You are on page 1of 175

The Ark

Avoiding Extinction

By Theodore D. Hall, Ph.D.

The Ark

Avoiding Extinction
Quite clearly, our task is to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate social patterns that will enable us to avoid extinction. --R. Buckminster Fuller

Copyright 1997-2007 TDHall. Permission is granted by the author/copyright holder for individuals to send this e-book (Avoiding Extinction) as gift to other individuals. All commercial rights are retained.

The Ark

A Word from the Author


Avoiding Extinction was first published in 1995 by the Leading Edge International Research Group of Yelm, Washington. A revised edition was republished in 1997 as the key component of The ArkSurviving the Flood of Disinformation, a printed and bound copy of which is available through Leading Edge (www.trufax.org). This e-book is the 1997 version. Given the potential importance of this book in assisting our species in the work of avoiding self-destruction, I, the author, am allowing interested individuals to send the following e-book version of Avoiding Extinction (AE) to other individuals as a gift. All commercial rights are retained by the author. After 1997, my research into the great Earth and socio-political transition we are now in the midst of continued. The result was a website (www.biofractalevolution.com) and several books on the crucial subjects of evolutionary science and consciousness factors in the great transition. I encourage you to buy and read these books, especially Over the Bones of the Dead: Evolutionary SciencePast, Present & Future. .

Yelm, Washington October 11, 2007 3

The Ark

Note: Some pages, such as this, are blank, as graphics that appear in the printpublished AE are not available at this time, and as adjustments must be made to co-ordinate pagination with index.

The Ark

Avoiding Extinction
Table of Contents
Preface ............................................................................................... 15

Introduction Paradigms ...................................................................... Basal Paradigms of the West ........................................... The White Horse: The Separatist Paradigm ............ The Red Horse: The Greco-Roman Paradigm ......... The Black Horse: The Judeo-Christian Paradigm .... The Pale Horse: Materialistic Scientism ................. The Present Moment ...................................................... Creationism Lamarkism and Creationism: Targets of Darwinists ........... 25 Triumph of Darwinism as the Official Theory ................ 26 Creationism ................................................................... 26 Compilers of Holy Bible kept the JudaicTestament ........... 27 Protestant Protest .......................................................... 27 Intentionalism as Postulating Intelligence Design .............. 28 Catastrophism: No New Species .................................. 28 The Fossil Record ......................................................... 28 Cuvier: Reconciler of Fossil Record with Biblical Record .. 29 Uniformitarianism ........................................................... 29 Uniformitarianism Replaces Catastrophism as Orthodoxy ...... In Short ......................................................................... 30 Lamarckism Judeo-Christianity as basis of Old World Order ................. Challenge to the Old World Order: Transformism ............. Lamarcks Heresy ....................................................... Larmarckism supports revolutionary Deism ..................... Lamarck: Organism and Environment are Interactive ........ Larmarckian anticipation of the Gaia Hypothesis .............. Interactivity as a function of the cellular IMP Network ..... 32 32 33 33 34 34 35 18 20 20 21 22 22 23

The Ark
Superiority of Lamarckism to Darwinism ......................... The Attack on Lamarck .................................................. Cuviers misrepresentation of Lamarckism ....................... Todays continuation of the attack on Lamarckism ........... Anthropomorphism: Projection of Human Characteristics .. Anthropomorphism as a science crime .......................... Darwinism as a form of Fortuitism ................................... Why did Creationism crumble? ........................................ Cuvier opens the door for Fortuitism ............................... Classical Darwinism Darwin .......................................................................... Darwin signed on by FitzRoy to prove Genesis true .......... Darwin receives full exposition of Larmarckism in 1832 .... Darwin lionized in London in 1839 .................................. Darwin retreats to Sevenoaks in 1842 ............................. Darwin receives missing link to his theory in 1858 ........ Darwins panic and the Lyell conspiracy ......................... The Darwinian Revolution in 1859 ................................. Classical Darwinism ...................................................... Speciation .......................................................... Darwinism given Lamarcks laurels ...................... Darwinism built on suppression of Lamarckism ..... The Wallace Factor ............................................. Natural Selection .......................................................... Wallace and the Natural Selection Hypothesis ... Natural Selection as understood by Darwin .......... Darwin decides survival of fittest is fitter .......... The Struggle for Survival .................................... Darwins fatal fallacy .......................................... Enter Malthus the Dismal .................................... Darwinism becomes a vehicle for Mathusianism ...... With Manifold Force The abominable tenet ...................................................... Birth of the population problem ................................... Malthus on mobs ........................................................... Malthus sees danger to Britain in the lowly potatoe....... Revolution and Reaction ................................................ Sir Edmund and Sir Thomas fight Democracy ..... Terror in France - Panic in England ...................... Commoners blamed for insurrection ...................... British against independent republicanism .......... The Simon critique .............................................. 52 52 53 53 54 54 55 55 56 56 41 41 42 42 42 43 43 43 44 44 44 45 45 46 46 47 47 48 48 49 49 35 36 36 36 37 37 37 38 38

The Ark
Scientist baffled by Scientism ............................... Malthus, the political polemicist (attack dog) ........ Malthusianism born again 1859 ......................... With Manifold Force .................. Darwin applies Malthus doctrine to life ................ Battlelines are drawn ........................................... Malthus and Darwin give Elite new lease on power.. Darwins Bulldog barks ..................................... Modern science built on abomination ..................... Population and Politics in the 19th Century Two hundredth anniversary of Malthusianism 1998 ............ Poetry of genocide .......................................................... A glimmer of light .......................................................... The Principle of Population .......................................... Early Malthusianism ........................................................ Malthusianism: Political Theory ............................. First think tank .................................................. Middle Malthusianism ..................................................... Laissez-faire malign neglect ............................... Herbert Spencer - Mr. Malthusianism ................. Late Malthusianism: Social Darwinism ............................. Evolution comes from conflict ............................ Darwinists carry life is fight to absurdity ............. Earth becomes one ...war zone .............................. Imperialism .................................................................... Surplus populations and Imperialism ................... African holocaust ................................................. War is progress and prosperity ........................... Masses led to agree to their own destruction .......... Germany wants an empire, too! World War I ......... War becomes a biological necessity .................... Population and Politics in the 20th Century Sanction ......................................................................... Socialism: The reaction against individualism .......... Darwinism supports Communism ............................ Democracy as a label for socialism ...................... State socialism ...................................................... Techno-Totalitarianism .................................................... Paradigm studies, basal shift ................................. Blood and Iron ............................................................... Germany Unified in the 1860s ............................... 72 73 73 73 74 74 75 75 75 64 64 65 65 65 66 66 66 66 67 67 67 68 68 69 69 69 70 70 70 71 57 58 58 58 59 59 59 60 61

The Ark
The British Empire gets competition ...................... The war drums of Darwinism in 1912 ..................... Kropotkin ...................................................................... Co-operation, not competition, the key to evolution.. Unprecedented destruction of life ............................ To the Victor Go the Spoils .............................................. Race Science offers an internal solution ............. The Nazis: Nothing but applied biology ............... The Present Moment ........................................................ Keeping alive the Third Reich ................................. Darwinism: Dead or Alive? Darwin criticizes Natural Selection .................................. Classical Darwinism is dead and alive! ............................ The realm of science divided .......................................... The Church of Scientism ................................................ Christians fight back with fish ........................................ Polarization of society ................................................... Two Nineteenth Century Critics of Darwinism ................. The novelist who knew more than scientists .......... Kropotkin nails Darwinism as old Hobbism ............ Sociability as key to winning struggle for life ... Prince of the commoners ...................................... Kropotkin nailed as an anarchist ........................ Into the Twentieth ......................................................... Darwin is stunned by the Gaia Hypothesis ............ Our home is homeostatic ...................................... Where is the Science of Science? ..................................... Modern science: A factory without quality control ... A modern Dunciad ................................................ Earliest eye: the Integral Membrane Protein ............ More incompetence ............................................... Philosophys failure, Weismanns success ................ Neo-Darwinism Weismann and other grounds ........................................ A new power-priesthood emerges .................................... He Cut Off Their Tails .................................................... Mice mutilation was unnecessary ........................... Weismanns doctrine: the germ of Neo-Darwinism .. Random genetic mutation ...................................... Interactivity .................................................................... Behavior as a product of IMP process, not genes .... 92 93 94 94 94 95 95 95 81 82 82 82 83 83 84 84 84 85 85 86 86 86 87 88 88 88 89 90 90 76 76 76 77 77 77 78 78 79 80

The Ark
The Weismann Doctrine crumbles ........................... Consciousness is in the genes ............................... Origin of Neo-Darwinism By Means of Weismann ............ The challenge of genetics ...................................... Weismannism: the struggle is microscopic .............. The Struggle is taken to absurdity by Dawkins ...... Natural Selection helped by Scientific Selection.. The Synthesis .................................................................. The doctrines of Neo-Darwinism ............................ How many doctrines have scientific merit? .............. Lorenzos oil ......................................................... Triumph of Materialism The strength of Darwinism cultural, not scientific .............. 104 Tyrannic Theology ........................................................... 105 Attack on Gnostic Christianity ......................................... 105 Gnosticism resurfaces ..................................................... 106 The Holy Bible, beginning of the modern West ................. 106 Gods Law enforcement officers ................................... 107 Protestant revolt and reformation ..................................... 107 The Challenge of Science and Scientism ........................... 108 The universe as machine, and the laws of Nature .... 108 The Laws of Newton ............................................ 108 Monarch of mind .................................................. 109 Reductive materialism .......................................... 110 Darwinists find a God-substitute in the genes ...... 110 Darwinists mistake DNA for brain ......................... 111 Brain is in membrane ............................................ 111 The moneys in the genes ...................................... 112 And Darwinism goes marching on .......................... 112 The Politics of Evolutionary Science ................................ 112 To briefly recapitulate ............................................ 113 The second great challenge to the Old World Order .. 113 Egalitarian republicanism: Natural Law Divine ...... 114 The first New World Order ..................................... 114 The Old Order reacts .............................................. 114 Reactionaries take over science ............................ 115 The reactionary New World Order .......................... 115 Neo-Gradualism After All These Years ..................................................... Lack of evidence troubles Darwin ........................... Missing link still missing ........................................ Missing marbles ..................................................... 118 118 119 119 96 97 97 97 98 98 98 99 99 100 102

The Ark
Attack from Within .......................................................... Discontinuity as important as continuity .................. Orthodoxy ignores macro changes ........................... Attack from Without ......................................................... Creationist science crippled .................................... New Testament Creationism defensible .................... The ex-communicated speak ................................... Fossils of man 800,000 years old are frauds .......... Humans in France two million years ago .................. Pliocene human remains in them thar hills .............. Pre-Tertiary prints and Early Tertiary remains .......... The Next Evolutionary Theory Is it possible to fix Darwinism? ..................................... Symbiogenesis ....................................................... Homeostasis .......................................................... Sciences of death ................................................... The West is Darwinized ........................................ Is there any sort of good alternative to Darwinism? ........... Larmarcks missing link found ...................................... Three premises of Fractal Evolution ................................. Fractal Geometry ............................................................ Increasing organismic intelligence .......................... Fractal packing ..................................................... Fractal leaps ......................................................... The Cambrian explosion is explainable .......................... The Cell Story Darwinism losing credibility ............................................. To find the Grail ............................................................. The biological cell ........................................................... Cell Structure ................................................................. Fishical and non-fishical .................................................. The Integral Membrane Protein Complex .......................... IMP: the cells hunters and gatherers ............................... Micro-world ................................................................... Back in big world ............................................................ The Prokaryote ............................................................... Why the difference? ............................................... Mastery of time ..................................................... The chalice ........................................................... The drawback ....................................................... The Eukaryote ................................................................ Greater size, greater intelligence ............................ 132 133 133 133 135 135 136 136 137 137 138 138 138 139 139 140 124 124 125 125 126 126 126 127 127 127 128 130 131 119 119 120 120 120 121 121 122 122 122 123

10

The Ark
Inner skeleton ....................................................... A Few Concluding Thoughts ............................................ The Lamb ............................................................. Design in Nature More on fractal geometry and mathematics ........................ Physical world - Fractal world .......................................... Fractal organization of body ............................................. Mandelbrot set ................................................................. New vision of the nature of things .................................... Consciousness ................................................................. The physiological basis of consciousness ................. Consciousness originates in environment ................. Cellular brain in the membrane ............................... Primacy of the IMP network .................................. Consciousness clarified .......................................... Expansion of Cellular Consciousness ................................. Expansion of membrane surface area ....................... Integration of inputs .............................................. Evolution pauses ................................................... The Fractal Leap ............................................................. Evolution punctuated ............................................ Multicellular rung ................................................. Proving Gaia Is Western civilization a failure? ....................................... If the planet is a single organism, what is mankind? ........... Earths membrane ........................................................... What is the planetary equivalent of the IMP network? ....... Mankind, the immune system ........................................ They were right all along ................................................. Immune cells running amok ............................................. Preliminaries to Proof ..................................................... Fractal Evolution supports the Gaia Hypothesis ................ Is the planet self-conscious? ............................................ Physiological basis of self-consciousness .......................... Schismism ...................................................................... The real key to helping the planet and its residents ............ A short, but important, to do list .................................. Discard the Anthropomorphic Fallacy .............................. Anthropomorphism is obsolete .............................. Objectivism a fallacy ......................................... A New Orthodoxy in Biology .......................................... The Frankenstein complex .................................... 152 153 153 154 154 155 155 156 156 157 157 158 158 158 158 159 159 159 159 144 145 145 145 146 147 147 147 147 148 148 149 149 149 150 150 150 151 140 141 141

11

The Ark
The predictions of orthodoxy ................................ Bodies are biological robots .................................. The second coming of evolutionary science ......... Re-establish Philosophy as the Science of Science ............. Guiding lights of ancient philosophy ...................... The end of Darwinism .......................................... A job for philosophy ............................................ The End of Human Evolution The Struggle of Life .................................................... Missing information .............................................. Two keys to homeostasis ...................................... The two natural modes of struggle ..................... The job of the leader ............................................ Replacing the brain .............................................. Struggle not a battle for dominance .................... Struggle is keeping the balance .......................... Modern War and Extraterrestrials ................................... If Darwin was right, man would be doomed ........... One for the X-files ........................................... Its Our Choice .............................................................. To re-cap the situation ......................................... Teachings of the cell ............................................. Opportunity for the Catholic Church to be catholic.. Invisible church underlying invisible government ..... A time for choice .................................................. The End/Beginning .......................................................... Scientific Holism..the sooner, the better ................. The Blending .................................................................. Species-organism coding ....................................... Necessity for Western Civilization ......................... Keepers and Finders ............................................. Enlightenment at the end of the tunnel (vision) ....... 165 165 166 166 167 167 167 168 168 168 169 169 169 170 170 171 172 172 172 172 173 173 174 174 160 160 160 161 161 161 162

12

The Ark

13

The Ark

14

The Ark

Preface
The situation is this, in a kind of science fiction format .... Western civilization is moving rapidly toward annihilation, and it doesn't know why. Its "leaders" think they know, but they do not. For a long time, both leaders and people have been programmed with a supposed scientific vision of existence which is in fact not scientific at all, which is in fact a kind of "species implant" designed to assure the destruction of not only Western civilization, but also the entire human race. So deceived are the people, they have welcomed the species implant, the death machine, into their lives ... into their hearts, their homes, their schools. The death machine has programmed the masses to view life as a "struggle of each against all," and to view themselves with disgust--as machines driven by an obsession with sex and violence. The implant has caused an Elite Order to arise, an order that is firmly convinced that the only final solution to what it sees as "the horror of human life" is the elimination of large numbers of the world's population ... and the total control of all the rest. It is the eleventh hour. Indeed, it is even later. The Elite Order is now in control of the planet's major political and economic systems. It controls the media and the educational system as well. Many of those not in the Order regard its members with fear and loathing. These members are seen, in the terminology of Star Wars, as the "Borgs" ... grotesque artificial life forms in the service of the diabolical will of a leader who is committed to the goals of "assimilating" all that there is of value in life, and of making all life forms, everywhere, slaves of the Order. As a key part of the take-over strategy of the "Borgists," agencies of the Elite Order fill the media with "disinformation," so that even the best and the brightest among the common people are lost in confusion. Unable to see or understand the situation they are in, the common people are unable to come up with effective "solutions" to the "problems" in their lives. Frustrated at every turn, they wander into deeper and deeper darkness. Most become zombies of the Order. The more sensitive and conscientious seek ways to get out of the "System," and many ways are offered to them by the System ... It is 11:57. Everywhere the "mind control systems" of the Order have been established,--from the shelves of supermarkets to the nightly news, from the local bar to the "darkskies" over us always.

15

The Ark
Thus it is that one part of a species has been programmed to control or destroy another part of the species, which has been programmed to be controlled-or destroyed. There is only one real hope for our species, and that is ... the removal of the species implant. People, including those in the Elite Order, still have an awesome power, one not usually recognized as such -- the power to change their minds. ARK is designed to assist you (and the species) in surviving the "flood of disinformation" that is now upon us, and to provide the perspectives and the understandings that will enable you to change your mind ... to remove the death machine ticking in your head. To escape the certain death that awaits you if you do nothing. This book is not just about "escaping," however. It is about an historic opportunity that we humans have at this moment,--an opportunity we would not have if the death machine implant did not exist! Paradoxically, the death machine could be our vehicle to "Heaven on Earth." How is that possible? Once it becomes clear to us what the death machine is and how it operates, then we have the understanding necessary to the creation of our own preferred implant! Yes, indeed ... it is possible to replace the species death program with a species "Heaven on Earth" program. The ultimate mission of this book is to assist in making that possibility into a reality. Thank you for joining me in this vital work...

16

The Ark

Introduction
"Darwinism is not scientific. So why is it still our orthodox evolutionary science?" This question was put to me in early 1994 by Dr. Bruce H. Lipton. Dr. Lipton is a cell biologist and the proponent of a new theory of biological evolutionary--"Fractal Evolution." I am a writer. I am a former college professor. If I were in teaching today, I would refer to my field of special interest as the "science of science." Originally, philosophy was the science of science. Now, philosophy is many things, but it is not the science of science. If it were, it would be providing introductory courses on scientific inquiry to all undergraduate universit y students, as necessary prerequisites to research in all fields. As an "SOS" specialist, I was immediately intrigued by Lipton's question. I, like just about everyone else, regarded Darwinism as synonymous with "evolution." Darwinism's been around for nearly a century and half. Surely Darwinism passed "the test of time." Surely it would have been demolished by now if it wasn't valid.... In short order, Dr. Lipton convinced me that Emperor Darwinism has no clothes, i.e. its key doctrines have little or no validity. For instance, contemporary Darwinism, which is called "Neo-Darwinism," maintains that the one and only source of human behavior is the "genes." This hypothesis is referred to generally as the doctrine of the Primacy of the DNA. Is it valid? No. If the doctrine was correct, then cells would cease to exhibit behavior if their nuclei (genes are in the nucleus) were removed. The doctrine does not prove out in the lab. The removal of nuclei from cells does not affect cellular behavior, at least not right away. After nuclei are removed from cells, the cells go on singing and dancing, exhibiting their normal behavior. The cells do not feel the absence of the genes until they require new parts. (The genes contain patterns for new parts.) So why is the Primacy of DNA doctrine maintained today as gospel truth? What's going on in biology? In seeking an answer to this question, I found myself quickly immersed in eighteenth and nineteenth century paradigmatics. "Paradigm studies" is the new name of an old discipline, the history of ideas. The root meaning of "paradigm" is pattern, or model. In our context, paradigm refers to a set, or system, of beliefs. Darwinism, which originated in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, is a "scientific paradigm," or, at least, it appears to be such.

17

The Ark
Darwinism was not "just another" scientific paradigm, however. It was the major intellectual event of the last century. With the support of the Royal Society, most prestigious scientific institution in the world, Darwinism quickly became the West's dominant vision of existence, occupying the place held for so many centuries by the Judeo-Christian vision. In other words, Darwinism rapidly became far more than a scientific paradigm; it became what we might term a "basal paradigm,"--a vision of existence that underlies an entire civilization.

Paradigms
A few words on paradigm studies is needed at this point. The field is, as indicated, relatively new, and there are many, many definitions of paradigm out there. For the sake of clarity, we need a paradigm of paradigms. Such a model may be illustrated as a pyramid, with four levels:

"Existence" is, of course, the necessary ground of both knowingness and belief. Knowingness is instinctive understanding. Knowingness derives from existence; beliefs derive from knowingness. The instinctual base of Western civilization, of any civilization, is what we might term the aboriginal consciousness, aboriginal meaning from (ab-) the origin, or original state. In aboriginal consciousness, as in New Physics, the material and super-material (metaphysical) realms are interwoven and inseparable. For the aboriginal, everything that is is part of the same one family. This consciousness is "holistic." The word holism dates from about 1926 and refers to a theory (or consciousness) of existence which stresses the interrelatedness, the "wholeness," of the parts. The pyramid represents the four levels of belief system constituting a civilization.

18

The Ark
The basal paradigm is definable as a model of existence that serves as a foundational vision for a civilization. Indeed, a "civilization" is distinguished from the total population of the planet by virtue of its basal paradigm(s). In the case of modern Western civilization, we recognize three basal paradigms: GrecoRoman polytheism (many gods); Judeo-Christian monotheism (one god) ; and Materialistic Scientism (no god, just matter), which became the dominant basal paradigm with the triumph of Darwinism. "Scientism" means, in our context, "science as religion." When a science's commitment to established doctrines over-rides the basic commitment of all sciences to disinterested research and fair acknowledgment of proven results, then this science is operating as a religion,--as a defender of dogmas. Darwinism, as we'll demonstrate, is Scientismic rather than scientific. A societal paradigm (second level) is a particular society's version of the basal paradigm or paradigms. Each society in a civilization will express the basal paradigm in a unique way, through the filter of its special cultural and historical experience. On top of the societal paradigms are innumerable "group" paradigms,--models of existence (or keys aspects or elements of existence) that are held to be true by groups within a society--all kinds of groups, from street gangs to the Supreme Court, from Freudians to B.F. Skinnerians, from Taoists to Scientologists, and on and on. Further, at this level we find all scientific and social theories of significance ... all that passes for "learned investigation." The topmost level is the personal paradigm. Every individual represents a unique combination of basal, societal, and group paradigms, along with inputs from the personal paradigms of others. Personal paradigms may be very similar, but, like fingerprints, no two are the same. There are, then, four major types of paradigm: Basal paradigms; societal paradigms; group paradigms; and personal paradigms. The paradigms are interactive to varying degrees at various times, i.e., they influence each other. Was Adolf Hitler a product of the German societal paradigm of the 1920s? Yes,-and the product of other paradigms as well. Did the personal paradigm of Adolf Hitler alter the German societal paradigm in the 1930s? Of course. A basal paradigm is the most basic belief system (regarding existence and the role of human beings) underlying a civilization. Basal paradigms supply credible answers to the questions we all have about life, especially human life. Who or what created us? Why were we created? What's the purpose of human life? How should we live?--by what rules? And ... what happens to us when we die?

19

The Ark

Basal Paradigms of the West


Western civilization has been built upon four basal paradigms. These four paradigms, interesting to note, chart a course of progressive separation (or deracination) of individuals from both the metaphysical environment (as symbolized by the "gods" for instance) and the natural environment. Also, they invite comparison with the Biblical Four Horsemen, who appear, according to Revelation, in the end days of the "Age of Flesh." A few points of comparison are indicated below.

The White Horse: The Separatist Paradigm


"I saw the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, ... and behold, a white horse, and he that sat thereon had a bow; and there was given unto him a crown: and he came forth conquering, and to conquer."

The first basal paradigm may be termed the "Separatist Horse Paradigm." It is the white horse of Revelation, white suggesting its origin in holistic, aboriginal consciousness. This paradigm represents a radical departure from aboriginal consciousness, the knowingness that all things are part of one thing. It involves a new idea----the idea that there are entities or realities which are not part of the universal family, the wholeness. There are some realities, the paradigm maintains, which are unholy. Flocks of birds operate on a kind knowingness we call "instinct." Humans operate on knowingness as well, but they also operate on beliefs-- "ideas" and "theories" about life. Knowingness is closely attuned with reality; beliefs may be very far afield from truth. Consider existence to be the first thing, the starting point of sentient life. Knowingness is then the second thing. Between existence and knowingness, there is a degree of separation. At a further remove from existence is belief, the third thing. As we know, beliefs are diverse. Ask a dozen people about their beliefs regarding any given thing, you'll get a dozen different answers. If birds operated on belief rather than knowingness, they would be as unnatural as contemporary man. Our newspapers would be filled with stories of the crows waging genocidal campaigns against the pigeons perhaps, or against us. In any event, before there can be the idea of the unholy, there must exist differing beliefs. The West's first basal paradigm may have been an inevitable consequence of the birth of belief.

20

The Ark
Historically, the Separatist Horse Paradigm was succeeded by three other basal paradigms, the modern paradigms Greco-Roman Polytheism, JudeoChristian Monotheism, and Materialistic Scientism. The Red Horse: Greco-Roman Polytheism
"Another horse came forth, a red horse: and to him that sat thereon it was given to take peace from the earth, and that they should slay one another: and there was given unto him a great sword."

Greco-Roman Polytheism. War is the great theme of this paradigm, and thus the second horse of Revelation is red. The "bibles" of this paradigm are the Greek myths and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad is the story of a protracted war of various Greek chiefs against the city of Troy, which ends with the infiltration of Greeks into Troy in the belly o f the "Trojan Horse." The Odyssey describes the arduous, twenty-year journey home of the greatest of the Greek chiefs-- Odysseus. Under this paradigm, the One Source ("Great Spirit") of the aboriginals is fractured into many gods and goddesses (hence "polytheism"). The divine realm is now separate from the natural realm, rather than interwoven. The kingdom of Zeus is on Mount Olympus, and many of the gods and goddesses make their main residence there. There are still connections between deity and nature, of course. The Great Ones are identified with the great forces of nature. Poseidon, for instance, is god of the seas, and Aphrodite goddess of love. The aboriginal oneness of divine and natural realms is gone, however. For the Greeks, Gaia (Mother Earth) was ancient history. In the aboriginal view, all living things are children of Father Sky and Mother Earth. Under the Greco-Roman paradigm, some men and women are children of the gods, but most are no more than playthings. As a rule, the gods respect and reward loyalty and courage. Thus men are well advised to develop habits of worshipfulness toward the gods and great courage in battle. War gains importance as a field of trial. The best reference regarding optimal man and optimal woman of the paradigm is the Odyssey of Homer--the model humans being Odysseus and his wife, Penelope. Earth, under this paradigm, is still sacred. Indeed, every mountain glen and spring has its guardian spirits. The vast physical features (oceans for instance) are protected by the greater gods. The metaphysical features of life (such as love, wisdom, and purity for instance) are also responsibilities of the gods and goddesses. Today, in certain parts of the world the old Greco-Roman "paganism" is alive and well. Folk culture in certain sections of Rumania, for instance, reflects the old pre-Christian basal paradigm.

21

The Ark
The Black Horse: Judeo-Christian Monotheism
"And when he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, Come. And I saw, and behold, a black horse; and he that sat thereon had a balance in his hand...."

Judeo-Christian Monotheism. "Holy War" is a major theme of this paradigm, the dominant paradigm in the West between the fourth century A.D., when Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the late nineteenth century. Throughout the world during this period, the "black robes" of the Roman Church sought to establish Catholic orthodoxy as the one and only truth of existence. They were joined by the black robes of some of the derivative religions. The third horse of the Revelation is black. The black symbolizes not the teachings of Old and New Testaments, but the compulsion of the Churches to force their orthodoxies upon the world. What was most black, most unenlightened, in the period was the idea that it is a "holy" thing to make war against those outside "The Faith." Under this paradigm, the gods and goddesses, nymphs and divas vanish, and are replaced by one God--God the Father. Thus the term "monotheism." The separation of divine and natural becomes much more profound, as God dwells in a kingdom far from Earth. Earth, in this paradigm, is not sacred. Rather, it is a fallen world, a good place to leave. Its primary value is as a stage for moral struggle. Here it is, in the Globe Theatre, we humans have the opportunity to overcome a natural tendency to disobedience and to turn ourselves into faithful servants of God the Father, and His authorized Church.

The Pale Horse: Materialistic Scientism


"And when he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, Come. And I saw, and behold, a pale horse; and he that sat upon him, his name was Death; and Hades [Hell] followed with him...."

Materialistic Scientism. Scientism is science operating as a religion. Scientism presents itself as science, but is not science, for its foundation is conjecture and doctrine rather than demonstrable evidence. Scientism arose in the last century as the polar opposite of metaphysical theism, as represented by the Christian religions. The Old Testament of Scientism is a body of speculation which may be summarized in the phrase "reductive materialism." The New Testament of Scientism is Darwinian biology and evolutionary theory.

22

The Ark
Scientism is the last horse of Revelation--the pale horse. Why is it pale? Scientism holds that the material realm is the only realm that matters. It ignores as unimportant the realm of energy, light and thought--the realm the New Physicists call "the implicate order." Scientism insists that the "explicate" order is all we can really know, and all we need to know. Scientism very pale because it is cut off from "Source," the implicate sun.

The Present Moment


The Four Horsemen of the Revelation, as we interpret them, are our very own basal belief systems, our own creations. The first horse represents our acceptance of the idea that there is some life that is unholy. The second represents our acceptance of the idea that war is the appropriate response against that which is "unholy." The third horse symbolizes the idea that it is just and righteous to wage an extended war of extermination against the unholy ... Holy War. The fourth horse--the Pale Horse--represents the idea that all organic life is in a state of warfare ... and that the extermination of opponents and potential opponents (including mass populations) is a simple exigency of living. At the level of the basal paradigm, Western civilization is far less complex than we ordinarily imagine. We are a warfaring civilization, and we have gone just about as far as we can go, short of generating species extinction. The good news is ... A new basal paradigm is in the process of being born. Probably, it will be called "Scientific Holism." It began its emergence long ago, in the speculations called "natural theology" and "Deism." Deism is a philosophy which regards Nature as the true bible. It began to take scientific form in the works of the father of evolution, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. In our own century, the New Physics provides a scientific basis for Holism. It is just a matter of time before all come to the understanding (the scientific understanding) that the great teachers and mystics were correct. We are One. This book is meant to assist the birth process. The New Enlightenment, the age of Scientific Holism, is at hand. In older languaging ... the Age of Flesh (materialism) is ending, and the Age of God is beginning. God, being everything, is by definition the ultimate "holistic reality," the Holy of holies. The necessary next step in the birthing is the discarding of our orthodox biology and evolutionary theory and the replacing of these with a biology and evolution theory that are truly scientific, that are full alignment with the New Physics.

23

The Ark
You can help, if you desire. Read this book, and if you are convinced of its merit, change your personal paradigm. The change will be felt on all levels, including the basal. When enough individuals change their personal paradigms, the basal paradigm will change--utterly. The Pale Horse will disappear, and--who knows?--perhaps the Unicorn will reappear as the next equine symbol of our most basic paradigm. What better symbol for unified consciousness than a unicorn?

