SUMMARY
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I am going to try to split evolutionary development into five steps. Reading Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species suggested this idea to me. At the end of Chapter 7, “Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection” he wrote:
“…Abrupt and strongly marked variations occur in our domesticated productions, singly and at rather long intervals of time. If such occurred under nature, they would be liable to be lost by accidental causes and by inter-crossing. In order that a new species should suddenly appear, it is almost necessary to believe, in opposition to all analogy, that several wonderfully changed individuals appeared simultaneously within the same district, [italics mine].
“Against the belief in abrupt changes, embryology enters a strong protest. The embryo serves as a record of the past condition of the species. Hence existing species during early stages often resemble extinct forms belonging to the same class. It is incredible that an animal should have undergone abrupt transformations and yet should not bear even a trace in its embryonic condition of sudden modification, every detail being developed by insensibly fine steps.
“He who believes that some ancient form was transformed suddenly through an internal force or tendency will be compelled to believe that many structures beautifully adapted to all the other parts of the same creature and to the surrounding conditions, have been suddenly produced; and of such complex and wonderful co-adaptations, he will not be able to assign a shadow of an explanation [author’s note: except, perhaps, disease].” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Abridged and Edited by Charlotte and William Irvine, 1978, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., p. 61.
Without additional clarification, Darwin’s theories run aground on shoals of scientific detail charted more recently. His evolutionary theory rests on five points.
1. All species produce offspring in excess of the number that can survive.
2. Adult populations in any region tend to remain constant, and therefore there is an enormous death rate. (Most biologists believe the first part of point 2 is wrong, the second part largely correct.)
3. There must be a struggle for survival which the majority of creatures lose.
4. The competitors vary in many small characteristics, and these will affect the chances of survival.
5. The result of the four previous conditions is that the organism best able to survive the conditions transmits its more adaptive traits to future generations.
Taken from Fred Warshofsky’s Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe, Readers Digest Press, New York, 1977, pp. 103-104.
Gordon Rattray Taylor summarizes Darwin’s problems in The Great Evolution Mystery. I take this quotation from Michael Crawford’s and David Marsh’s The Driving Force – Food, Evolution and the Future, William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1989, p. 30.
1. The suddenness [sudden, to paleontologists, means happening in a few million years] with which major changes in pattern occurred and the virtual absence of any fossil remains from the period in which they were alleged to be evolving.
2. The suddenness with which new forms ‘radiated’ into numerous variants.
3. The suddenness of many extinctions and the lack of obvious reasons for such extinction.
4. The repeated occurrence of changes calling for numerous coordinated innovations, both at the level of organs and of complete organisms.
5. The variations in speed at which evolution occurred.
6. The fact that subsequently, no new phyla have appeared, and no new classes and orders. This fact, which has been much ignored, is perhaps the most powerful of all arguments against Darwin’s generalization.
7. The occurrence of parallel and convergent evolution, in which similar structures evolve in quite different circumstances.
8. The existence of long-term trends (orthogenesis).
9. The appearance of organs before they are needed (pre-adaptation).
10. The occurrence of ‘overshoot’ or evolutionary momentum (e.g. how organs once useful became overdeveloped, such as the tusks of the saber-toothed tiger and the antlers of the Irish elk).
11. The puzzle of how organs, once evolved, come to be lost (degeneration.)
12. The failure of some organisms to evolve at all.
Even though many diseases increase mortality, some infections might benefit their hosts. Could ‘domesticated’ pathogens have introduced immune, digestive, neural, and other specialized cells where none existed before? Did mutagenic microbes make new mutations inheritable? Could successfully adapted tumors have become physical mutations?
All these suppositions are heretical today, pigeonholed under clumsy rubrics like “endosymbiosis” and “horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes.” Scientists are just beginning to take up the study of oncogenes, transposons, plasmids, plasmagenes and episomes: micro-organic savings banks, post offices and stock exchanges whose hallways echo with the complex intercourse of DNA.
Could our bodies be seen as ‘bacterial clouds’: multi-generation starships constructed with, by and for microorganisms, to transport their DNA (so-called “junk DNA”?) in safety and comfort across vast stretches of space-time—from your armchair to the refrigerator, say, or across the galaxy?
