Evolution and humility

One of the arguments against evolution is that the incredible complexity and diversity of life could never emerge from randomness in any conceivable timespan. I would suggest this reflects more on the limitations of our ability to conceive of time quanity than on the possibilities of evolution.

Humans are terrible at understanding large numbers and time - much less the two combined. Let's take the second point first: "It seems like just yesterday..." "Every second seems like an hour when you're gone..." ""Where did the time go?" Our memory and time sense are not designed to let us really understand that a year is 365 times as long as a day (for that matter the concept of 365 is beyond us; see below). Even less are we able to understand what a million years is. Yet opponents of evolution blithely decry that it could occur on that kind of timeframe, generally without any evidence other than their own intuition.

People also lack intuitive understanding of even moderately large numbers, much less the huge numbers involved in evolutionary timespans. Do you really have a sense, for example, of how big a hundred is? If a bag of jellybeans spilled on the floor, could you say whether there were 100, 75, 150, or 200, just by looking at it? If not, I argue, you don't really understand what a hundred means. You may be able to use the number, compute with it, make judgments using it, but you don't really understand it in an intuitive way, like you do, say, five.

Now imagine a hundred bags of jellybeans - that's 10,000. Would you have any clue how many were there? Now imagine a hundred of those 10,000-jellybean spills - that's a million. So, sez me, you can't even come close to understanding the numbers involved in evolutionary timeframes.