24

The Ark

Chapter 1 Creationism
Belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible is as old as Christianity itself, the author of the Second Epistle to Timothy declaring that "all Scripture is given by the inspiration of God." The Church Fathers elaborated this belief into doctrine and drew from it the corollary of the absolute infallibility of the Bible.... [1] --John C. Greene

In the spring of 1996, a controversy arose in the small town of Sultan, Washington, regarding the teaching of biological origins. "Some say that if the Snohomish County town allows students access to information challenging contemporary Darwinism," writes a commentator, "all manner of ill will prevail. Not only would such information confuse the facts, it would mislead them [students] about the very nature of science. Worse, it would let fundamentalist religion back into the classroom." The controversy in Sultan reflects a controversy in our civilization that has flared up intermittently ever since the 1860s, the decade in which Darwinism was established in important scientific circles as the Western world's official science of biology and evolution. As the result of the strenuous efforts of T.H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," and other leading scientists of the period, Darwinism quickly gained wide acceptance as the one and only scientific truth of existence. In keeping with the fundamental Darwinian conviction that life is war-"incessant struggle," the followers of Darwin adopted a militant posture in the early days of their crusade to convince the world of the truth of their "Master" ... Charles Darwin, BA Christ's College, Cambridge (1831), Fellow of the Royal Society (1838). To simplify their war, they acknowledged only two opponents-"Lamarckism" and "Creationism." Lamarckism and Creationism, targets of Darwinism The correct name for Lamarckism is "Transformism." Transformism, the first theory of evolution, was developed by the great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and set forth in Philosophie Zoologique, 1809. Although one of the three most influential books of the nineteenth century, Lamarck's Philosophie did not appear in English edition until 1914. "Creationism," a term which refers to any theory maintaining that life is in some sense the product of intelligent design, was (and is) viewed by the 25

The Ark
Darwinists as their chief enemy. Darwinism maintains that the opposite is true-there is no intelligent design behind nature; the evolutionary process is haphazard, the result of random genetic mutation and Natural Selection. In 1925, the debate between the Darwinists and the Creationists (in this case the Christian Creationists) went to court in Dayton, Tennessee. School teacher John T. Scopes was accused of violating state law by teaching "evolution" (Darwinism). Mr. Scopes was convicted in the Dayton trial and fined $100. (The fine was paid by the Baltimore Sun.) The conviction was over-turned at the state level. After all the hoopla, the great benefactor of the trial was Darwinism, which gained its very first American martyr--John Scopes. Triumph of Darwinism Today, the situation is quite reversed. Darwinism is the official biology and evolutionary theory of the U.S. government and of most public school systems. Teachers who challenge the orthodoxy, by suggesting there might be alternatives to Darwinism, are regarded as highly suspect--enemies of science perhaps, perhaps even the pawns of "fundamentalism." Today, more than ever, Darwinism is synonymous with evolution, or so the masses are told. What's the truth of the matter? What are the issues--the real issues--behind the "great debate" between the Darwinists and the Creationists? Let's consider Creationism first,--its rise and fall. After that, we'll turn to Darwinism.

Creationism
If you were a typical member of Western civilization two hundred years ago, you believed in the Bible--in the Biblical vision of existence. The Bible was the authority on the subject of life on Earth. The Bible embraces two religious traditions--Judaism (the Old Testament) and Christianity (the New Testament). Where the subject of life on Earth is concerned, your standard reference was the book of Genesis, first book of the Old Testament. In this book, God is described as having created the heavens and Earth in six days. Man and woman, and all the other creatures, are the direct creations of God. The Genesis position regarding life, as articulated two hundred years ago by the theologians, may be summarized as follows: How did life on Earth begin? Earth and everything on it were created by God--an all-powerful and all-knowing being. How long did it take God to create

26

The Ark
the world? Six days. When did He create the world? Thousands of years ago. What were they like?--the animals and plants He created back then. Pretty much the same as those we're familiar with today. Except ... they were perfect. Were humans created perfect? Yes, humans were created perfect and given dominion over all other life forms. "Dominion"? Yes. Adam and Eve were created to be the caretakers of His earthly garden. Sad to say, they didn't hold the position long. Why not? Adam and Eve came under the evil influence of a troublemaker, a serpent who tempted them into becoming disobedient to God. What was the result? Adam and Eve were cast out of their jobs and out of the Garden of Eden, their first home. Ever since then, life has gone downhill. Downhill? Yes, indeed, since that time, life has degenerated. It has devolved. Compilers of Holy Bible kept the Judaic testament As a point of real interest, the Catholic compilers of the Holy Bible had an opportunity to leave behind the Old Testament, and to focus upon the life and teachings of Christ. They chose not to do this. This decision was fateful, as it obligated the Catholic Church, and later Christian churches, to defend a great many difficult-to-defend pre-Christian accounts, beliefs, and doctrines. A Christian Creationism based solely on the New Testament would have been far more defensible than the Genesis-based Creationism. In any event, the early Catholics chose not to make a clean break with the earlier testaments, and they had their reasons. Undoubtedly, one reason was the fact Genesis represents mankind as sorely in need of salvation. Churches are in the salvation business. How can humankind right the old wrong and win once more the full approval of God? Catholicism required obedience to the Church as the way back to God. By canon, the pope was deemed the one and only true representative of Christ. Thus to obey pope and Church was to obey the will of God.

Protestant protest Early Protestants protested that this answer was not adequate. Generally, the answer to the question given by the Protestants was "Follow the example of our Lord Jesus Christ." The most famous presentation of this answer is to be found in John Milton's epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. By implication, "evolution" is definable from the Miltonian (and Protestant) point of view as a personal matter,--of becoming enlightened spiritually by way o f entering into the brotherhood of Christ. In the University of two hundred years ago, as in the Church, the Genesis account was deemed sacrosanct--the unquestionable truth. All academics who were cast in the mold of the old Judeo-Christian paradigm came to be known as "Creationists." 27

The Ark

"Intentionalism" better label for theories postulating intelligent design Today, the term Creationism is used to describe any philosophy which maintains that the universe is the product of intelligent design. However, the term is so rooted in the Judeo-Christian paradigm, it certainly ought to be reserved as label for philosophies arising out of that particular tradition. A better term by which to categorize all philosophies which argue for intelligent design would be Intentionalism. (Opposite of intentionalism would be fortuitism.) Catastrophism ... no new species In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century University, a type of Creationism called "Catastrophism" reigned supreme. Catastrophism held that all the species that ever existed were created by God in the beginning. A great many of these species were wiped out in subsequent catastrophies; those existing today are the survivors. The first big authority to suggest that there are no new species cropping up along the way, that all species were created in the beginning, was the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778). As Loren Eiseley states, Linnaeus "had been quick to express the view that were no new species, and this view in turn had been taken up and reiterated with great confidence in theological circles...." [2] What caused Linnaeus to originate the idea that all species were created in the beginning? Why did Linnaeus and his followers in Church and University regard it as necessary to establish the doctrine that the "origin of all species" was at the very start of bio-history? The answer is, in three words, the Fossil Record.

The Fossil Record The discovery of the Fossil Record began many centuries ago with the discovery of shells, teeth, bones and other remains buried in the ground. Some of these corresponded to parts of known, living organisms, but others were not at all familiar. "UBOs" we might call them--unidentified buried objects. Leonardo da Vinci, the great fifteenth century artist and scientist, was the first to suggest the correct answer to the question "What are these UBOs?" They are, Leonardo said, the remains of animals that existed once, long ago. What happened to these animals? They vanished. They became extinct. The more eighteenth century Western man dug into the Fossil Record, the more unlikely it seemed that the theologians were correct in their insistence that

28

The Ark
Earth and its life forms were created only a few thousand years ago. The ancien regime required a reconciler of the Biblical record and the Fossil Record. Cuvier--reconciler of Fossil Record with Biblical record The Great Reconciler was French naturalist Baron Georges Cuvier (17691832), who is remembered as one of the most eminent French scientists of the early nineteenth century. He is credited with the discovery of the Fossil Record, and with founding the science of paleontology. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Cuvier was celebrated far and wide for his brilliant reconstructions of prehistoric beast skeletons. Cuvier, by the way, was also the chief Catastrophist of his time. Following Linnaeus, Cuvier asserted that there are no new species. All species, he insisted, were created "In the Beginning." How far back was the creation of life on Earth? Baron Cuvier provided the answer that was, for quite a time, the official scientific answer ... about six thousand years. Ironically (and tragically), Cuvier came to destroy that which he devoted his life to, that which he loved most--Creationism. But this is a story for the next chapter....

Uniformitarianism
The establishment of the Linnaeus premise as the basis of Creationism was unfortunate. The premise was not scientifically valid. It was based on doctrine, not on facts. Inadequate though it was, it became the "acid test" of the validit y of the entire Biblical paradigm. Once the premise was refuted, the Bible began to lose its authority as the great Truth of life and to become, more and more, "just myth." The refutation of the Linnaeus premise began in 1875, in which year the English geologist James Hutton advanced a theory that interpreted the formation of fossil-bearing rock strata as the result of ordinary processes of erosion, sedimentation, disruption and uplift, etc.,--processes occurring over long periods of time. In other words, Hutton maintained that the many-paged and very thick Fossil Record was a work authored not by periodic "act of God" catastrophes, but by uniform natural processes. Hutton's theory is called "uniformitarianism." Hutton's hypothesis was sensible, scientific, but it lacked the merit of doctrinal correctness. Indeed, it was dangerous in its implications: If the layers upon layers of fossil-bearing rock are the result of normal natural processes, and are not the remains of

29

The Ark
catastrophies, then life forms have been on Earth for periods of time far, far longer than the Bible suggests. Could the Bible be wrong? Unthinkable! Hutton's uniformitarianism was ignored by contemporaries. However, it was taken up and developed by the English geologist Charles Lyell. In 1832, nearly fifty years after its first presentation, uniformitarianism was again presented, as the bedrock theory of Lyell's Principles of Geology . The timing couldn't have been better. In 1832, Baron Cuvier (the only possible threat to the uniformitarianism of Lyell) passed away. Uniformitarianism replaces Catastrophism as orthodoxy in geology Within a very short time, uniformitarianism became the new orthodox geology, replacing Catastrophist geology, which was little more than a bunch of doctrines. Once Lyell established that the geological record was produced over a very, very long period of time, and not just few thousand years, then it became possible to conceive of the biological record as a product of small natural changes over vast tracts of time. In many ways, Charles Lyell set the stage for Charles Darwin. Are current life forms merely the surviving actors in a theatre that has been smashed time and again by an angry God? Or are they the muchimproved and ever-evolving descendants of crude, primitive life forms? Lyell introduced to Charles Darwin not only uniformitarianism, but also to "Lamarckism,"--the very first modern evolutionary theory. This theory is a main subject of our next chapter.

In Short ...
In the nineteenth century, the Biblical paradigm of existence, which had reigned supreme in Western civilization for over fifteen hundred years, lost its preeminence. It was replaced, gradually at first and then very rapidly, by a new "scientific" paradigm, a paradigm in which life is understood as evolving rather than devolving. What made the emergence of a new vision of the history of life on Earth inevitable was a discovery so important that many scientists still capitalize it .... the Fossil Record. In response to discovery after discovery of obviously very ancient fossil remains, remains which suggested that the Earth and its life forms are much older than the Bible suggests, the defenders of the old paradigm generated an orthodoxy meant to reconcile the Biblical and Fossil Records. This reconciliation was called Catastrophism. The tenets of this orthodoxy were: (1) All species were created by God in the beginning; and (2) the Earth is periodically destroyed by catastrophies commanded by God. The Fossil Record is fundamentally (pun intended) a record of catastrophic occurrences.

30

The Ark
The chief Catastrophist was the eminent Baron Georges Cuvier. The year 1832 is a pivotal year, as it marks the death of Baron Cuvier, the mainstay of Catastrophic geology, and the emergence of uniformitarian geology. Uniformitarianism, which maintains that the geological and fossil records can be explained in terms of normal (rather than catastrophic) processes, was invented by James Hutton circa 1785 and manufactured (so to speak) in the 1830s by Charles Lyell. Lyell's uniformitarian geology provided a solid stage for a uniformitarian biology and evolutionary science. A biology and theory of evolution that filled the bill was put forth in 1859 ... Darwinism.
References: [1] Darwin and the Modern World View (New York: Mentor Books, 1963), 17. [2] Darwin's Century--Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961) 23.

31

The Ark

Chapter 2 Lamarckism
"After a long succession of generations, the individuals, originally belonging to one species, become at length transformed into a new species distinct from the first." --Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the attention of the world was on the dazzling work of Georges Cuvier, discoverer of the Fossil Record, founder of the science of paleontology, and pure genius at the reconstruction of the skeletal structures of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures. Until his death in 1832, Cuvier regarded the the Fossil Record--the key to a truly scientific understanding of the history of organic life--as his exclusive domain. Politically, Cuvier was a defender of the ancien regime, the Old World Order of Church, Bible and King. It was thus inevitable that Cuvier interpret the Fossil Record as supporting the Biblical account of life on Earth. Judeo-Christianity basis of Old World Order It was the Biblical paradigm--Judeo-Christian Monotheism--that was the foundation of the Old World Order. There is but one God, according to the paradigm, and this God is the source of all power. Power flows from God the Sovereign to His earthly representatives, the Church and the State. Personal salvation lies in conforming to the Will of God, which is expressed in the Holy Bible. Official keeper and interpreter of the sacred Word is the Church. The official secular representative of God is the monarch, also called "Sovereign." As above, so below. One God above, one King below. This orthodox reading of the Bible gave us monarchy, not democracy. Cuvier jealously guarded his interpretation of the Fossil Record and his position as "the authority" on the Record. He was ready to pounce on any who might interpret the Record in other terms, in terms that would cast doubt on the reliability of the Bible story. Cuvier met his nemesis in the person of an older colleague--Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck (1744-1829). Challenge to Old World Order In 1809, Lamarck established the science of evolution with publication of Philosophie Zoologique. "After long succession of generations," Lamarck 32

The Ark
writes, "the individuals, originally belonging to one species, become at length transformed into a new species distinct from the first." [1] This is the premise that underlies all modern evolutionary theories.

Transformism
Lamarck called his theory Transformism. The main propositions in the theory, writes L.J. Jordanova, are that "organic forms develop[ed] gradually from each other and were not created at once in their present form" and that "the laws governing living things have produced increasingly complex forms over immense periods of time." [2] These propositions flew in the face of Catastrophism. A key underlying premise of Transformism--a premise that inflamed Cuvier against Lamarck-- is that God has conferred upon Nature the Creator power. In the Discourse de l'an XI, writes Barthelemy-Madaule, Lamarck "appeals first to the first author and his infinite power; the prodigies of nature, which 'the sublime Author must have willed that she possess'; and finally the necessity of including in his 'biology' this 'natural power' that represents the Supreme Being...." [3] Lamarck's heresy For Cuvier, the idea that God confers His power upon Nature was rank heresy. In the orthodox perspective of the Baron, God confers His power upon the monarch and the Church. Those are His chosen representatives--not Nature. The point is far from "academic." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there arose a number of challenges to the prevailing belief that the Holy Bible is the best available expression of the Word and Will of God. One of the most insidious, from the point of view of the ancien regime, was "Deism." Deism maintained that there is indeed a Providence, but the best expression of His Word is not the Bible. Best expression is His own creation, i.e. Nature. The laws of Nature reveal the laws of God. Lamarckism supports revolutionary Deism Behind both the American and French revolutions was Deism. Power originates with the Sublime Author, and from the pen of the Author the power flows into His creation, the Book of Nature. And from Nature the power flows into the hearts and hands of those closest to Nature--common people. In a stroke, Deism removed both royalty and Church from the power flow. Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Paine ... all were Deists. In France, the most famous Deist was Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Without the influence of Rousseau, Napoleon said, the French Revolution never would have occurred. Without Rousseau, Transformism never would have happened. Rousseau was an important mentor of the young Lamarck. It was Rousseau who

33

The Ark
first suggested to Lamarck that the future belongs to those who can read the divine Book of Nature. Transformism was a "declaration of independence" of sorts, independence not from the "sublime Author," but from narrow definitions of God and His Word that supported the ancien regime --the rule of Monarch, Church and Nobility. In Lamarckian thought, the book written by the "sublime Author" is not the Bible, but Nature. The power of God is conferred not upon some select class or group of people, but upon Nature generally. It goes without saying, Baron Cuvier and other defenders of the ancien regime could be counted on to oppose the "heresies of republicanism" (as expressed in the American and French revolutionary movements) and any theory of a scientific nature that might support republicanism. Lamarck's Transformism was supportive of the main idea underlying republicanism--the idea the true bible is the Book of Nature. Those closest to Nature are closest to God--the commo n people. Elites are obsolete. Transformism had the potential of becoming the scientific basis for worldwide revolution against monarchism. Transformism, from the point of view of Cuvier, was highly dangerous.... Lamarck views organism and environment as interactive In 1815, six years after publication of the original theory, Lamarck offered a revised version of Transformism in the first volume of Naturelle des Animaux Histoire Vertebres. Four "laws" are offered, the first two of which are of immediate interest to us. The first law maintains that as animals progress up the evolutionary scale, they express more complexity of form and greater size. (Within any group of animals, the ancestral type is always the smallest.) The second law, the "essence of real Lamarckism" according to Cannon, holds that new biological structures (and species) emerge in response to environmental demands. Biological evolution is, in other words, a result of interactivity between organism and environment. In contemporary terminology, the moment-to-moment result of this interactivity is a state of equilibrium called "homeostasis." Lamarck anticipated Lovelock (Gaia hypothesis) In our own time, observations regarding the interactivity of organisms and environment gave rise to the "Gaia hypothesis" of the British scientist James Lovelock: "Journeys into space did more than present the Earth in a new perspective. They also sent back information about its atmosphere and its surface which provided a new insight into the interactions between the living and the inorganic parts of the planet. From this has arisen the hypothesis, the model,

34

The Ark
in which the Earth's living matter, air, oceans, and land surfaces form a complex system which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place to live." [4] The Transformism of Lamarck, we might note along the way, anticipates the holism of James Lovelock and other New Biologists. Interactivity understood today as function of cellular IMP network Today, we understand much about the mechanisms of interactivity. In the case of the single cell, for instance, information from the environment is processed by a network of protein complexes in the cellular membrane. These complexes are called integral membrane proteins, "IMPs" for short. Lamarck was compelled to work toward an understanding of organismenvironment interactivity without the assistance of the technology we now have. All that he knew with certainty was, as the environment changes, organisms must accommodate the changes--or die. The requirement for accommodation, he said, is experienced by organisms as "need." Lamarck used the French word "besoin" to refer to such a need. So ... in response to changes in the environment, animals experience a besoin (need) to change. This "need" is the activator of the organismic adjustments which constitute the evolutionary process. With the 1815 additions, Transformism was complete: Species come from other species, and the mechanism of transformation (evolution) is biological restructuring in response to environmental changes. Biological adjustment and restructuring processes are (to use contemporary phrasing) triggered by environmental signals. What is it that gives some organisms greater adaptability than others? Greater ability to read the environment correctly (i.e., greater awareness) and to respond appropriately. [5] Lamarckism superior to Darwinism Lamarck, the founder of evolutionary science, was the most important scientist of the early nineteenth century. According to many, including cell biologist and evolutionist Dr. Bruce H. Lipton, Lamarck's theory of evolution offers a basis for evolutionary studies that is superior to classical Darwinism. Curiously, the name "Lamarck" is practically unknown to the general public these days, and in the orthodox life science circles, the name is synonymous with heresy. How did it happen that a great scientist and his theory were practically destroyed?

35

The Ark The Attack on Lamarck


In his crusade against heretical tendencies in modern science, Baron Cuvier made it his special mission to attack and destroy Lamarck. That the name Lamarck is unfamiliar to most people today reflects the fact that Baron Cuvier was very successful in destroying Lamarck's reputation. Lamarck died in 1829, and not long after, Cuvier, the bastion of political correctness, wrote a "eulogy" that made a mockery of Lamarck and Transformism. At the time, Cuvier held high office in the French Academy--the equivalent of England's Royal Society. In this position, Cuvier became a kind of "reputation maker or breaker" by virtue of his frequent work as the eulogist of departed Academy members. Generally, Cuvier was fair and kindly in his eulogies, but in the writing of Lamarck's eulogy, he wrote with a poisoned pen. Cuvier's poisonous misrepresentation of Lamarckism Indeed, Cuvier's eulogy for Lamarck was so derogatory, the Academy refused to publish it. On November 26, 1832, the eulogy on Lamarck was presented to the Academy by one M. le Baron Silvestre. The most damaging remarks had to do with the term "besoin," which Cuvier intentionally misrepresented as meaning "wish." Animals evolve, according to Cuvier's version of Transformism, because they wish to evolve. "The seed of ridicule having been sown," writes Cannon, "Cuvier continues by giving examples of what he pretends are Lamarck's views. Aquatic birds, he said, acquired their webbed feet by dint of wishing to swim: from continually wishing to fly, the bird developed its wings and feathers: from continually going to the water's edge but wishing to avoid wetting the body, the long-legged bird appeared...." [6] Cuvier's poisoned eulogy destroyed Lamarck's reputability as scientist. So ridiculed was "Lamarckism," the great Philosophie Zoologique did not appear in an English edition until 1914. From the time of the eulogy to the present day, "Lamarckism" became in orthodox scientific circles a term of censure--a prime example of the "anthropomorphic heresy." The attack on Lamarckism goes on today ... Recently, Darwinist Richard Dawkins had this to say about Lamarckism: "Lamarckian types of theory are traditionally rejected-- and rightly so--because no good evidence for them has ever been found (not for want of energetic trying, in some cases by zealots prepared to fake evidence)." And here is Dawkins' definition of Lamarckism: "All evolutionary advancement follows this pattern.... The animal strives for something it needs." [7] More than a hundred and sixty

36

The Ark
years have passed since the death of Lamarck, and important members of the scientific establishment are still repeating the distortions of Cuvier. The greatest victim of Cuvier's attack on Lamarck was not Lamarck, but Homo sapiens. Lamarck had offered humankind a gift of immeasurable worth-a genuinely scientific theory of evolution. Had this theory not been repudiated, our life sciences (and our species) would be far more advanced than they are today.

Anthropomorphism
One of the more unfortunate results of the Cuvier attack on Lamarck was the establishment of anthropomorphism as a principal heresy in science. The concept of anthropomorphism--which refers to the projection of human characteristics upon animals or deities--goes back to the ancient Greeks. As a term of censure, it was used frequently against Christianity in the medieval period by Jewish and Islamic theologians. Where the Jewish are concerned, Mosaic law forbids visual representation of the Deity, and this prohibition was likely the original basis of the idea that anthropomorphism is "heretical." Anthropomorphism a science crime ... In the nineteenth century, this "heresy" was adopted by science, under the name "anthropomorphic fallacy," as a criticism of religious thought generally and as a criticism of "subjective" scientific thought. Cuvier's attack on Lamarck, for his supposed anthropomorphic crimes (attributing to animals the ability to wish and then calling this ability the key to evolution), established anthropomorphism as one of the most grievous errors in science. Soon after the eulogy, the concept of anthropomorphism-as-grievous error was elaborated by the German materialist Ludwig Feurerbach and others. The demonstration by New Physics that the observer is inseparable from that which he or she observes rendered the "anthropomorphic fallacy" obsolete. The anthropomorphic fallacy is itself fallacious. Nevertheless, even today, many scientists, speak of "committing anthropomorphism" as if it was a deadly sin.

Darwinism as a form of Fortuitism


In simplest terms, the debate between Creationism and Darwinism is a debate between those who think that life is the product of intelligent design and those who believe there is no intelligent design behind the creation. In the twentieth century, the debate was won by the fortuitists, those who maintain that life unfolds fortuitously, by chance. Darwinism, our current orthodox biology and evolutionary theory, is a form of fortuitism.

37

The Ark
Why did Creationism crumble? Why did Creationism crumble so quickly in the last century? After all, the Biblical paradigm had reigned supreme for fifteen hundred years. Just about everyone believed that the creation was the result of intelligent design, and the Designer was God. One answer to this question has to do with power politics and imperial design, subjects we'll be focusing on in the following chapters. Another answer, one more relevant to our current context is this: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was a serious split among the Creationists. Cuvier and the Catastrophists maintained that the design function was God's alone, that organisms cannot be invested with the divine creative power. This group set itself up for a fall, as the validity of this view depended upon the weak and finally untenable proposition that there are no new species. This group, the old orthodoxy, had one chance to establish Creationism upon a secure, scientific basis, and that chance was ... Lamarckism. Because of its assumption that the Creator power is innate in the creation, Lamarckism could accommodate the discovery that there are indeed "new species." Cuvier's attack on Lamarckism destroyed the best opportunity that Creationism had for entering the modern era as valid science. If there is no great Designer in the heavens, and if organisms do not have design capability, why then ... we are fortuitous folk living in a fortuitous universe. Cuvier opens the door for fortuitism ... Enter fortuitism. In 1859, Charles Darwin published his famous On the Origin of Species By Means Of Natural Selection. For materialist scientists of the time (those who maintained that the universe is not the product of intelligent design), the theory was a dream come true, as it postulated a mechanism of evolution that was non-intelligent and wholly external to organisms--Natural Selection. It was not "wishful thinking" that was the means of evolution, but natural mechanical selective processes. From this theory came the current orthodoxy's definition of the Creator as, in the phrasing of Richard Dawkins, a "blind watchmaker."

38

The Ark
References:
[1] Ernst Mayr, Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) 226. [2] Lamarck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 56. [3] Madeleine Barthelemy-Madaule, Lamarck the Mythical Precursor--A Study of the Relations Between Science and Ideology, trans. M.H. Shank (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982) 56. [4] J.E. Lovelock, Gaia--A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 [1979]) x. [5] Barthelemy-Madaule, 100-01. [6] H. Graham Cannon, Lamarck and Modern Genetics (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1975) 10-11. [7] The Blind Watchmaker--Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1986), 287.

39

The Ark

Chapter 3 Classical Darwinism


"On the basis of data drawn from comparative anatomy, embryology, and the experience of breeders, classical Darwinism asserted that the progression from the early species to the later ones ... was a process of actual physical descent governed by natural selection through such agencies as the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, sexual selection, and adaptation, all of which worked in small cumulative steps through vast periods of relatively undisturbed time...." --Norman Macbeth

In 1973, a retired lawyer by the name of Norman Macbeth published an book titled Darwin Retried--An Appeal to Reason. The thesis of the book is that classical Darwinism has been abandoned by the professionals. Classical Darwinism is, in Macbeth's words, "no longer considered valid by qualified biologists." [1] At the same time, Macbeth observes with some amazement, no one has notified the public of the demise of Darwinism. "Why hasn't anyone bothered to tell the public?" Macbeth asks. There are a number of answers to this question. Firstly, the term "Darwinism" is for orthodox biologists a valuable label. It had served them well in their long battle against Creationism. It had become synonymous with "evolution." Why drop a good thing simply because it is no longer considered to have scientific merit ? Secondly, in 1947, classical Darwinism was replaced very quietly by a new orthodoxy, which uses the very same name. It is termed "neo-Darwinism." (I capitalize the neo- in this book because Neo-Darwinism is in fact very different from classical Darwinism.) For these and other reasons, the orthodoxy in biology continued to regard classical Darwinism as the living truth long after it was pronounced dead. Indeed, in 1976, just a few years after the publication of the Macbeth book, Harvard Darwinist Ernst Mayr declared that at long last, after a century and a quarter, Darwinism had fully established itself as the supreme Authority on the subject of the "moving force" behind evolution. "Among specialists," Mayr writes, "almost complete agreement has been reached in recent decades. Whether they are botanists or geologists, paleontologists or geneticists, all.... interpret the results of the evolutionary process in the same manner and find the same causal connections." [2] What

40

The Ark
does this consensus-of-scientists regard as the ordering principle in evolution? Natural Selection. Natural Selection is the principal doctrine in classical Darwinism. "Hey!" I can almost hear you say, "what's going on here? Biologists are saying Darwinism is dead, and other biologists are saying it's alive and well. What's the truth?" The Truth is a complicated, fascinating story, one that requires considerable backgrounding. Let's start our background work with a sketch of Darwin himself, and then shift to consideration of the main lines of the theory he developed--classical Darwinism.

Darwin
Charles Darwin was born in 1809, the year in which Lamarck published his Philosophie Zoologique. At age fifteen, Darwin was sent off the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. Finding the lectures intolerably boring, he transferred after two years to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he began the study of theology and (on the side) zoology. He distinguished himself early as an avid member of a club devoted to the study of beetles. Darwin's interest in the very new sciences of zoology and geology drew the attention of Professor John Stevens Henslow. In 1831, Henslow recommended young Charles to Captain FitzRoy of the H.M.S. Beagle, a ten-gun sloop-brig which was at the time being prepared for a five-year surveying voyage. FitzRoy was looking for a young naturalist to accompany him on the voyage. To Darwin, Henslow wrote, "I have stated [to FitzRoy] that I consider you to be the [most] qualified person I know of to undertake such a situation. I state this not in the supposition of your being a finished naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing and noting anything worthy to be noted in Natural History.... Captain FitzRoy wants a man (I understand) more as a companion than a mere collector, and would not take anyone, however good a naturalist, who was not recommended to him likewise as a gentleman.... Don't [have] any doubts or fears about your disqualifications, for I assure you I think you are the very man they are in search of." [3] FitzRoy signed Darwin on to prove truth of Genesis! Captain FitzRoy was an evangelical Christian, and one of his fond hopes was that the naturalist he chose to go with him would have a capability of finding in nature proof of the Genesis story. Professor Henslow was a fervent Catastrophist, and thus his recommendation carried great weight with FitzRoy. In 1831, when the Beagle set off on its famous five-year voyage, no could have guessed that the very conventional Charles Darwin would one become a major paradigm shifter--Scientism's equivalent of Jesus Christ. only indicators that Darwin was perhaps heading beyond the pale were one day The two

41

The Ark
subversive books he took with him. One was John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. First published in 1667, Paradise Lost presents a Puritan version of the Genesis account of man's origins. According to Catholic canon, we children of the outcasts of Eden have only one hope, and that is gaining the intercession of the Church. John Milton advanced the idea that through the example of Christ [rather than through Church doctrine], humans have the opportunity of evolving spiritually. The other book was Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, volume one. This work led Darwin to convert from Catastrophism to uniformitarianism. 1832: Darwin received exposition of Lamarckism On October 26, 1832, Darwin received the second volume two of Lyell's Principles of Geology, which contains an exposition of Lamarckism. Lyell's geology was revolutionary, but his biology was not. He concludes by rejecting Transformism, even though it is aligned with his uniformitarianism. Darwin returned from his long voyage to find that his collections and his observations had made him a scientific celebrity. He plunged back into work, cataloguing and distributing the specimens he had sent home during the voyage. He supervised the publication of the Beagle's scientific report, and he wrote and published his own report, Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle. This work became a popular classic of travel. 1839: Darwin lionized in London In 1839, Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, and the wealthy young couple set up their home on Gower Street, London. Darwin was lionized by the scientific elite of London, and in short order he gained the undying friendship and support of individuals who later proved invaluable in the establishment of Darwinism as the orthodox biology and evolutionary theory--Lyell of course, the botanist J.D. Hooker, and T.H. Huxley. 1842: Darwin retreats to Sevenoaks Less than a year after his marriage, Darwin was incapacitated by ill health. In 1842, he moved to Down House near Sevenoaks, and here he resigned himself to secluded invalidism, working for just a few hours each day and then suffering an ordeal of nausea, weakness, headache and palpitations. In 1842, Darwin sketched out a theory in a 35-page outline, and two years later, he expanded this into a 230-page treatise. He wrote instructions that the treatise was to be published in the event of his unexpected death. By as early as 1837, Darwin committed himself to the Lamarckian position that species derive from predecessor species. At the outset of his theorybuilding, writes Jonathan Miller, "he modeled this process [of speciation] along lines similar to his predecessor, Lamarck. In other words, he visualized

42

The Ark
biological change as something directly shaped by the environment, with plants and animals progressively fitting themselves to the changes in the physical world...." [4] During the late thirties and forties, there was nothing original in Darwin's model of evolution and no satisfactory explanation of the mechanism of speciation. 1858: Darwin received "missing link" to completion of his theory Why was it that the Origin doesn't appear until the end of the fifties? Darwin never found a really satisfactory explanation of the mechanism of speciation, of evolution. It was the realization that another naturalist was beating him to the punch that caused Darwin to rapidly finish and publish his book. On June 18, 1858, Darwin received a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) which outlined a theory of evolution in which natural selection is described as the main mechanism of evolution. Darwin's panic and the Lyell conspiracy Immediately, Darwin wrote to Lyell, seeking advice. "If Wallace had my ms. [manuscript] in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads in my chapters...." [5] Lyell and others arranged for a presentation of Darwin and Wallace papers at a meeting of the Linnean Society. Neither Wallace nor Darwin was present. (Most accounts suggest both were present.) The manuscript that Wallace had sent Darwin was read, and then a few notes by Darwin. Darwin was headlined in the event, and so priority for the theory of speciation by means of natural selection was accorded to him. For a time, the theory was known as the Darwin-Wallace theory. Wallace was a goodnatured and deferential man who never begrudged Darwin his notoriety as father of evolution. Indeed, the two became friends and correspondents on many subjects. 1859 and after: The Darwin revolution In 1859, Darwin published his long-awaited opus, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. This book is the foundational text of "classical Darwinism." Despite the fact the principle of Natural Selection was celebrated widely as the last word of Science, Darwin himself was not convinced that Natural Selection was a sufficient explanation of evolution. In 1868, he published The Theory of Pangenesis, which purports to explain the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Thus he found himself right back in Lamarckism. Lamarck had maintained that acquired characteristics are heritable (i.e., they can be passed along to the new generation), and this claim was about as welcome to the new Darwinistic Order as Gnosticism to the early Catholic Church. In 1871, Darwin won his way back into good standing in the Order by publishing the Descent of Man, which argues that man and monkey have common ancestors.

