Auguries of Innocence

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night

Towards the End...

Over the past few days I've been thinking a lot about evolution and the place humans occupy in it. Repeatedly, I have come back to the fact that my last post may have ignored the one distinguishing feature that sets us apart from other species—our minds.

Historically, the very first homo sapiens came on the scene during the Ice Age. As they moved away from their ancestral home on the African savanna, they faced glacial sheets, much like the one that covers Greenland today, advancing and retreating with the seasons. Each time the sheets advanced, the humans were forced south; when the sheets receded, the humans moved north to find abundant hunting grounds in their wake.

During this period, the selective process for better brains must have been intense. Only those humans with bigger, more developed brains would be able to reproduce among the perils of new lands and harsher climates.

As evolution progressed, this trend continued. Those humans with the greatest mental capacity survived the longest. Those who used their brains in the most effective ways succeeded. Today, things have changed a bit and arguments could be made about modern medicine allowing the human genetic pool to become polluted with disease, infirmity and handicaps that would have been wiped out in earlier ages—their carriers simply would not have survived long enough to reproduce. However, it could also be argued that the sympathy—the humanity—we express through our mastery of technology and medicine are hallmarks of our evolution away from the beasts and toward something greater.

Either way, the MIND is the key. Consciousness. It is clear to me now that this truly is the central drama and purpose behind all these billions of years of evolution. Consciousness is what life has been heading for all this time. And it has manifested in us!

Can you grasp the power of that?

Think about it like this:

• 3.5 billion years ago… life on this planet began.
• 2 million years ago… apes evolved into the homo genus.
• In a single century… we've discovered and traced the evolutionary forces at work.
• In a few short decades… we've revealed the very basis of life: DNA.

It seems we are fast approaching an Omega Point, where the consciousness of all mankind works together for some grander purpose. Call me an idealist, but no one—human or alien—can doubt that our species will lead this planet and all its inhabitants into a whole new and final unification…or to its ultimate destruction.

I don't know about you but the point of all this can't just be fast cars and rock stars and bank accounts and MTV. Though our current cultural conditioning certainly seems to be pointed that way, if you have any sort of feeling beyond the basest impulses for food and self preservation, you must realize that there is more—and I'm not talking about religion per se.

I think Daniel Pinchbeck says it best:

"The possibility of establishing a radically new understanding of the psyche… threatens the underpinnings of a culture obsessed with acquiring goods, wealth, and status. If we were to discover that other aspects of reality deserved serious consideration, we would have to reconsider the thrust of our current civilization: entire lives and enormous expulsions of energy would seem misdirected or even wasted…"

Consciousness is the key. We have to avail ourselves to the possibilities life offers, whether they seem profitable or not. We must listen to our inner impulses and follow them faithfully, even if we don’t fully understand where they bringing us. What else do we have to go on?

In the beginning…

In the beginning, the Earth was cold and the seas as barren as deep space. The primordial tides rose and fell against small, lonely patches of wasteland. The oceans stretched on and on and on, and there was no sound save for the thresh of the wind and the omnipresent roll of thunder rattling in the distance…two billion years before an ear existed to hear them.

And then one day—a day like any before it, a day that seemed almost stupid with its regularity—a very peculiar thing happened. It wasn't an unheard of event exactly, it had happened in other places on other worlds, but this was the first day it happened on this planet. On that day, not far from the surface of the ocean, a microscopic single-celled organism gained the miraculous (?) ability to divide and reproduce itself. Not long after that, another single-celled organism gained the same ability. Then another, and another, and another… The conditions were perfect to permit it. Time passed, and the single-celled organisms became soft, multiple-celled organisms. These, in turn, joined with others to become larger, more complex organisms, eventually leading to the formation of primitive water-dwelling invertebrates.

These creatures were well adapted to the ancient seas, and they flourished. Over a short period of time—perhaps 1 million years or so—they multiplied so many times that hosts of mutations inevitably occurred. The most successful mutations adapted to their environment and blossomed in that place. The creatures mutated further, and again, the most successful lived on, eventually becoming a class of creatures we might today call fish. This was about 365 million years ago.

Mutation and selection worked its magic, and the fish eventually developed better fins for swimming and better jaws for catching prey. The ones we call crossopterygians developed a primitive lung in addition to their gills. By pure chance, some of these crossopterygians were born with mutated legs, which allowed them to waddle onto the land formed by the receding seas, opening up for them a whole new habitat. These creatures existed on the tiny insects flying at the edge of the water. Time passed, and they mutated further into antediluvian amphibians.

So it went that the fish begat the amphibian, the amphibian begat the reptile, the reptile begat the mammal, and from small, ambiguous mammals came the primates, from the primitive primates came the apes and monkeys, from the apes came australopithecus, homo erectus, homo habilis, the Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man, and finally homo sapiens: The modern man was born.

Half a billion years of evolution… and at every step of the way, mutation and selection flowed through life like water through rock, carving away the useless, the inadaptable, the weak. Creatures that were not strong or ruthless enough to thrive did not get a chance to reproduce.

And now, to the surprise of many, modern man has escaped evolution. Survival of the fittest no longer applies to our species, at least not in the manner that it has in the past. Physical mutations no longer affect the carrying on of our genes to the next generation. We now have the choice of whether to reproduce or not. Sex is a leisure activity; children a financial decision. Neither hold the instinctual/survival obligation they once did.

When seen on a scale like this, the worries of our everyday life seem utterly insignificant. Who really cares if this or that project gets done today, next week, or next century? Does it even matter? In the space of 70 years—a human lifetime; a micro-blink of the evolutionary eye—what real meaning could anyone’s life really hold? Who really cares if I do or don’t have children, go to work today or stay home, pay my bills or set fire to my credit cards, live, die, kill, be killed… do anything at all? Does it really matter?

Religion, too, takes on a strange, artificial pallor when seen through the evolutionary lens. Where is there a place for God if life is purely mutation and selection, a set of coincidental circumstances occurring with scientific regularity when the conditions permit?

I’m not the first to ponder these issues, and I’m sure I won’t be the last either. Anyone? Is anyone else out there?