Adaptive mutation by way of benign disease processes might settle many arguments between evolutionary gradualists and catastrophists.
The immune systems of dominant species would have been suppressed by environmental catastrophes. They might have caused pandemics of heightened mortality, in-species differentiation and genetic drift. During such disasters, whole herds might have been annihilated or transformed into a more viable new species. Since every animal would have been affected simultaneously, the descendants would have skipped ‘transitional’ stages. Such an evolutionary process of selective die-out is modeled in Kropotkin's book, Mutual Cooperation.
It may also be interesting to note that many species that had extremely long histories of genetic stability appear to have gained relative immunity to most diseases -- sharks, mollusks, lichen, fungi, ginkgoes(?). Better-qualified scientists who specialize in such studies should take note.
This evolutionary blueprint would have left the fragmentary fossil record our paleontologists puzzle over today, minus the ‘missing links” that Darwinists keep predicting and failing to find: a very bad sign for a theory.
Behavior, however, seems to have evolved under environmental influences, following a more gradual, Lamarckian path. Given other circumstances, certain deviants went crazy in specific ways. This kind of craziness increased their reproductive success, was learned by succeeding progeny and thus retained in species memory.
Someone may appear to be acting crazy, but his craziness may be a survival factor under altered circumstances that mere ‘normals’ couldn’t handle. When Chaos looms, deviant responses may be more efficient than routine normalcy.
Species are rarely exterminated as a direct outcome of predation, endemic disease and selective competition; but more often from some massive ecological disruption – asteroid strikes, volcanism, ice ages, massive flooding, long droughts, human encroachment, etc.; followed by lethal pandemics triggered by lowered immunities across the board.
Thereafter, a few survivors replace the masses that died, and reproduce to fill in the gaps. The distinguishing traits they shared become “Darwinian mutations.” These traits would not need to “improve fitness”; on the contrary, they would tend to reinforce that species’ statistical average among a handful of survivors. Rare individuals with superior traits adapted to that special niche would have died along with the majority. Only an endlessly unstable environment (lethal on a semi-permanent basis) would promote the survival of radical mutants, in the very rare cases during which they wouldn’t annihilate them entirely.
You might note that the planet has caught a short-lived cold, and we are it.
To better understand our place in the scheme of things, think of humanity as an Earth pathogen—not its dominators, lords or even failed caretakers. Like most disease organisms, we evolved through progressive relationships with our host. Any population that fails to reach the next higher level, drops to a lower one and languishes interminable obscurity or disappears.
Someone once suggested to me that children pass through similar stages with respect to their parents. Since I have never raised children, I won’t go there.
Level One: The organism is frail, simple and unadaptable; it only survives under optimal circumstances. Opportunistically, it establishes precarious toeholds in empty niches and in hosts afflicted with impaired immunity. Its growth is sluggish or static; its simplicity is its gravest flaw. The slightest disturbance threatens it with annihilation.
Level Two: A much tougher organism invades a new host, overwhelms its defenses and kills it through explosive growth. The invading organism commits suicide by outgrowing its habitat.
Within decades, the Black Plague killed off half of all Europeans. Human growth rates flattened for a century, until some unknown mechanism stopped this rampage cold. After all, no plague survivor became immune to the Black Death. Perhaps every town rat died? Now they tell me that there weren’t enough rats (remains) from back then, to confirm their vector status; and many legends of black-clad specters waving what looked like scythes in the air, just before entire communities collapsed from the plague.
The basic difference between Level One and Level Two is that the actors – host and pathogen – have traded places on the power scale. In any case, each is diminished by the disappearance of the other.
Level Three: A more sophisticated organism controls its growth, accepts casualties from its host’s defenses and attenuates its harmful effects. Host and pathogen survive to reproduce, though neither may flourish as well as before.
Syphilis took this course during the Renaissance; so did the flu at the end of World War I (and perhaps soon again). Both mutated from subtle plunderers of children, the weak and the elderly, into runaway killers of vigorous adults, and back again. They and others may have done so over and over for a long, long time; this does not alter the facts today.