43

The Ark
Darwin died in 1882. His remains are buried three feet from those of Sir Isaac Newton.

Classical Darwinism
Again, the full title of Darwin's opus is On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As this title suggests, the book expounds upon three major themes: (1) Speciation (the "origin of species"); (2) Natural Selection, which is viewed by Darwinists even in our own day as the only ordering principle in nature; and (3) "Struggle for Existence." Let us briefly consider these.... Speciation Speciation is defined by Ernst Mayr as "the multiplication of species, that is, the division of one parent species into several daughter species. It is this process that is responsible for the extraordinary diversity of the organic world...." [6] For many years, Mayr continues, the question of speciation was the dominant subject in Darwin's notebooks. Darwin given Lamarck's laurels "For Darwin," Professor Mayr writes, "the origin of new species was the key problem of evolution. Pre-Darwinian authors [which includes Lamarck]... considered the origin of new species inconceivable, and thus speciation became the real touchstone of evolutionary thought." [7] This is not correct, but it is interesting--as it exemplifies the rather astonishing ability of many Darwinists to not know what they know. In his Evolution and the Diversity of Life, Myer himself quotes the Lamarck lines which head chapter two: "After long succession of generations, these individuals, originally belonging to one species, become at length transformed into a new species distinct from the first." Mayr gives to Darwin credit for a concept that originated with Lamarck. In reading modern Darwinists on the origins of evolutionary science, one wonders why is it Lamarck is remembered only for his "inheritance of acquired characteristics" hypothesis, and not at all credited for the invention of the concept underlying all modern evolutionary theory--that species come from other species. In the last century, at least a few Darwinists gave credit where credit was due The German biologist Ernst Haeckel, for instance, writes in his History of Creation (1873): "To him [Lamarck] will always belong the immortal glory of having for the first time worked out the Theory of Descent [via speciation], as an

44

The Ark
independent scientific theory of the first order, and as the philosophical foundation for the whole science of Biology." [8] One reason Lamarck is always marginalized by the Darwinists is that to validate him as inventor of the species from species concept would perhaps precipitate a reappraisal of his entire theory. Such a reappraisal would be bound to raise many very unsettling questions and might even point toward the conclusion that classical Darwinism is not so much an original theory as a reactionary usurpation. Darwinism: Built on suppression of Lamarckism As indicated in chapter two, Lamarckism might have given Creationism a second wind, had it not been depreciated, first by the Creationists (for attributing to nature that which belongs to God), and then by the Darwinists (for attributing to nature that which belongs to man). Darwinism is built upon the defeat of Lamarckism, and the Darwinists of our time are careful to make sure that the stricken theory does not have an opportunity to rise again. Another reason may be a simple copy-cat tendency. As Loren Eiseley points out, Darwin was in the habit of denying that Lamarck had had any influence on him and his theory. It is a common characteristic of disciples to re-assert blindly the assertions of the master. "Although Darwin was in the habit of repudiating any intimation that he had profited from Lamarck," Eiseley writes, "he was acquainted at any early age with English versions of the latter's work and in 1845 there is a reference in an unpublished letter to [Charles] Lyell regarding 'my volumes of Lamarck.'" Eiseley continues: "His rather cavalier rejection of his distinguished forerunner is tinged with an acerbity whose cause at this late date is difficult to discover...." [9]

The Wallace Factor The dead Lamarck was almost as troubling to Darwin as the living Alfred Russel Wallace, who was the official "co-discoverer" of the principle of speciation by natural selection. (Incidentally, the Darwin-Wallace story was brilliantly re-created by Arnold Brackman in a recent book titled A Delicate Arrangement.) Darwin first became aware of Lamarck's Transformism while a medical student in Edinburgh. Circa 1826, Darwin attended a lecture by a Dr. R.E. Grant, who ."clearly adopted the view that species are descended from other species" and who "burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution." [10]

45

The Ark
In 1831, Darwin set sail on the Beagle, with Lyell's Principles of Geology his principal literary companion. In 1832, he received a very important book--the second volume of Principles of Geology. Darwin had practically devoured the first volume. Indeed, as previously indicated, volume one caused him to take the radical step of discarding Catastrophism and embracing uniformitarianism. The second volume contains an exposition of Lamarckism. What strength Darwinism has is in the first premise, the Lamarckian premise of the evolutionary transformation of species into other species. Wallace, it should be noted, made a very significant contribution to the premise. Lacking sufficient taxonomical data, Lamarck had viewed the evolutionary line as strictly linear. Species A produces B, B produces C, C produces D, etc. In 1855, Wallace re-formulated the premise, arguing that the evolutionary line may be branched, i.e., Species A may produce C as well as B, B may produce D, E and F, etc. Further, Wallace argued, evolutionary steps are not necessarily "progressive" (more and more perfect), as Lamarck had maintained. The Wallace position came to be known as "the Sarawak Law."

Natural Selection
The second premise of classical Darwinism is: "Natural Selection" is the cause of divergence in species, i.e., the origin of species. (The capitalized Natural Selection in this book refers specifically to the Darwinian doctrine.) The first published mention of the concept of Nature-as-selector is in Rousseau's "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men" (1755). In a discussion of the conditions of life in ancient Sparta, Rousseau writes, "Nature used them precisely as did the law of Sparta the children of her citizens. She rendered strong and robust those with a good constitution and destroyed all the others." [11] Wallace and the "Natural Selection" hypothesis A more immediate source was the evolutionary theory of Alfred Wallace. In June of 1858, Wallace submitted to Darwin an unpublished work titled On the Tendency of Varieties To Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type. Shortly thereafter, as previously indicated, Darwin wrote to Lyell, "Your words have come true with a vengeance--that I should be [could be] forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views on Natural Selection depending on the struggle for existence. I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my M.S. [manuscript] written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters...." [12]

46

The Ark
Natural Selection as understood by Darwin Darwin's understanding of Natural Selection derived from his work with breeding. The breeding of plants and animals Darwin called "artificial selection"; the breeding that occurs in the wild he called "Natural Selection." In the Origin, Darwin defines Natural Selection in these (anthropomorphic) terms: "Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing.... every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working.... at the improvement of each organic being...." [13] In effect, Darwin replaces the traditional belief that order in nature is the result of a divine influence (God) with the idea it is the result of a natural influence (Natural Selection). For the anti-Creationists of Darwin's century and our own, the great value of the Natural Selection hypothesis lay in the fact that it sent a liberating message to humankind.... there is a "natural explanation" for all the wonders of nature. No God-hypothesis necessary. The idea of Natural Selection as cause of divergence (origin of species by means of Natural Selection) is an "empty generalization." It is not incorrect; it is simply too general to be of value. If I were to tell you that the cause of divergence in species is the "environment," would you find that explanation adequate? No, of course not. We need to know what it is, specifically, in the environment that causes divergence. "Natural Selection" is really no more specific than "environment." Darwin decides at last ... "survival of fittest" is fitter Darwin himself was uneasy with the term. In the sixth and last edition of the Origin, Darwin says that "survival of the fittest" is a "more accurate" expressio n of what he had previously called natural selection. [14] "Survival of the fittest" has more specificity. It at least refers to a criterion of selection, i.e. degree of organismal adaptation to the environment. Interestingly, the phrase "survival of the fittest" was coined not by Darwin, but by philosopher-evolutionist Herbert Spencer some seven or eight years before the publication of the Origin. By 1872, the phrase had become the common catchword (slogan) for Darwinism. Naturally, Darwin laid claim to it-"selected" it-- preferring it over the meaningless "Natural Selection." Also, Darwin may have felt that the phrase Natural Selection was tied too closely to Alfred Wallace, the talented young evolutionist whom he had totally eclipsed. "Survival of the fittest" was the product of one of Darwin's most ardent apostles. Mr. Spencer couldn't have been more pleased by the master's preference for "survival of the fittest."

47

The Ark

The Struggle for Survival Once Darwin committed himself to the idea that Natural Selection is the "means" of speciation (and by implication evolution), he required a proper setting for the operation of Natural Selection. The job of Natural Selection is to select. Options to select from are thus required ... variations. "Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe," Darwin writes , "than that the more complex organs and instincts should have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor...." [15] In addition to options, opportunities are required for Natural Selection to do it work of selecting for survival the "fittest" of the variations. Life, Darwin tells us, presents a continuing opportunity for selection, in that everything living is involved in a continuing "struggle for existence." Darwin's fatal fallacy ... Our difficulty in believing that complex organs and organisms are the result of the accumulation of slight variations vanishes, Darwin assures us, once we accept the following propositions: [1] "That gradations in the perfection of any organ or instinct, which we may consider, either do now exist or could have existed, each good of its kind,--[2] that all organs and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable,--[3] and lastly, that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct." [16] The first two propositions concern variations and are truisms. The third proposition is invalid. It represents a case of "begging the question," in this case stating as a truism that which is to be proven. Where is the proof that "struggle for existence" leads to the "preservation of each profitable deviation"? Darwin offers no proof. He apparently does not see the need for proof. Apparently, he does not see the difference between a truism and a theory. Darwin's blindness in this regard stems from his uncritical acceptance of the conventional wisdom of his time, that life is synonymous with struggle. "The life of man on Earth is warfare." in the words of late nineteenth century novelist Henry James. In part, this idea of life as incessant struggle was an inheritance from the Biblical paradigm. In part, it reflected the dark philosophy of the Rev. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), famous "pessimist" and a major influence on Darwin. Enter Malthus the Dismal ...

48

The Ark
In the view of Malthus, "all animated life [tends] to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it," and thus there can never be real progress for humankind. Give humans a little more bread than usual, and they'll breed more than usual, wiping out their little gains. Populations, Malthus asserts, increase by geometrical progression, while the means of subsistence increase by only mathematical progression. Humanity is thus doomed to procreate itself into destitution. Malthus, one of the primary reasons why the "dismal science" (economics) is so dismal, painted pictures of a future filled with starving and diseased multitudes. In "Malthusianism," Darwin found all that he had been seeking in the way of a fitting context for the work of Natural Selection. In his autobiography, Darwin writes that he had been reading Malthus "for amusement" one day when it struck him that the "struggle for existence" was not just a prevailing condition in life, it was the necessary condition of evolution. Nature, in Darwin's view, is not unlike a gladiatorial arena in which organisms of every kind fight for survival. Those with a bit of an advantage tend, naturally, to win ... and to gain the opportunity to breed the next generation. Darwinism becomes vehicle for Malthusianism Darwin adopted Malthusianism lock, stock and barrel: "A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase," Darwin writes. "Every being ... must suffer destruction ... otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced that can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied wit h manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom...." [17] The "Malthus doctrine" became the third premise of classical Darwinism. The doctrine of Malthus was "doctrine" by virtue of the fact that a great many powerful people considered it true. In fact, the doctrine does not have any scientific merit. It is based upon misunderstanding, misinterpretation of data, personal eccentricities and political animosities. The doctrine of Malthus is so important, so fateful for Western civilization, it is necessary to consider it at greater length, to give it a chapter unto itself.

References:
[1] Darwin Retried (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1973) 6. [2] Mayr 9. [3] Jonathan Miller, Darwin For Beginners (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) 62.

49

The Ark
[4] Miller 97. [5] Miller 123. [6] Mayr 117. [7] Ibid. [8] Cannon 6. [9] Eiseley 187. [10] Edward Bailey, Charles Lyell (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1963) 64. [11] Cannon 4. [12] Miller 123. [13] On the Origin of Species--A Facsimile of the First Edition, ed. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) 84. Cited in Macbeth, 46. [14] Macbeth 65. [15] Darwin 459. [16] Ibid. [17] Darwin 63.

50

The Ark

Chapter 4 With Manifold Force


"In an endeavor to raise the proportion of the quantity of provisions to the number of consumers in any country, our attention would naturally be first directed to the increasing of the absolute quantity of provisions; but finding that as fast as we did this, the number of consumers more than kept pace with it, and that with all our exertions we were still as far as ever behind, we should be convinced that our efforts directed only in this way would never succeed. It would appear to be setting the tortoise to catch the hare. Finding, therefore, that from the laws of nature, we could not proportion the food to the population, our next attempt should naturally be to proportion the population to the food. If we can persuade the hare to go to sleep, the tortoise may have some chance of overtaking her....

--the Rev. Thomas R. Malthus

According to those who knew him at Haileybury College, where he taught political economy, Thomas Malthus was an affable and witty man. One of his admirers recalls that Malthus always had a bit of a twinkle in his eye, except when engaged in literary combat with his detractors. This same admiring acquaintance expressed utter astonishment when none other than the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge attacked Malthus and Malthusianism in these words: "Malthusianism. Is it not lamentable ... that the monstrous practical sophism of Malthus should now have gotten complete possession of the leading men of the kingdom! Such an essential lie in morals ... I solemnly declare that I do not believe that all the heresies and sects, and factions, which the ignorance, and the weakness, and the wickedness of man have ever given birth to, were altogether so disgraceful to man as a Christian, a philosopher, a statesman, or citizen, as this abominable tenet." These were very strong words, especially coming fromthe man who had penned the following lines in his closing of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": "He prayeth best, who loveth best/ All things both great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us,/ He made and loveth all." What was it in the work of the affable Thomas Malthus that occasioned such a strong attack from Coleridge? What is the "abominable tenet"?

51

The Ark

The abominable tenet The abominable tenet to which Coleridge refers is remembered in the history of thought as the "Malthus doctrine." This doctrine maintains that human populations tend to grow at a geometrical rate, whereas the means of subsistence replenish themselves at only an arithmetical rate. "It may safely be pronounced," Malthus writes, "that population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geometrical ratio." [1] To give his hypothesis graphic dimension, Professor Malthus provides the following projection: "Taking the whole earth ... and supposing that the present population equal to a thousand millions, the human species would increase as the numbers, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256; and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. In two centuries the population would be to the means of subsistence as 256 to 9; in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable." [2] To give additional darkness to his projection, Malthus cites the opinion of a man whose name is familiar to us in the annals of British intelligence: "Sir William Petty," he writes, "supposes a doubling [of population] possible in so short a time as ten years." [3] Birth of the "population problem" The obvious and necessary implication of the Malthus doctrine is that unless checked, populations pose a serious threat to the viability of nations and perhaps the planet itself. "There is a constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it, " Malthus writes. "The increase of the human species can only be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity, acting as a check upon the greater power." [4] What is this "law of necessity"? The law of necessity refers generally to any severe condition that works to inhibit population growth--especially famine, disease and war. Before Malthus and his "Principle of Population," famine, disease and war were looked upon as evils. After Malthus, they are regarded as necessary evils, or not evils at all, but important regulators of population. In an address at the University of Aberdeen, circa 1934, a Malthusian rector spoke these edifying words: "War is the pruning hook of nature, and by it she keeps her human orchard healthy." At the time, this metaphor was a simple biological platitude--a truism. [5] Professor Malthus is the inventor of the modern "population problem" that we hear so much about. Prior to this invention, the rulers of Europe looked upon large populations as assets. After the "Principle of Population," they began to view large populations as liabilities. Behind their readiness to embrace the dark

52

The Ark
vision of Malthus was the terrible French Revolution, which had made it very clear that large masses of people can be lethal to ruling classes. In 1789, first year of the French Revolution, the European country with the largest population was .... France. Malthus on mobs Indeed, the theme of the "mob" underlies the entire Malthus treatise and frequently comes to the surface: "A mob, which is generally the growth of a redundant population goaded by resentment for real sufferings, but totally ignorant of the quarter from which they originate, is of all monsters the most fatal to freedom. It fosters a prevailing tyranny, and engenders one where it was not; and though in its dreadful fits of resentment it appears occasionally to devour its unsightly offspring, yet no sooner is the horrid deed committed than, however unwilling it may be to propagate such a breed, it immediately groans with a new birth." [6] The common people, when in dire circumstances, can turn into a horrid monster. What could be done, if anything, to protect the better classes from the threat of the mob? "If we can persuade the hare to go to sleep," Malthus writes, "the tortoise may have some chance of overtaking her." [7] Colleagues of Malthus no doubt smiled knowingly at the phrase "go to sleep." Haileybury College was an institution established for the education of officials and future officials of the East India Company, which was in the last century notorious in the opium trade. First chartered by Elizabeth I, and then re-chartered by James I, the company became an imperialistic arm of the Crown. It actually ruled India until 1857, when it proved unable to handle the Sepoy Rebellion. The Crown assumed the rule.

Malthus sees danger to Britain in lowly "potatoe" Malthus belonged to "The Company" of the last century. The East India company and British intelligence were very much interrelated. If he was alive and working today, Mr. Malthus would be considered by many an "intelligence analyst" with a specialization in population studies. Among his lesser known works is a treatise on the Irish population rate, which was at the time very high. Malthus identified the culprit behind the high rate as the lowly "potatoe." Further, he warned that if the rate was not adjusted downward, the Crown might find it very difficult to maintain its control of Ireland after the turn of the century. Some forty years after this analysis, Ireland was devastated by a potato famine. [8]

Revolution and Reaction


53

The Ark
In support of his doctrine, Malthus cites the case of eighteenth century North America: "The English North American colonies, now the powerful people o f the United States of America, far outstripped all the others in the progress of their population.... Throughout all the northern provinces the population was found to double in 25 years. The original number of persons which had settled in ... New England in 1643 was 21,200. In the year 1760 they were increased to half a million. They had therefore all along doubled their number in 25 years...." [9] Malthus fails to observe that much of the population increase was due to immigration. In 1643, the settlement of America by Europeans was just beginning. Sir Edmund & Sir Thomas fight the dragon "Democracy" In 1798, when the "Principle of Population" was first published, both America and France were symbols to the English of mob rule. "Democracy," rule by the common class, had emerged to challenge the old order, and the old order was not terribly willing to relinquish its power. Against the likes of the rabblerousers Rousseau and Paine, the English fielded a number of knights of the ancien regime, including Edmund Burke and Thomas Malthus. England's initial response to the revolution in France was one of mild enthusiasm. Troubles in the house of an old enemy make interesting news. However, when inflammatory pamphlets started circulating in England, the voices of reaction began to make themselves heard. The most articulate of those voices belonged to Edmund Burke. In his younger days, Burke had pleaded the cause of the American colonies before Parliament. In 1790, however, Burke was no longer sympathetic to firebrands. He was an old man with a large estate to support. Further, in 1790, insurrection of the masses was not something occurring far across the Atlantic; it was occurring across the Channel. On February 9, 1790, Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons and began his critique of the new "democracy": "Our present danger is ... from anarchy, a danger of being led, through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excess of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscatory, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy. On the side of religion, the danger is no longer from intolerance but from atheism--a foul, uncanny vice, a foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind--which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction, accredited, and almost avowed." [10] In November of the same year, Burke published his famous Reflections on the French Revolution, which represented the conservative position in most convincing terms. Indeed, Burke's Reflections provided the ideological basis for the forces of reaction in Europe. "The book," the Durants write, "became the bible of the courts and aristocracies." [11]

54

The Ark
The subsequent excesses of the French Revolution appeared to many to prove Burke's argument. When news that Louis XVI had been beheaded reached London, George III and most of his subjects were absolutely shocked. On January 24, 1793, the British government ordered the French minister to leave the kingdom. On February l, France declared war on both England and Holland. Burke rejoiced. [12] Terror in France, panic in England As the Revolution turned into the Terror, the upper classes in England became more and more distraught. In the words of Will and Ariel Durant, "panic struck the upper classes of Britain when they found themselves faced by another revolution so soon after the costly revolt of the American colonies. The thousand-year-old world of kings and aristocracies seemed to be collapsing, besieged by peasants burning feudal chateaux and title deeds, and by city mobs imprisoning the royal family and cutting off hundreds of noble heads....." [13] All this madness, many Britons felt, was the result of atheistic French philosophers (especially Rousseau) and their English counterparts, people like William Godwin (the "Foolish Philosopher") and Thomas Paine, the "Pen of the American Revolution." After the Treaty with Britain ending the Revolutionary War, Paine had made his home in England. "Where liberty is there is my home," Franklin once said. Paine replied, "Where liberty is not, there is my home." Paine did not stay in England very long, however. As his writings began to have more and more influence in England, officialdom took notice. "Philosophy is all right," said William Pitt, "but it should be taught to philosophical people. If this thing is kept up London will re-enact the scenes of Paris." [14] It was against this background that Malthus committed to paper his pessimistic appraisal of the condition of man, including critique of mobism. It all began as something of an academic exercise. Thomas' father Daniel was an admirer of Rousseau. Wouldn't be interesting to challenge Father with a view completely different from his own? Daniel was so impressed by the ingenuity of his son, he encouraged Thomas to publish the piece. The first edition of "Essay on the Principle of Population" was published in 1798--anonymously. Commoners blamed for insurrection The essay provided the upper classes of England--and of Europe--with a rationale for mass insurrection--mobism--that placed all the blame on the common class. Naturally, young Malthus found himself much in demand as an authority on the population problem. No longer would he require a little curacy somewhere. (After receiving his holy orders at Cambridge University when nineteen years of age, Malthus held a curacy at Albury, Surrey, for all of three months. That was the extent of the Reverend Malthus' career in religion.) The 55

The Ark
world of aristocrats was at his feet. Indeed, the Company was so anxious to hear more of Malthus' views, it created for him a special chair at Haileybury. British begin counter-offensive against "independent republicanism" An important mentor in Malthus' life at this time was Sir William Petty, whom he cites in the "Principle of Population" (see above). In a book titled Treason in America, Anton Chaitkin has this to say about Britain's reaction to republicanism and Petty's role therein: "Facing bankruptcy as the result of the losing, worldwide conflict with America, and threatened with a global emulation of the American republican experiment, the British Empire responded by organizing a campaign to subvert enemy governments. The U.S.A. must be reconquered, the oligarches vowed. France must be destroyed, and Spanish America must be captured before being lost to independent republicanism.... The campaign was directed by William Petty, Earl of Shelburne, whose new British Secret Intelligence Service represented an alliance of 'noble' families of Switzerland, Scotland and England. The eyes and ears of this apparatus were provided by the British East India Company. Shelburne ... used the Company to employ a legion of 'theorists,' including Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Malthus...." [15] At Haileybury, Professor Malthus established himself rapidly as expert on the subjects of populations and economics. In short order, his conjectures regarding "population pressure" and his conclusion that populations per se represent a serious danger entered into the mass consciousness as truisms. So influential were these untrue truisms, they are widely regarded even today as valid. The Simon critique An excellent critique and refutation of of the Malthus theory is to be found in The Ultimate Resource, by University of Illinois professor Julian L. Simon. The key tenets of modern orthodox population theory, which have "hardly changed since Malthus," are effectively contradicted by Simon on the basis of empirical evidence. Dr. Simon confesses that before his in-depth research, his opinions regarding the "population explosion" were aligned with those of the orthodoxy. After developing his unorthodox but scientifically valid position, he found himself in difficulty professionally: "I have been trying--mostly unsuccessfully--to get a hearing for [my view] since 1969, and though times have changed somewhat, the difficulties of espousing this unpopular point of view do get to me; until recently they were near the point of shutting me up and shutting me down." [16] Dr. Simon is a real scientist, and like many real scientists, he is disturbed and confounded by the lack of scientific professionalism that he finds in many colleagues in his field. Demographic science is as politicized as biology. Time and again, he finds himself confronting latter-day Malthusian pseudo-science. In

56

The Ark
one case, for instance, he begins by quoting a newspaper article titled "Population Control of Third World Planned, Sterilization Storm in U.S.": "In what must be this year's prize-winning entry for reckless candour in public places, a senior State Department official has said the U.S. is seeking to provide the means to sterilize a quarter of all Third World women, in part to protect the interests of American business overseas. The official is Dr. R.T. Ravenholt, Director of the U.S. Office of Population...." Simon responds: "I am mystified as to the true meaning of Ravenholt's remarks, or of similar views that I often hear in private conversation about population. But as an economist I am sure that this 'self-interest' motivation makes no economic sense in this case. Of course Ravenholt is a physician and not an economist--but he is also the fellow who controls those big bucks at AID [U.S. Agency for International Development]." [17] What Simon fails to understand is that Malthusianism exists today as an important component of the "world vision" of the Scientismic establishment. Scientist baffled by Scientism Time and again, Simon refers, with bafflement, to the polemics of Paul Ehrlich and other neo-Malthusians. He finds it difficult to understand why the population of Malthusian academics and opinion leaders appears to be so numerous. He writes: "In the words of environmentalist William Vogt, whose book Road to Survival sold millions of copies, population growth in Asia is due to 'untrammeled copulation' by Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus, and the rest of 'the backward billion.' Biologist Karl Sax asserted that 'nearly two-thirds of the world's people still reply upon positive checks [Malthusian term] to control excessive growth of populations.' Or as Robert C. Cook, the long-time [anti-] population activist and editor of Population Bulletin, put it more politely, 'Over a billion adults in less developed countries live outside the realm of decisionmaking in this matter' of family size. And in the words of a well-known physician in the official Journal of the American Medical Association, 'If we breed like rabbits, in the long run we have to live and die like rabbits.' This idea goes hand in hand with the view that population growth will increase geometrically until starvation or famines halt it." [18] The "long-run view of demographic history," Professor Simon indicates, "suggests that, contrary to Malthus, constant geometrical growth does not correctly characterize the human population." Rather, he continues, "a major improvement of economic and health conditions produces a sudden increase in population, which gradually moderates as the major productive advances and concomitant health improvements are assimilated. Then, after the initial surge, the rate of growth slows down until the next big surge...." [19] Malthus was political polemicist (attack dog)

57

The Ark
Malthus had no adequate demographic statistics with which to work, nor did he have a valid methodology. William Petty suggested that a doubling of a population could occur in ten years. Malthus opted for a less extreme time figure. Census statistics from North American suggested to him that over the course of a hundred years, a population doubling had occurred every twenty-five years. Without considering the role of immigration in the case of the American population increase record, Malthus presumed this increase typical of cases where populations have abundant resources and few checks. For Malthus' aristocratic readers, it was readily apparent that geometrical population growth spells insurrection. Thomas Malthus was not a scientist. He was a political polemicist. His assignment was to attack and neutralize the philosophers of republicanism. He did his job well. He did it so well, there are today numerous academics who credit him with having been a legitimate scientist and with having developed a tenable (if somewhat reductive) theory of populations. 1859: Malthusianism "born again" Had Malthusianism been the sole "scientific" basis of nineteenth century ruling class reaction against American- and French-style republicanism, it would not lasted much beyond the mid-century point. Whatever its literary merits, its high style and circumlocutionary brilliance, it has no scientific merit. It would have been exposed as a fraud. Fortunately for its adherents (and unfortunately for the rest of us), Malthusianism was "re-born" in 1859.

With Manifold Force


"There is no exception to the rule," writes Charles Darwin in the Origin, "that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slowbreeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny...." Darwin embraced the Malthus doctrine as scientifically valid. Not only did he embrace it, he utilized it as a foundation of his own theory. "In October 1838," Darwin writes in his autobiography, "I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed." [20] Darwin applies Malthus doctrine to animal and vegetable kingdoms (life)

58

The Ark
The limitless fecundity of nature produces multitudinous organisms, and these invariably wind up struggling for the wherewithal to survive. "As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive," Darwin writes, "there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine or Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom...." [21] Life is a battle for survival. What organisms survive? The "favourable variations," the organisms with advantages. Variations existing now are the winners of past and present struggles for existence. Future variations will be those that survive future tests of struggle and selection. Battlelines are drawn Significantly, the sub-title of Darwin's Origin is The Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The Social Darwinists, those who applied Darwinism to social theory, drew lines of battle not only between races, but between classes and between humans at different stages of development. The "natural man" of Rousseau was a child of light. In the reactionary, Malthusian model, natural man becomes a child of darkness-- a violence and sex machine. Malthus himself outgrew the Malthusian model. As Simon indicates, "explicit in Malthus' first edition and in the writings of many writers today, is the assumption that people--or at least poor people--breed 'naturally' and 'without limit,' due to 'untrammeled copulation.' But as Malthus came to accept in his subsequent editions ... people everywhere give much thought to marriage, sex, and procreation. The notion of 'untrammeled copulation' represents either ignorance or arrogant untruth." [22] Or ... it represents a distortion that serves certain special interests. Malthus and Darwin give ruling elite new lease on power Ever since the French Revolution, the fate of the traditional ruling classes had been in question. Was the old elite losing ground? Was the elite obsolete? Malthusianism comforted the ruling classes by representing the revolutionary cause as a simple matter of excessive population. So admired was this reductive conjecture, it became "doctrine"--the Malthus doctrine. Not to be outdone in service to the elite, Darwin applied the Malthus doctrine to all biological life. "There is no exception to the rule," Darwin writes with totally unwarranted certainty, "that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair." What about humans? "Even slow-breeding man," Darwin

59

The Ark
states, "has doubled in twenty-five years, and this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny...." [23] One implication of the application was that the powers-that-be, far from being obsolete, represent the pinnacle of human evolution. Elite status is prima facie evidence of evolutionary superiority. Another implication is that if the "favoured" classes intend to remain favoured, they must find a solution to population problem.

Darwin's "Bulldog" barks What must the elite do to maintain superiority? Taking the lead of T.H. Huxley, a chorus of Social Darwinists answered: "Acceptance of the first and foremost responsibility of the elite--to regulate unprincipled natural man." In other words ... population control. The Malthus-Darwin position regarding natural man was, as suggested above, the direct opposite of the Deistic position of those in the line of Rousseau and Lamarck. For the Deists, natural man was divine, close to the Creator. "Civilization" is corruption. For those in the Darwin camp, the opposite is true. Natural man is vicious, and society represents the efforts of the ethical few to contain the violence and the destructiveness inherent in natural man. "Among primitive men," wrote T.H. Huxley, "the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, survived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence. The human species, like others, plashed and floundered amid the general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as it best might, and thinking neither of whence nor whither." Note: For the Darwinists, the Hobbesian war of each against all is the natural state of existence. "One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief cause, of the struggle for existence," Huxley continues, "is the tendency to multiply without limit, which [tendency] man shares with all living things...." This is the familiar Malthus hypothesis, which Darwin incorporated into his theory. Further, Huxley writes, "The effort of ethical man to work towards a moral end by no means abolished ... the deep-seated organic impulses which impel the natural man to follow his non-moral course...." Ethical man is the product of "moral" (as opposed to natural) evolution. Society is an expression of moral evolution. "Society not only has a moral end, but in its perfection, social life, is embodied morality."

60

The Ark
Huxley concludes that the primary and absolutely necessary function of ethical man, and society is to regulate non-moral man. Ethical man "founds his life on a more or less complete self-restraint, which is the negation of the unlimited struggle for existence...." [24] Thus it was that Darwinism (and Social Darwinism) gave the ruling classes of the nineteenth century a new justification for existence, and a new lease on power. They become the regulators of the sex-crazed, violent beast--the amoral masses of mankind. Modern science built on abomination The long and short of it is: Darwin took a perverse, elitist, unscientific philosophy (Malthusianism) and made it one of the foundations of modern biology and evolution. Without the legitimization that Darwin provided, Malthusianism, the "abominable tenet," would not have survived into our century, to serve as it has served--as the "scientific" rationale underlying all population control programs, from relatively benign projects to the"race purification" programs of Hitler and his Third Reich, to programs that are even more sinister. [25] Did Darwin knowingly conspire to insinuate into science an abhorrent view of life?--conspire with reactionaries to establish an evolution theory that justified the rulers of the last century and our own in committing numberless crimes against the common people, all in the name of science. Darwin was not an original thinker; he was collector and synthesizer of information. Where social theory is concerned, Malthusianism had achieved among Darwin's associates in the Royal Society an orthodox status. All the important people believed in it. It was not in the character of Charles Darwin to believe differently.

