|
We accept as a premise that the biological forms on the planet
had a creation, that is a point in time when they came into
existence. The popular social wrangling is between two distinct
myths about what happened next; did the life evolve, or was each
species individually created. Most likely neither myth is wholly
correct, but each has elements of truth.
Being a scientist, I adopt the view that at sometime, someplace on Earth some set of conditions came together which allowed or caused living material to come into being. It was the time where inorganic chemicals were subjected to the conditions which allowed or caused them to become living molecules. There are two problems with this supposition. Firstly, we have yet to prove that life can spontaneously generate in this way. Second, and much more significantly, if it could happen once, it must have happened again, perhaps, many times. It's likely still going on today. Indeed, there may be no way to stop it. Lets let the first obstacle hang and just accept for a moment that life blossomed from non-living materials when they were subjected to the right conditions. If that's true, the theory of evolution clearly has come complication to it. There would be not one tree of living things, but several, perhaps many trees of various ages and with various interactions. There's no reason to suppose that only hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen zap together to make living things. So to the conundrum: how many times was life created (or recreated) and how have the various products of the creations interacted, united or conflicted? Sometime, lets say three quarters of a billion years ago, elements and conditions got together in just the right way somewhere in Earth's atmosphere and life was created for the first time. It had to be in the "air" and not the water. Water inhibits life-generating conditions by constraining molecular formation to the water lattice. "Creation One" at "Life-Year" zero may or may not have survived and may or may not have evolved. Lets suppose that after a few million creations, natural selection and simple luck encouraged one creation to survive for a while, perhaps a few million years of development and evolution. Clearly at least one had to catch on; here we are, you, me and Rebecca's dog, Sunshine. So the roots of a tree of life were planted. But the creation process continued. It's like evolution, if it's so, it must still be going on. Suppose that about Life-Year 300 million (or something), an other creation caught on. Ah, but this is different. The environment is no longer pristinely inorganic. The creation of Life-Year 300 million occurred in an organic crucible. It replaced and/or altered and/or co-existed with the existing creation or creations. (This may explain where women came from, something that's always mystified me.) The new creation is a parasite and predator more than it's a descendant. More likely, it's a neighbor and collaborator, at least for a few million generations. So, evolution is not simply a process by" which a single form changes into great diversity. Evolution became a hybridization of various creations interacting and changing one another. To the extent that evolution actually works, little really occurs by slow, gradual procession. It works through crisis, stress and tragedy. A hundred generations ago, your predecessors were pretty much like you. Chances are that a hundred generation after you (should the species survive) your descendants will be pretty much like you - unless, a crisis selects out particular genetic traits and kills off the others, or unless some other life form melds with or replaces ours as it has done countless times before. The principle failing with the religious creationist mythology is that "god" did it once and quit. Why would nature do that? Indeed, how would nature to that. Life had to come into existence through the action of natural laws. The laws didn't change. In my religion there's a time called "the beginning of the world." There's another time called "time out of mind." Like most scientists, I take it on faith that the world was created or really that it is being created and that in the past there was a time when there was no world, but I'm not totally sure that that's possible. Mostly, antiquity is "time out of mind," too long ago for me to remember and before grandpa wrote anything down. As humans, we have a very small sampling of universal processes. Who knows if I could have had indigestion a million years ago. It's all guess work. Where we see changes in a species, where we see what we call evolution, we may actually be observing interference from the process of continuing creation; the new form meets the old form. They get on happily and produce a modified from. We call him Adam, or more likely, eve. In the turbulent contrails of a jet settling at O'Hara during a thunderstorm, how many countless new living molecules are created? My bet is that that's where George Bush came from; the bastard of tractor exhaust and Angus dung. It proves that not all evolution is progress. "It seems like the less a statesman amounts to,
You are welcome to use or republish
any of our material.
|