By Dmitri Dozortsev

 

Overlooked elephant in the room

 

The chances are incomprihencibly small ....  for humans. 

 

There are no questions that evolution has taken place, but was it Darwinian evolution? This question may sound absurd, because we hear of no other evolution. But let's think about this for a moment. If we look at the evolution on a largest time scale, we have to accept that evolution has undoubtedly has taken place allowing a some form of bacterial life (the simplest known form of self-sufficient organism) over a period of several billion years to evolve into the most complex form of life: humans. However, in order to be Darwinian, this evolution has to fulfill one fundamental principal: each subsequent evolutionary step leads to a new organism, which is better adapted to the environment than its ancestor. Therefore, we have to expect that the pinnacle of evolution - humans are better adapted to at least some type of environment than the most primitive form of life - bacteria. But, do humans have any adaptation advantage? 

 

Let's compare:

 

Humans need at least 13 years plus 9 months to reproduce. Bacteria reproduce every few minutes. Humans need an ambient temperature between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius to feel comfortable.  Bacteria can survive any temperature below zero and as high as 100 Celsius. 

 

Bacteria live everywhere and anywhere on earth. They can use as food anything and everything. The best proof of their perfect design is that they have not changed since the evolution has began! Nature was not able to come up with anything better adapted than the simplest form of life. Humans don not hold a candle to bacteria. The whole evolution from the bacteria view point was simply diversification of its diet. 

 

Since the pinnacle of the evolution is not better adapted to any environment than the starting point, the evolution that we see and which had without any doubts has taken place cannot possibly be Darwinian. In fact Darwinian evolution, which was initially based on the observation of small adaptive changes cannot explain anything beyond those small adaptive changes, let alone global evolution.  

 

Darwinian evolution fails to address the most fundamental fact - increasing complexity of life without any adaptation advantages. 

 

What kind of evolution was it? 

If adaptation to the environment cannot serve as an engine of evolution, than what does? Since increased complexity gives no evolutionary advantage to life, there are really only two alternative explanations - the increased complexity over time is the intrinsic property of life or, if it cannot be asserted, it may only be the result of intelligent intervention. 

 

Inevitability is certainly a central player in evolution of he universe and just about everything in nature, including evolution of humans as civilization.

 

Even though, there is no complete agreement between cosmologists on a Big Bang hypothesis, there is a fundamental agreement that under force of gravity and electromagnetism, dust clouds inevitably become stars, and that depending on the size, some stars will make more one kind of chemical elements than other. Stars eventually explode and bits and pieces of them cool down and inevitably become planets forming a planetary system, including our own. So far, it is obvious that without any need for "engine", just sheer chance, numbers and intrinsic properties of matter took us from "simple" disorganized "primitive" cosmic dust to "complex" organized planetary system. Note, that this cosmic evolution toward complexity had an inevitable outcome, despite the fact that it was not "directed" by anything, each individual cosmic event was completely random and it was not "adopting" to any environment.

 

The inevitability needs only 3 conditions to be revealed: numbers, time and hidden quality of matter that can manifest under certain circumstances.

 

If we look at the development of humanity, it becomes obvious how mere increase of the number of people on earth (without average person becoming any smarter) increases the complexity of civilization. This increase of complexity is not only inevitable, but the speed with which inevitable outcome is achieved is continuously accelerating. 

 

The increased number of people ensures the ever diminishing impact of major non-linear developments, even as significant as world wars, on inevitability of human destiny. 

 

Let's now look at inevitability in the the development of civilization. Civilization development is driven by scientific discoveries which have to inevitably happen. One human being has very little value for this inevitability: individual human's only intrinsic inevitable quality is death. As number of humans was small, it was taking a long time from one discovery to another. For example, it took thousands of years to exit the stone age and enter bronze age. The man who came up with the first stone tool had no competition for thousands of years. Today, when I get a "new" idea in my small and highly specialized field, I can be assured with 99% certainty that someone had exactly the same idea a few days or perhaps few years ago. It becomes incredibly hard to be original ... which means that all possible discoveries becomes inevitable. This inevitability of increased complexity of civilization does not increase humans ability to adopt to the environment, it is not directed by anything or anybody, but an intrinsic quality of a large group of humans: everything that can be discovered, will be discovered leading to ever increasing complexity. We do not know who will make a discoveries, we don't know how it will happen, but they will happen with absolute inevitability. 

 

It is not similar to our every day experience. We know that so many people will get a speeding ticket today. We don't know who will get them and the leading circumstances are unpredictable,  but we do know that it is inevitable.

 

Inevilution

"In quantum mechanics, everything that can happen will happen."

 

I have chosen the two examples above because they are rather obvious and based on a solid foundation of mathematics or our own experience, even though their scale is vastly different from each other. In case of cosmic events we deal with non-life matter and in case of humanity we deal with the pinnacle of life. Yet, in both cases the increased complexity is not the result of adaptation to the environment and it does not require intelligent direction or design. In both cases it is simply an inevitable manifestation of intrinsic properties of matter, life or not. If that is the case, why can't we accept that origin of life and its increased complexity is simply just that - an intrinsic property of matter which manifested with inevitability when given enough times to try. I would call it - Inevitable Evolution (Inevilution).  

 

Overwhelming evidences of quantum principals in life. Increditable variety of species with incomprehensible differences in complexity occupying the same enviroment is the best evidence of 

 

   

 

           

The finches that Darwin observed in the Galápagos Islands provide the most famous example of this process. The species of finch that originally found its way to the Galápagos from South America had a beak shaped in a way that was ideal for eating seeds. But once arrived on the islands, that finch eventually diversified into 13 species. The various Galápagos finches have differently shaped beaks, each fine-tuned to take advantage of a particular food, like fruit, grubs, buds or seeds.

Such small adaptations can arise within a few generations. Darwin surmised that over millions of years, these small changes would accumulate, giving rise to the myriad of species seen today.