References:
[1] Masterworks of Economics, ed. Leonard Dalton Abbott (Garden City, NY: 1946) 198-99. [2] Masterworks 201. [3] Masterworks 198. [4] Masterworks 201. Doubleday,

61

The Ark
[5] F. William Inman, Biological Politics (Bristol, England: John Wright and Sons, Ltd., 1935) 68. [6] Masterworks 240 [7] Masterworks 231. [8] Occasional Papers of T.R. Malthus--On Ireland, Population, and Political Economy, ed. Bernard Semmel. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1963), 33-40. [9] Masterworks 208. [10] Will and Ariel Durant, Age of Napoleon (New York: Simon and Schuster,1975) 514. [11] Will and Ariel Durant, Rousseau and Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967) 722. [12] Rousseau and Revolution 725. See also, Age of Napoleon 517. [13] Age of Napoleon 517-18. [14] Elbert Hubbard, Thomas Paine--Little Journey to Homes of Reformers (East Aurora, NY: The Roycrofters, 1907) 157. [15] Treason In America, Anton Chaitkin (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House,1985) 4. [16] Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1981) 11. [17] Simon 296-97. [18] Simon 175. [19] Simon 163. [20] The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover Publications, 1958) 42. [21] Darwin, 63. [22] Simon 187. [23] Darwin 33. [24] "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society," in Petr Kropotkin's Mutual Aid--A Factor in Evolution (Boston, MA: Extending Horizons Books, 1955) 332. The Huxley essa y appeared originally in The Nineteenth Century, February 1888. [25] "The Philosophy and Morals of War," North American Review CLXIX (1889): 794. Cited in Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955) 171.

62

The Ark

Chapter 5 Population and Politics in the 19th century


"It is quite conceivable that a country without colonies may cease to rank as a great European power, however strong it may be. Therefore, we must never become rigid as a purely continental policy must make us, but see to it that the outcome of our next successful war must be the acquisition of colonies by any possible means." [1]

--H. Von Treitschke, German historian, 1897

Not long ago, I watched a segment of a "Sightings" show devoted to the "population problem." The segment suggests that the fate of Easter Island serves as a warning to all of us on Earth, a warning that over-population can result in the extinction of peoples and possibly ... extinction of the species. What was the fate of Easter Island? According to Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the chief "expert" employed in the report, the people of Easter Island went out of balance with their environment. They cut the forest cover, destroying their own principal food source. The hungry people of Easter Island then turned to cannibalism, according to Ehrlich. The segment continues by showing the current destruction of the rain forests, and by suggesting that today the human species is following the path to extinction. The conclusion Ehrlich draws: The planetary population is now beyond the "carrying load." The population must be brought under control, or we'll all die. Dr. Ehrlich is a modern-day Thomas Malthus, a population alarmist. His grim portrait of the end of the Easter Islanders is sheer conjecture, not science. It is highly unlikely that a people surrounded by the infinite bounty of the sea found themselves facing starvation. When populations disappear from an area, the usual reason is severe climatic changes. In the case of island populations that disappear, the most probable cause is inundation by the sea. These possibilities are not discussed by Ehrlich. No, it is quite clear to the population specialist that the Easter Islanders vanished for the very same reason contemporary man could disappear--abuse of the environment. 1998: Two hundredth anniversary of Mathusianism

63

The Ark
In 1998, we mark the two hundredth anniversary of Malthus' essay on population. How much longer will we tolerate Malthusian pseudo-science? In 1984, Roger Revelle, former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, estimated that the planet is capable of sustaining 40 billion people, many times the current "carrying load," without compromising itself or any life form on the planet, provided resources are managed intelligently. If there is indeed a serious threat to our biosphere, it comes from the under-application of intelligence rather than an over-supply of bodies. [2] The Malthus conjectures on population have been reiterated so often, in so many different formats, they are now components of the "conventional wisdom" of the species. Today, most people accept as an obvious truism the idea that "over-population" is the big problem on Earth. News of this "truth" has traveled world-wide, and it has served as rationale, time and again, for the deliberate, systematic destruction of people, i.e., genocide.

Poetry of genocide Prek Po is a village about fifty kilometers north of Phnom Penh. Here are the opening verses of a poem, "The Krasang Tree at Prek Po," written by the exiled Cambodian poet U Sam Oeur: In '75 the krasang tree was green, bore fruit for the soup of all the villagers. By '79, the krasang tree had withered, its thorns adorned with the hair of babies, its bark blood-stained In '75 the krasang tree was surrounded by people seeking refuge. By '79, the krasang tree was surrounded by babies skeletons, smashed against its trunk by Utapats [evil ones]. The Utapats said: "To annihilate grasses, uproot them, daily!" O, Grass! What sin has the grass committed? [3] To the question "What sin has the grass committed?" there is an answer. The grass had committed the crime of being too numerous. This crime was first identified as such by Thomas Malthus. A glimmer of light

64

The Ark
Genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group of people. The term was originated in 1944 to describe the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. In the past several years, genocidal campaigns have been waged in Rwanda and Bosnia, Iraq and elsewhere. The Western world is alarmed. From what depths of horror, of perversion, has the monster arisen? In this chapter, we'll chart, briefly, the rise of the monster, beginning with the population essay of Malthus. At this point, in our investigation of the dark, I would like to offer a glimmer of light: Genocide, the destruction of our species, and eco-cide are not inevitabilities. They are possibilities only, and they become impossibilities just as soon as we discard the belief systems which give them life. Now let us return to the matter at hand....

The Principle of Population"


The Malthus population essay was written in response to the revolution in France. Malthus defined the revolution, and indeed any form of "mob" insurrection, as an inevitable result of over-population. Too many commo n people spells insurrection. From the beginning, the concept of "population problem" was defined by rulers and their ministers as, "A sufficient number of common people to cause serious disturbances to the establishment." "It may be safely asserted," Malthus declared again and again, beginning in 1798, " that population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical progressio n of such a nature as to double itself every twenty-five years...." To this conjecture, the rulers of Europe replied, "How ghastly! Why we'll be over-run by masses of starving commoners! Something must be done!"

Early Malthusianism
After the explosion on the world scene of independent republicanism (the American and French revolutions), after the fear-wrought reactions of Burke et al and the dark expositions of Malthus, acts of reproduction among the commoners took on the colorations of criminal conspiracy. The presumption of Malthus and the establishment was that the number of poor people (read commoners) is a direct reflection of the availability of food for the poor. The more assistance rendered to the poor, the higher the birth rate of the poor.

65

The Ark

"Malthusianism"--political theory "Malthusianism" was the political theory that sprang from the Malthus theory. The very first political application of Malthusianism in England was a cut-back of public assistance to the poor. Why feed potential enemies of the Crown? It was obvious to commoners that early Malthusianism was nothing more than the self-serving rationalization of the upper classes. During the first fifty or so years of their existence, the doctrines of Malthus were embraced only by the upper classes, but embraced they were ... and held to be gospel. As indicated previously, Rev. Malthus was employed by the East India Company, which was closely linked with British intelligence. The influence of Malthus on the intelligence people was profound. Malthus invented the field of "population and politics," i.e., population studies with an eye to the political implications of trends. First "think tank" In 1821, Malthus founded the Political Economy Club in London. Other founding members were George Grote, David Ricardo, James Mill, and John Tooke. [4] This association was the prototype for the modern "think tank."

Middle Malthusianism
Middle Malthusianism may be summarized in the phrase "laissez faire," which is defined as a political doctrine opposing government involvement in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary to maintain law and order. The term came into use in 1825, as a political expression of Malthus' theory. The underlying premise is that if the poor are not supported by the state, they will simply lie down and die. "Laissez faire"--malign neglect Laissez-faire has nothing to do with the Jeffersonian concept that the best government is the least government. Laissez-faire translates, "The best thing government can do for the poor is nothing." If the governors are to do anything, let them work to debilitate the common people. "Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor," the Rev. Malthus writes, "we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations...." [5]

66

The Ark
Herbert Spencer--"Mr. Malthusianism" Malthus died in 1834, but his honorific chair as Nemesis of the Poor did not remain empty long. It was filled by philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820- 1903), whose vision of biology and evolution anticipated that of Darwin in many ways. Indeed, it was Spencer who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." Spencer was an exceedingly ambitious, self-taught social theorist who endeavored to unify all scientific knowledge into one Synthetic Philosophy. After Darwin's Origin, Spencer became a chief Social Darwinist. During the decade prior to the Origin, Spencer was Mr. Malthusianism. According to Richard Hofstadter, Spencer's "categorical repudiation of state interference with the 'natural,' unimpeded growth of society led him to oppose all state aid to the poor." The poor are unfit, Spencer declared, and they should be eliminated. "The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, and to make room for better.... If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die." [6] Laissez-faire achieved, through Spencer, reputability among the commo n people, especially in America. As a self-made philosopher from the common stock, and as a literary jack-of-all-trades, Herbert Spencer appealed greatly to citizens of the nation where the common man was king.

Late Malthusianism (Social Darwinism)


If the proponents of Malthusianism were to succeed in achieving what they desired, i.e., severe population reduction, they had to enlist the support of those they wanted to eliminate--the commoners. The solution to their problem of unpopularity was provided ultimately by Charles Darwin, who incorporated the Malthus pseudo-science into his own theory of evolution. "Evolution comes from conflict" "In October 1938," Darwin writes in his autobiography, "I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed." Darwin's cognition seems harmless enough, at first glance. But consider the idea in these somewhat poetical terms: "Evolution arises from the Cauldron of Conflict." The "struggle for existence" is rarely discussed any longer as an issue in biology. As Norman Macbeth indicates, "Darwin took it over from Malthus, who was a sociologist (and a grim one) rather than a biologist. It was not derived

67

The Ark
from a loving contemplation of plants and animals. Such a contemplation would show that there were always more seeds than were needed for the replacement of the parents, but it would not show that each organic being was striving to increase at a geometrical ratio or that there was continual struggle...." [7] Today, in biology, the emphasis is on co-operative relationships among organisms rather than competitive ones. In The Lives of a Cell, for instance, biologist Lewis Thomas writes: "Most of the associations between the living things we know about are essentially cooperative ones, symbiotic in one degree or another; when they have the look of adversaries, it is usually a standoff relation, with one party issuing signals, warnings, flagging the other off...." [8] Following the publication of the Origin, however, the Malthusian ideas of "geometrical population pressure," "life is incessant struggle" and the Spencerian idea of "survival of the fittest" became the major themes in biology and derivative social theory, i.e. "Social Darwinism." Once Darwin had committed himself to the proposition that all life forms tend to reproduce at a geometrical rate, he was compelled to conclude that, as a necessary consequence, life is incessant struggle. Who wins in the struggle of life? The "fittest"-- those having certain advantages over the competition. Darwinists carry "life is fight" concept into the land of absurdity In their great enthusiasm for Darwinism, some of Darwin's followers carried the idea of "life-as-fight" to absurd lengths: "T.H. Huxley said that all the molecules within each organism were competing with each other. August Weismann [a German biologist] suggested that the particles of germ plasm were in conflict with each other, so that the ancestors who had contributed them could be seen as struggling with each other as to which should be re-created. Wilhelm Roux developed the theory that the organs were struggling with each other for nourishment, kidneys against lungs, heart against brain." [9] Earth becomes one ... war zone Within a decade of the publication of the Origin, war became the order of the day. "War," writes Jacques Barzun, "became the symbol, the image, the inducement, the reason, and the language of all human doings on the planet. No one who has not waded through some sizable part of the literature of the period 1870-1914 has any conception of the extent to which it is one long call for blood,...." [10] To reiterate the insight of Max Nordau in 1889: "The greatest authority of all the advocates of war is Darwin. Since the theory of evolution has been promulgated, they can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim the sanguinary instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of science." [11]

68

The Ark
Had there been a hundred Nordaus in the late nineteenth century, it is not likely they could have stopped the juggernaut Social Darwinism. After eighty years of Malthusian lectures and thirty years of neo-Malthusianism in the form of the Darwin theory, the elites of Europe were fully convinced that population was in fact a very big problem, a powder keg under the throne.

Imperialism
From the point of view of those living twenty or thirty years from now, the twentieth century will look like a genocidal nightmare. In this century, our planet has become one vast killing ground. The slaughter began in the nineteenth century, as the major European powers, convinced that the possession of colonies was the key to national survival, set about the grisly work of appropriating as much of the "uncivilized" world as they could seize. Why were colonies so important? "Surplus populations" and Imperialism As a result of the "first wave" of Social Darwinists, the rulers of Europe found themselves suddenly with "surplus populations." Nation after nation entered the race to acquire foreign lands. The motive was not greed, it was ... "survival." The nations that would survive into the future, it was believed, would be those in possession of vast tracts of land for dumping of surplus population. The alternative was drowning in a Malthusian sea of flesh. Thus was born the "Age of Imperialism." African Holocaust In a very short time, all of Africa was carved up by the European powers. Aboriginal peoples of that continent who objected to slavery were destroyed. Many great tribes, tribes that for thousands of years existed in balance with the environment, were eradicated. This was the "African Holocaust." Today, the holocaust continues. Empire-building, it may be argued, has always been a main theme of Western civilization. Indeed, modern Western civilization officially begins with the establishment of the Roman Empire and later the worldwide empire of the Roman Catholic Church. These early empires were built slowly, methodically, as expressions of the will of man manifesting the will of the gods, or God. War is progress & prosperity In the late nineteenth century, empire-building has a different character, a character derived from acceptance of Darwinism as scientific truth. "Life is

69

The Ark
war," wrote the nineteenth century novelist Henry James. Evolution is war. Progress is war. Darwinism was formulated in the mind of Western man as a call to battle in the service of evolution. War was the "pruning hook of the human orchard." War was the grand test of virtue--of manliness. War was a means of assuring the future prosperity of one's nation,--through acquisition of new lands and their resources. Masses led to agree to their own destruction From the point of view of a young man in the late nineteenth century, all this was the stuff of grand adventure. From the point of view of the Malthusian elite, it was a dream come true ... the masses were eagerly agreeing to their own destruction. Further, whatever territorial gains were made as the result of war would serve as future dumping grounds for excess population. Had not Malthus proved that in just two centuries the ratio of population to the means o f subsistence would be 29 to l? Essentially, the nineteenth century race for empire was an attempt to find an external solution to the "population problem." As the years went by, imperialism led Europe deeper and deeper into a madness from which there was no escape. There was only so much land that could be seized from the people with spears. Sooner or later, the empire-builders had to turn upon each other.... Germany wants an empire, too! Competition for empire was major cause of World War I. Germany was a late-comer to the race for empire, and this meant she had to "step on others' toes" in order to seize her share. In 1901, Arthur Dix, the editor of two Berlin journals, wrote: "A timorous people, which knows not how to use its elbows, may of course put a stop to the increase of population--it might find things too narrow at home. The superfluity of population might find no economic existence. A people happy in its future, however, knows nothing of artificial limitation; its only care can be to find room on the globe for a livelihood for other members of its own race." [12] In Britain as Germany's Vassal (1912), F. von Bernhardi, retired German general and a highly influential Social Darwinist, writes, "In the interest of the world's civilization it is our duty to enlarge Germany's colonial empire. Thus alone can we politically, or at least nationally, unite the German civilization throughout the world, for only then will they recognize that German civilization is the most necessary factor in human progress. We must endeavor to acquire new territories throughout the world by all means in our power, because we must preserve to Germany the millions of Germans who will be born in the future, and we must provide for them food and employment. They ought to be enabled to live under a German sky, and to lead a German life." [13] War becomes "biological necessity" 70

The Ark
Given such attitudes (not only in Germany, but throughout Europe), war between the nations became inevitable. It became inevitable for another reason as well: War was viewed by Bernhardi and other influential Social Darwinists as an "indispensable regulator" of populations. "If it were not for war," Bernhardi writes, "we should probably find that inferior and degenerate races would overcome healthy and youthful ones by their wealth and their numbers. The generative importance of war lies in this, that it causes selection, and thus war becomes a biological necessity." [14]
References:
[1] Conquest and Kultur--Aims of the Germans in Their Own Words (Washington, D.C.: The Committee on Public Information, 1918) 71. Treitschke was described by the Kaiser as "Our great national historian." Extremely popular, revered by many, Treitschke was the chief spokesman for late nineteenth century German nationalism. In the view of Treitschke, Germany had to become the dominant state in Europe and the world. [2] Robert W. Lee, "Feeding the World," The New American, 1 June 1992. [3] Selections from Sacred Vows, trans. U Sam Oeur and Ken McCullough (Iowa City, IA: Zephyr Limited Edition Chapbook Series, 1993) 15. "U Sam Oeur is a Cambodian poet who survived four years in Pol Pot concentration camps by feigning illiteracy and by destroying the manuscripts of his literary work. Since he had grown up on a farm, he was able to adapt to the brutal rigors of forced agricultural labor." [4] Masterworks 195. [5] Masterworks 235-36. [6] Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1962 [1944]) 41. [7] Macbeth 59. [8] The Lives of a Cell--Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Bantam, 1975) 6. [9] Macbeth 56-57. [10] Darwin, Marx, Wagner--Critique of a Heritage (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955) 92. [11] Hofstadter 171. [12] Conquest and Kultur 23. [13] Conquest and Kultur 79-80. [14] Conquest and Kultur 32.

71

The Ark

Chapter 6 Population and Politics in the 20th century


"It is estimated that the area occupied by human beings amounts to no more than 1 percent of the earth's land surface. If all of the people in the world moved into the state of Texas, each person could be given the space available in the typical American home, and all the rest of the world would be empty..." [1]

--Dr. Jacqueline R. Kasun

"Darwin's new and revolutionary [reactionary] view," writes Australian scientist Michael Denton, "implied that all the diversity of life on Earth had resulted from natural and random processes and not, as previously believed, from the creative activity of God. The acceptance of this great claim and the consequent elimination of God from nature was to play a decisive role in the secularization of western society...." [2] By "secularization of western society," Denton refers to a power shift by which "Science" emerged as the only really reliable authority on existence. The Judeo-Christian concept that life is a moral struggle which is overseen by God, was replaced in the mind of Western man by the the idea that life is simply an out-and-out struggle, without purpose, without any sort of divine interest whatsoever. "The twentieth century would be incomprehensible," Denton continues, "without the Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would not have been possible without its intellectual sanction...." [3]

Sanction
Abolition of classes was achieved in America with the establishment of egalitarian republicanism in 1789. Revolutionaries in France attempted to follow the American example, but failed. The French Revolution failed for many

72

The Ark
reasons. One reason was that the class system in Europe was strong-- longestablished and powerful. The reaction against individualism ... "socialism" The trauma of the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars left Europe (after 1815) distrustful of "individualism." "Socialism" arose in England as an acceptable alternative to individualism,--a reform effort that did not challenge the class system. The term socialism was first used in England (1833) with reference to a group called the "Association of All Classes of All Nations." The commitment of the organization was to the proposition that all classes, everywhere, could better themselves through co-operation. The first socialism, in other words, maintained that social reform could come about peacefully. After Darwin, this belief is regarded as naive. In 1859, Karl Marx, living in obscurity in London, learned of the Linnean Society' s famous meeting and explosive aftermath. Marx attended Huxley's lectures on the Darwin-Wallace theory, and a friend later recalled that Marx "spoke of nothing else for months." The Darwin-Wallace theory sanctioned the view of Marx that violence is a necessary means of social evolution. The new theory, Marx wrote Freidrich Engels, provided a basis in natural history for class struggle. [4] Darwinism supports Communism The point should be underscored: At the time when the formulators of modern socialism were in deep debate regarding the momentous question "Can democratization be accomplished by peaceful means?--or is violence inevitable?", Darwinism entered the debate on the side of violence, on the side of Karl Marx, Father of Communism. Marxist Communism is a form of state socialism premised on the incorrect idea that historical progress is basically a matter of class struggle. The great struggle ends, Marx supposed, when the working class (proletariat) becomes the ruling class. Like Darwinism, Marxism emerged as the orthodoxy in its field-political science. "Class-cooperative" socialism was ridiculed out of existence. Also defeated was "anarchism," which was (and is) condemned as opposition to all order. "Anarchism" is a negative label for "individualism," i.e. egalitarian republicanism, which maintains that individuals constitute the proper basis o f government. "Democracy"--a label for socialism In 1863, the first socialist party (Social Democrats) appeared in Germany. The objective of the party was to turn Germany into a "democracy," i.e., a country ruled by the common class. Democracy is opposite of aristocracy. (As democracy is a concept based on the class system, it cannot be used to describe 73

The Ark
the American System, which abolished classes.) Subsequently, in the West, democracy became the popular slogan for social reform, thereby reinforcing class consciousness and the class system. "Democracy" has proven in our time to be nothing more than a positive label for state socialism. Given popular acceptance of a basal paradigm that regards individuals as sex-and-violence machines, there arose the general agreement that populations require, for their own good, strict authoritarian governance. The "State" emerged as the modern monarch, the holder of the sovereignty. What is the "State"? The State is the political expression of the "responsible elite." It's important to be very clear about the difference between egalitarian republicanism, or "individualism," and state socialism. In the case of the former, the individual is the important factor in life, and the proper basis o f government. The function of government is to serve individuals, and not to control them. In the case of the latter, the social organism (social-ism) is the important factor,--"national security." Individuals are subjects of the State, in the sense that their personal fates are unimportant in comparison with the security of the State. State socialism As monarchism arose as the preferred political expression of the JudeoChristian paradigm, so state socialism arose as the preferred expression of Materialistic Scientism, our current basal paradigm. Three forms of state socialism dominate politics in the twentieth century: National socialism, as illustrated by Nazi Germany; international Communism, as represented chiefly by the former Soviet Union; and global socialism, the political expression of international corporate capitalism. Global socialism is commonly known as the "New World Order." All three political systems are emanations of Darwinism.

Techno-Totalitarianism
Adolf Hitler was the first to take state socialism to its logical conclusion, technocratic totalitarianism ... total control of population by the State, with political leaders working closely with the scientific and professional elite. If population pressure is as serious as the Malthusians say, and if people are as brutish as the Malthusians make them out to be, then the Third Reich is not history, but a model for a global Reich now in the making. For this reason, it is important to understand the Third Reich and its rise. Volumes and volumes have been written about the Hitler era, but none to my knowledge approach the subject from the point of view of paradigm studies.

74

The Ark

Paradigm studies, basal (foundational) shift Paradigm studies is a relatively new field--a hybrid of philosophy and the social sciences. Its focus is upon belief systems. The lives of people, the lives of civilizations are built upon beliefs. In the Introduction to this book, the concept of basal paradigm was introduced, and the point was made that in the nineteenth century a major basal paradigm shift occurred. The Judeo-Christian basal paradigm was overlaid by the paradigm termed Materialistic Scientism. Necessarily, the point has to be repeated time and again in our text, in that this event, this overlay, is the principal determiner of modern history. Let's look briefly at modern Germany (Germany after Darwin) from the paradigmatics point of view.

Blood and Iron


There is an old saying to the effect that every action of every individual has worldwide influence. A Chinaman throws a pebble in a pond, and all the world feels the ripples. Only moments after Charles Darwin threw his Origin of Species into the thought-pond of Homo sapiens, the ripples reached Germany. Up until the 1860s, Germany was not a nation in the modern sense. It was a loose federation of independent states. Historically, the preference of the Germans was for diversity over unity. In their historical experience, unity meant empire, and empire meant tyranny. It was the Germanic tribes which put the sword to the Roman Empire. In later times, it was the Germans, inspired by Martin Luther, who put the skids under the Roman Catholic empire. This empire had as its goal the subjection of all the world to Catholic orthodoxy. With the emergence of Protestantism, the goal of "one world under the banner of the Roman Church" became impossible. 1860s: Germany unified In the 1860s, the German states were unified under the direction of Karl Otto Eduard Leopold Bismarck-Schonhausen, whom we remember as Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor." Bismarck (1815-1898) set the tone for the new German nation in 1862, when he said, "Not by speeches and resolutions of the majority are the mighty problems of the age to be solved, but by blood and iron." With his blood and iron imagery, Bismark was not striving for dramatic effect; he was driving home the point that life is war. Had not Darwin declared

75

The Ark
this to be the scientific truth of existence? Did not the Royal Society second him in this view? The British Empire gets competition Germany entered late into the nineteenth century race for empire, but what she lacked in lead time, she made up for in resolve, in iron will. Great Britain found itself with a competitor with serious ambitions, and with a capability equal to its own--or greater. During the opening years of the twentieth century, the German press was filled with the Social Darwinist rhetoric of struggle and glorious triumph. "If people should ask us," writes editor and author Adolf Grabowski, "whether we intend to become a world power that overtops the other world powers so greatly that Germany would be the only real World Power, the reply must be that the will to power has no limit." [5] General von Bernhardi: "The war which seems approaching will decide our whole future. As far as we are concerned, the question is whether we are to maintain our present position in the political world and become a world power or whether we are to be pushed back and become a purely continental state of second rank.... If a permanent understanding [between England and Germany] is to be reached, Germany's interest must be safeguarded in every respect. England would have to grant us an absolutely free hand in domain of European politics...." [6] 1912: The war drums of Darwinism Inevitably, the contenders for world power had to face each other on the field of struggle. By 1912, the Western world was ready for war. Given the Social Darwinist belief systems that then ruled both the rulers and the masses, war was unavoidable. The war drums began to beat more and more loudly, drowning out all the voices of sanity and compassion.

Kropotkin
One of the most compelling voices of sanity was that of the Russian naturalist and evolutionist Petr Kropotkin. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Kropotkin endeavored unsuccessfully to tell the world that the key to evolutionary progress is cooperation., not conflict. In his years of research in Siberia and elsewhere, Kropotkin maintained, he failed to find "that bitter struggle for existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists ... as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution." [7]

76

The Ark

Co-operation, not competition, the key to evolution "If we ask Nature," Kropotkin writes, Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another, we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of the intelligence and bodily organization...." [8] In 1902, Kropotkin published Mutual Aid--A Factor of Evolution, a book refuting the idea that struggle for survival is the source of evolutionary progress. It was too late. The Social Darwinists were in command of the field, and they were demanding war. Unprecedented destruction of life In 1914, the despairing Kropotkin wrote: "When the present war began, involving nearly all Europe in a terrible struggle, and this struggle assumed ... a never yet known character of wholesale destruction of life among the noncombatants and pillage of the means of subsistence of the civil population, 'struggle for existence' became the favorite explanation with those who tried to find an excuse for these horrors." [9]

To the Victor Go the Spoils


In the philosophy of Social Darwinism, no provision is made for the losers in the struggle for survival. Under the highly punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, Germany was physically contracted and stripped of her colonies. This contraction was not merely a punishment; it was (in the Social Darwinist point of view) a death sentence. If a country was blocked in terms of discharging its surplus population, it was doomed. Unwilling to roll over and die, Germany sought an alternative solution to the dread population surplus problem. Did not the war provide alleviation, you might ask. No. From the point of view of many German leaders, the blood of the noblest had been shed in the war, and the blood of degenerates now threatened to inundate Germany. What could be done?

"Race science" offers an internal solution to population problem In the late nineteenth century, a pseudo-science known as "race science" had been developed in Germany. Race science was based on the assertion of the

77

The Ark
eminent Darwinist Ernst Haeckel that the races are "separate species." Ernst Haeckel was, as indicated previously, the biologist who converted Germany to Darwinism. Once the concept of races as separate species was defined, the next step was to distinguish between progressive and regressive races. "Race science" was instituted in order to make the necessary discriminations and then to offer recommendations as to the proper pruning of the human orchard. One highly influential race scientist was Alfred Jost, author of The Right to Death (1895). The main thesis of Jost's book is that the final solution to the awful population problem is state control over human reproduction. The Right to Death is couched in the Social Darwinist rhetoric of "natural rights." The state, according to Jost, has a "natural right" and a "sacred responsibility" to kill undesirable individuals in order to 'keep the nation, the social organism, alive and healthy.' [10] In the post-World War I period, Social Darwinist opinion leaders in Germany began to focus intently on the matter of "scientific" control of population. Race scientists found in America an important model. In the opening decades of this century, America was the main laboratory for a pseudo-science called "eugenics," which means good breeding. Father of eugenics was Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. German race scientists were much impressed with the American model, especially with the sterilization programs. In 1923, Fritz Lenz, a German physician-geneticist who became a leading ideologue in the Nazi race purification programs, complained bitterly that Germany, under the Weimar Constitution (which prohibited the infliction of bodily alterations on humans), prevented widespread use of vasectomy techniques, and that Germany had nothing to match the eugenics research institutions and programs in America and England. [11] During the 1930s, there was a considerable flow of eugenics information from the United States to Germany. The Nazis: "nothing but applied biology" The major political expression of German race science was the Nazi party, national socialism. "National Socialism," said Nazi Deputy Party leader Rudolf Hess in 1934, is nothing but applied biology." [12] Indeed, the third premise of classical Darwinism became a foundation of the Third Reich. As early as the publication of Mein Kampf (1924), Adolf Hitler declared that the sacred survival mission of the German people was the "assembling and preserving of the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements [and] ... slowly and severely raising them to a dominant position." [13] The Third Reich was a powerful machine designed to do just that, to assure the worldwide dominance of

78

The Ark
the Germanic genes, the "basic racial elements." Hitler was no madman. He was the ultimate Social Darwinist demagog. For him, the stakes were absolute: "If the power to fight for one's own health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends." [14] Hitler was passionate in his commitment to the "scientific" eradication of what he regarded as "life unworthy of life." During the period of his reign, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG), a scientific research institution which operated between 1911 and 1945, focused much of its attention on eugenics. Because of its association with the Nazis, the term eugenics fell out of favor after the the war. The work of eugenics was continued, however, under the auspices of "genetic engineering."

The Present Moment


Today, the West's standard vision of existence is Darwinism. The United States government, for instance, recognizes Darwinism as its official evolutionary theory. This recognition means, in practical terms, that the various major policies of the federal government are based on the idea that life is war and that "fitness," national survival, requires that the nation develop and accumulate as many advantages as possible over present and potential competitors. Keeping alive the Third Reich ... Today, in the history classes of the West, the Third Reich is represented as a moral abomination, a psychopathological aberration that must never be repeated. So long as we represent the Third Reich as such, we give keep it alive. It is not possible to "fix" abominations and pathological aberrations. Such things are beyond our understanding and control. The Third Reich represented a logical extension of Social Darwinist theory. In terms of its (supposed) scientific framework, it was a highly progressive political order, the first full-fledged example of techno-totalitarianism, rule of the masses by means of a combination of scientific and police and military technologies. Techno-totalitarianism is, for social theorists basing their work on the Darwinian orthodoxy, the "final solution" to the old, old problem of population. So long as we acknowledge the Darwinisms as our orthodoxy in biology and evolution, we keep ourselves on a road that leads ultimately and inevitably to world techno-totalitarianism.
References:
[1] "Has Global Population Exceeded Earth's Carrying Capacity?" AntiShyster 6.3 (1996) 15-18. [2] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986) 17.

79

The Ark
[3] Denton 358. [4] Arnold C. Brackman, A Delicate Arrangement--The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Times Books, 1980) 274. [5] Conquest and Kultur 28. [6] Conquest and Kultur 25. [7] Mutual Aid--A Factor of Evolution (Boston, MA: Extending Horizons Books, 1955) vii. [8] Kropotkin 6. [9] Kropotkin, from unpaginated "Preface to the 1914 Edition." [10] Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors--Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986) 46. [11] Lifton 23. [12] Lifton 24. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid.

80

The Ark

Chapter 7 Darwinism--Dead or Alive?


