A BUNCH OF OLD FOSSILS
It’s pretty clear that change is the order of the day – or of the ages. If you look at the remains they’ve left behind, it’s obvious that millions of critters – large, small, and tiny – have come and gone over a timespan of at least hundreds of millions of years. The earth’s environment changes continuously, and the creatures have changed with it. Climate change is not a new affair. It happens all the time.
But where did they all come from, and how much do they change? Well, first off, let’s understand that it is the changing minds of all creatures that result in all the changing circumstances. All the little beings – all creatures – are effectively shareholders in the reality they occupy. We have all jointly thought our world into existence. That’s the way the projection system of the One Being functions. The world we know and the beings in it are all a result of this divine projection system.
According to the current scientific theory of life and its origins, however, matter came out of nowhere in a big bang, a long, long time ago. That matter then self-organized itself until, one day, the first living creature came into existence due to an accidental combination of environmental circumstances such as water, chemicals, lightning, and so on. This primal microorganism then reproduced itself, and began evolving into more complex forms in response to environmental needs, powered by natural selection of the most useful of random changes in its genetic makeup.
Now there’s a great deal of unproven speculation mixed up with this theory. And if we are prepared to take on board the indications that consciousness gives rise to material substance, rather than the reverse, then some of the fundamentals of this creation story begin to unravel.
For a start, being or consciousness does not come into existence through the self-organization of material substance. The sensory perception or experience of material substance is a level of consciousness of pre-existent beings. Beings come first. Without beings, there is no material substance. We’ve been through all this before.
Then there’s this time thing. The only moment in which being exists is the present moment. The eternal now. The past and the future are illusions engendered by the very change that brings about the sense of time. Being is essentially timeless. Time, change and material substance are all illusions. Only the eternity of the present moment has any reality.
Thirdly, there’s the probability factor. Even if it were somehow possible for consciousness to arise from matter, the likelihood that a primeval living microorganism with the ability to reproduce itself could somehow be created accidentally from the coincidental juxtaposition of chemical substances and physical forces is effectively zero. The spontaneous creation of a living organism would of itself be well-nigh miraculous. For it to possess the ability to reproduce as well only adds impossibility to the impossible.
Over the last half-century, many scientists, using advanced statistical analysis, have reached this conclusion. They simply cannot reconcile the dynamic complexity of living organisms with the underlying statistical probabilities. “The probability that random chance created life is roughly the same as the probability that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and create a jumbo jet.” It’s not a lot different from the Victorian notion that mice were spontaneously generated in baskets of soiled linen. The biochemistry of even the simplest microorganism is just too incredibly complex for it to have come into being by chance.
These three considerations – the prior existence of consciousness, the illusion of time, and the probability factor – pull the rug from beneath much of the modern scientific creation story. Scientists freely admit that they struggle with the seemingly insoluble conundrum of “What existed before time began,” which is inherent in the modern myth. All consideration of the fossil record, therefore, has to be understood in this light. Especially when that exceptionally patchy and incomplete record is used to speculate on the origins, rather than just the history, of life on earth.
Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere near the literal interpretation given to an ancient Mesopotamian creation allegory, originating some 3000 years ago in a culture and mindset very different from our own. The book of Genesis is an intriguing document from ancient times, but it needs to be understood within its own cultural context. Like many other religious texts of that period, it uses mythology to present things that are actually beyond our human understanding. Like the stories we tell children.
So let’s first remove from the equation any idea that studying the geological and fossil relics of the past will reveal to us the essential nature of life, consciousness, and its origins. What then does the fossil record tell us of the history of living creatures?
Firstly, that creatures change in response to their environment. Secondly, that this process has been going on for at least hundreds of millions of years. Thirdly, that the earliest fossil records that contain a reasonably overall picture of life on earth reveal the presence of a spectrum of creatures that bears a remarkable similarity to the modern spectrum as regards their probable levels of intelligence or consciousness.
For the last 300 million years or so, there have been microorganisms, vegetation, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and probably warm-blooded, furry creatures as well. Some have changed a lot, others not so much. But if we understand these creatures as representing a spectrum of consciousness – and compare them with their modern-day counterparts – then creatures of all degrees of consciousness appear to have been present on earth for several hundred million years. Only the outward forms have changed.
And before that? Well, the fossil record – which, at its best, represents only the tiniest of a tiny fraction of the life forms that have ever lived on earth – gets increasingly patchy, as you might expect, given the tremendous geological forces that move, shift, mould, and recycle the surface of our planet.
Pushing back in time, then, until we find the beginnings of the fossil record, we reach an era more than half a billion years ago that scientists endearingly call “snowball earth” or – say those who favour a less radical scenario – “slushball earth”. Either way, it was pretty chilly. The earth was so cold that it was wrapped in ice – up to a kilometre thick say the “snowball” proponents – and it had been that way for a long time. If that was indeed the case, it would have been sufficient to grind much of the surface to dust, including fossilized creatures any larger than bacteria. And that is why, perhaps, there are no fossils of anything but bacteria and a few isolated instances of invertebrates from rock more than half a million years old.
