Are we still evolving?

FAITH

“When common people,” says Al-Khazini, writing in the twelfth century, “hear from natural philosophers that gold is a body which has attained to perfection of maturity, to the goal of completeness, they firmly believe that it is something which has gradually come to that perfection by passing through the forms of all other metallic bodies, so that its gold nature was originally lead, afterward it became tin, then brass, then silver, and finally reached the development of gold; not knowing that the natural philosophers mean, in saying this, only something like what they mean when they speak of man, and attribute to him a completeness and equilibrium in nature and constitution—not that man was once a bull, and was changed into an ass, and afterward into a horse, and after that into an ape, and finally became a man.” – Excerpt from John William Draper. “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.”

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
IT would appear from the above that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was not quite original.
Those before Darwin like the quoted Al-Khazini and the multitude after him who devoutly teach his (Darwin’s) theory as a science, have led us here and then abandoned us to our own devices.
For if evolution is a process of natural selection and of survival of the fittest, the process must be continuing as you read his, moulding plant and animal life, including humans, in accordance with social and environmental circumstances along a badly lit path towards? – however it turns out.
But Charles Darwin, to my mind, did not trace the evolutionary path back to the beginning of life on earth and then lit up that path in his Origin of the Species for all the world to know, challenging the prevailing belief at the time in a Creation of the Species by Divine Ordinance.
Of the future he did not determine much of either. Of the past too he did little more than observe plant and animal life far more closely than all others, for instance, insects which he as a curious child collected and dissected for study. He read botany and biology avidly, so he says in his own biography.
What he discovered in these interludes intrigued him and ultimately helped form his theory of evolution. The atmosphere at home and in that period helped, what with a scientist father and the company of the contemporaries his father kept.
Darwin might have travelled widely in his famous boat Beagle, collected a lot and observed much, but his theory was already formed, I think, by an active mind in his native Shropshire, England, when he was yet a teenager and from the books his eager mind voraciously immersed itself in.
He saw distilled in the same plant and animal evolutionary evidence. He saw, with the clarity of a genius, what we know for certain today looking through an electron microscope which was not invented in his day.
He saw in the animal a single sperm cell among teeming millions in a jelly compound mate with a female egg cell and the egg cell now fertilised divide and form new life beginning in the warm watery confines of the womb and by turns attaining different life forms – from single cell to multi-celled formless amoeba to spouting tail and limbs to become tadpole, then fish, then frog and so on before finally emerging as a human fetus.
He saw further. From the watery womb the helpless baby splattered forth unto dry land at birth, more amphibian than mammal. Outside the womb the baby slept on its back, turned over and rolled, sat upright, then crawled on all fours, walked unsteady in a crouch position and straighten up stage by stage until he was fully erect as a grown person.
He was single-celled organism, then formless amoeba, then tadpole, then sprouted limbs to become frog, then after birth he was blundering Neanderthal, simpleton Homo Erectus and reasoning, devising Homo Sapien – all in the one package across the lifetime of an individual, not evolving in incremental stages across aeons.
The processes described in the theory of evolution, you will note from this line of inquiry, is packaged in the one life time of every living thing, plant and animal. We miss nothing. Each plant and animal carries with it the past and awaits only future circumstances in the weather and the environment to incorporate into its data or unique biosignature just so that it can adapt to its environment for mere survival purposes.
So yes, “survival of the fittest” occurs all the time in the here and now, not across aeons. It does evolve, that is for sure, not to attain a better future life form in a progressive line but the better to adjust to its present environment and in conformity with the knowledge and experience it has gathered along the way.
The evolution suggested by Darwin does also seem to follow the theological believe in vogue in his day – that man is an imperfect being on earth attaining by penitential works on earth such credits as would help him attain his whole in the kingdom of heaven at some future date.
All this Charles Darwin inadvertently seems to have arrived at an understanding before geneticists in our era arrived at deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the code that contains all information about a creatures’ development down through the centuries.
Perhaps that is what Darwin ought to be credited with for he saw clearly in his mind’s eye what was revealed to the geneticist two full centuries later looking through powerful tools. And that, in itself, is not an insubstantial discovery.
Where to from here?
But perhaps we are mistaken. Perhaps there is a process of evolution going on all the time. Now let us see where the process will ultimately lead to.
We start with a human being as he will appear in a million years if his current unbridled passion for tampering with the forces of nature will allow him to live that long.
Let us remove for this exercise the interruption of technology and see as Darwin saw in his day.
Man will now be numbering in the hundreds of billions. He will live in the sea unassisted by breathing apparatus. He will have terra-formed the moon, Mars and one or more of the other planets.
He will have developed, in addition to mouth and nose, a set of gills because long before the moon, he will have been forced by overcrowding on land to live in the sea.
His legs would have formed back into that of a frog, the better to swim with.
He would have sprouted wings and have a flattened wider trunk to help with lift during flight through the air.
The head will shrink into a beak to remove the weight but the brain, now grown so large, will comprise the entire spinal cord elongating our future relative a great deal.
There will be other adjustments to his physique, internal and external, to enable him to live in extreme heat and cold and lighter or denser atmospheres. He would be an amphibious bird-frog-fish man of tremendous height and agility.
His pet dog or parrot will likewise have undergone much change and would now be able to perhaps talk.
Most likely, however, our future man will be part human and part machine, a mach-man or cyborg when we add technology to our evolutionary process. If we add artificial intelligence our future ancestors might perform the functions of servants or dogs in a world of sentient machines.
It is also likely that the earth will once again be a desolate windswept desert region again with no capacity to sustain plant or animal life, it having arrived there by the thoughtless, self-centred machinations of one member of the animal kingdom who will have summoned Armageddon by his war mongering as is his current tendency.
Man has been assisting in the evolutionary process a great deal with his own so-called advancement and since he now seems in charge of the process he might as well do all life a favor by looking ahead from time to time to see where he is directing future evolution.