"I wrote a short article contending that classical Darwinism was dead. This was almost entirely based on the verbatim statements of eminent biologists, my part being to select and arrange.... My thesis was simply that the professionals had moved away from classical Darwinism, but that no one had informed the public of what had happened. This, I believed, was important news for the American public."[1]

--Norman Macbeth

For the early Darwinists, the great appeal of the Natural Selection doctrine lay in its replacement of the Divine Hand hypothesis. "Newton banished God from nature," writes Gerald Heard, "Darwin banished him from life." [2] Darwin discovered, so the legend goes, the true, "natural" explanation for life on Earth. In reality, one anthropomorphic theory was replaced by another, the Divine Hand by the hand of nature. At the turn of the century, Natural Selection was no longer regarded as a valid concept in (elite) scientific circles. "Forty years ago," writes Henry Adams in 1903, "our friends always explained things and had the cosmos down to a point, teste [by witness of] Darwin and Charles Lyell. Now they say they don't believe there is an explanation [for existence], or that you can choose between half a dozen, all correct. The Germans are all balled up. Every generalization that we settled forty years ago is abandoned. The one most completely thrown over is our gentle Darwin's Survival [survival of the fittest], which no longer has a leg to stand on." [3] Darwin criticizes Natural Selection One of the first critics of the Natural Selection theory was Darwin himself. "I suppose natural selection was a bad term," he wrote, "but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded, nor can I think of a better. 'Natural preservation' would not imply a preservation of particular varieties and would seem a truism, and would not bring man and nature's selection under one point of view." [4] "Natural preservation" would have been simply a label for something that anyone can see. (It "would seem a truism.") "Natural Selection" implies an agency underlying the fact of natural preservation. Thus it can be said to bring "man and nature's selection under one point of view." All implied parallels aside, "Natural Selection" is, as indicated previously, nothing but an empt y 81

The Ark
generalization. It amounts to little more than the proposition that since some organisms survive and others don't, there must be a process of selection going on. Not long after the publication of the Origin, Darwin indicated that he preferred the term "survival of the fittest" to Natural Selection. Survival of the fittest at least suggests a principle of evolution: The greater the degree of versatility in adapting to the environment (i.e. "fitness"), the greater the likelihood of survival. Classical Darwinism is is dead and alive! To answer the question of whether classical Darwinism is dead or alive: Classical Darwinism was never "alive" in the sense of being a living, working, demonstrable theory. However, it was (and is) very much alive at the level of the basal paradigm. It became a chief component of what we call Scientism ... science-as-religion. The hypothesis of Natural Selection filled the God spot, so to speak, in the basal paradigm. What is the source of order in the world? "Natural Selection." What about God? "An anthropomorphic fiction." How do we find out the truth of existence?--the real low-down on life? "Close your Bible, open your Darwin." The realm of science divided Contemporary Western civilization may be said to begin in 1859 with the publication of the Origin. This book and its sequel, The Descent of Man , became the Gospel of Science--science's equivalent of the New Testament. Darwinism became, in other words, encoded in the new, emerging basal paradigm. Darwinism is lacking in scientific merit, as we know. Thus the Darwinization of the paradigm resulted inevitably in a splitting of the realm of science. Scientists who honored the tradition of "hypotheses non fingo" (no hypotheses without proof) continued the useful work of "pure science." Scientists willing to put their hearts, minds and mouths in the service of unprovable doctrines formed the priesthood of the new religion of science ... Scientism. The Church of Scientism Scientism is today the West's current dominant religion. At the heart of it there are a number of doctrines (the equivalents of church canons) stemming from original Darwinism, from Social Darwinism (the evangelical application of Darwinism to social theory), and from our current orthodoxy, Neo-Darwinism. With the full emergence of the new paradigm, Materialistic Scientism, the honor once accorded to priests was transferred to scientists. Most celebrated among the scientists today are the geneticists. The "genetic engineers" are the

82

The Ark
exorcist priests of our time. Today, virtually all "dysfunctional behavior" and all disease is viewed as having a genetic origin. How do we fix behavioral disorders? How do we fix diseases? We summon the genetic engineers. We find and correct the genetic defects that are the source of the problem. Christians fight back with fish The victory of Darwinism is far from complete, of course. In ways great and small, we still see a kind of "battle of the paradigms" being waged in these latter days. On the back windows or bumpers of autos owned by old paradigmers, we see the logo of Christianity, a fish containing the name "Jesus." On the vehicles of the Scientismic paradigmers, we a see a fish with little legs. The name inside the fish is "Darwin." Polarization of society On a far more serious level, certain of the agendas and objectives of Scientism have polarized our society, to the point where groups of citizens are forming self-defense organizations, i.e., "militias." Built upon the untrue Darwinian premise that life is a fearsome dog-eat-dog struggle, Scientism holds that the only hope for peace is in turning the planet into a kind of super-kennel. Once humankind has been properly kenneled, then perhaps the work of genetically engineering the perfect world and perfect people can begin in earnest. Many citizens are alarmed by the seemingly ever-increasing regulatory powers of government at all levels, but they know not the source of the phenomenon. The source can be described in these terms: Darwinism, Social Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism. The Darwinisms constitute our civilization's current basal paradigm--our most basic assumptions about the nature of existence. It is for this reason that classical Darwinism has survived refutation after refutation. Most would-be topplers of classical Darwinism are pretty naive. They have no idea that "scientifically valid refutation" is not sufficient. What is required to kill this Darwinism is something like a silver stake, a large hammer, and the right opportunity.

Two Nineteenth Century Critics of Darwinism

83

The Ark
In this century and the last, more than a few good critiques of Darwinism, or key components of Darwinism, have been offered to the public, and none of these had much impact. The novelist who knew more than the scientists ... In late nineteenth century England, at least one voice of real genius was raised against Darwinism, that of Samuel Butler, who is remembered now (when remembered at all) as the author of a utopian fiction called Erewhon. Butler's principal objection to Darwinism was that the hypothesis of Natural Selection cannot possibly be an adequate explanation of evolution. Natural Selection might tell us a little something about the process of speciation, the process of species A becoming species B and species C, but it cannot explain the existence of A, B or C. In examining Darwin's text, Jacques Barzun writes, "Butler found that small random variations were taken for granted or occasionally ascribed to a metaphysical agent called Variation, so as to provide Natural Selection with something to work on...." "To me," Butler wrote, "it seems that the 'Origin of Variations,' whatever it is, is the only true Origin of Species." [5] In other words, Butler saw that there was a something, not defined by Darwin, that was generating the organismal variations that Natural Selection operated upon. Natural Selection had to be part of much larger process. It was not, in itself, a sufficient explanation of the origin of anything. What puzzled Butler's contemporaries, Barzun writes, is that he ]Butler] "seemed to be striking out on a new line [of speculation] instead of choosing, like everybody else, between theology and materialistic science...." [6] A biological organism, Butler believed, is not simply a machine built and operated by Natural Selection. It has an "interest" in evolutionary process. "It wants to do certain things and not to do others. In other words, the physical action of living beings is the expression of a mental action," mental referring here to "consciousness, however limited." [7] Kropotkin nails Darwinism as "old Hobbism writ new" Petr Kropotkin has been cited earlier as an important early critic of the Darwinian hypothesis that evolution is a product of bitter struggle of each against all. Kropotkin correctly places Darwin in the tradition of the eighteenth century pessimist Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes took the position, Kropotkin writes, that the state of nature is "nothing but a permanent fight between individuals, accidentally huddled together by the mere caprice of their bestial existence...." The Hobbesian philosophy, Kropotkin continues, has plenty of admirers still; and we have had of late quite a school of writers who, taking possession of

84

The Ark
Darwin's terminology rather than of his leading ideas, made of it an argument in favour of Hobbes' views upon primitive man, and even succeeded in giving them a scientific appearance...." The case of T.H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," is cited: "Huxley, as is known, took the lead of that school, and in a paper written in 1888 he represented primitive men as a sort of tigers or lions, deprived of all ethical conceptions, fighting out the struggle for existence to its bitter end, and living a life of 'continual free fight'; to quote his own words--'beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.'" [8] "Sociability" key to winning "struggle for life" Political difficulties prevented Kropotkin from publishing his refutation of the Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian hypothesis (evolution from struggle) until 1902. Mutual Aid--A Factor in Evolution is still an impressive, well-documented argument for the thesis that sociability, not conflict, is the key to evolutionary progress. In Kropotkin's own words: "While fully admitting that force, swiftness, protective colours, cunningness, and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under certain circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those species which willingly or unwillingly abandon it are doomed to decay; while those animals which know best how to combine, have the greatest chances of survival and of further evolution, although they may be inferior to others in each of the faculties enumerated by Darwin and Wallace, save the intellectual faculty. The highest vertebrates, and especially mankind, are the best proof of this assertion...." [9] Prince of the commoners Kropotkin was a member of the highest Russian aristocracy, his family descended from the Princes of Smolensk and Kieff. Politically, however, he was in the tradition of egalitarian republicanism. The word "republic" comes from the Latin res publica and means simple "public affairs." In the past, a form of government replacing monarchy was called a republic. Thus the dictionary definition: "A government having a chief of state who is not a monarch." Today, the term "republic" is used to describe virtually any kind of nation and its government. There are two basic types of republics--elitist republics (those in which the ultimate power [sovereignty] belongs to an elite) and egalitarian republics, such as the early American republic, in which sovereignt y lies with the people ("We the People"). In the elitist system, citizens are subjects (subject to the Crown or equivalent authority); in the egalitarian system, the citizens are "co-owners" of the system,--co-sovereigns.

85

The Ark

Kropotkin nailed as an anarchist Labeled an anarchist, Kropotkin was in and out of prisons during the last decades of the nineteenth century. On the basis of his wide experience as naturalist and prison inmate, Kropotkin came to the understanding that the highest and most enduring achievements of mankind come from the masses. The legacy of the ruling classes, he firmly believed, is war and destruction. In 1883, Kropotkin was imprisoned in France for political reasons. In England, a petition for his release was drawn up, stressing the importance of Kropotkin's many contributions to science. Many notable Britons signed the petition. T.H. Huxley declined to add his name. In later years, Huxley, who was in 1883 president of the Royal Society, explained his refusal to offer aid to a fellow scientist in this way: "So long as I am President of the Royal Society, I shall feel bound to abstain from from taking any prominent part of public movements as to the propriety of which the opinions of the Fellows of the Society differ." In the years following his release, Petr Kropotkin published many articles which were directly critical of Huxley's Hobbesian Darwinism. Huxley failed to respond to any of the criticisms.

INTO THE TWENTIETH ...


Given the backwardness of biology in the middle nineteenth century, there was really not much that Darwin or anyone else could have said, with certainty, regarding the mechanism of evolution. Now, in fairness to Darwin, let us give him another chance.... Darwin stunned by Gaia hypothesis It is June 1859. Charles Darwin, having worked up quite a headache trying to figure out evolution, leaves his study and enters the parlor. There waiting for him is a large package. He opens it and finds a manuscript. The manuscript is not from his brilliant junior colleague, Alfred Wallace, the co - discoverer of Natural Selection; rather, it is from the future.... it is a book by James Lovelock called Gaia--A New Look at Life on Earth. With great wonderment, Darwin reads the "Gaia hypothesis" of Lovelock, the hypothesis that "the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs

86

The Ark
and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts." [10] No view could be more different from that of Darwin. Darwin regards the hypothesis as preposterous. At the same time, he is intrigued by the wealth of data Lovelock brings to bear on his thesis, and especially by the fact that "The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth now and throughout its history seems always to have been optimal for life." [11] "Astonishing!" Darwin remarks to himself. Our home is homeostatic Astonishing, indeed. The Earth, Lovelock demonstrates amply, is a "homeostatic" phenomenon. "Homeostasis" is a word invented by the American psychologist Walter Cannon. It refers (in the words of Lovelock) to "that remarkable state of constancy in which living things hold themselves when their environment is changing." [12] The fact of homeostasis gives our born again Darwin the reference he was looking for. "Ah!--nature is homeostatic," he exclaims, " and thus what we mean by 'Natural Selection' is homeostatic selection!" The Lovelock data would have provided Darwin with a valid scientific framework and enabled him to define Natural Selection in a testable way. (Methodological aside: Only hypotheses that can be tested can be considered "scientific.") Natural Selection might have been defined as "homeostasisproducing selection." All organisms are under pressure to balance wit h environment; organisms most effective at balancing, for whatever reason, are most likely to survive and reproduce. What "fittest" would mean, from this point of view, is most aware and appropriately responsive. Unfortunately, news of the homeostatic nature of planet Earth never reached the historical Darwin. Lamarck, with his concept of organisms and environment as interactive, had been on the right track; but for Darwin and his colleagues, Lamarckism was "heresy."

Where is the Science of Science?


In 1903, as Henry Adams points out, classical Darwinism didn't have a leg to stand on. It was dead. So.... if it was dead, why didn't it fall? It didn't fall for the reason discussed above ... it had become part and parcel of the modern basal paradigm. Further, there was apparently no one around with

87

The Ark
the competency and will to say, "Look, this famous theory that all the world now believes in is nothing but a load of rubbish. Let me explain just why...." Modern science: A factory without quality control Let us regard scientific enterprise in general as a factory--a factory that produces "true knowledge" about the way things are. Okay, who or what is responsible for quality control? The ultimate quality control is the job of philosophy, "science of science." In Darwin's time, philosophy was not doing its job. In our own time, it's still not doing its job. Generally, philosophy in our civilization has been compromised out of existence. It was taken over, first by the churches and then by academe. Philosophy was not equipped to say Darwinism was dead because philosophy itself was dead. It is a sad commentary on the quality of the Western knowledge factory that today, as we stand ready to step into the twenty-first century, our orthodox theory of evolution is still, after all these years and refutations, Darwinism. Scientists are "workers" in the knowledge factory, and ordinarily they are not sufficiently qualified to run good quality control. In the typical education of a scientist, there is little, if any, attention given to the philosophy and practice of scientific methodology. Furthermore, scientists are invariably specialists. Their expertise is in nuclear physics, or beetles and bugs, or any one of a thousand specific fields of interest. Few, if any, specialize in scientific methodology, its philosophy and practice. The most glaring out-point in our higher education system is that philosophy is divorced from the sciences. Philosophy today is a just a minor department in the division of Humanities. A modern Dunciad ... In the absence of a regulatory science of science, the proponents of Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism have been able to say whatever they wanted without being challenged. The work of contemporary Darwinist Richard Dawkins is a case in point. In his defense of Darwinism titled The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins addresses the question of how it is that intricate organs, such as eyes, evolve. They evolve, he writes, "by gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessors, to have arisen by chance...." [13] Where is the evidence that anything comes into existence "by chance"? There is none. What is the nature, exactly, of the supposed "gradual step-by-step transformations" of primordial "simple" biological receptor mechanisms into organs such as eyes? No details provided. Just more conjectures, conjectures on top of conjectures.

88

The Ark

Earliest "eye": the Integral Membrane Protein The earliest "eye" we know of is a frequency receiver-transducer known as an "IMP" (integral membrane protein) complex. The first organism to arise was, o f course, the single cell. The basic cell membrane is formed by organic compounds called phospholipids, which self-assemble into spherical form. Between the layers of the membrane are situated the IMPs, which are the "eyes" and "mouths" of the cell. Here is a picture of one type of IMP:

The IMP complex is a stimulus-response mechanism. (A) This is the "receptor" component of the mechanism. It is the function of the receptor to identify a specific item (a certain chemical, for instance) important to the cell, and then to "capture" that item. When the receptor detects the item it seeks, it reconfigures itself so as to capture the item. This signals the "effector" component (B) to prepare to receive and transduce the target item. "Transduction" is the conversion of the received signal into biological response, i.e. behavior.

IMP complexes are designed to perceive certain specific frequencies and to gather those frequencies for the cell. Even this simple eye is wonderfully complex. Here, Mr. Dawkins, is your "primordial eye." Now please explain how it arose "by chance." Dawkins cannot do this, of course. His premise is sheer conjecture. Darwin, Mayr, Dawkins--the whole raft of Darwinists--have from time to time passed off nonsense and gibberish as true scientific understanding; and there has been no one to stop them. The quality control function belongs to philosophy, and philosophy, as indicated elsewhere, isn't at home. Where is it? It is the eleventh hour, Western Civilization. Do you know where your science of science is? More incompetence ...

89

The Ark
Scientists opposed to Darwinism are often as lacking in methodological competency as the pro-Darwinism scientists. Michael Denton is a case in point. In 1986, Denton, an Australian scientist, published Evolution: A Theory In Crisis. This book, a highly interesting critique, comes to the conclusion that Darwinism is "the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century." "One might have expected," Denton writes, "that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than a myth." [14] In practically the same breath, Denton remarks, "Darwinism remains.... the only truly scientific theory of evolution" ! Compounding the confusion, Denton writes, "It was the lack of any obvious scientific alternative which was its [Darwinism's] great attraction in the nineteenth century and has remained one of its enduring strengths ever since 1859. Reject Darwinism and there is, in effect, no scientific theory of evolution." [15] In fact, a "scientific alternative" was available--the Transformism of Lamarck. In fact, there was a Lamarckian school of thought in the last century, and this school of thought persists into our own time. It is only an illusion that there was and is no alternative to Darwinism, an illusion created and perpetrated by the Darwinists. Denton "bought into" the illusion. Further, from the point of view of methodology, it is not a "strength" of any particular theory that there is no alternative to the theory. A theory must stand on its own merits, not on an "absence" of other theories. For a long time, a principal "defense" of the Darwinists has been "Well, no one is offering a better idea." This is not a valid defense. As Macbeth indicates, "The proponents of a theory, in science or elsewhere, are obligated to support every link or chain of reasoning, whereas a critic or skeptic may peck at any aspect of the theory, testing it for flaws...." [16] Philosophy's failure, Weismann's success Philosophy has failed us. This is one important reason why classical Darwinism is still with us today. Another important reason is that classical Darwinism underwent, after the turn of the century, some major changes. It became "Neo-Darwinism." [17] It "evolved," so to speak, in the nick of time. Its rescuer was a scientist by the name of August Weismann. How it was that Weismann accomplished this remarkable rescue is one of the subjects of the next chapter.
References:
[1] Macbeth 4-5. [2] Barzun 87. See also Heard's The Five Ages of Man--The Psychology of Human History (New York: Julian Press, 1963). [3] Barzun 101.

90

The Ark
[4] Barzun 115. [5] Barzun 108. [6] Barzun 110. [7] Barzun 108. [8] Kropotkin 77-78. [9] Kropotkin 57. [10] Gaia--A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 [1979]) 9. [11] Lovelock 10. [12] Lovelock 152. [13] Dawkins 43. [14] Denton 358, [15] Denton 355. [16] Macbeth 5. [17] Ordinarily, Neo-Darwinism is not capitalized. I capitalize it so to suggest it is not simply a recrudescence of classical Darwinism. There are important differences between the two Darwinisms.

91

The Ark

Chapter 8 Neo-Darwinism
"I well remember how the synthetic theory [Neo-Darwinism] beguiled me with its unifying power when I was a graduate student in the mid-1960s. Since then I have been watching it slowly unravel as a universal description of evolution.... I have been reluctant to admit it ... but if [Ernst] Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as text-book orthodoxy." [1]

--Stephen Jay Gould

In our century, Darwinism has triumphed as an orthodoxy, as a "rallying point of innumerable scientific, philosophical, and social movements." Mr. Darwin became the oracle, as Barzun suggests, and the Origin of Species [became] the "fixed point with which Evolution moved the world." [2] This triumph occurred in spite of the fact that the central doctrine in Darwinism--Natural Selection--was understood to be lacking in scientific merit. "It is an ironic aftermath of the [classical] Darwinian era," writes Loren Eiseley, "that the two discovers and popularizers of the theory of natural selection should both have found the doctrine inadequate when applied to man. [Alfred] Wallace made the more spectacular rejection ..... Darwin, by contrast, escaped attention through a gift for being ambiguously inconspicuous. Yet it is plain that ... Lamarckism increasingly characterized his later years,...." [3] Weismann and "other grounds" Major adherents of Darwinism at the turn of the century were also well aware of the inadequacy of Natural Selection. For instance: German biologist August Weismann (1834-1914). Weismann, prime mover in the original establishment of Neo-Darwinism, was asked whether small random variations in nature are important enough to decide between the life and death of creatures. His response: "Even one who, like myself, has been for many years a convinced adherent of the theory of selection, can only reply: We assume so, but cannot prove it in any case. It is not upon demonstrative evidence that we champion the doctrine of selection as scientific truth; we base our arguments on quite other grounds." [4] What are these "other grounds"? Why did Weismann and other scientists become to-the-death defenders of a theory that they should have attacked as 92

The Ark
unscientific? Ignorance is ruled out. By his own confession, Weismann was fully aware of the inadequacy of Natural Selection as scientific doctrine. In England, the famous William Bateson and many others hurled a few epithets at Darwinism, but they did not succeed in generating a reformation in evolutionary theory, even though a reformation was clearly needed. "No one can survey the work of recent years," Bateson wrote, "without perceiving that evolutionary orthodoxy developed too fast and that a great deal has got to come down." [5] Barzun addressed the question of "what other grounds?" over fifty years ago and came up with the following possible explanation: "By substituting Natural Selection for Providence, the new science could solve a host of riddles arising in practical life, though by the same exchange the new science had to become a religion." [6] Barzun was on the right track. Beginning in the last century, the West's traditional theistic vision of life was replaced by a presumably "true science" vision, i.e. Darwinism. Darwinism was, from the start, more a fait h than a science, and many of its adherents, Weismann for instance, understood this. Classical Darwinism was the great weapon of the materialists against the Creationists, the "intelligent design" people. In its struggle against religion, science (evolutionary science) became religion. A new power priesthood emerges ... In contemporary languaging, what occurred in the last century was a major "paradigm shift," attended by a major power shift. The traditional Biblical paradigm was no longer convincing. Ever since the Enlightenment took hold in the mind of Western humanity, the power of the Church had waned steadily. Religion in the last century was not the authority (and tyrant) it had been. It had entered into a pacific old age. Western civilization was ready for a basal paradigm shift, and the apparent best candidate around for new paradigm was Darwinism. In actuality, the best candidate for a new paradigm was Transformism, but this theory was in effect destroyed by the ridicule of Cuvier and cohorts. Darwinism was not, as Barzun suggests, the great liberator or anything like that. The liberation of the Western mind from the dogma of the Church had already been accomplished. What the West was looking for was a new, trustworthy vision of existence. In other words, it was simply time for a new "Truth." "We do less than justice to the men of the nineteenth century who first did battle for evolution," Barzun writes, "if we think that it was altogether for secret or unconscious economic motives that they clung to Darwinism. A man like Huxley may have been tempted by his pugnacity and evangelical passion to overstate his conclusions, but he was neither stupid nor dishonest. He had the highest kind of courage, and Calvinistic desire to be chosen for the right reason, which for him was the possession of truth. 'Science and her methods,' he

93

The Ark
declared, 'gave me a resting place independent of authority and tradition.'" [7] Darwinism, for better and worse, happened to have become the chief representative of the scientific alternative to religious dogma. We can understand and appreciate the psychological and practical necessities motivating Huxley and peers, but at the same time, we cannot condone the Weismann compromise--the promulgation of a theory as scientific which is unsupported by evidence. Not only did Weismann promulgate a theory he knew to be inadequate (Darwinism), he attacked the Transformism of Lamarck by spurious means.

He Cut Off Their Tails ...


In the mythology of Scientism, the "final refutation" of Lamarck's claim that certain characteristics acquired by parents can be heritable (passed on to offspring) was accomplished by Weismann. August Weismann's supposed refutation involved cutting off the tails of many generations of mice. If Lamarck was correct, Weismann assumed, then the new generations would be born without tails. This experiment was based on the false presumption that the absence of tails is an acquired characteristic. When the offspring of tail-less parents continued to sport tails, Weismann took this as proof that acquired characteristics are not transmitted. Mice mutilation was unnecessary ... In 1935, the British social theorist F. William Inman made this remark regarding the famous Weismann experiments: "An interesting dispute in inheritance has been the bitter controversy as to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The experiment has even been tried of cutting off the tails of rats for many generations, in the the hope that they might ultimately breed without tails. This appears to be a little bit unnecessary, as it is well known that little Jew babies have had their foreskins removed when a week old for many thousands of generations without its having any effect on the covering or protective sheath...." [8] Weismann's Doctrine, the germ of Neo-Darwinism On the basis of his famous "farmer's wife" experiments, Weismann was able to establish as a foundation of the orthodoxy the so-called "Weismann's barrier," or "Weismann's doctrine." In the words of Francis Hitching, this doctrine maintains that "there are special reproductive cells which are responsible for passing on parental characteristics to the off-spring (known as germ cells, as distinct from somatic cells in the rest of our body--the soma). Germ cells become isolated, very early in the growth of the embryo, and remain unaffected by what happens in the rest of the body during the remainder of its life...." [9]

94

The Ark
From this doctrine derives the contemporary Neo-Darwinist doctrine "the primacy of DNA." To quote Hitching again: "Weismann saw in this [seeming imperviousness of germ cell to somatic changes] a 'central directing agency,' much as neo-Darwinists [today] see genes playing the same role; its primary job was to secure 'continuity of the germ-plasm.' The essence of the belief, updated by the geneticists, is that nothing can happen to DNA from without. It is irretrievably enclosed in a protective capsule, constantly emitting coded messages that instruct the organism how to act. Occasionally, a random mutation takes place, the message changes, and the organism acts accordingly. The organism can never answer back. Come heat, come cold, come rain, come sun, we are at the mercy of our genes." [10] An implication of this hermetic doctrine is that the environment has no influence on the genetics. Lamarck maintained that evolution is a function of interactivity between organism and environment. Primacy in the matter of organismic evolution would have to go to environment. Weismann closed the door on interactivity, and as a result, those who followed him had to conclude that all organismic expression originates in the genes. "DNA [became] not only the library and transmitter of information, but its sole author." [11] Random genetic mutation Darwinism, as developed by Weismann and other Neo-Darwinists, came to the conclusion that the source of evolutionary alteration is within the organism-random genetic mutation. [12] Regarding this conclusion, Professor Pierre-Paul Grasse, the eminent French biologist, wrote: "To attribute such a power to a single substance, however complicated and exceptional its molecular structure may be , is in my view aberrant." [13]

Interactivity
As an event, the Weismann compromise represents not simply a case of overzealousness, but the continuation of a fateful betrayal of the integrity of science that began with the Cuvier attack on Lamarck. The theory of Lamarck is basically correct. Evolution is a matter of interactivity between organism and environment. Behavior a product of IMP processing, not genes In the case of unicellular organisms, the mechanism of interactivity is the IMP network in the cellular membrane. Each IMP complex operates as a frequency receiver/transducer. The receptor component of the IMP complex detects and captures a particular frequency thing, and the effector component initiates the transduction of the target thing into biological behavior. The cell membrane may be likened to a radio receiver. Its IMP network is designed to

95

The Ark
"pick up" frequencies from the environment. The equivalent of the "broadcast station" is not in the cell, it in the environment. The Neo-Darwinist view that the DNA is origin of all biological expression simply ignores the fact that cellular membrane has a great deal to do with biological expression. "Direct influence of the environment on the genetic materials is impossible!" the orthodoxy declares. [14] And that's that. The Weismann Doctrine crumbles In the late 70s, the Weismann barrier began to crumble. The first attack came from three young scientists at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto --Ted Steele, an Australian, and two Brits, Reg Groczynski and Jeffrey Pollard. In their experiment, the three researchers used newly born mice. "Adopting a wellknown technique of immunology," Hitching writes, "young mice were 'persuaded' to tolerate foreign tissue antigens from another kind of mice. (Normally, as we know from transplant surgery, tissue from another body is rejected.) This tolerance was inherited by the offspring. [15] Steele and his colleagues injected a large quantity of foreign cells into a mouse's bloodstream soon after it was born, while "the immune system is not complete." The foreign cells were accepted as self-cells. This tolerance, Steele subsequently discovered, was passed on to subsequent generations "in just the numbers conventional Mendelian theory would expect--that is, roughly half the children, one quarter of the grand-children." [16] In the terms of biologist Bruce H. Lipton, there is a very short period of time after the the birth of a mammal in which "each and every cell in the organism is coded with receptors which distinguish cells that are 'self' from cells that are foreign." If chicken skin is grafted on a neonatal human who is still in the selfcoding process, the skin will be accepted as self. Steele and associates had discovered a "window of opportunity" through which acquired characteristics (foreign cells) proved to be heritable. If the window had been an avenue of opportunity, the refutation of the Weismann doctrine would have been very final. Today, the oppositional evidence is becoming formidable. In just the past few years, Lipton indicates, a number of research projects have demonstrated very specific mechanisms by which environmental signaling affects the genetic structure directly. [17] As it becomes increasingly obvious that primacy is in the environment and that physiological primacy is in the cellular membrane and not the DNA, the orthodoxy is casting about for new ways of defending the DNA primacy doctrine.

Origin of Neo-Darwinism By Means of Weismann


96

The Ark
At the beginning of our century, classical Darwinism had lost its luster in scientific circles. Where was the evidence for Natural Selection? There was none. Weismann knew. Others knew. Natural Selection was an assumption, nothing more than an hypothesis. "We are reasoning in a circle," Weismann writes, "not giving proofs, and no one who does not wish to believe in the selection value of the initial stages can be forced to do so." [19] The challenge of genetics At the same time, a challenge to classical Darwinism arose among the pioneers in genetics. De Vries, a Dutch biologist, asserted in 1901 that there were two kinds of variation--"the random variations previously observed by Darwin, and what he himself called 'mutations,' or sizeable divergences from the parent form...." [20] The work of Bateson (from 1894 and on) suggested that small random changes (viewed by Darwinists as a primary means of evolution) "did not accumulate through long ages and were in fact irrelevant to evolution." [21] In addition to these challenges to the orthodoxy came publication of the work of Gregor Mendel, a Moravian abbot who had completed in the mid-nineteenth century "some beautifully simple and clear experiments on the proportions in which the characters of the common or garden pea are inherited upon crossing." [22] Biology was ceasing to be interested in unprovable hypotheses and turning its attention to the microscopic world, where "invisible determinants did the work of evolution prenatally." [23] For the most part, the pioneers of genetics did not view themselves as elaborating upon Darwinism in any sense. If anything, they tended to see themselves as establishing a basis for a more scientific theory of evolution. The doctrines of Darwinism seemed to crumble, almost visibly. Take, for instance, the idea that evolution is a very slow, minute step by step process. "Do the new lights on heredity and variation," asked Bateson, "make the process of Evolution easier to understand? On the whole they do,.... An Evolution by definite steps is more, rather than less easy to imagine that one proceeding by the accumulation of indefinite and insensible steps." [24] Weismannism ... the struggle is microscopic Early critics of Darwin, especially Samuel Butler, received apologies, Barzun indicates, and "biographies of Lamarck took on a eulogistic tone." [25] Once again, as in the previous century, the forces of reaction moved into action.... with the result that classical Darwinism and the new genetics were combined into a new theory of evolution,--Neo-Darwinism. The father of Neo-Darwinism is August Weismann.

97

The Ark
Underlying Neo-Darwinism is the ingenious thesis of August Weismann that even though a proof of Darwinism cannot be found in the visible world, there is a proof, and that proof can be found in the microscopic world. The Struggle is taken to absurdity by Dawkins The classical Darwinian idea that variation is the result of "the struggle of existence" is replaced by the idea that variation comes from a kind of microscopic struggle. In 1976, this idea was taken into the land of total absurdity by Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene. According to Dawkins, writes Niles Eldredge , "there are in life but two kind of entities: replicators and vehicles .... Genes are replicators, but they can't exist and operate on their own. Genes need a vehicle--an organism--to house and nourish them and to facilitate their replicative functions. It isn't organisms (the mere vehicles) that are competing for reproductive success, but the genes themselves. Organisms as vehicles are simply the unwitting dupes of their genic [genetic] components." [26] In Dawkins' own immortal words: "Survival machines [bodies] began as passive receptacles for the genes, providing little more than walls to protect them from the chemical warfare of their rivals and the ravages of accidental molecular bombardment.... Both animals and plants evolved into many-celled bodies, complete copies of all the genes being distributed to every cell. We do not know when, why, or how many times independently, this happened.... The genes too control the behaviour of their survival machines, not directly with their fingers on puppet strings, but indirectly like the computer programmer. All they can do is to set it up beforehand, then the survival machine is on its own, and the genes can only sit passively inside. Why are they so passive? Why don't they grab the reins and take charge from moment to moment? The answer is that they cannot because of time-lag problems...." [27] Enough? Natural selection gets help from scientific selection What happens to Natural Selection? Natural Selection is reaffirmed by the neo-orthodoxy, but reaffirmed as a means of evolution that no longer operates "in the clear." Religions and various other "civilized" institutions have interfered with the natural course of evolution, and thus it is necessary for a responsible elite to take up the burden of ensuring the continuance of evolutionary progress--through scientific government and through genetic engineering. Under the current orthodoxy, Natural Selection is regarded simply as a longago reality, and "scientific selection" is viewed as humankind's best hope for the future.

