The Theory of Universal Evolution
There has to be a start to life. This is a given. The mud puddle and lightening bolt theory is pretty far-fetched. There must be a reasonable explanation, and my guess is that incipient life is just around the universe in a spore-like state. This is of course an educated guess; no-one can empirically answer the question.
When that incipient life finds itself in an environment in which it can survive, it will become active, as the spore of a fern or mushroom does, and evolve until it is satisfied with its existence in that environment. Then it will cease evolution and live in harmony with the environment, so long as that environment exists. That satisfaction, that desire to live in harmony with it’s environment, is the drive for evolution, and the major point of the existence of life.
When that environment changes so that life is no longer in harmony with its existence, or when even greater harmony may be reached, life will return to evolution. It will go through species-wide permanent changes until it is satisfied with its existence within that new environment. Or it will become extinct.
We see that on our planet. Four billion years ago, our planet was capable of supporting only single celled life. It wasn’t much satisfaction, but all the earth offered, so for three point six billion years, life consisted of bacteria, and probably viruses. Then, according to our geologists, around four hundred million years ago our planet cooled down to a point at which it was a fairly nice place for multi-cellular life to live, and there was a surge of evolution for some fifty million years. We call this period the pre-cambrian explosion because of the tremendous number of species that appeared over such an incredibly short period of time.
After the pre-cambrian explosion there was a period of no noticeable change for some forty million years, until something still unknown happened. Whatever happened caused what we call the permian die-off. The fossil record shows that life in general re-entered evolution, changing again, until it was in harmony with its new environment.
That period of evolution was followed by some fifty million years of stasis, with again no noticeable change. Then came what we call the K/T boundary crisis.
We’re pretty sure that an asteroid crashed into the earth around sixty-five million years ago. It truly was a disaster, causing sudden and severe changes in the environment, which in turn caused yet another evolutionary surge.
That was the last environmental change that affected the entire planet. The plants and animals that had reached stasis about thirty-five million years ago are pretty much the ones that are around now. There was no more Eohippus, but there was horse, zebra, donkey and the rest.
Three times there have been dramatic changes in the environment, and three times there have been evolutionary surges immediately following. Each surge has been followed by a long period with no evolutionary change observed.
This demonstrates the theory of universal evolution: When life finds itself in an environment in which it can survive, life will evolve until it is in harmony with it’s environment. When that environment changes life will evolve again until it is in harmony with it’s new environment.
Evolution must have a drive. Satisfaction, the desire for harmony with the environment, is the only universal drive and the only logical choice for an evolutionary drive.
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN
Let’s begin at the beginning. Four billion years ago, we were single celled amoeba of some sort, swimming among other amoeba, maybe like us, maybe not, and probably some virus guys of some sort, and we were happy, but not overjoyed with our existence.
We hung around like that ‘til almost yesterday, some 350 million years ago, when the planet cooled to where it could support multi-cellular life, and all of us were ready. We exploded into every kind of multicellular life you could find, over about fifty million years and, once we were in harmony with our environment, once we were satisfied, we settled down to a much sweeter life.
We in particular became sort of a salamander, kind of like the Hell-Binder native to Maryland. We populated the river deltas all around Pangaea. This was one of the most diverse environments and one where food was plentiful and of great variety.
This only lasted about forty million years, and then came the Permian die-off, when we think maybe something happened in the deep ocean which made it untenable, and each layer of life pushed on the one above it, eventually pushing us salamanders up on shore, and into evolution.
We were pushed up all over Pangaea but we all had the same general mind-set, so each group of us evolved into a mammal of some sort, reaching harmony and satisfaction in what seems to be a shorter time, maybe forty million years. We again in particular evolved into something small, the size of a mouse they like to say.
We stayed like that maybe forty-five million years, until the K/T boundary crisis, when much greater satisfaction was made available to us. As with great-grandmom the Hell-Binder, different groups of us evolved into different members of the primate family, while we in particular grew to maybe two feet tall and entered the trees in the leading edge of the forest where the food was most plentiful and most varied.
It rained for awhile every afternoon, cleansing us almost automatically, and the only predator was the snake. It was every bit as good as great-grandmoms life in the deltas. Then, again, something happened.
This has been harder to piece together. It took some deduction. No-one else has been looking, and most of my knowledge has come from scientific papers published, but I learned that the Rocky mountains rose up overnight around twenty-five million years ago and the four major deserts formed around that same time.
It’s not hard to conjecture that the chicksale of the Rockies suddenly rising tens of thousands of feet into the sky altered wind patterns worldwide and ended the daily rains in those four regions, turning our magnificent home into a hard-scrabble desert pulsating with predators in just two short years.
And the timing would be pretty much right. If we get better at evolving each go-round, then for the third go-round, twenty-five million years seems close. And we did have to evolve.
There seems to be a limit on physical evolution, and around fifty thousand years ago we began to evolve intellectual awareness. It began slowly of course, just a few people at first, gradually increasing the number over thousands of years. Then the number intellectually aware reached that point (usually called “the hundredth monkey syndrome” ) where suddenly, everyone became intellectually aware. This was around seven thousand years ago.
Then we became confused. We thought the feeling of dissatisfaction was individually based. We thought we had evolved.
We have to finish evolving. Evolution ends when the species reaches satisfaction, not individuals, and we’re going to continue to destroy the world until our species is satisfied, or until we become one of those evolutionary “dead ends” where the species just disappears from the fossil record.