Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, as I understand it can be summarized as follows: Species arise by random mutation and evolve into their current forms by stepwise mutations that are accepted or rejected by species through their mating choices or natural selection and that this is a comprehensive explanation and that survival is the criterion of choice. There are several objections to this theory:
* It is too materialistic. By this it is meant that this essentially mechanistic method leaves little room for the action of awareness in the equation. Since awareness is visible in all living species and since awareness is the means by which choice manifests itself and since awareness is the author of Darwin’s theory itself, one is left dissatisfied by a theory that provides too little discussion of its impact on the process.
* It would seem that, under some circumstances the glacial pace of evolution might not be sufficient to survive dramatic change.
* We aren’t seeing new species emerging around us. We do see minor changes in existing species, but nothing new.
* It is unsatisfying in its efforts to account for the existence of structures who’s function before complete manifestation cannot be accounted for. The typical example of this is the wing, though that is not a particularly good example since protowings might have arisen for the purpose of cooling the owner.
* Symbiosis seems to be another weakness. One has to imagine the partners evolving in a codependent fashion. The flowers and the bees for instance.
In my own view the above stated theory fails in the demand that it be comprehensive. The greatest of the three weaknesses described is the first. Unless awareness is satisfactorily taken into account, we will continue the feeling of dissatisfaction.
Before considering the question of awareness let us first dispose of religion. In my view religion is best characterized as a shorthand explanation for something that is beyond the reasoning capabilities of the receivers of this wisdom, that is life, especially human life. I think it best to consider that religion is essentially true, but that it leaves vast gaps that are now being filled in and that Darwinism is one of the efforts at filling the gaps.
I would go on to say that Darwinism is inescapably true, just not comprehensively so. My favorite example of its inescapability is the shrimp evolving on both sides of the isthmus of Panama. I understand they have evolved to the point of being incapable of further crossbreeding though they still appear indistinguishable. Presumably the recent appearance of the isthmus seperated them and allowed for their differential evolution.
Awareness, as even Darwin accepts is capable of choice. Otherwise how does natural selection work. Selecting is the act of choosing. Choosing presupposes an aware observer making selections based on some criteria.
Whence came the criterion for manifesting choice?
Whence came evolution as a strategy for survival?
We can respond with the God concept of course. Or we can suppose that survival is a manifestation of conservatism. Whence came conservatism?
Eventually we will have to posit the existence of attributes. We should define attributes as non divisible characteristics of things. This is not a stretch of credulity. All elements acquire attributes according to the number of primary particles they contain. Thus gold is a yellow metalic substance and by adding one proton and corresponding electron it loses those attributes and acquires others. This is also true of molecules.
From this it seems to me likely that the quality of life is an attribute. It is probably an attribute of sufficiently complex carbon molecules.
If we further define conservatism and liberalism as the tendencies to remain the same or to change, these also seem sufficiently unitary to assume them to be attributes.
So, if we assume that sufficiently complex carbon molecules can arise through random action in a suitable environment, and that they acquire the attribute of life, and that the attribute of conservatism is felt by that new life, then everything that is needed to explain the arrival of life on earth is in hand. Let us use the name Gaia for this new arrival on planet earth. Let us further assume that self awareness is how life manifests itself and that that awareness is what distinguishes the living from the non living.
Now, Gaia exists and is self aware. With awareness comes the ability to choose. After gaining a few more atoms and losing others, Gaia will become aware that she has liberal qualities, that she is capable of change. I choose the feminine pronoun as appropriate because Gaia will soon begin to give birth. Gaia will experience conservatism as the desire to continue to exist.
Soon Gaia, by acquiring new atoms and molecules will begin to grow structures and by trial and error will decide which structures are useful and which aren’t. Eventually, in response to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, she will begin to make copies of herself.
From this we must draw the conclusion that evolution exists as a strategy for survival chosen by Gaia and relied upon by her for two reasons. One is that the only alternative would be to rely on imagination, wholly inadequate to the job judging from our own abilities in this realm. A second reason will be the continuous need to adapt to a changing environment. But, evolution is a gradual process, not suited to the rigors of dramatic change, such as the reversal of the magnetic pole or the arrival of a large asteroid. Dramatic changes in temperature are also to be expected.