The Synthesis

98

The Ark

The work begun by Weismann, of synthesizing classical Darwinism and modern genetics, was completed in 1947 at a conference held at Princeton University, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Evolution, which was founded in 1946. In the words of Niles Eldredge: "A milestone conference was held at Princeton in 1947, during which geneticists, paleontologists, systematists, and other biologists got together and agreed, in effect, that the Neo-Darwinian paradigm was both necessary and, in the main, sufficient to explain evolution...." [28] The doctrines of Neo-Darwinism What are the main doctrines of this paradigm that is both "necessary" and "sufficient" to explain evolution? [1] The doctrine of natural causation. Historically, Darwinism emerged as the polar opposite of Creationism, which is based on the fundamental faith that the creation is the product of intelligent design. Neo-Darwinism, like its predecessor orthodoxy, maintains that intelligent design is not involved in the creation. Rather, there is a "natural" explanation for everything in the creation. By "natural causes," Neo-Darwinists usually mean either materials or processes observable in nature. [2] The doctrine of gradualism. Like their predecessors, Neo-Darwinists maintain that evolution is a long, long gradual process. The one source of biological novelty, they assert, is genetic mutation. Gradualism originated as an extension of Lyell's uniformitarianism. Lyell presumed, as indicated earlier, that Earth's geological processes have always proceeded at a more or less uniform rate. This concept was "eagerly adopted by Darwin, who needed slow and steady environmental changes for natural selection to work in finely graduated steps; and with the triumph of Darwin's book, this aspect of uniformitarianism became accepted too." [29] [3] The doctrine of Natural Selection. Neo-Darwinism maintains, like classical Darwinism, that Natural Selection is the sole ordering principle in nature. Genetic mutation proposes, Natural Selection disposes. [4] The doctrine of the primacy of DNA. This doctrine maintains, as indicated earlier, that DNA is the exclusive source of all biological expression, including consciousness. [5] The doctrine of scientific selection. Though seldom discussed in the scientific literature, the idea that the engineering of the future should be entrusted only to qualified scientists is such a commonplace among the NeoDarwinists and their allies in behavioral psychology and elsewhere, it merits the status of "doctrine."

99

The Ark
In the words (circa 1935) of F. William Inman, Social Darwinist: "It is not as yet practicable politics, but we might suggest that the only way to stop wars is to have the government of the whole world carried on by scientific experts. These would limit the population by deliberately weeding out all the unfit and inferior; so that what has now to be done by the comparatively clumsy and crude methods of nature would be done more efficiently by man's own foresight...." [30] In the words (circa 1972) of behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner: We face "terrifying problems" these days, but fortunately "our culture has produced the science and technology it needs to save itself.... The geneticist who changes the characteristics of a species by selectively breeding or by changing genes may seem to be meddling in biological evolution, but he does so because his species has evolved to the point at which it has been able to develop a science of genetics and a culture which induces its members to take the future of the species into account." [31] How many of the doctrines have scientific merit? Curiously, not one of the above doctrines has scientific merit. The doctrine of natural causation is a form of materialism. All forms of materialism, scientific or philosophical, were rendered obsolete by the New Physics and derivative philosophy of science. Today, no theory based solely on material causation (the primacy of DNA doctrine, for instance) can be considered scientifically valid. The doctrine of gradualism ("Nature does not take leaps") does not find supporting evidence in the Fossil Record. If the doctrine was correct, the Record would show numerous intermediate forms between parental species and offspring species. "The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, must be truly enormous," Darwin himself writes. "Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." [32] Darwin conjectured that future research, using technologies far more advanced than those of his time, would provide an evidential basis for his gradualism hypothesis. This did not occur. Indeed, most of the evidence presented by modern paleontology is evidence to the contrary. The most glaring refutation of gradualism is the sudden appearance of multicellular life forms in the Cambrian period. "After 3,000 million years in which nothing more complicated than bacteria and slime lived upon our world, came the dawn of life," Hitching writes. Billions upon billions of fossils have been

100

The Ark
found, showing a marine life that suddenly became rich and abundant ...." Although there are many places on Earth, Hitching adds, where "5,000 feet of sedimentary rock stretch unbroken and uniformly beneath the Cambrian, not a single indisputable multi-celled fossil has been found there...." [33] The doctrine of Natural Selection has no more scientific merit today than it did a hundred years ago, when it was all but abandoned as worthless. On its face, Natural Selection is a nebulous, empty generalization. It persisted not because of its scientific value, but because it was needed as a counter-concept, a foil to the Judeo-Christian hypothesis of Divine Selection as the principal source of order in existence. To the unthinking, Natural Selection has a certain plausibility, particularly when defined in terms of "survival of the fittest." (As indicated previously, Darwin came to prefer Spencer's "survival of the fittest" phrase to his own Natural Selection.) The plausibility stems from the fact that "Natural Selection" is a version, a distorted version, of the commonplace principle of "natural elimination" of the weakest. Every schoolkid knows that the weakest animals in a group are those most likely to be killed by predators. If Darwin had titled his masterwork On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Elimination of the Weakest, could he have won high reputability in the world or science, or the world at large? No, of course not. He would have been a laughingstock. Elimination of the weakest is an important mechanism in the scheme of things, a mechanism of import, but clearly it is not in the category of Prime Mover causative principle. "Natural Selection," however, has a kind of Prime Mover ring to it. The primacy of DNA doctrine. If the genes were in fact the origin of all biological expression, then we would expect that the removal of the same would cause the death of the cell. However, when cells are enucleated (have their nuclei, including genetic material, removed), they continue to live and operate normally--until they simply cannot get along without new parts. It is the function of the the genes to provide blueprints for new parts. In contrast, if the receptors (frequency receivers called "IMPs") in the cellular membrane are cut, then the cell goes comatose. If these receptors are not replaced by visceral processes, the cell dies. What this indicates it that physiological primacy is in the cell membrane, not the genes. The doctrine of scientific selection. The widespread and wholehearted cooperation of numerous German scientists, medicos and psyches, with Hitler and his "race purification" programs should have alerted us all to the fact that in our time, the Dr. Schweitzers are far outnumbered by the Dr. Frankensteins. If scientists and life sciences professionals are operating on the basis of a pseudo-

101

The Ark
scientific evolutionary theory such as Neo-Darwinism, can we really credit them with much intelligence? Lorenzo's Oil In sum, none of the doctrines of Neo-Darwinism have scientific merit. Our orthodoxy in biology is a fraud. If you still feel that there must be some truth to the (Neo-Darwinist) view that people in lab coats are the best hope of the world, I suggest you view a film titled "Lorenzo's Oil." So ... the next question that presents itself is, Why is Neo-Darwinism our current orthodoxy biology and evolutionary science?

References:
[1] "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?" Palaeobiology, 6.1 (1980) 119-30. [2] Barzun 69. [3] Darwin's Century--Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,1961), 309. [4] Barzun 68. [5] Barzun 69. [6] Barzun 63. [7] Ibid. [8] Biological Politics 113. [9] The Neck of the Giraffe--Darwin, Evolution, and the New Biology (New York: Meridian, 1982) p. 55 [10] Ibid. [11] Ibid. [12] Ibid. [13] Ibid. [14] Mayr 6 [15] Hitching 123

102

The Ark
[16] Ibid. [17] The Sky Londa Briefing--Interviews with a Cell Biologist, unpublished manuscript of interviews conducted by author with Dr. Bruce H. Lipton between January and August 1994. [18] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Scribners, 1994). [19] Barzun 116. [20] Ibid. [21] Barzun 117. [22] Ibid. [23] Ibid. [24] Barzun 118. [25] Ibid. [26] Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwinism--The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996) 39. [27] The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1976[, 49-56. [28] Eldredge 28. [29] Hitching 129-31. [30] Inman, 61-62. [31] Beyond Freedom & Dignity (New York: Bantam, 1972 [1971]), 80. [32] Hitching 3. [33] Hitching 15.

103

The Ark

Chapter 9 Triumph of Materialism


"The spread of [Darwinian] evolution was truly world-wide. The Origin of Species was translated into the language of the 'newly awakened' Japan and that of hardly emancipated Hindustan. The scientists won on vaccination and vivisection, Bible teaching and table rapping. By won, I mean that opposition to their views on all these things put one in a minority even in the opinion of the ignorant. Materialism, conscious or implicit, superseded all other beliefs." [1]

--Jacques Barzun

"Materialism," in our present context, may be defined as a theory that the primary cause or causes of life are material. Materialism would thus be the opposite of "super-materialism," or supernaturalism, or "idealism." Idealism is the theory that the first cause is "idea," or thought. After the New Physics and derivative philosophy, neither materialism nor idealism can be considered a valid basis for biology. David Bohm and other New Physicists now speak of existence as an interplay of "explicate order," the explicate or perceptible realm, and "implicate order" the formative realm. It is remarkable indeed that today, the field of biology is still based upon nineteenth century materialism, and not upon holistic philosophy and physics. That Darwinism exists today as our orthodox evolutionary theory, we must conclude, has little to do with its scientific validity, and much to do with other factors. Especially important is the fact that Darwinism, having replaced the Biblical view of existence, now stands in the Bible's place, as The Authority on the subject of existence. This particular "vision of life" has, in other words, enormous paradigmatic importance. The strength of Darwinism cultural, not scientific Underlying every civilization, as we have discussed, is a picture of life, a generally agreed upon vision of "what life is all about." This vision is the civilization's basal paradigm. The triumph of Darwinism in the last century was not a triumph of science over superstition, but a triumph of materialistic philosophy over both the traditional Judeo-Christian paradigm and over true science (Lamarckism). The fact that Darwinism established itself at the level of basal paradigm is a primary reason why it has been so "unassailable" in this century.

104

The Ark
Indeed, in 1976, more than fifty years after the dawn of New Physics, Ernst Mayr could claim that Darwinism had triumphed absolutely. "Among specialists," Mayr writes, "almost complete agreement has been reached in recent decades. Whether they are botanists or geologists, paleontologists or geneticists, all.... interpret the results of the evolutionary process in the same [Darwinian] manner...." [2] This is the equivalent of the Pope claiming, some fifty years after the establishment of Newtonian physics, that the Roman Church had become the universally recognized authority on the subject of physical existence. Today, nearly eighty years after the dawn of New Physics, our biology and derived sciences (orthodox medicine, for instance) are still materialistic. For this and other reasons, it is necessary that we reconstruct the history of modern materialism. We need to understand better its origins and evolution in the history of modern science and civilization.

Tyrannic Theology
There was a time when the Roman Catholic Church was a great tyrant. The founders of this Church sifted through the records of early Christians and from these records compiled what they regarded as the one and only true account of existence, of the origin and history of life on Earth, of God's plan for humankind. This compilation was called the "Holy Bible." A principal way by which the Church "proved" that its doctrines (beliefs that are regarded as laws) represented "the one and only true account of existence" was by subverting and destroying oppositional points of view. The first targets of this policy were the "Gnostic" Christians, followers of Christ who claimed to be able to "know" God and God's will directly, without the need for the intercession of a church hierarchy. Attack on Gnostic Christianity Many present-day critics of early Gnostic Christianity charge that it was a form of "paganism," i.e. it hearkened back to the polytheistic basal paradigm that was replaced by Judeo-Christian Monotheism. Among modern writers, the brilliant, eclectic Manly P. Hall was instrumental in reinforcing the paganism charge. "The entire history of Christian and pagan Gnosticism is shrouded in the deepest mystery and obscurity," Hall writes in 1928, "for, while the Gnostics were undoubtedly prolific writers, little of their literature has survived. They brought down upon themselves the animosity of the early Christian Church, and when this institution reached its position of world power it destroyed all available records of the Gnostic cultus." "The name Gnostic means wisdom, or knowledge," Hall writes, " and it derived from the Greek Gnosis. The members of the order claimed to be familiar with the secret doctrines of early Christianity. They interpreted the Christian

105

The Ark
mysteries according to pagan symbolism. Their secret information and philosophic tenets they concealed from the profane and taught to a small group only of especially initiated persons." [3] More current scholarship focuses not an remnant symbolism, but on key doctrinal differences between Gnostic and Catholic Christianity. [See The Gnostic Gospels , and Holy Blood, Holy Grail ] The definition of Gnosticism used in this book stems from the truism that there are two basic ways of knowing something--directly, or indirectly. The Catholic Church was established upon the doctrines of apostolic succession and papal infallibility, i.e., God can be approached only by indirect means,--via the Church. Gnosticism postulates that God may be approached directly. A good basis for such a position may be found in any number of Christ's teachings, such as "The kingdom of Heaven is within," or "I am the way" (as opposed to "The Church is the way"). Clearly, such an position could not be tolerated by an organized church dedicated to the proposition that it was the one and only official interpreter of the one and only son of God. Early Catholic Church leaders did their best to exterminate Christian Gnostics and Gnosticism. Gnosticism resurfaces ... In that the Gnostic position has validity, at least as much validit y as the orthodox position, it was never really destroyed. Rather, it surfaced time and again, in a variety of philosophies, including radical Protestantism, Cartesian science (based on the famous dictum "I think, therefore I am"), Deism (which held that Nature is the living word of God), and in our own time, "channeling." The channeling phenomenon is based on the belief it is possible for the individual to know ultimate realities directly--through the process of "tuning in" to entities in the higher ranges of consciousness. The Holy Bible, beginning of the modern West In any event, modern Western civilization begins with the establishment of Roman Catholicism as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The doctrines of the Church were as important to its authority as the legions of the Emperor were important to secular rule. These doctrines constituted a basal paradigm, a widely promulgated and accepted vision of existence. Let us consider existence to be a "system." Any system has four major components--an input, a process, an output, and memory. In the Biblical basal paradigm, the input is God the Source, the output is personal salvation and the salvation of humankind; the process by which salvation is accomplished is "faith" in the Word of God as expressed in the doctrines of the Church. The

106

The Ark
memory of the system (the knowledge of the entire system) is encoded in the Holy Bible. God's Law enforcement officers The leaders of the Catholic Church regarded themselves as the "keepers" of the sacred basal paradigm; their mission, they believed, was to "entrain" the entire world to their point of view. All those who had "other points of view," other understandings of existence, were current or potential enemies of the paradigm, which is to say, enemies of God. For early Church leaders, to slay the enemies of God was no crime; it was simply "purification" of the world, the work of building God's temple. In the contemporary period, the Catholic Church has been, in many ways, a progressive, enlightening influence. Prior to the contemporary period, however, the Church was a tyrant. It regarded itself as the possessor of the absolute truth of existence, and it was adamant in its insistence that all the world believe the truth of the Catholics. The infamous Inquisition, a tribunal for the discovery and punishment of heresy, lasted six hundred years. Among those who were "corrected" by the Inquisition was Galileo. The eminent Galileo was brought before the Inquisition and forced to recant his view that the Earth revolves around the sun. In the Catholic view, it was the sun that revolves around the Earth. The inflexibility of the Church in the case of Galileo did much to destroy its authority among thinking Westerners. Protestant revolt and reformation In response to Church tyranny, Martin Luther and others precipitated the Protestant Reformation, which dates officially from 1529. By that time, the Roman Church had been at war against anti-Church dissidents in Europe for over a hundred years. What the Protestants protested was the claim of the Roman Church that it was the one and only legitimate representative of God. The revolt did not challenge the basal paradigm. Catholics and Protestants worshipped the same God. For both factions, God the Father was not only the creator of the physical universe, He was the day-to-day regulator of the universe. "His eye is upon the sparrow." Both factions accepted the Bible as the definitive Word of God.

The Challenge of Science & Scientism


The Biblical paradigm itself did not face serious challenge until modern science was invented in the middle of the seventeenth century. On a pleasant spring day circa 1633 , French philosopher Rene Descartes was taking a stroll in

107

The Ark
the marvelous Royal Gardens at Versailles. The Royal Gardens were the Disneyland of the Middle Ages, famous for their ingenious machines. One might step on a certain stone, for instance, and mechanical nymphs would begin to play in a nearby fountain--and a giant Neptune, complete with trident, might advance menacingly. [4] These mechanisms gave Descartes a bright idea. It occurred to him that the universe is an immense organic machine, a machine that may not require the constant governance of the Almighty. The universe as machine, and the laws of Nature This intuition was quite a radical one. If the universe was, as Descartes believed, an immense self-regulating machine, then it was conceivable that the creator of the machine might perhaps have lost interest in His creation and gone off on some other business. Equally radical was an idea that sprang from the concept of universe-asmachine: The best way to find out all about the laws of existence is to study the machine. The universe is a machine; machines operate on mechanical principles; define those principles and you have true, scientific insight into the workings of life. The doctrines of the Church faced a serious challenge: The laws of nature. Modern "materialism" originates with the Cartesian view of the world as machine. ("Mechanicalism" was an awkward term for the Cartesian view. Materialism came to be the preferred label.) Important to note, Cartesian materialism does not maintain that "only objective realities are real," which is the position of nineteenth and twentieth century reductive materialism. Descartes was well aware that the basis of what we regard as reality is subjective--"I think, therefore I am." Descartes would have no problem with the New Physics understanding that "subjective" and "objective" realities are inextricably interwoven. The Laws of Newton ... Descartes discovered that the world is a machine; the great Isaac Newton (1642-1727) discovered the laws (some of the laws) by which the machine works. Sir Isaac established the science of mechanisms, appropriately called "Mechanics." Mechanics was the foundation of "Natural Philosophy." Natural Philosophy, in time, was sub-divided into three sciences--mechanics (later known as physics), chemistry, and biology. Physics is the master science, as it provides an understanding of the basic laws of the universe. Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) is often considered the most important scientific work ever written.

108

The Ark
The Principia Mathematica is the foundation of "classical physics," and of modern science. In this work, Newton formulated three laws of motion: The first law articulates the principle of inertia (a body at rest tends to remain at rest and a body in motion remains in motion at a constant velocity unless affected by outside forces); the second law defines a force in terms of mass and acceleration; and the third states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Elaboration upon the basic laws eventuated in the "law of universal gravitation," which enabled Newton to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. In the words of Isaac Asimov, "The Principia Mathematica developed an overall scheme of the universe, one far more elegant and enlightening than any the ancients had devised. And the Newton scheme was based on a set of assumptions, so few and so simple, developed through so clear and so enticing a line of mathematics that ... [it] excited awe and admiration among Europe's scholars...." Impressive though he was as scientist, Newton was even more impressive a cultural phenomenon. He became something like science's equivalent of the great law-giver Moses. He was respected in his lifetime as no scientist before him, and no scientist after him, except Albert Einstein. "Nature and Nature's laws lay his night," Alexander Pope wrote, "God said, Let Newton be! and all was light." Monarch of mind In 1703, Newton was elected president of the Royal Society, a position that he held until the time of his death (1727). In 1705, he was knighted. As a scientific genius who happened to be the head of the most prestigious scientific institution in the world, Sir Isaac had an unparalleled opportunity to influence what we might call the "world mind," the world's vision of life and the meaning of life. Newton had many loves, many passions, but only one real hatred. He hated the Catholic Church. What he detested most in the Church was its arrogant insistence that it had a monopoly on truth. What was the basis of this "Truth?"-nothing but conjectures, opinions without proof. In contradistinction, Newton declared "Hypotheses non fingo"--"I do not make hypotheses." How does Newton define "hypothesis"? The following appears in the General Scholium to Principia, 2nd edition (1713): "Whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy." By so saying, Isaac Newton disqualified most, if not all, theology from "experimental philosophy."

109

The Ark
In Philosophical Transactions 29 (1714-15), Newton elaborates in these terms: "We are not to fill this Philosophy with Opinions which cannot be proved by Phenomena. In this Philosophy Hypotheses have no place, unless as Conjectures or Questions proposed to be examined by Experiments." Certainly, Newton was saying something that needed to be said at the time: Hypotheses not based on phenomenal evidence (i.e., evidence known through the senses, or testable evidence) have no place in science, what he termed "experimental philosophy." In the context of paradigm shift, the Newtonian "non fingo" dictum was of immense importance, as it drew the line clearly between the realms of religio n and science. It was, in effect, the first step in what became in later times a sharp division of the world of thought. Religion inherited the kingdom of metaphysics, and science staked its claims on terra firma and nothing but--the material world. Reductive materialism Newtonian physics and scientific methodology established themselves quickly as the foundation of modern science. When the teacher is gone, the disciples have their way with the teachings. After Newton, the "scientific materialism" of the master became, in the hands and heads of the disciples, more and more reductive, which is to say, exclusionary. Given the materialistic bias of physics and scientific methodology in the nineteenth century, it is not at all surprising that the biology which proved most convincing, most acceptable to scientists of that time, was Darwinian materialism. Species come from other species by mechanical means. Darwin himself nodded occasionally to the "Creator," as the original Source, but his followers did not follow him in this deference. Darwinism quickly acquired the reputation of being a refutation of the God concept. Darwinists find God-substitute in the genes Having convinced itself of the "primacy of material causation" (let us call it), Darwinian biology felt obligated to come up with some sort of proof. What was the final "scientific" answer to the Genesis myth?--and the other primacy of God folklore? What physical items could science offer as the real "genesis factors" underlying the creation? The answer to emerge ultimately was "the genes." In the early and midnineteenth century, scientists had no inkling of the existence of genes. The discovery of the specific physical mechanism of reproduction had to wait upon the refinement of the microscope. The first description of the chromosomal details of mitosis (the cellular formation of new nuclei) dates from 1876. he first laws of heredity, including "Mendel's Laws," were set forth in 1900.

110

The Ark
In 1911, T.H. Morgan was able to postulate that the heredity factors, which he named "genes," were located in the chromosomes in linear order--"like beads on a string." Genes means, literally, "genesis factors." The DNA is Darwinism's final answer to the God hypothesis. What of God? "The God concept is nothing but anthropomorphic mythology," according to the Darwinists. "There is a simple, material explanation for life on Earth.... DNA." Darwinists mistake DNA for brain After the breaking of the genetic code in the 1950s, the DNA became more and more an "explain-all." Among the orthodox the consensus arose that the nucleus and its genetic materials are the "brain" of the cell. On the basis of this (incorrect) hypothesis, the orthodoxy concluded that organismal behavior of all kinds is an expression of the genetics, is encoded in the genes. This conclusion came to include "consciousness." Is there a possibility that environmental signaling of some kind might be influential in causation of behavior? "Absolutely not," the orthodox responded. "A direct influence of the environment on the genetic material is impossible," writes Professor Ernst Mayr. "The way from the DNA (via the RNA) to the proteins is a one-way street." [5] In fact, the role of the genes is not to originate behavior, but to provide molecular blueprints for items that are "requested" by the environment. To use a metaphor of Bruce Lipton, the nucleus represents a jukebox, with the genes being the records, the musical selections. The records do not create their own play list, do not play themselves spontaneously. What pushes the buttons? What creates the play list? The environment. Brain is in membrane In the words of Bruce Lipton: "Contrary to the established view that behavior is encoded in the genes ... cellular, and ultimately organismal, awareness in structurally and functionally mediated by the cell membrane, the molecular boundary enveloping every biological cell. The cell membrane, the only organelle common to all life forms, creates a selectively permeable barrier that envelops the cytoplasm and divides the domains of self and non-self, and consequently, [the membrane] is in a position to interface communications between the cytoplasm and extracellular milieu." [6]

The money's in the genes Today, the genetics and genetic engineering industries are based upon the orthodox "Primacy of the DNA" doctrine. The major project now underway is the so-called "mapping of the genome." The presumption is that this mapping

111

The Ark
will be of enormous value in the near future, in helping science rid the world of defective behavior through the correction or the elimination of defective genes. [Editor Note: It is interesting to note that in Sumerian terms, the word sinner meant one who was defective.] And Darwinism goes marching on ... As Jacques Barzun indicates, the Darwinian theory proved so persuasive, it took the world by storm. "The Origin of Species was translated into the language of the 'newly awakened' Japan and that of hardly emancipated Hindustan. The scientists won on vaccination and vivisection, Bible teaching and table rapping. By won, I mean that opposition to their views on all these things put one in a minority even in the opinion of the ignorant. Materialism, conscious or implicit, superseded all other beliefs." Darwinism and its successor Neo-Darwinism are expressions of reductive materialism. With the advent of the New Physics in the early decades of this century, materialistic science became obsolete--as science. We are now at the threshold of the twenty-first century, and the Darwinisms are still with us!--as our orthodox biology. Why? Let's look at the subject....

The Politics of Evolutionary Science


It was suggested earlier that Darwinism became the gospel of the West's modern religion, "Scientism." Scientism, or science as religion, replaced the Biblical vision of existence at the level of basal paradigm. Scientism became the new supreme authority on life. Naturally, August Weismann and others who played significant roles in the new "high command" were not willing to discard a key doctrine such as Natural Selection for the unimportant reason that it lacks scientific merit. Scientism could not have emerged as the West's major religion without the support of the powers-that-were. Monarches and their ministers in the last century understood that the traditional justification for monarchy, the doctrine of "divine right," was no longer convincing. Indeed, the entire basis of the Old World Order was beginning to look very questionable....

To briefly recapitulate ... The traditional basis for modern Western civilization was, as discussed previously, Judeo-Christian Monotheism. As a basal paradigm, monotheism "recommended" theocratic monarchy as the preferred form of government. As above, so below. One God above, one king below. How does God regulate the

112

The Ark
monarch? Through a theo-cratic (God-ruling) mechanism known as the Church. God inspires the churchmen, and the churchmen advise the king. If there are "any questions," these may be resolved through reference to God's guidebook for man--the Holy Bible. The above paragraph describes what we refer to generally as the "Old World Order." Any threat to the authority of Bible and Church was a threat to the Old World Order, and those holding power positions in the Order were devoted, naturally, to the protection of their interests. The hated Inquisition and other institutions of religious suppression operated in Europe for hundreds of years. They could not have done so without the sanction of the kings and queens and without the blessings of the clergy and nobility. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, two very serious challenges to the Old World Order arose. One was science, which is based on the idea that truth is be found through direct observation and to be verified through objective experimentation. Who do you prefer to trust where the question of (say) the center of the solar system is concerned? Do you trust the clergy and their Bible?--or do you trust Galileo and his telescope? Cartesianism held that the world was a gigantic machine. It was not just a stage on which moral dramas were played out, but a fabulous mechanism, a super-version of the Royal Gardens at Versailles. The eyes of Western Humanity began to turn away from the Bible and the pulpit and the stained-glass cross ... and toward nature. The second great challenge to the Old World Order Along with challenge to the are based on the that compilation modern science "natural theology" arose--the second great traditional order. "Deism" and other forms of natural theology idea that the Word of God is to be found in nature rather than in of ancient testimonies we call the Holy Bible.

With the American Revolution, Deism became a very active threat to the Old World Order. When Thomas Jefferson argued that the Colonies must seek independence, he justified his position by appealing to "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God." "Nature's God" is not the Biblical God. Egalitarian republicanism ... "Natural law is Divine law" The Americans succeeded, and following their revolution, they outlawed one of the favorite institutions of the Old World Order--aristocracy. Indeed, on the basis of Deism in America, there arose the first New World Order ... egalitarian [all are equal] republicanism. The simple basis of the new order is the

113

The Ark
conviction that the word and will of God are to be found not in the pages of a manmade book, but in the creation itself--Nature. The revolutionaries in America were fortunate in those early days of the beginning of a new basal paradigm and new world order. When the French attempted a revolution of the same sort, they were defeated by coalitions of monarchists and by self-sabotage--by handing over sovereignty to Napoleon. The first New World Order If the Old World Order had had a battle cry, it would have been "Deism must be destroyed!" Under the Biblical paradigm, the flow of power (sovereignty) is from God the Source (the ultimate sovereign) to the king (the temporal sovereign), to the nobility, who are appointed by the king. Overseer of this transfer-of-power system is the Church. The Deistic vision of existence completely cuts royalty, aristocracy and clergy from the power flow. In the Deistic vision, the power flow is from God to Nature, the "Living Scriptures." Who is next in line? Those who are closest to Nature--common people. Science and Deism came together in the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. The evolutionary theory of Lamarck supports the Deistic vision of existence as an egalitarian affair, rather than the Biblical vision of life as hierarchical order. The first New World Order is egalitarian rather than elitist. The Old Order reacts ... Are we beginning to get the picture? Deism and science (as represented by Lamarck) were simply not acceptable to those who ruled Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was not possible for the elites of Europe to defeat the new "visions of existence" that were emerging so powerfully in the West. The only practical recourse these rulers had was to "own," to control, the new forces as much as possible. The Transformism of Lamarck was not just the first theory of evolution, it was the first scientific basis for a new holistic basal paradigm. Another such basis would not emerge until the New Physics was born in the first decades of the twentieth century. Transformism was genuinely revolutionary. Had the French succeeded in their revolution, Transformism would be heralded today as the first of the New Sciences. Instead, Transformism fell (like the revolutionaries in France) before the onslaught of the reactionaries--the forces of the old paradigm. Reactionaries "take over" science What the reactionaries of Europe in the early nineteenth century needed was a science that saw nature not as "the living word of God," but as a dark and 114

The Ark
frightful thing--a menacing reality that would cause the common people to cry out for protection. As we all know, political elites happen to be in the protection business. Classical Darwinism was the means by which the old paradigm elitists of the middle nineteenth century "took over" science. Darwinism was, and is, a reactionary pseudo-science. Its most basic premise is that there is no moral guidance force called "God," that there is nothing in fact to warrant the idea that life has any kind of purpose--divine or otherwise--whatsoever. Life is dark and brutal struggle, struggle without meaning. Biological organisms emerge out of haphazard processes, and whether they live or die is determined by haphazard Natural Selection. The reactionary New World Order For well over a hundred years, this dark vision of existence has been recognized as the "official, scientific truth." It is incorrect scientifically, but it is very correct politically. Indeed, the Darwinisms lie at the very basis of what is called these days the "New World Order." The New World Order of our century is, of course, a reactionary order. The original, progressive New World Order recommends egalitarian republicanism as the most appropriate form of government. The reactionary New World Order recommends state socialism as the necessary form of government. If life is a madhouse, then it follows that strong, authoritarian government is an absolute must. The triumph of reductive materialism in the last century, i.e. Darwinism, prepared the way for for the great plague of the twentieth century ... state socialism.

References:
[1] Barzun 65. [2] Mayr 9. [3] An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Quabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, Fifth Edition (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1928) 25. [4] Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters--An Overview of the New Physics (New York: Bantam, 1980 [1979]) 22.

115

The Ark
[5] Mayr 11. The full quotation: "A direct influence of the environment on the genetic material is impossible, an influence postulated by the majority of the Lamarckians. The wa y from the DNA (via the RNA) to the proteins is a one-way street. The environment can influence the developmental process but it cannot affect the blueprint that controls it. Changes in the proteins cannot be translated back into nucleic acids." [6] Bruce H. Lipton, The Biology of Consciousness--An Introduction to Fractal Evolution, book draft, July 1993.

