You wait all day for a bus ...

... then two come along at once. That's the popular remark on what seems to be a common, valid observation.

This article is not about public transport per se though. There is an interesting element of truth in the observation that busses arrive at bus stops in pairs (or sometimes more) which is absent, or at least not as evident, in some other sayings, such as the assertion that toast always falls butter side down. So why should busses do this, and what does it tell us? It turns out this is not really an article about busses. It is really an article about God, creationism, thermodynamics and evolutionary biology. Clearly we have a bit of a journey to get there though.

Bear with me.

Advocates of Intelligent Design often cite the stunning improbability of the occurrence of complex living structures as evidence of a divine origin for life. How could the beautiful, unpredictable variety of life have happened by chance? The only possible explanation is that they serve some purpose, that they manifest some divine intentionality.

But creationists are not seeing the whole picture. They are not considering the processes by which the information content of the environment is imprinted on the organisms that inhabit it. It is as though they are marvelling at the apparent structure in the order and timing with which busses are arriving at the bus stop without considering how the busses got there and why that process makes this structure inevitable rather than unlikely.

As with all religious explanations that rely on an appeal to a sense of awe, science reveals a truth infinitely more marvellous and beautiful than all the possibilities that can occur to even the most devout.

I am not denying God. I am saying you short-change Him when you attempt to use your inevitably limited understanding of His omniscience and omnipotence as an explanation for what you can see. It is only the incomplete, provisional, conjectural, incremental endeavour that is science that permits truth and beauty to impinge, however imperfectly, upon the puny awareness of our flawed and fallible thinking apparatus.

Let's consider the busses again. They are not just driving around uniformly distributed in a circle without any interaction with each other or their surroundings.

We know they encounter bus stops. They also encounter junctions and traffic lights. If a bus has recently reached a bus stop it is likely there will be no passengers waiting for that service immediately afterwards, and while this persists the subsequent bus doesn't need to stop and so can catch up and even overtake the other bus. Similarly with busses stopped at junctions and traffic lights. An effect known as "platooning" can occur.

The busses are embedded in a complex environment, are circulated around it and interact with it and each other, and this process is driven by energy provided by fuel. This process encodes the information content of their environment on the distribution of elements within it, until apparently unlikely structures emerge. It doesn't take much for structures to emerge once you provide energy to power a process: consider Conway's Game of Life. In this context, a swarm of busses, prowling the bus routes, consuming and disgorging resources in the form of passengers, loosely bound by the processes I have described, is a sort of organism. We could even define an entropy based on the likelihood of encountering busses in groups, rather than individually, which tells us something about the information content of their environment.

Imagine now the material being circulated is atoms and molecules rather than busses. Imagine the interactions and combinations that might occur as the energy of the sun powers this cycle, directly or stored by photosynthesis. Imagine the variety of structures that will emerge through the infinite recursion by which they interact with their complex environment on the one hand and form part of the environment itself on the other. The equilibrium we observe is anything but simple. Indeed, given the complexity of the environment and the abundance of its information content, with mountains and rivers and oceans, polar icecaps and tropical jungles, it would be remarkable if it was. We do not need to seek the information manifested by life in a remote divine origin. It is all around us.

So the next time you are waiting for a bus, remember that if you wait long enough, it isn't two busses that you will see going past.

It is a cheetah chasing a gazelle. It is a baby elephant with its trunk wrapped around its mother's tail. It is a bird of paradise performing a dance to attract a mate.

It is that thin greasy film adhering to a pock mark on a volcanic rock next to a ocean trench three and a half billion years ago to form the lipid membrane of the first cell, cradling its precious cargo of amino acids. It is that eukaryotic organism that first underwent mitosis.

It is that one mesoproterozoic microbe that was eaten by another microbe a billion years ago, but refused to be food, and survived by sharing its genetic material rather than allowing it to be obliterated, to initiate instead the sequence of sexual reproduction that ultimately delivers you into the arms of your beloved tonight, after a meal illuminated by a candle shedding sunlight captured by a leaf long ago, drinking Champagne effervescing with an oxide of carbon atoms that complete a long solar powered journey around this earth that began when they arrived with the Late Heavy Bombardment four billion years ago.