This question ran through my mind this morning as I considered the most influential scientific theory of the nineteenth century, namely the theory of evolution. Evolution is taught as a proven scientific fact, yet it is directly contradicted by archaeological evidence and provably impossible due to the overwhelming number of interdependent factors in even the simplest of life forms. The only aspects of the theory ever demonstrated inside or outside the laboratory are that random mutations occur and natural selection can lead to extinction. Should it not then be called the theory of extinction?
And if the widely accepted "fact" of evolution is in fact not true, then a worldview shaking conclusion follows: We are not evolving.
Our ability to think abstractly often causes us to gloss over important details and to equate things that are not true. For example, we see machines such as automobiles wearing out with use, so we assume that our bodies similarly wear out over time. This is simply not true. Unlike an automobile, our bodies grow stronger when exercised. If we break a bone, the bone heals and is often stronger than it was before. Why then do we eventually die? Because the systems within our bodies shut down as we grow older. We do not wear out; we shut down.
Likewise, we think that because we are evolving technologically, we must be evolving in other ways and therefore the whole universe is somehow evolving. This again is a fallacy. That we are evolving technologically is undeniable. That we are evolving physically or mentally is provably false. Our ability to remember and to delineate between finer shades of meaning has significantly decreased over the centuries and millenia. This can be observed through the flattening of language, such as the devolution of ancient Greek to modern Greek. It can also be observed by comparing the vast amounts of information memorized by people in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as compared to the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first Going back further to medieval and ancient times, and we find people frequently of memorizing huge volumes of information. This is not to say that we are no longer capable of doing so today. We simply don't do it because we don't need to. Modern information sources are at our fingertips, so why do we need to memorize so much? For the same reason, we often allow others to do the delineating of finer shades of meaning for us and so lose that capability as well. Thus, our technical progress is actually in spite of our mental change, not because of it.
The conclusion here is critical to dwell upon. We are not evolving. Stop for a second to think what that means. Even if you don't accept it after reading this post, think about what it would mean if you did. This need not be a depressing thought, though it likely is for someone who has spent their entire life believing we are evolving. It is simply truth that can point us to a different source of hope.
I think you are pretty much right that species aren't generally making an effort to advance their lot in life with amazing new mutations unless there's some external force taking a hand in it. These days that's usually mankind on other species (breeding dogs, for example). But I think your "Theory of Extinction" phrase is on target because that's the invisible hand which causes the pattern we see.
ReplyDeleteAfter relatively long periods of nothing new under the sun, sudden drastic shakeups affect all the members of a population at once. A few have a latent gene that weakly expressed itself which enables them to bridge over the disaster a bit. So rather suddenly, the only ones left to mate are these few outliers.
Were it not for the disaster, these freaks would be hard-to-observe among all the regular creatures. Good luck finding them in the fossil record! What magnifies their special attribute to make them easy to spot was after they mated and the characteristic went from subtle to blatantly obvious.
In other words: you don't see massive evidence of these missing links because there only needed to be a few of them. Their children would look very new and their parents would look almost exactly like them. Huge fossil populations of the before and after types would drown out the transitionals in no time. So the search for missing links is a tough job of finding a few oddballs who lived only as long to make weird children.
This is not a problem for my common sense. What *is* a problem is the outright denial of a history of contact with other forces—call them angels, prophets, aliens, higher selves, or whatever you will. To quote an entity to which I spoke in a dream:
"Your scientific establishment consists basically of amateur surrealists. They spend all their time trying to explain how all of conscious life emerged from a pool of water molecules with no outside intervention."
http://realityhandbook.livejournal.com/39369.html
My general theory is that we are just one planet where the spark of creative intent has seeded. Were ours a planet of scarecrows motionless and spaced out every 10 feet, I think forces of animation could choose to step in and bring life and wisdom.