed – with an added “because God designed it that way” just for good measure. The genius, beauty, and simplicity of Darwin’s big idea was in how it utterly reshaped the manner in which all “why” questions about reality are posed and how their answers are understood. The Origin of Species laid the foundation for the complete upheaval of the very word “why.”