The last great environmental change occurred about ten thousand years ago, which coincidentally, or not, seems to be the duration of homo sapiens in its current objective manifestation. So, we aren’t seeing new species because the environment isn’t changing, though it would appear to be heading into a change now. Prior to the current state of moderate temperatures a state we call an ice age existed. This state continued for a very long time with only fluctuations of a few degrees within it, over 100,000 years. So, this must be termed normalcy and our current weather environment must be viewed as aberational.
If this notion of Gaia is a fair representation of reality and she is our immediate creator, where is she now? She must have an executive function, where is that? The most reasonable answer to these questions is DNA. Is DNA alive? Indubitably. It chooses and reproduces. How does Gaia communicate with us? Feelings.
Having discovered where we came from, where are we going? In order to answer this question, it will be necessary to give up on the discredited chauvinism. We cannot assume that we are the ideal of creation or even an evolutionary apex. We must view ourselves as one of a vast number of experiments Gaia has tried and that she tried us for a reason. That we have some mission to accomplish and once that is done, we will be moving on to other challenges.
What is our mission? Well, it must be something that flows from objective awareness, since we uniquely carry this capability. One of the things we are manifestly doing in a big way is recycling hydrocarbons, that is, burning oil. So, this seems a likely mission. Perhaps there are others. Perhaps we should transplant Gaia to another home in the solar system or beyond. If so we will do it, because we will get a good feeling when we contemplate the possibility.
So, injecting a strategically aware Gaia into the equation, resolves all of the problems with Darwinism. It recognizes the importance of awareness. It allows a mechanism for the development of structures having no immediate use to the carrier. It provides for rapid production of new species when needed, that is, if imagination comes up with a likely idea, Gaia is capable of bringing it into existence, possibly very rapidly. Gaia can do this because she is the engineer of DNA and understands both it and its possibilities. It is apparent how symbiosis can arise.
Gaia has some other positive features. She provides a brake for hubris. She invests life with meaning. She provides an answer to the question: Why do humans pursue goals they don’t understand?
Would it be possible to objectively demonstrate the existence of Gaia? This would provide an advantage over the God concept. I would contend that, were one able to film an example of strategic awareness in a species having no significant brain, that would go far towards demonstrating the existence of Gaia. I therefore provide a personal experience here that, if accurately reported, is an example, though, not having a camera at the time it isn’t on film and therefore the reader will have to accept or reject my veracity as he sees fit.
Duck Story
When about thirteen I went goose hunting with my uncle and the principal of my school. We went to a reservoir in southern Oregon and stationed ourselves at intervals along the dam. My station was above the outlet. There was a small pond of about ten feet in diameter below the outlet pipe and a small lake about a hundred yards distant on the path of the stream that the outlet created. In the lake were about a dozen ducks in which I had no interest because the strategy of the hunt called for us to await the departure of the geese in the middle of the reservoir when they left for their morning meal in the grainfields in the valley below. The ducks swam about making duck sounds and eventually one duck arose from the group, flew around the lake a couple of times gaining speed and then flew directly over me at low altitude but very fast. I didn’t move a muscle for the reasons stated above. The group of ducks then arose as one and flew to the pond below me and landed in it. I then gave up on the geese and fired on the ducks.
In the car I was asked why I had violated the strategy of the hunt and so I told my uncle and principal what had happened and interpreted it in this way. The ducks wished to move to the pond because of some desirable food source there but were worried that I might be a threat. So, they devised a strategy for determining whether or not that was the case. They sent a decoy, who, being worried flew over me low and fast, hoping that, should I fire, I would miss. When I made no effort to shoot, they concluded I was harmless and moved to the pond.