116

The Ark

Chapter 10 Neo-Gradualism
"If we join Darwin in assuming that macro changes must have accomplished in small steps, so that the gaps were at one time filled, then what has happened to all the intermediate forms? This question occurred to Darwin, and he furnished the answers that are still in use today--the extreme imperfection of the geological record and the poorness of our paleontological collections...." [1]

--Norman Macbeth

In The Blind Watchmaker, a contemporary exposition and defense of Darwinian gradualism, Richard Dawkins writes: "We have seen that living things are too improbably and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence? The answer, Darwin's answer, is by gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have into existence by chance...." [2] In fact, it was not Darwin's position that there were primordial entities that came into existence by chance. Darwin acknowledged the "Creator" as responsible for the primordials. The idea that Darwin personally repudiated the Creator concept is Neo-Darwinian revisionism. Dawkins is a Neo-Darwinist, and the view he attributes to Darwin is in fact his own. It is Dawkins who presumes that the primordial organisms came into existence by chance. This presumption of chance origin is sheer conjecture. It has no basis in fact whatsoever. Further, even the earliest organisms to emerge on Earth--prokaryotic cells--are far from "simple." On the "basis" of his invalid premise, Dawkins goes on to postulate a long chain of chance organismal alterations following upon the first chance event: "Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance." Again, the postulate is invalid. It is an example of "begging the question." It assumes that which is to be proved. "The whole sequence of cumulative steps," Professor Dawkins continues, "constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original starting point." This is an abstract re-presentation of the old idea that if given enough time, a basement full of

117

The Ark
monkeys pecking away randomly at typewriters could come up with the Origin of Species ... or was it "Romeo and Juliet"? There is a principle of order, after all, Dawkins concludes, and this principle is "nonrandom survival." "Nonrandom survival" is mere chop-logic. Rando m alteration + random alteration + random alteration and so on = nonrandom survival. While Dawkins cavorts with such phony rationalizations, the orthodox doctrine regarding order in naure remains plainly reductive: Order in nature is the product of Natural Selection working upon variations. Nothing can be more apparent than Neo-Darwinist gradualism, as set forth by Dawkins, is a fabrication of fallacies. How is it possible, we may wonder, that this sort of pseudo-science continues, year after year, as our orthodoxy in biology and evolutionary science?

After All These Years ...


It is nearly 150 years since Darwin theorized that biological evolution is a long-term, gradual and uninterrupted affair. If the gradualism hypothesis had been correct, the proof would have been found in the Fossil Record. Between ape fossils and early man fossils, for instance, there would be transitional fossils-records of ape-becoming-man creatures. Lack of evidence troubles Darwin The lack of evidence of these hypothetical creatures troubled Darwin. He understood clearly that his evolutionary theory depended upon finding the intermediate forms. Why? It is inconceivable that blind Natural Selection can be said to be responsible for macro changes. Selection may explain small changes (micro changes), but it cannot explain the big ones. "The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, must be truly enormous," Darwin writes in the Origin. "Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." [3] When pushed on the issue, Darwin's response was meandering assertion that the Fossil Record is incomplete. "With respect to the absence of fossil remains, serving to connect man with his ape-like progenitors, no one will lay much stress on this fact who reads Sir. C. Lyell's discussion, where he shows that in all the vertebrate classes the discovery of fossil remains has been a very slow and fortuitous process. Nor should it be forgotten that those regions which are most likely to afford remains connecting man with some extinct ape-like creatures, have as yet not been searched by geologists." [4]

118

The Ark
Missing link still missing It is now nearly 2000 A.D. Fossil evidence of intermediate varieties between ape and man has still not been found. What are we to conclude as to the validity of Darwin's gradualism hypothesis? The only conclusion we can reach is that the hypothesis is not correct. If the evidence was there, it would have been found by now. Missing marbles Does the Neo-Darwinist orthodoxy agree with this conclusion? No, indeed. The orthodoxy, as represented by Dawkins in the discussion above, proclaims that the gradualism doctrine is truth, despite all evidence to the contrary. As illogical and unscientific as it is, Dawkins' "Neo-Gradualism" is today the official orthodox view. Fortunately, this view is being challenged, both from within and without the establishment.

Attack from Within


At the time of this writing, the most reasoned challenge to gradualism comes from the paleontological wing of Neo-Darwinism. Niles Eldredge, in Reinventing Darwin, charges "ultra-Darwinists," such as Richard Dawkins, wit h maintaining a "thoroughgoing reductionist stance." Discontinuity as important as continuity "It boils down to this, Eldredge writes: "ultra-Darwinians emphasize [evolutionary] continuity through natural selection and the primacy of active competition for reproductive success as the prime mover underlying absolutely all evolutionary phenomena." In contrast, Eldredge continues, naturalists "see the complex biotic world as composed of discrete entities. Discontinuity is as important as continuity in depicting the real, natural world." [5] The standard orthodox position (Dawkins et al) is that evolution can be described as a very long gradually ascending inclined plane. Eldredge is too much of a scientist to go along. While assuring us frequently that he has his Neo-Darwinian credentials in order ("No naturalist evolutionary biologist seated at the High Table entertains the slightest doubt that natural selection is the deterministic process underlying adaptive evolutionary change....") [6], Eldredge challenges the orthodoxy by making a case for the proposition that evolution proceeds not by little, little steps (gradualism) but by "punctuated equilibrium," which he defines, coyly, in terms of intention-- "a simple attempt to address patterns of discontinuity between species in neo-Darwinian terms ...." [7] Orthodoxy ignores macro changes

119

The Ark
The simple fact of the matter is that macro changes ("giant steps") have occurred in evolution. How does the orthodoxy explain them? It doesn't. It simply ignores them. One example of a macro change is the explosive proliferation of marine life forms in the Cambrian period. One moment, the oceans belonged to unicellular organisms; the next they were populated by invertebrate life forms. How did it happen? All that we hear from Dawkins and his associates in the Darwinian Dunciad is "little, little changes, occurring over a long, long period of time." Eldredge's ultra-discretion typifies the sort of intellectual pussy-footing that goes on among evolutionists who would like to think they are important voices in the supposedly "Great Debate" going on at "the High Table of Evolutionary Theory." After his hypothesis of "punctuated equilibria" began to appear in religious tracts as evidence that some scientists doubt evolution, Eldredge writes, he was quick to join ranks with other evolutionists at the High Table (i.e., the theologians and priests of Scientism). "Closing ranks to face a common enemy is a natural reaction. In a way creationism was good for evolutionary biology. And it reminded us that we have, after all is said and done, more in common as evolutionists that we have issues that drive us apart...." [8]

The Attack from Without


There have many efforts to challenge Darwinism through establishing Creationism as a science. To date, these efforts have not had much impact. Publicly recognized Creationist authorities on evolution are almost as hard to find as intermediate life forms between ape and man. Creationist science crippled The great liability of Creationist science is its commitment to the defense o f the Genesis account of creation. The Genesis account is in the first book of the old, Judaic testament. One would think that with the coming of the New Testament, the Word made incarnate, the old Judaic testament would have been relegated to the category of interesting historical background. No such thing occurred. Why not? As a very practical matter, the early Catholic Church needed a weighty tome as Bible. The weightier the book, the more convincing to the masses. When Bishop Irenaeus and his associates compiled the New Testament, they excluded the bulk of the writings that could be construed as Christian--the so-called Gnostic gospels. Indeed, they made it their most important mission to destroy all evidence of Christian points of view other than those views they regarded as orthodox. One consequence was that when they had finished their destruction, they had very few writings left. Indeed, their product, the New Testament, looked pitifully thin in comparison with the Old Testament.

120

The Ark
The solution was, of course, to combine old and new testaments into one great book--the Holy Bible. This solution may have been a blessing to the early Christian Church, but for generations of modern Christian scientists, it has been a curse. Most of these have been lost in conundrums--in mysteries that cannot be solved. New Testament Creationism defensible Had these same scientists been freed of the burden of defending Genesis, they might well found themselves with the far easier task of defending Creationism as defined, for instance, by the Apostle John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Let us regard "Word" as the Christ, he who expressed verbally the will of God. "In the beginning was the Christ, and the Christ was with God, and the Christ was God." If this is true,-that Christ was in the beginning, that he was with God, and that he and God are one, what can we infer about the nature of realit y? Reality is monadic,--just as the first great philosophy (Pythagoras) said. Just what Descartes intimated. Just what Isaac Newton suspected. Just what the holographic theory of the universe suggests. The ex-communicated speak ... At this time, the most potentially damaging evidence against orthodox gradualism and neo-gradualism is coming not from the defenders of the old paradigm, but from an increasingly numerous body of scientists who have discovered evidence refuting gradualism and who have had the nerve to publish this evidence. Almost needless to say, these scientists have been, to a person, ex-communicated from the Church of Scientism. The witness of the ex-communicated is set forth in the above-cited book, Forbidden Archeology--The Hidden History of the Human Race. The orthodox position on presumed descent of man from the apes was established by Darwin in 1871. In the Descent of Man, he writes: "We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.... the higher animals are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal, and this through a long series of diversified forms, from some amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish-like animal. In the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all the Vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal...." [9] In time, the orthodoxy concluded that Homo sapiens "missing link" some 100,000 years ago. emerged from the

"What if ... fossils of anatomically modern modern humans were found to have lived contemporaneously with Dryopithecus [man's supposed ape ancestor] (or even a million years ago, 4 million years after the Late Miocene 121

The Ark
disappearance of Dryopithecus, that would be enough to throw the current accounts of the origin of humankind completely out the window." [10] "Fossils of man found in deposits older than 800,000 years are frauds" With the discovery of Java man, the first protohuman hominid between Dryopithecus and modern humans, scientists had a benchmark. "Henceforth, scientists would not expect to find fossils or artifacts of anatomically modern humans in deposits of equal [800,000 years] or greater age. If they did, they ... concluded that this was impossible and found some way to discredit the find as a mistake, an illusion...." [11] Humans in France two million years ago? As early as 1863, fossil evidence began to show up indicating modern man was far older. In that year, at St. Prest, Monsieur J. Desnoyers of the French National Museum discovered human artifacts indicating humans had been in France prior to the end of the Pliocene period. [12] Something had to wrong with this find, the orthodox concluded. The end of the Pliocene period occurred two million years ago! Desnoyers was accused of marking the bone artifacts in question with his own instruments, and this conclusion was accepted by the French Academy of Sciences. The authors go on to discuss numerous artifactual finds in the nineteenth century indicating that man was present in Europe between two and 2.5 millio n years ago. Pliocene human remains in them thar hills The discovery in the last century of Pliocene human remains and artifacts in gold-bearing gravels in California led to an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science by O.C. Marsh, president of the Association and one of America's foremost paleontologists: "The proof offered on this point by Professor J.D. Whitney in his recent work (Aurif. Gravels of Sierra Nevada) is so strong, and his careful, conscientious method of investigation so well known, that his conclusion seem irresistible.... At present. the known facts indicate that the American beds containing human remains and works of man, are as old as the Pliocene of Europe. The existence of man in the Tertiary period seems now fairly established." [13]

Pre-Tertiary prints In concluding their survey, Cremo and Thompson discuss a number of finds indicating that humans existed in the pre-Tertiary period. Footprints found on

122

The Ark
an outcropping of hard, massive sandstone on a Pennsylvania farm have been dated at about 300 million years. [14] Early Tertiary remains The authors conclude that the Fossil Record shows incontestable evidence of human beings as far back as the early Tertiary period, which began about 63 million years ago. What the evidence suggests, in other words, is that man descended not from the apes, but from man. This conclusion is, of course, unacceptable to the Darwinist orthodoxy. Clearly, it "smacks" of the old enemy line of thought ... Creationism. In any event, the question of mans origins is, again, an open question.
References:
[1] Macbeth 32. Also, nota bene: "Darwin was a timid man in many ways, but fortified by his faith in variation, he acted boldly in this situation. He took the micro changes observed by the breeders ... and he extrapolated them. He said, in brief, that twenty years of breeding often achieved substantial changes; therefore, if nature continued the work for a hundred million years, it could close all the gaps. His actual phrasing was more poetic: "Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do so much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection." "Extrapolation is a dangerous procedure. If you have a broad base of sound observations, you can extend it a little at the ends without too much risk; but if the base is short or insecure, extension can lead to grotesque errors...." 31 [2] Dawkins 43. [3] Hitching 3. [4] A. Cremo and Richard L Thompson, Forbidden Archeology--The Hidden History of the Human Race (San Diego: Bhaktivedanta Institute, 1993) 11. [5] Eldredge 7. [6] Eldredge 13. [7] Ibid. [8] Eldredge 104. [9] Cremo and Thompson 11. [10] Cremo and Thompson 18. [11] Cremo and Thompson 19. [12] Cremo and Thompson 28. [13] Cremo and Thompson 452.

123

The Ark

Chapter 11 The Next Evolutionary Theory


"We now know that the purpose of evolution is to produce consciousness of higher and higher order. The universe is a teaching and learning machine. Its purpose is to know itself." [1]

--Itzhak Bentov

Like its classical predecessor, Neo-Darwinism has shown a remarkable capability for surviving long after its death. Despite its posthumous longevity, however, despite its profound influence in this century and its honorific standing among the powers-that-be of the present time, it is--at last--losing its death grip on the mind of Western man. The question now is, "What's next? What will replace Darwinism as our standard evolutionary theory?" Let's look at several possibilities, starting with one I do not prefer, but must admit as a possibility ... the development of a reformed Darwinism.

Is it possible to "fix" Darwinism?


The answer is "yes." It may not be worthwhile, but it is possible. The reform would have to start at the level of basic premises. Consider classical Darwinism, for instance. We've analyzed this into three major premises--the Lamarckian premise, the Hobbesian premise, and the Malthus premise. It is possible to build a Reformed Darwinism which retains the valid Lamarckian premise and which replaces the two invalid premises. Symbiogenesis Most likely candidate to replace the Hobbesian "life is war" idea would be the "symbiosis" premise. Symbiosis refers to the living together in more or less close association of two dissimilar organisms. In contemporary biology, there is a school of speculation (associated with Dr. Lynn Margulis especially) that regards the establishment of symbiotic alliances among organisms as the main mechanism of evolution. The premise of "evolution from alliance" ("symbiogenesis") is a great advance over "evolution from war."

124

The Ark

Homeostasis Most likely candidate to replace the Malthus "hare and tortoise" premise (reproduction pressure being the hare, and resource replenishment the tortoise) would be the Lovelock, or "homeostasis," premise. Dr. J.E. Lovelock is the inventor of the so-called "Gaia hypothesis," which maintains that the Earth operates as one self-regulating mechanism. In Lovelock's own words, the hypothesis maintains "the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, [an entity] capable of manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suits its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts." [2] Interesting to note, it was religion and not science that offered Lovelock his first public forum. Lovelock was asked to give a speech regarding Gaia at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. At about the same time, he writes, the Gaia hypothesis was being "condemned as teleological by my peers, and the journals Nature and Science would not publish papers on the subject...." [3] Sciences of death More than anything else, it was the Malthus doctrine that turned classical Darwinism into an ideological malignancy. The following quotation, from Malthus, indicates the main idea from which the malignancy came: "In an endeavor to raise the proportion of the quantity of provisions to the number of consumers in any country, our attention would naturally be first directed to the increasing of the absolute quantity of provisions; but finding that as fast as we did this, the number of consumers more than kept pace with it, and that with all our exertions we were still as far as ever behind, we should be convinced that our efforts directed only in this way would never succeed. It would appear to be setting the tortoise to catch the hare. Finding, therefore, that from the law of nature, we could not proportion the food to the population, our next attempt should naturally be to proportion the population to the food. If we can persuade the hare to go to sleep, the tortoise may have some chance of overtaking her...." Out of this elaborate sophism arose the infamous "sciences of death" that have stood (and stand) in this century side by side with the politicos of state socialism.

The West is Darwinized

125

The Ark
As Dr. Lovelock suggests, Earth and everything on it are self-regulating. The African tribes wiped out in the nineteenth century by the armies of Social Darwinism were all self-regulating. The North American tribes wiped out by the Euro-immigrants were also self-regulating. The South American tribes now being wiped out by latter-day Social Darwinists were all self-regulating. The only civilization not self-regulating is Western civilization, and this is a result of numerous factors, an important one being that we in the West believe, on the basis of pseudo-scientific Darwinian dogma, that not only are populations unable to be self-regulating, they pose a constant threat to themselves and the environment. So Darwinized are most Westerners, they view the increasingly severe degradation of our environment as the fault of the little people, or of mankind in general. They continually fail to see the obvious fact that the creators of the problem are the big pea-brained international corporations and their political and military extensions--the self-styled "responsible elite." The ruling political and economic elites of our time are responsible indeed ... they are responsible for the sad plight of the planet.

Is there any sort of good alternative to Darwinism?


Yes. Transformism ("Lamarckism"), the original evolutionary theory, is superior to Darwinism. Lamarck's "heresy" was his supposed attribution of intelligence to organisms. Lamarck was aware that organisms have a compensatory mechanism that allows them to adjust to changes in the environment (i.e. to maintain homeostasis) He spoke of this mechanism in terms of besoin, a French word meaning need but also translatable as wish, or desire. Lamarck's critics accused him of taking the foolish position that animals evolve because they wish to evolve. On the basis this misrepresentation of his theory, the critics subjected Lamarck and his work to endless ridicule. Lamarck's "missing link" found According to Dr. Bruce H. Lipton, what Lamarck lacked in his theory was understanding of the specific mechanism by which the organism was able to read environment signals, and respond appropriately. "The mechanism is now well known," Lipton indicates. "At the unicellular level, it is the cellular membrane, or plasmalemma, the 'skin' of the cell. The membrane contains a complex system--the "nervous system"--designed to read environmental signals and to activate appropriate organismic responses." [4] Dr. Lipton is modest in character and recommendations. He is in fact the developer of what is very likely to be our next orthodox theory of evolution ... "Fractal Evolution." In the discussion that follows, there may be terms you are

126

The Ark
unfamiliar with. If they are not defined in the immediate text, they will be in subsequent chapters. My intention at this point is to provide a quick introductory over-view.

Three premises of Fractal Evolution


Lipton's theory of Fractal Evolution is based on several premises: [1] The main theme of biological evolution is the increase of organismic intelligence; [2] fractal mathematics plays a key role in the design of the organic means by which intelligence is increased; and [3] organic evolution is punctuated by "fractal leaps." (All three premises are heretical, of course, from the point of view of the Darwinists.)

Fractal geometry
Before these premises make sense, it's necessary to understand the term "fractal." Fractal is short for fractional. Before 1975, our only geometry was Euclidean--a geometry of whole integers. In 1975, the French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot outlined a new geometry--of fractions, and he this he termed "fractal geometry." Fractal mathematics is the math that makes "computer modeling" possible. Fractal mathematics is the math that makes "physical existence modeling" possible. Let's do some fractal modeling. Take a stone and throw it into a pond. Observe the ripples. The ripples have the same shape, but different sizes. Each ripple may be called a fractal--a fractional version of the other ripples. We may observe the same fractal ripple phenomenon in solid structure. For instance, if you were to take photographs of the same ragged coastline from a space station, from a blimp, and from a position just thirty feet off the ground, the photographs would all look the same. They would show the very same contours. "Chinese eggs" offer a convenient symbol of fractals. These are eggs (wooden usually) that are nested together. Open one, and there's another. Open the other, and there's yet another, smaller egg. So on and on--down to the last, very little egg. Each egg in the series is describable as a fractal of the other eggs. Knowing this, we know enough to understand the theory of fractal evolution.... Increasing organismic intelligence [1] Premise number one: Common sense tells us that evolution has much to do with increasing intelligence. Fractal evolution agrees. Darwin began his

127

The Ark
study of evolution with the study of species and "speciation." Dr. Lipton began with the study of cells. His primary specialization is cell biology. If we look at the development of the unicellular organism, starting with the very first cells (prokaryotes) and ending with the much, much larger final stage cells (eukaryotes), Dr. Lipton observes, we can infer that "nature has a constant interest in the work of increasing organismic intelligence," which is defined by Lipton as the "capability to interact with environment to encourage its survival." What is the mechanism that mediates organismic intelligence? "The mechanism is a system of proteins built into the cell membrane called integral membrane proteins, or IMPs. IMPs are transducers; they convert environmental information into biological behavior. The typical IMP is a complex of two devices--a receiver (receptor) mechanism and an effector mechanism. The IMPs are the 'hunter-gatherers' of the cell. They detect and capture all that the cell requires in order to maintain viabilit y." "IMP proteins recognize environmental signals and convert them into a biological response," Lipton indicates. "The reception is responsible for 'awareness' and the effector converts the signal into a physical response. By definition, a receptor/effector complex represents a molecular unit of perception, for, by definition, perception is awareness of environment through physical sensation." Each IMP complex, Dr. Lipton maintains, is a percept--the physiological mechanism of a perception. Integrate all the perceptual mechanisms (IMPs), and the result is the "intelligence system" of the organism. "The IMP percept units are physically limited to a monolayer in the cell membrane. As a result, each percept unit occupies a defined unit of membrane surface area. The installation of more IMPs thus requires more surface area." The story of cell evolution, Lipton states, is the story of the increasing of cell membrane surface area. The greater the membrane surface area, the more IMPs can be located in the membrane. The more IMPs located in the membrane, the "smarter" the organism. Fractal packing [2] Premise two: Fractal mathematics plays a key role in the design of the organic means by which intelligence is increased. The primary way by which the cell meets nature's demand for greater and greater organismic intelligence is expansion of membrane surface area, as indicated above. The optimal way to model the two-dimensional "packing" surface area into a three-dimensional space is by means of fractal mathematics/geometry. Dr. Lipton refers to this technology as "fractal packing."

128

The Ark
To illustrate fractal packing, let us say that we have a simple triangle within a circle, as below. The circle represents any volumetric reality. The edges of the triangle represent "surface area."

Our task is to maximize surface area by any graphic means--without extending our lines outside the circle. One way to increase surface area would be to make the lines of the triangle wave-like, as in the following illustration:

Have we achieved the ultimate in terms of packing surface area into the circle? No. The ultimate can be approached only through use of fractal geometry. Consider the following:

Fractals of the original triangle have been placed in those positions which allow for greatest size. By repeating the process again and again, before too long, we find ourselves with something that looks like this:

129

The Ark

Through such fractal engineering, we are able to pack the maximum amount of surface area into the available space. The same technology is utilized in the building of organisms. Fractal leaps [3] Premise three: Organic evolution is punctuated by "fractal leaps." According to Darwinism, evolution is a very long and continuous process. Biological changes, new species etc. arise out of genetic mutations, according to current doctrine. (This doctrine is maintained in the face of evidence that nature goes to elaborate lengths to deselect genetic mutations.) Darwinism has no explanation whatsoever for macro changes, i.e. major changes, as mice becoming bats. The subject of macro changes is simply ignored, except by those professionals (such as the paleontologists) who are confronted with the question of macro-change on a frequent basis. Within the discipline these day, the paleontologists do not have a central role, or much status. They are considered the "old bones people." According to Dr. Lipton, the principle of fractal replication applies not only to physiological construction per se, it also characterizes the process of biological evolution. Evolution is synonymous with the building of greater and greater levels of bio-intelligence. What happens when a specific level is complete? "When nature could do no more with the single cell in terms of increasing intelligence, then evolution stopped--momentarily." Lipton states. "It resumed, after a short stretch of a billion or so years, when nature discovered the way of building even more intelligence into biology--multi-cellular construction." "Multi-cellular organisms literally exploded on the evolutionary scene," Lipton says. "Darwinism cannot explain this. From the point of view of the orthodoxy, it was impossible. Yet it happened. Almost in the twinkling of an eye ... one moment this was a unicellular world, the next it was montage of multi-cellular organisms." "Cambrian explosion" explainable 130

The Ark
Can Fractal Evolution explain the birth of the multi-cellulars? "Yes," Lipton replies. "Multi-cellular construction is essentially a replication of unicellular construction. The basic membrane of the cell is formed when organic chemicals called phospholipids self-assemble into spherical form. [With the installation of the IMP network, the membrane is completed.] As the German novelist Thomas Mann suggested, at a certain point the unicellulars "got the idea" of staying together in a mass, sharing existence on a familial basis. Where did the idea come from? The idea was implicit in the basic structure of the single cell--in the self-assembly of the phospholipids. Multi-cellular construction begins when nature says, "Ah, in order to move evolution to a higher level, all we have to do is assemble single cells into a 'self' ... using them as if they were phospholipids." It is certainly refreshing to find underlying Lipton's theory premises that are verifiable, and not dark and dubious doctrines such as "life is war." In keeping with our shift of focus from doctrine to observable phenomena, let's consider now the structure and development of the single cell.

References:
[1] Stalking the Wild Pendulum--On the Mechanics of Consciousness (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1988 [1977]) 166-67. [2] Lovelock 9. [3] Lovelock vii. [4] The Biology of Consciousness--An Introduction to Fractal Evolution (unpublished).

131

The Ark

Chapter 12 The Cell Story


"All life is cellular in nature. All present-day living material is made up of cells or the products of cells.... A cell is the most elementary unit that can sustain life...." [1]

-- Harold Morowitz For a long, long time, most members of our Western civilization believed (as they were told) that all the answers to whatever questions they might have about life could be found in the Bible. Some who were not entirely satisfied that a book put together by early Catholic Church leaders contained the untainted "Word of God" preferred to hunt for the wisdom of the Lord in other places. Many looked to nature. Others looked for the Lord in mystical realms. The legend of the Holy Grail dates from the medieval period and is one of the great legends of our civilization. The Grail of the legend is the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. The pursuit of this Grail became the great passion of the knights of King Arthur. In the story, only one of the Knights of the Round Table was successful in finding the Grail. In a story of our own time, the sacred Grail is found by an American.... Indiana Jones. At the heart of the Grail legend is the poignant desire of multitudes of our ancestors--to have certain knowledge concerning the world and will of God. We are not content to lead empty lives. We want the truth of existence ... whatever it is. The conversion of much of Western civilization in the last century to the Darwinian view of existence is a striking testament to the desire of our predecessors for a credible vision of existence--a paradigmatic map for man. Darwinism losing credibility Yesterday, it was the Biblical paradigm that was on the wane. Today, the Darwinian paradigm is losing ground. The concept of life as a meaningless and incessant struggle, with the prize of "survival" going to those who are able to accumulate the most advantages over others, is simply no longer convincing to the intelligent. At the same time, the Darwinian vision of the dynamics of existence is still being played out (perhaps now more than ever) in the historical arena. Contemporary history is the bloody aftermath of Darwinism. To find the Grail ...

132

The Ark
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that there is in fact a Holy Grail. In this Grail, let us say, the meaning of existence is encoded. What is it in real life that fits the Grail description? We need something that is a vessel or vessel-like, ideally something that contains a liquid. Further, it must be in some sense original, in that it was touched by the lips of the Source (Christ, God incarnate). Also, as it is "holy," it must embody, or radiate, the idea of "wholeness." The word holy comes from "whole," meaning "sound." Finally, it must contain in some sense the story of existence. You have until the next paragraph to think about it.... The biological cell Best physical candidate for the Holy Grail is the biological cell. The cell is indeed a vessel, a vessel so common we take it for granted. The common cell is more fabulous than the "Starship Enterprise." Can the Starship Enterprise reproduce itself? No. But the cell can. The cell is the most elementary form in which life is sustained. It is ... the original form of life.

Cell Structure

[cross-section of a cellular membrane]

What we're looking at in the above illustration, is a cross-section of the cell's skin, the cellular membrane. Looks something like a bread and butter sandwich, doesn't it? Now the basic (or lipid) membrane is formed by organic compounds called phospholipids. A phospholipid is a relatively simple two-part invention composed of a lipid (fat) end and a phosphate end.

Let's look at an anthropomorphic magnification of a phospholipid:

133

The Ark

[phospholipid]

The phosphate end is hydrophilic--water loving, and the lipid (fatty) end is hydrophobic--water hating. Now when a bunch of these phospholipids are thrown together into a watery domain, a very interesting thing happens ... they self-assemble into a lipid bilayer membrane. It is interesting to note that chance is not involved in the formation of the basic membrane, the physical basis for the cell. The basic membrane is formed by self-assembly of its components, and there is a purposeful reason for the self-assembly. If we define purpose as intention, then the purpose of the phospholipids is to secure the most stable physical structure. This intention is not a conscious intention, of course. Rather, it is inherent in the chemistry. Now.... if we define purpose as the end product ("the war was fought for the purpose of securing liberty") then the purpose of the phospholipids is simply stability. The following illustration shows the lipid bilayer closing into a cell-like membranous sphere:

[membrane closing into cellular structure]

Any exposed free edges of the membrane are unstable in that the central hydrophobic zone is exposed directly to water. To complete its search for the most stable structure, the membrane folds upon itself--until it forms itself into

134

The Ark
sphere. The cell is not "alive" yet, but it is well on the way. All that is needed now to give the cell "life" are some molecular devices that can capture and process signals (material and non-material). Fishical and non-fishical New Physics tells us that the primary thing in existence is frequency. [2] Metaphorically, let us say that we are fish in the sea. Everything physical is fish--the "fishical world." Now where does the fishical world come from? It comes from the sea, the non-fishical world. And what is the nature of the nonfishical world? The non-fishical world contains all the frequency pieces (no pun intended) out of which the fishical world is made. Those "pieces" are not fishical. They are pre-fishical patterns that we call "frequency waves." Frequencies. Everything that exists has its own special frequency identity. The Integral Membrane Protein (IMP) Complex What follows is an illustration of a frequency receiver mechanism, and a frequency transducer mechanism. The receiver is called a receptor, and the transducer is called an effector. (Transduction is, literally, the process of converting one form of information into another form of information.) Together, the receptor-effector combination is called an "IMP complex," the IMP short for "integral membrane protein." The receptor/effector converts "environmental" information into a form of information called biological behavior.

[ Illustration ]

IMPs the cell's hunters and gatherers All organisms require energy and chemicals, and each IMP complex is designed to acquire from the environment one of the items needed by the cell.

135

The Ark
Together, the network of IMP complexes, which are situated in the cellular membrane, forms the "hunting and gathering" mechanism of the cell. Micro-world Imagine that you are very very small, so small that a cell is for you the size of a planet. Now imagine you are standing on the surface of the planet-cell. From your new point of view, the receptors seem to be something like giant trees. Each receptor-tree is in fact a kind of antenna. Each antenna is uniquely shaped and designed to detect a specific signal. Some receptors recognize and couple with molecular structures, such as hormones, metabolites, etc. Other receptors are direct energy receivers which recognize and respond to various potentials of the electromagnetic spectrum. As you're standing near a certain receptor-tree, you see a molecular thing come floating along. You don't know what it is. For you, it's a UFO. But the tree seems to recognize it! Indeed, the tree begins to change in response to the presence of the UFO, its branches forming into a kind of glove--a glove that actually catches the UFO! At the very same time this incredible thing is happening, the ground near the tree begins to open up. It's almost as if the opening hole was a mouth! As you stare in amazement, the tree directs the captured molecule into the hole, which is actually a certain type of effector--a "channel" which connects the external environment with the inner domain of the cell.

[IMP complex graphic]

After you witness the marvel of the ground opening to swallow the UFO, you begin to feel a little nervous. Perhaps you're next. You don't have to worry. The cell doesn't have an IMP complex with the mission of capturing and transporting (carrying across the membrane barrier) microscopic human beings. Nevertheless, you decide to leave.

136

The Ark

Back in big world Back in the big world, you pause to reflect on the miracle of the creation. So small is the receptor-tree you were just now observing, you can find it again only with a very sophisticated electron microscope, if ... you can find again (among gadzillions of cells) the cell that you visited. Further, now that you've actually visited a cell, it seems perfectly obvious that there's no way in Hades that this "primordial organism," as Darwin and Dawkins call it, could have been formed by chance. Every cell is, in fact, a tiny world and not some kind of haphazard primordial smear of chemicals.

The Prokaryote
The illustration below provides an idea of an early cell that appeared on Earth--the "prokaryote" (which was named as such in 1963). Bacteria and bluegreen algae are examples of prokaryotic cells. "Prokaryote" means, "a cell that does not contain a nucleus."

