Strings of History

“Um…son…what are you doing?”

Crouching, I twisted my body to face my mother, who was standing above me in the doorway. I held a huge roll of string in one hand and a thick roll of duct tape in the other. I had cleared the floor of my room by squishing all the furniture uncomfortably against the far wall. On the newly barren, wooden floor lay rows and rows of the string I was holding. Starting in one corner, it bee-lined straight towards the other end of the room where it was firmly fastened. Then, it zigzagged back alongside itself. Again and again, back and forth, I had laid the string down until it resembled a large grid or pipelines.

I smiled at my mom. “I’m conducting a little experiment.”

Now, I’m not usually a science enthusiast, but I was determined to prove a point that day. I had recently read an article in Time Magazine about the ongoing debate between Darwinists and Creationists, the latter cleverly labeling themselves as supporters of “intelligent design.” I remember reading that the primary argument of intelligent design was that the structure of life was too complex to occur randomly over time, and therefore, a conscious presence must have been involved in its creation. As I read more and more of intelligent design’s proposals, I grew more and more determined to prove its adherents wrong.

I immediately set out to suggest that chance mutations could have been responsible for creating today’s life, considering the enormous expanse of earth’s history. Using 1 cm to convey 100,000 years, I calculated how many times I would have to lay a piece of string across my room in order to represent the world’s timeline. In the end, the string made 82 trips across my room, a distance equaling about four football fields. And how long was human civilization on this timeline? Much