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Fiction » Essay » Ravings font: B s : A A A . width: full 3/4 1/2
Author: warnthepenguins
Fiction Rated: K+ - English - Humor/General - Reviews: 150 - Published: 10-15-03 - Updated: 10-13-05 - id:1422868

If you are a proponent of evolution by mutation, you believe, in a sense, that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the product of random chance.

Having said this, the evolutionist is also perfectly capable of believing such, because the universe has been around a truly staggeringly long time, and given a suitably long time, any number of impossible things may happen.
So it is not only possible, it is probable that, over the course of the fifteen-billion-year lifetime of the cosmos, at some time, on some planet, there evolved a certain kind of tree. And that this tree flourished, and that somewhere, in some secluded valley on this particular planet, there grew a copse of these certain trees, and that sometime in one particular hour of one particular, unremarkable day, a wind blew through this copse, just exactly right. And in that one hour, if you were there, you would have heard, in perfect key, a precise rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

And which is more likely—this accidental confluence of undirected natural forces, or the tortuous road which brought us human sentience, Europe, Austria, Ludwig van Beethoven and all their attendant baggage? Humans are so rarely predictable.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but Happenstance undoubtedly fathers it.



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