Level Four: As an infectious agent evolves, it develops a symbiotic relationship with its host. Remaining disease symptoms benefit the host as well as the invader. Positive and negative effects come into balance.
Sickle cell anemia strengthens its host’s immunity to malaria, perhaps the deadliest human disease. Actually, malarial fevers have burnt out some cases of syphilis and may thwart other diseases.
A constant background count of sturdy but marginally lethal human diseases, tremendously old, crowds out newer, more deadly but vulnerable organisms. Without this old crowd of microscopic competitors, the worst newcomers might kill off humanity in a few weeks of mass plague. Everywhere on Earth, that is, except in military laboratories. There, such organisms are pampered pets nurtured in sterile environments and taught deadly new tricks. See Levels One and Two, above.
Level Five: A hyper-sophisticated organism’s cumulative usefulness to the host overcomes the harm it could inflict. New internal organs appear, like new scoops on an ice cream cone. They house new functions —perhaps as benign tumors.
The infection makes a new home for itself within the host’s strengthened body. In return for this survival benefit, the host’s genes reprogram themselves, they mutate. Infection and host merge genetically into a more complex and adaptive spawn.
It’s inter-Kingdom sex! The outcome of this sexual act (it can be called nothing else, even though such ideas are taboo to current science dogma) is a new entity stronger than the sum of its original parts.
Take that, you devil-take-the-loser Darwinians. Dispute it as much as you please!
The disease relationship we maintain with the Earth teeters between Levels Two and Three. Humanity graduated from Level One to Level Two by learning the usefulness of weapons and tools. Level Three would mark a significant boost in the complexity of our civilization, beyond mere weapon technology.
However, our weapon managers have ignored runaway population growth, resource depletion and environmental impacts. They have replaced this promising commencement to Level Three, with the technical, societal and moral preparations for omnicide (“Kill everything!”): the only future their weapon hypnosis allows.
Level Two human overpopulation is a complex Earth disaster that promises the collapse of civilization and our annihilation, just as a colony of primitive pathogens would destroy itself by irritating its host beyond its tolerance.
Info elites have evolved through the aforementioned disease Levels with their proletarian hosts. While seeming mighty, the rich are at best in transition from Level Three to Level Four in their relationship with the poor: any public benefit they achieve partially offsets their innate clumsiness. The slightest breach of the peace threatens to drag them and us – our heads banging on the stairs – to lower Levels and annihilation.
Once we rally around Level Four and create an Information Commonwealth headed for Level Five, we may yet thrive. Future transitions between higher Levels may seem nearly instantaneous to us, compared to the snail-crawl millennia we've wasted dallying between Levels One and Three.
In the same way, the Community of Dissidence maintains its Levels Three and Four with Conspiracies of Greed.
Level One persisted until the Time of Prophets, when lone martyrs to peace (Buddha, Zarathustra, Mani, Jesus, Mohammed and many more nameless dead) decorated imperial crossroads with broken and poisoned bodies: their own and that of their adherents. During the course of this Level, each info elite revalidated its weapon mentality by misrepresenting their dying words and teachings, and passing these distortions down to posterity as sacred truths.
Level Two arose when clueless weapon dissidents KO’d the decomposing body-politics of royal and imperial weapon technologies. They didn’t know what to do next; they only saw an unfair system that needed to be overthrown. Just like us, they mistook mere symptoms (tyranny, corruption, greed, etc.) for the principal cause of societal sickness (weapon mentality) and tried to eliminate them blindly. Then they swallowed the same toxin whole and normalized its symptoms, institutionalizing, perpetuating and perfecting them in the process.
Included here are the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, American, French, Fascist, Communist and Anti-Colonialist Revolutions. In short, all the circular, short-circuited, positive feedback and negative-outcome revolutions our history bothered to document.
Modern civilization jerks between Levels Three and Four. Weapon managers and dissidents flail at each other without rhyme or reason while body counts, environmental destruction, overpopulation and unsustainable industries detonate around their heads.
Learners may achieve Level Five once we fully understand the weapon/peace dialectic, subordinate weapon mentality and restore global peace to its rightful sovereignty. That would muffle most of those global detonations of their own accord.
Nowadays, the only thing that's stopping us is our
collective fear of peace.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld