It’s the Small Things that Count
An account of the impact of small changes on evolution — bit by bit
The Universe has existed for a little over 13 billion years.
As for our planet, it is about 4 billion years. Scientists estimate life to have begun a billion years later.
We do not know how it started, but here we are, its products, 3 billion years after Gaia was born. This is a long-enough time for the diversity that we appreciate in life to spring, but it was not that easy for Darwin when he formulated his idea.
One of Darwin’s challenges was the estimates he gave for the emergence of the diverse life forms we see. He gave a ballpark figure of around one billion years.
When he advocated for his theory, the citizens were ardent believers of the creation theory. The challenge then was to convince humanity how and if the world has existed for a long-enough time to result in the species we see.
Enter Lord Kelvin
William Thomson, AKA Lord Kelvin was one of the lead scientists whose meticulous works earned him immortality as long as humans continue to exist. He was so instrumental in the development of thermodynamics, scientists named the absolute temperature scale in his honour.
And he was about to destroy Darwin’s honour.
His calculations estimated a planet that has been existing for around 100 million years. This was the initial estimate, and over time, he kept reducing it every so often to way less than 100 million years. This is magnitudes smaller than Darwin’s estimate.
Since his theory was dependent on slow gradual change, Darwin needed at least a billion years. Over time, a single species would then branch into two, resulting in the origin of new species, hence the name of his book. The process that describes Darwin’s theory is usually referred to as gradualism.
Gradualism is only possible if the Earth had existed for over a billion years. But Lord Kelvin thought otherwise.
The kind of meticulous work that Lord Kelvin did is often mentioned by scientists when describing their understanding of subjects:
Unless you measure it, you do not understand it.
Lord Kelvin’s measurements showed that Earth is young, which would mean that Darwin’s theory was a moot case.
This was very stressful for Darwin, for he took such a long time amassing evidence in support of his theory. Over twenty years!
He only had to wait a little bit. But this felt like a long time, given Darwin’s perspective, for he was trying to defend his theory.
Enter Ernest Rutherford.
The pioneer works of Ernst Rutherford on radioactive decay was the small element that mattered.
As the Kenyan artist, Jua Cali, would say, he only had to wait kiasi (a little bit).
As an example of how small things matter, consider the number Pi as 3.142. These are four significant figures. Now eliminate the last one, and we have 3.14.
If you were to make iterative calculations using 3.14 instead of 3.142, the downstream results would be very different. It would be worse if were were to use 3.1. Worse still, 3!
The small bit of radioactivity was all that was needed.
Darwin was vindicated when this heat source was factored into the calculations that adjusted the Earth’s age estimate to about 4.5 billion years. This is a long-enough time for Darwin’s slow process, for there to be gradual changes enough to give rise to species.
Not abrupt changes, but small gradual changes, changes kiasi.
This gradual process ended up being a contested topic later when other scientists suggested an abrupt, precipitous process rather than a slow one.
That is a topic for another article.
For now, the point to note was these small changes (gradualism) that propelled him to fame. He also had to wait for a small change (time), for the world to understand the role of radioactivity.
It was these small things that counted
In short, like Darwin would have to wait… kiasi.
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