Its almost as if we are living in ‘The Second Age of Babel’ where everyone is speaking a different language and expecting ‘the others’ to conform to their viewpoint. How you view the topic of ‘Evolution’ depends upon your world view.
Are you with ‘The Clockwork League’ where the Universe is like a precisely driven and predictable mechanism, valued on its being of use to humans.
Perhaps you are a Darwinian, believing that ‘survival of the fittest’ is key to your philosophy of life, allowing you to just take whatever you can, whenever you can, because you are the dominator species, and it is your right.
Or maybe you are with the more considered Gaian philosophy where ‘Whatever I do to you, I do to myself’. Where universal justice and self-fulfilling prophecy combine to give you what you deserve.
Evolution would be a different thing within each of the above philosophies. A simple three-word definition might be: “change through time”. Life has a long history, and it has changed throughout that history, resulting in the biodiversity that we see today, just after its peak.
A more complex Darwinian definition is: “a process of gradual change that takes place over many generations, during which species of animals, plants, or insects slowly change some of their physical characteristics”.
Historically the term evolution implies that species of animal, plants or insects undergo physical change as a reaction to external stimulus. But what happens when humans themselves are the ones creating the changes on our planet? Unsustainable use of land, air, water and energy by humans have created climate change. We are failing to adapt to the changes we have made and the planet has entered the Sixth Mass Extinction.
The planet Earth has been polluted before and it is interesting to take an example of what happened then, provided by the scientist and author James Lovelock in his insightful book ‘Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth.’
He talks about a time, aeons ago, when life was in the early stages on earth. Back then it was populated by ‘chlorine-breathing’, marine algae that gave off oxygen as a by-product of their photosynthesis.
“The first appearance of oxygen in the air heralded an almost fatal catastrophe for early life…Ingenuity triumphed, and the danger was overcome, not in the human way by restoring the old order, but in the flexible Gaian way by adapting to change and converting a murderous intruder into a powerful friend”.
James Lovelock
Will ingenuity triumph this time? Might some of us respond to the meltdown to become methane breathers, living off the reek of our rotting rubbish and breathing farts? Will we become lizard like, tough skinned beings who can survive extremes of weather and radiation and enjoy swimming. I’m sure the elites have plans already to get off this planet.
Here we are, Homo Sapiens, an oxygen breathing species at the peak of our evolution, having abused the planet on which we live for so long that our survival is questionable. James Lovelock, author of The Gaia Hypothesis, died on his 103rd birthday on 26th July 2022. He believed that the survival of humans is unlikely because we have already damaged the biosphere too much to maintain the stability of our fragile planet. Perhaps the desecration of the Earth is our destiny as humans, and ‘That’s All Folks’. But perhaps some of us, like the chlorine ‘breathing’ life forms who converted to oxygen, are due for an upgrade to the next form of being.
Physical evolution all but stopped when humans started to dominate their environment. Why adapt when you can change the environment to suit yourself? But some of us are taking this narrow window in time to evolve our consciousness – but it appears, only a few of us will make it to the next stage. What choices are you making to participate in your own evolution?