There is certainly no clear evidence that life and consciousness originated from material substance. That is an entirely speculative theory, an unsupported extrapolation of the available data into the realm of scientific mythology.
Nor is there any actual evidence of creatures of a lower order of intelligence and consciousness changing into creatures of a higher order. This is pretty difficult to demonstrate, of course, because it’s not so easy to assess the intelligence of a creature from the past, even if you have its complete fossilized remains in front of you. It’s problematic enough trying to figure out the degree of intelligence possessed by the living creatures of today. Even that of your friends and relatives.
But while it seems clear that some pretty radical changes of outer form have taken place (birds are probably descended from some of the dinosaurs, for instance), there is no fossil evidence of a smooth progression from microorganisms to plants, to invertebrates, to cold-blooded vertebrates, to warm-blooded vertebrates, and thence to primates. All the essential missing links have remained missing.
And human beings? Or whatever creatures represented our level of consciousness in the past? That’s the most contentious issue, of course. Proponents of the ‘ancient man’ hypothesis cite a few ancient artefacts that suggest the presence of ‘intelligent’ beings such as ourselves, and which are said to date from way before the relatively recent time span generally allotted to human beings. Metal objects embedded in coal and ancient rocks, human-like footprints in ancient alluvial deposits, human skulls and skeletons from way before we are supposed to have appeared on the scene, and things like that. Mostly they are finds dating from the nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth centuries, and their authenticity as truly ancient relics is dubious. But even if they were genuine, the strength of the modern neo-Darwinian belief system is sufficient for them to be generally discounted as valid fossil evidence, without further consideration. Most scientists are ultra-wary of having anything to do with them anyway, since such an interest is likely to be seriously bad for their career prospects. So the question remains open, though in the minds of most, it is shut!
From a more cosmic perspective, looking at “life, the universe, and everything” as an expression of a hidden Intelligence or Being, it seems likely that there have always been creatures possessed of human-like intelligence and the potential for realizing the highest levels of divine consciousness. But that’s a priori reasoning, of course, and actual evidence in the fossil record is slim to non-existent. Such is its nature, since it represents only the tiniest of tiny random windows onto the events of the ancient past. Even so, absence of proof is not proof of absence.
But what drives all this change? What drives evolution? From a material standpoint, it is clearly the need to survive in a competitive biosphere, and to adapt to a changing environment. Traditional Darwinism dictates that this comes about through natural selection of random genetic mutations. But looking at the well-ordered ways of nature, I have difficulty accepting that so vital a need as adaptation to changing circumstances is not covered by something cleverer than blind chance and random mutation. Genetic processes are already known to be so intricate that it would seem bizarre if one of their primary functions was left to mere opportunism.
There are already indications that bacteria and other microorganisms can adapt to changing circumstances, like the presence of antibiotics or the possibility of a new host, in ways that seem to rule out chance. These guys reproduce so rapidly that we can see adaptive evolution taking place before our eyes. So there seems no reason why genetic processes, whose finer intricacies have yet to be unravelled, should not include feedback from environmental pressures through biochemical, biophysical and neurological processes that have yet to be understood.
After all, it is commonly said that more than 95% of DNA is ‘junk’, having no useful purpose. That’s a pretty rash assumption. Just because we can’t see what it is up to is no reason to discount it. Perhaps part of the ‘junk’ is connected with a means of adaptation to environmental change. There are certainly indications that it is involved in the switching on and off of gene function. So maybe the ‘junk’ contains genetic memories from the past in case they are useful in the future. This would explain the occasional instances of spontaneous atavism (reversion to an ancient form) – hens’ teeth and horses’ toes, for example. So dinosaurs may not be as dead as we thought. There may be a dinosaur lurking in your farmyard chicken.
But however all these changes and adaptations are orchestrated, behind all the physical processes lie the patterning processes of the formative mind, projecting subtle inner mental patterns into physical reality. This is all a part of what some folk call the law of karma.
Maybe, as with so many other aspects of nature, there is a natural cycle going on, covering spans of millions of years. There is certainly evidence that although species are adapting and changing all the time, radically new species only appear in waves every eight million years or so. They call it the theory of punctuated equilibria. So maybe there is an ebb and flow of the universal mind that creates these evolutionary cycles – seasons of the mind, so to speak – with a ‘springtime’ of subtlety when new forms can more readily come into being. Maybe even the four ages of Indian and classical Greek mythology have some basis in reality. Who knows? So much of evolutionary theory is more like speculative biological history, viewed through a window of preconceived ideas.
So I’d say that the actual origin of life on earth remains a mystery. In the divine creative process, consciousness gives rise to matter, not the reverse. Mind and spirit give rise to bodies. That’s a fundamental principle. Of course, that leaves open the question not only of how life got started, but of how the physical universe itself got going. And that’s the final fundamental mystery to consider.