This is indelibly recorded in my memory because I knew at the time that that behavior was inconsistent with current interpretations regarding the capabilities of animals and the difference between them and humans. Animals are perported to operate on instinct, by which we mean a recorded set of responses to particular stimuli. It is assumed that, for example, animals will copulate because of chemical signals provided by the female that activates that response in the male. Human females, along with most females in the animal world instinctively protect their young from danger. So, instinct thus defined, undoubtedly is one of the modes of behavior that living things exhibit. Humans demonstrate a strategic capability that involves visualizing circumstances and how they would be altered by certain actions on the part of the visualizer. This capability has been assumed to be absent in animals and the assumption is that strategic action requires a large brain. This is a particularly striking example in a creature with an insignificant brain, but strategic behavior isn’t that uncommon. Bonobos trade sex for food, birds crack eggs with rocks.
The experience recounted above demonstrates, if accurately recalled and interpreted, that a large brain isn’t required for strategic behavior, that there is some other seat of intelligence in animals. That seat I would say is DNA, which I name, in its entirety, Gaia. If that is an accurate interpretation we are confronted by another question. Why is such behavior not more frequently reported as such? I would say that the answer to this question is that humans are discouraged from reporting or interpreting events in other than the currently accepted mode. They don’t wish to be ridiculed, as in the case of the UFO phenomena. Beyond that, trained observers aren’t often in the field making observations and those that are, few in number as they are, must be very careful about what they report if they don’t wish their funding to dry up.
Perhaps it is rare, anyway. Gaia does provide instinctive behavior that deals with all ordinary circumstances, so only unusual situations would call for such behavior. Perhaps, until now, it has been in Gaia’s interest to limit our observations in order to provide us with the proper motivation to accomplish our mission.
Beyond that, I would propose that we are capable of programming our own DNA and the method we use is called practice. A good musician is required to make the mechanical aspects of playing his instrument automatic or instinctual. All that is required for him to play is the proper stimulus. The rest of us do the same with driving after sufficient years of practice. This suggests to me that it is also inheritable if procreation occurs after the achievment of the capability. This thought explains to me the startling performances of those we call idiot savants, and were we capable of discontinuing the activities of the brain, we would be startled to find what we are capable of. We are all familiar with the equivalent of thought occuring at the DNA level. We call them dreams.
So, Gaia is carrying on the experience of life on our planet. We are best characterized as observers. We were needed to accomplish a mission, a requirement of which was objective thought. Perhaps we are not the first such species nor the last in the complete history of life. We must conclude that objective species are rare, and therefore probably short lived. Once our purpose is fulfilled we should expect to gradually lose our objective capabilities and to return to normalcy as a member of the family of animal life on the planet. I guess we will join the various species of whale. This process appears to me to have already begun, we call it feminism.
We can predict some aspects of this transformation. The first thing to go will be education. I recommend to the reader the Pink Floyd album, The Wall, in which the group sings the words:
We don’t need no education.
We don’t need no thought control;
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
By which the poet means to say that education, far from having in view the expansion of the horizons of the student, actually narrows the field of experience by forcing the student to concentrate on and extend the experience of particular interest to the teacher. No doubt we will also see a great deal of violence and destruction. We can already see this coming in terrorism. Since pleasant weather was instrumental in making possible this adventure, we should expect a return to colder temperatures. El Nino is probably a harbinger of that change. Since technological society rests on economics, world wide economic failure is a certainty.
This all sounds rather negative. It is always depressing to see the end of a culture from the inside, as the American Indian will attest, but most humans are unwilling participants in our culture. For them it will seem a very good thing, indeed. They will undoubtedly find it appropriate to wreak some vengeance on us, thereby hastening the inevitable end. Once this transitional period passes, most humans will return to a subsistance existence, what few remain. No doubt a few outposts of culture will also continue to exist, under constant attack from the primitives. After that, the weather will be in control.
Predicting the future isn’t very hard, once a clear picture of what has happened over the last 10,000 years is achieved. Predicting the timing isn’t so easy. I guess all of what I have described will occur in the next century. This prediction isn’t very different from the Christian Book of Revelation, but the emphasis is. It is represented in The Bible as a momentous event. I would describe it as ordinary life on the planet Earth.