[ Illustration ]

The "plasmalemma" is the technical name for the cellular membrane. You are already familiar with the plasmalemma. It is a "lipid bilayer"--two layers of "phosphos" with a lipid (fatty) layer inbetween. The fatty layer is the cell's "impermeable barrier." The IMPs, as previously discussed, provide the means by which the cell obtains all that is required for viability. The "cytoplasm" is the interior the cell--the inner domain. The cytoplasm contains metabolic building blocks, stored energy, and an apparatus to replace components of the membrane that need replacement. Interestingly, the prokaryotic cell contains most of the same physiologic systems that are present in the human body: The respiratory system, the

137

The Ark
digestive system, the excretory system, the reproductive integumentary (support) system, and the nervous system. Why the difference? Note that the name of each of these systems, with the exception of one, refers to the function of the system. The digestive system digests food; the excretory system eliminates wastes, etc. The system with the exceptional name is the "nervous" system. For the average person, the word "nerves" conjures up a picture of a network of filaments that carry electronic impulses. The term "nervous" points to components of the system. If the system in question was named as the others are named, it might be called the "homeostasis system," or "space mastery system," in that its primary function is to keep the organism in balance with the environment. Mastery of time "But wait a minute," you say, "time is also an aspect of environment, not just space. The New Physics describes the environment as a timespace phenomenon." Correct. Ingenious as always, Mother Nature has come up with a system for enabling organisms to master the aspect of environment we call "time." Can you guess what it is? It is the same system Darwinists view (incorrectly) as the "war room"--the place for the planning of wars-- within each organism. It is the reproductive system. This system allows for the organismic mastery of time through the fabrication of new organisms. In the case of the prokaryotic cell, the reproductive system (like the other life support systems) is on the membrane surface. The genome consists, in the minimum case, of a single double-stranded closed loop of DNA. The mode of reproduction involved is the synthesis of an almost identical genome, followed by cell division. The chalice The structural support system of the prokaryote is an "exoskeleton," i.e. an outer skeleton. This exoskeleton is formed from what is called the glycocalyx. With reference to our original idea in this chapter--that the biological cell is a good candidate for Holy Grail, glycocalyx means literally a "sugar chalice." Calyx is from the Greek and means chalice. "Glyco-" refers to those crystalline forms we call sugars. The glycocalyx is simultaneously a nervous system and a support system. It is composed of the combined sugar-coated antennas of the IMP receptor network. If we were to re-name the glycocalyx in more familiar terms, we might call it a "cellular sugar satellite dish." system, the

138

The Ark
The drawback ... The exoskeleton is a marvelous invention, but it has a serious drawback --it restricts the size of the cell. Prokaryotic cells can be so big, no bigger. Consequently, there is a definite limit to the number of IMP complexes that can be located in the membrane. Consequently, the perceptual capability of the prokaryote is limited. Suppose for the moment that you are Mother Nature, and you really want to make a cell that doesn't have the limitations of the prokaryotic cell. You want to make a "smarter" cell. How would you do it?

The Eukaryote
The illustration below describes the eukaryotic cell, the solution Nature "came up with" to the challenge described above. Eukaryotes made their appearance on Earth about a billion years after the prokaryotes. Eukaryotic evolution resulted ultimately in the creation of a large family of single-cell organisms called "protozoans." The protozoans maximized the size of the eukaryotic structure. Cellular evolution stops with the development of the protozoans.

[ Illustration ]

Greater size, greater intelligence Let's look at a few interesting differences: Our illustrations don't show size difference, so please take my word for it. Eukaryotes are much larger than prokaryotes. They can be thousands of times larger. If the prokaryote is a rowboat, then the eukaryote is an ocean liner!

139

The Ark
Greater size means greater perceptual capability--greater frequency reception capability. Why? Again, each IMP complex is a mechanism of perception. The more extensive the membrane surface area, the more IMP complexes can be situated in the membrane. In order to do their jobs, most IMP complexes require access to both the external environment and the inner domain. For this reason, the population of IMP complexes cannot be increased by means of stacking. Inner skeleton In order to overcome the original obstacle to expanding cell size, namely the exoskeleton, nature opted for an internal skeleton--an endoskeleton. Microtubules are rod-like protein polymers that serve as main components of the inner skeleton. These microtubules bind to specific membrane IMPs. The dynamic nature of microtubule assemblies allows the cell to express various morphologies (shapes). In Star Trek terms, the microtubules allow the eukaryote to "shape shift." The "intermediate filaments" span the cytoplasm and anchor distant regions of the membrane. The filaments physically support and functionally integrate internal organelles within the cytoplasm. ("Organelles" are the cell's organs.) The microfilaments provide for contraction. They are thus important in resisting stresses. Further, they provide a means of locomotion for both the cell and the internal organelles. The microfilament network is responsible for "cyclosis," the circulation of cytoplasmic components. It is the cellular equivalent of the cardiovascular system. Interesting to note, the eukaryotic structure makes more room for IMPs not only through increased membrane size and the internalization of the structural support system, but also through the internalization of all life support systems other than the nervous system (and skin, for protection.) So it was that the genome found itself in new offices in the interior of the cell ... not because the genes are "most important" and require thus the protection of a closely guarded inner sanctum, but because they are not relevant to the moment-to-moment homeostatic adjustment work that occurs on the cell surface.

A Few Concluding Thoughts ...


When we read the story of cells and cell evolution, we're drawn to the inevitable conclusion that what evolution is "all about" is the increasing of organismic intelligence. Biological evolution can be interpreted as a kind of educational system. The inputs to the system are organisms with a certain IQ. The processing is termed "experience," the result of the deployment of the organism into environment. The outputs are organisms with higher intelligence capabilities. The memory of the system is encoded in the DNA.

140

The Ark
Why is it that nature is so constantly interested in increasing organismic intelligence? The mystic would answer by saying, "It's all part of the process by which gross matter travels on its way to becoming God." The Darwinists would maintain that the quest for ever-greater intelligence is just part of the well-known endless struggle for dominance in the biological world. Taoists will offer the paradox that "greatest stability is in change." A fractalist might say that the universe itself is basically a system, and thus everything within universe is going to reflect the basic systemic design. Biological evolution, the fractalist might add (redundantly), repeats in biological terms the workings of the basic universal system. What are the components of that most basic system? The inputs are frequencies, the processing involves frequencies interfering with other frequencies, the outputs are modified frequencies, and systemic memory is everywhere--in that memory is basically the ability to repeat, which is an ability intrinsic to frequency. The Lamb As we started this chapter with discussion of Biblical symbology, let us conclude with the same. In the Revelation, last book of the New Testament, it is said that a very pure entity will arise who will open the first four seals of the book of life and thus reveal the truth of existence. This pure entity is called the "Lamb." Most interpreters of the Bible assume that the Lamb is Jesus Christ, even though this Lamb is described as having seven horns and seven eyes. It has always been difficult for me to regard Christ's acquisition of five additional eyes and seven horns as an improvement in appearance! Perhaps this difficulty is simply another expression of the limitations of my finite understanding. Or perhaps ... Perhaps the Lamb of the Revelation is a personification not of Jesus Christ but of the last (and smallest) of the great masters to instruct us humans in the truths of existence ... namely, the biological cell. The seven eyes of the Lamb may be understood as receptors, and the seven horns (vortexes of energy?) as effectors. Alternatively, we may understand the eyes and horns as symbolic of the seven seals of the human body, which is contained as a potential in the single cell. The single cell, as we know, contains all the life support systems that are found in the human body. When the Great Book is open to all eyes, it will be interesting indeed to learn whether we are correct. Is the biological cell the Alpha and Omega master of our existence? Is it symbolized by the Holy Grail that started us on the quest for truth?--and by "the Lamb" who stands at the end of that search.

References:

141

The Ark
[1] Harold J. Morowitz, Beginnings of Cellular Life--Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, circa 1992) 39. [2] For reference, see Itzhak Bentov's A Cosmic Book--On the Mechanics of Creation (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1988) 17-22. Bentov sees the ultimate state as the "void," which is consciousness. "Consciousness in a vibratory state manifests itself as our familiar matter, from which the different forms that we see around us are made. The table, the flowers, the scent of the flowers, and our bodies are all made of rapidly vibrating consciousness." Every thing that is, we assume, has a unique vibrational identification, or frequency.

142

The Ark

Chapter 13 Design in Nature


"A decade after Mandelbrot published his physiological speculations, some theoretical biologists began to find fractal organization controlling structures all through the body. The standard 'exponential' description of a bronchial branching proved to be quite wrong; a fractal description turned out to fit the data...." [1]

--James Gleick

In the view of the Darwinists, the endlessly exquisite designs of nature are the result of an interplay of two factors--random genetic mutation and Natural Selection. Genetic mutation proposes, Natural Selection disposes. The question of "design" in nature was one that troubled Charles Darwin all his professional life. In the year following the publication of the Origin, he writes to Asa Gray: "I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design." [2] Darwinist Ernst Mayr, for one, is well aware of the design dilemma. "No consequence of Darwin's theory of natural selection was a source of greater dismay to his opponents than the elimination of design from nature. Those who studied the countless superb adaptations of animals and plants had been most gratified by the explanation that such perfection was clearly the result of design by the maker of this world." In fact, Darwin did not eliminate design from nature, as he himself indicates in his letter to Gray. Darwin and his followers succeeded only in challenging the traditional idea that the source of all design is God. After citing many examples of fantastic design in nature, Mayr goes on to say, "But when we ask how this perfection is brought about, we seem to find only arbitrariness, planlessness, randomness, and accident...." [3] If Mayr and his fellow Darwinists find in nature only "arbitrariness, planlessness, randomness, and accident" that is a reflection on their ability, not on the capability of nature.

143

The Ark

More on fractal geometry and mathematics Today, any graduate student asked to develop a paper on the subject of design in nature would invariably wind up looking into fractal geometry and mathematics. Fractal geometry, as indicated previously, focuses on the description of geometrical structures, and structuring, in fractional space. Until 1975, our only geometry was the familiar Euclidean geometry, which goes back over two thousand years. The Elements of Euclid (circa 300 B.C.) summarized in thirteen volumes the mathematical knowledge of ancient Greece. Up into our own century, Euclid's books of geometry were taken as the final, authoritative word on the subject. Euclidean geometry deals with whole rather than fractional realities. Two types of Euclidean geometry are commonly taught-plane geometry, which concerns planar (one- and two-dimensional) structures; and solid geometry, which describes volumetric (three-dimensional) structures. "New geometries always begin," writes James Gleick, "when someone changes a fundamental rule." Fundamental supposition would be a better term than rule. Gleick continues: "Suppose space can be curved instead of flat, a geometer says, and the result is a weird curved parody of Euclid that provides precisely the right framework for the general theory of relativity. Suppose space can have four dimensions, or five, or six. Suppose the number expressing dimension can be a fraction.... suppose shapes are defined, not by solving an equation once, but by iterating it [repeating it] in a feedback loop." [4] French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot made a number of the above suppositions, and the result was the birth in 1975 of fractal geometry and mathematics (Les Objets Fractal). The original stimulus behind the work of Mandelbrot was interest in irregular (seemingly "chaotic") patterns. Cotton prices over a long period of time, frequency of earthquakes, flooding conditions ... all seemed to occur with a regular irregularity. What was the principle of order within the "chaos"? Mandelbrot's "studies of irregular patterns," Gleick indicates, "and his exploration of infinitely complex shapes had an intellectual intersection: a quality of self-similarity. Above all, fractal meant self-similar. [5] "Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern. Mandelbrot's price charts and river charts displayed self-similarity, because not only did they produce detail at finer and finer scales, they also produced detail with certain constant measurements...." [6]

144

The Ark
Physical world - Fractal world The physical world, the explicate realm, is structured along the lines of fractal geometry. The basic underlying idea is the idea of repetition of structure in different scales of magnitude. To use our coastline example once again: A photograph of a section of coastline from a blimp will show the same ragged contours as a photograph of the whole coast taken from a space station. A photograph of a one-foot-long section of the same coast will also show the same contours. The various coastlines are "self-similar," each similar to the others in shape, but different in magnitude. Mandelbrot and those who took up the tools he provided found endless evidence of the fact that the creation, the explicate realm, is designed via fractal mathematics. In light of these findings, the idea of Mayr and other Darwinists that the perfections of nature are the result of "planlessness" is simply ludicrous. The physical realm is structured like Chinese eggs, eggs nested within eggs. Fractal organization of body "A decade after Manelbrot published his physiological speculations," Gleick writes, "some theoretical biologists began to find fractal organization controlling structures all through the body. The standard 'exponential' description of bronchial branching proved to be quite wrong; a fractal description turned out to fit the data. The urinary collecting system proved fractal. The biliary duct in the liver. The network of special fibers in the heart that carry pulses of electric current to the contracting muscles...." [7] "How did nature manage to evolve such complicated architecture?" Gleick asks, rhetorically. "Mandelbrot's point is that the complications exist only in the context of traditional Euclidean geometry. As fractals, branching structures can be described with transparent simplicity, with just a few bits of information...." [8] "Fractal mathematics" is comprised of the simple formulas by which conversions are made--fractal to fractal. Mandelbrot set The following illustrates a famous set of fractals known as the Mandelbrot set:

[ Illustration ]

145

The Ark
The seemingly infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set is based on the simple formula z = z 2 +c Take a number, multiply it by itself, and add the original number. [9] New vision of the nature of things "By the 1980s," Gleick writes, "a home computer could handle arithmetic precise enough to make colorful pictures of the [Mandelbrot] set, and hobbyists quickly found that exploring these pictures at ever-greater magnification gave a vivid sense of expanding scale. If the set were thought of as a planet-sized object, a personal computer could show the whole object, or features the size of cities, or the size of buildings, or the size of rooms, or the size of books, or the size of letters, or the size of bacteria, or the size of atoms. The people who looked at such pictures saw that all the scales had similar patterns, yet every scale was different. And all these microscopic landscapes were generated by the same few lines of computer code." [10] A decade or so after the publication of Les Objets Fractal, as Gleick observes, a number of biologists (and not just "theoretical biologists") began the work of re-understanding the body in terms of fractal engineering. Today, the fractal approach is being used to better understand every component of the human body. Neuroscientist Ary Freeman, for instance, maintains that a kind of "ordered unpredictability" lies at the heart of the brain's ability to perceive the world. "Studying the electrical activity of the brains of rabbits trained to recognize various smells, Freeman finds that the animals' brain waves shift to a different pattern of chaotic activity as each smell is inhaled." [11] "Paul Rapp of the University of Pennsylvania has found similar results in humans. When his subjects were asked to count backward from 100 by sevens, their brain-wave patterns suddenly shifted into a chaotic state that marked intense concentration...." [12] The Freeman and Rapp references are from a recent article by William F. Allman, "The Mathematics of Human Life." We sense Allman's excitement as he comes to realize the full dimensions of the fractal phenomenon: "The body's overall structure bears the signature of the chaotic processes that shape it--right down to the DNA molecule that serves as its genetic blueprint.... The fractal nature of DNA appears to play a role in its ability to pass on biological information that controls development of the various parts of the body. Because fractals represent a midway point between randomness and predictability, DNA's fractal structure may represent a compromise between encoding the maximum amount of information, while still being extremely resilient to damage...." [13]

Consciousness
146

The Ark
In the early eighties, the Darwinian orthodoxy still reigned supreme, and consequently it was assumed that the secrets of biological evolution would be discovered as the result of research in genetics. Most biologists interested in evolutionary process were guided (or misguided as it were) by the doctrine of the primacy of the DNA. For these researchers, fractal geometry was of interest as it might apply to understanding the nature and workings of the DNA. The above reference to the "fractal nature of DNA" suggests the sort of conclusions that came from the orthodoxy. The physiological basis of consciousness Among the more unorthodox biologists interested in fractal mathematics was cell biologist Dr. Bruce H. Lipton. Only after improvements in electronmicroscopy made during the fifties and later was it possible for researchers to get a really look at the cellular membrane. Lipton's career as evolutionist began while studying IMPs through an electron microscope. The specific point this career began was the point he realized that the IMP complex is "the physiological basis of consciousness." In orthodox theory, consciousness is thought to be something that is encoded in the genes. Consciousness originates in environment "Consciousness originates in the environment," Lipton maintains, "not in the genes." Ordinarily we think of consciousness as "ideas." Consciousness is, in reality, far more inclusive. It involves a whole range of activities, from thought origination and projection to thought reception and response. The late Itzhak Bentov maintained that everything that is originates in the "void," and the void is consciousness. Everything in existence, including ideas, has a specific, unique signature vibration, or frequency. What we call our "higher selves" may be likened unto radio broadcast stations. And we,--our bodies that is--are radio receivers. Cellular brain in the membrane In the case of single cells, the frequency receiver mechanism is the IMP network within the cellular membrane. What's the word that comes to mind when we think of the processing of frequencies? Think it over... The word is "brain." The IMP network is the brain of the cell. The brain of the cell is not in the genes, it is in the membrane. "The biological basis of perception," Lipton observes, "is the simple IMP complex--a stimulus-response mechanism in which the receptor is the stimulus receiver and the effector the response activator." So, Lipton says, "we get into a really interesting understanding of consciousness here. The fundamental unit of 147

The Ark
consciousness happens to be a protein receptor and protein effector in combination. If you separate either of these two proteins from each other, then the unit of that perception is not made. If you cut the receptor off, no signals come in, or if you cut the effector out then there's no response to the signal. In either case, you break the perception pathway." [14] Primacy of the IMP network The biological primacy of the membrane over the DNA is demonstrated, Lipton indicates, by the simple fact that if the IMP receptors are cut off, then the cell goes comatose and dies, whereas if the nucleus is taken out of the cell, the cell continues to operate normally, until such time as it requires new parts. New parts are supplied by the cell's Parts Department--the genome. The ultimate primacy, Lipton suggests, is in the environment. Lipton compares the biological cell to a jukebox. "If the cell's a jukebox, the play buttons are the IMPs, and the records are the genes. Who or what creates the play list?--the songs that are played. Not the genes. The musical selections are made by the environment." Consciousness clarified Clearly, the Lipton view requires an expansion of the common definition o f consciousness. In a Liptonian lexicon, consciousness refers to a process that occurs in any organism, from the prokaryotic cell to the human being--the process of receiving signals (from outer environment and inner domain) and translating those signals into appropriate biological responses. Of course, as Lipton indicates, existence presents a wide spectrum of awareness, "from the hypothetical organism that can see one percept--meaning it would have just one receptor and effector, so it can see only one thing, to a human being, who has an enormous range of awareness and enormous versatility in terms of response." [15] In keeping with orthodox doctrine, many biologists define consciousness as a strictly human phenomenon. There are great differences between the signal reception-response expressed by a unicellular organism and the signal receptionresponse expressed by the human being, but these differences do not justify the hypothesis that there is no relationship between awareness at the cellular level and awareness at the human level. If Darwinism should have taught us anything, it is that (physiologically) man is not some kind of special creation. Guided by this understanding, we would suppose that human consciousness is not a "special phenomenon" (an idea which "smacks of" the Biblical doctrine that man is a special creation), but an evolved form of lower consciousness. If we're ever to understand what we call "human consciousness," perhaps we ought to study consciousness expansion at the cellular level.

148

The Ark

Expansion of Cellular Consciousness


Lipton identifies three primary means by which consciousness evolved at the unicellular level. The first means, discussed previously, was increase of cellular membrane surface area. Nature had to figure out how to make the prototype cell (the prokaryote) into a smarter cell--a cell with greater consciousness capability. Again, the cellular mechanism of perception is the IMP network. Most IMPs require access to the external environment and to the inner domain, and thus they cannot be stacked. This means that if the IMP (consciousness) capability of the cell is to be increased, then the surface area of the membrane must be increased. Expansion of membrane surface area Expansion of cell membrane surface area was accomplished in two ways, through replacement of the exoskeleton with the endoskeleton, and through the internalization of all life support systems not requiring a face-to-face contact with the external environment. In the case of the prokaryote, all systems (including the DNA) are on the membrane surface; in the case of the eukaryote (final stage cell), only the "skin" and "nervous system" are on the surface. The other systems are internalized. Integration of inputs What the evolution of consciousness next required, as part of what we might call the "membrane expansion program," was the development of the optimal program for the integration of inputs. The IMP receptors receive signals (inputs), and the effectors activate the functions that transduce the signals into behavior. In addition to receptors and effectors there is an intermediate protein called a processor protein, or "G protein." Processor proteins interface between receptors and effectors, and given their positions, they have great potential for directing or re-directing incoming frequencies. In the words of Lipton: "A processor can hook a receptor to one output, and another processor can hook the same receptor to a different output--so that one incoming signal can be split by the processor into multiple functions. Over evolution, the processor proteins are co-ordinated, or co-ordinate themselves, in such a way that the processor sub-system has tremendous versatility in terms of its ability to get the most out of incoming signals. The sub-system might be able, for instance, to use just one incoming signal to provide a wide variety of biological functions." What the processor protein sub-system represents, Lipton states, is a "mechanism of expanding the consciousness not just by increasing the numbers

149

The Ark
of receptors and effectors, but by integrating them into functional biological repertoires." Evolution pauses Once nature perfected the cell, which is to say maximized its capability for receiving and processing signals, then there was, according to Lipton, a momentary pause in the evolutionary process. If nature was to continue with the work of building greater and greater consciousness capabilities into the biological realm, she had to come up a new format. The cell format had been completed. What would be the next step?

The Fractal Leap


Dr. Lipton recalls the moment in 1983 when he discovered the answer to that question: "I was sitting in my laboratory looking at a eukaryotic cell through an electron microscope. I was reiterating in my mind the common understanding that all the physiological systems that can be found in the human being are in the eukaryotic cell when it really struck me.... the cell I was looking at was a fractal of the human body. Alternatively, the human being is a fractal of the cell--a version on a greater order of magnitude." From that moment, Lipton the anatomist and cell biologist became Lipton the evolutionist. [15] Evolution punctuated "Evolutionary process is not that very very long uninterrupted upward inclined plane that the Darwinists suppose it is," Lipton says. "It is a stop and go process, and it is highly patterned." Dr. Lipton is reluctant to describe the evolutionary process in the usual metaphors ... chains, ladders, and inclined planes. For those who require symbols, perhaps the best would be the pattern of ripples emanating from a point where the proverbial pebble hits the pond. The first ripple is the unicellular organism ripple. Symbolically, the expanding ripple represents the expansion of organismic consciousness. A new ripple appears. The new ripple becomes the unicellular ripple, and the original ripple now becomes the multicellular organism ripple.... If this seems too complex, a simple "fractal ladder" will do. The bottom of the ladder is grounded in the densest of matter, and the top of the ladder extends into the most ultimate reaches of higher consciousness. Each rung is constructed by nature with infinite care. The first rung on this ladder is the unicellular rung. This rung comprises the history of unicellulars, from the very first prokaryotes to the most fully developed eukaryotes. After this rung was completed, there was a momentary pause in evolution.... And then nature started in with the building of a new, higher rung.

150

The Ark

Multicellular rung The next rung was, of course, the multicellular organism rung. What was the main principle of construction? Integration. In maximizing unicellular consciousness, nature's ultimate technology was the integration of perceptual mechanisms (IMPs). With the application of the integration principle to the whole animals (unicellulars), the result was a multi-cellular animal. What is the position of Homo sapiens on this metaphorical ladder? For better or worse, man is the ultimate in terms of multi-cellular construction-- the ultimate land animal at any rate. We are the protozoans of our fractal rung. The evolutionary shift from one rung to the next is called by Lipton a "fractal leap." Now that humans have achieved completion as individual life forms, what is the next step, or leap? Let's wait a chapter before answering this question. For those who need a clue, let me suggest one ... the Internet. [16]

References:
[1] Chaos--Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1988 [1987]) 109. [2] Mayr 30. [3] Mayr 32. [4] Gleick 226. [5] Gleick 103. [6] Ibid. [7] Gleik 109. [8] Gleick 109-10. [9] Gleick 227. [10] Gleick 231. [11] William F. Allman, "The Mathematics of Human Life," U.S. News & World Report, 14 June 1993: 84-85. [12] Allman 85. [13] Ibid. [14] The Biology of Consciousness--An Introduction to Fractal Evolution (unpublished). [15] Ibid. [16] The only site on the whole Internet to cover all the issues appears to be the Leading Edge International Research Group, at http://www.cco.net/~trufax. Email: trufax.cco.net

151

The Ark

Chapter 14 PROVING GAIA


"We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time...."

--T.S. Eliot ("Four Quartets")

In the aboriginal understanding, creator and creation are practically synonymous. The thinnest of veils separates the visible from the invisible worlds. To the question "What is the way for man to live?" the response of the aboriginal is, "Live in accord with the sacred powers of existence." In the words of the legendary Black Elk: "It is from understanding that power comes ... nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the sacred Power of the World lives and moves." [1] The Europeans who settled North America were more aligned, it would seem, with the Profane Power of the World. "Once," Black Elk says, "we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-legged lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. But the Wasichus [whites] came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichus; and it is dirty with lies and greed." [2] Is Western civilization a failure? The presumption of the superiority of the Western whites over the aboriginal peoples was not much questioned until our own time. "Now," writes Gary Snyder, it is understood that "what we call civilization is an early successio n phase; immature, monoculture system" and "What we call the primitive is a mature system with deep capacities for stability and protection built into it. In fact, it seems to be able to protect itself against everything except white sugar and the money economy trading relationship; and alcohol, kerosene, nails, and matches." [3] The Snyder view is more valid that the view it seeks to replace, but it is equally biased, and equally based on the separatist premise that we're talking about peoples who have little or no intrinsic connection. As a consequence of his premise, Snyder is compelled to view the historical development of civilized man as one long decline from aboriginal maturity. Thus he writes, "I was

152

The Ark
impressed by Levi-Strauss' opinion that everything has gone downhill in western culture since the neolithic.... However, the economic anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has changed my mind because he says the paleolithic is where it's at. According to Sahlins' research, Stone Age Economics, the upper paleolithic was the original affluent society, and he estimates that they worked an average of 15 hours a week.... In those societies nobody had very much but there were no poor people. There is no class of landless paupers in primitive culture. Landless paupers belong to civilization...." [4] If the planet is a single organism, what is mankind? It is possible to come to very different conclusions about the history of mankind if we start from an integrative premise, the premise suggested by James Lovelock, for instance-- that the planet is one organism. "Journeys into space did more than present the Earth in a new perspective," Lovelock writes. "They also sent back information about its atmosphere and its surface which provided a new insight into the interactions between the living and the inorganic parts of the planet. From this has arisen the hypothesis, the model, in which the Earth's living matter, air, oceans, and land surface form a complex system which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life." [5] Lovelock calls this hypothetical single organism "Gaia." "The concept of Mother Earth or, as the Greeks called her long ago, Gaia, has been widely held throughout history and has been the basis of a belief which still coexists with the great religions...." [6] Lovelock is not the only biologist who feels that the planet as a one thing. "I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism," writes Lewis Thomas, "but it is no go. I cannot think of it in this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell." [7] Earth's membrane If Earth is a super-cell, then what is its membrane? In the case of the biological cell, the basic membrane is formed by organic compounds called phospholipids. These self-assemble into the familiar cell shape, forming an impenetrable barrier. With the addition of the IMP complexes, the cellular barrier becomes semi-permeable. In the case of our planet, the membrane would have to be the atmosphere. "Originally," Thomas writes, "in the time of prebiotic elaboration of peptides and nucleotides from inorganic ingredients in the water of the earth, there was

153

The Ark
nothing to shield out ultraviolet radiation except the water itself...." [8] Oxygen generation begins with the emergence of water-shielded photosynthetic cells. "You could say that the breathing of oxygen into the atmosphere was the result of evolution, or you could turn it around and say that evolution was the result of oxygen.... Once the photosynthetic cells had appeared, very probably counterparts of today's blue-green algae, the future respiratory mechanism of the earth was set in place.... [9] It is an illustration of our "fantastic luck," Thomas writes, that "oxygen filters out the very bands of ultraviolet light that are most devastating for nucleic acids and proteins, while allowing full penetration of the visible light needed for photosynthesis...." About 400 million years ago, Thomas suggests, there was a sufficient canopy of oxygen to permit biological organisms to move out of the water and onto the land. [10] Now, writes Thomas, "we are protected against lethal ultraviolet rays by a narrow rim of ozone, thirty miles out. We are safe, well ventilated, and incubated, provided we can avoid technologies that might fiddle with that ozone...." [11] What is the planet's equivalent of IMP network? If the atmosphere is planetary equivalent of the basic membrane, what would be the planetary equivalent of the IMP network? Best candidate for nervous system is the biological realm in its entirety. All biological life is cellular; all cellular life involves the reception and the transduction, or processing, of frequencies. All such processing is in the nature of homeostatic adjustment. Mankind the "immune" system What is humankind in relation to the planetary nervous system? The human species represents something like the planetary equivalent of the immune system. Humans are the immune cells of the planet? I can sense a certain disbelief. Let me explain.... Within the world of the human body there is a cell that is quite unique in its capability. It has the ability to identify invading organisms, and it has the abilit y to "learn" these organisms. It does so by locking onto the invader, "embracing" it as it were, and learning through the embrace. Further (and this is really fascinating information), this cell has the capability of creating genetic blueprints for organisms that will immobilize and render harmless the invader. These newly created organisms are called "antibodies."

154

The Ark
The immune cell has been termed by Bruce Lipton "the cell of evolution," as it has the ability to "know the unknown" and to create new life forms. Could it be that the natural role of humankind is to serve as the planet's immune system? For us Westerners, the idea seems very improbable. We are accustomed to viewing humans as (at best) accidental tacky tourists on the planet, and (at worst) parasites, constant offenders against the laws of nature, and incorrigible despoilers. Recently I received literature from a save-the-planet organization calling for "voluntary self-extinction" of the human race! We are so bad, we really ought to do the planet a favor and terminate our species. [12] They were right all along ... Aboriginal people, of course, have no problem in accepting as true the idea that they are the planet's protection system. When the Comanches fought the westward advance of the whites, it was with the expressed intention of protecting Mother Earth. What did the Comanches know about us whites that we didn't know? They knew that Westerners disrupt and destroy the natural order of things. Immune cells running amok If the human species is the immune system of the planet, then there's apparently a problem with that system. Part of the system, a part calling itself Western civilization, appears to running amok, doing the very things it is supposed to be guarding against! One obvious reason why the Western civilization people are not doing a good job of protecting Mother Earth is that they've been operating for a very long time on beliefs that depreciate Earth. Under the Judeo-Christian paradigm, Earth is a fallen world, a den of danger, and it's best to get away from Earth as soon as possible!--"Get out of here quick, get up to Heaven!" Our current basal paradigm--Materialistic Scientism--goes even further in blackening the name of Earth. According to this paradigm, Earth is nothing but a jungle, a madhouse. When an immune system attacks that which it is supposed to defend, this is called auto-immune disease. We suffer AIDS because, essentially, we are AIDS.

Preliminaries to Proof ...


For the typical member of contemporary Western civilization, the idea that the planet is an individual--Mother Earth or Gaia--is nonsense. We have been

155

The Ark
conditioned by Darwinian speculation to view the world as a highly dangerous jungle. How can a jungle, or a madhouse, be described as "Mother"? or "Lady Gaia"? What a crazy idea! Further, from the supposedly scientific point of view, any hypothesis which involves a super-individual smacks of the old Biblical "superstition." The idea of "God" and "Gaia" would be, from this point of view, examples of the "anthropomorphic fallacy"--the imposition of a human face on that which is not human. When Lovelock first advanced the Gaia hypothesis, he was attacked by his colleagues in science as a heretic. "I had the faint hope that Gaia might be denounced from the pulpit," Lovelock writes. "Instead, I was asked to deliver a sermon on Gaia at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. By contrast, Gaia was condemned as teleological by my peers[,] and the journals, Nature and Science, would not publish papers on the subject...." No satisfactory reasons for rejection were given; it was as if the establishment, like the theological establishment of Galileo's time, could no longer tolerate radical or eccentric notions...." [13] In a period of time when any idea of a super-individual--whether "God" or "Father Sky" or "Mother Earth"--is perceived as false on its face, it has not been possible to argue effectively for the truth of the Gaia hypothesis. Fractal Evolution supports Gaia Hypothesis Unfortunately, Lovelock himself detracted from his own hypothesis by saying, "Ancient belief and modern knowledge have fused emotionally in the awe with which astronauts with their own eyes and we by indirect vision have seen the Earth revealed in all its shining beauty against the deep darkness of space. Yet this feeling, however strong, does not prove that Mother Earth lives. Like a religious belief, it is scientifically untestable and therefore incapable in its own context of further rationalization." [14] In concluding that the Gaia hypothesis is unprovable, Lovelock is a bit premature. Like many another scientist, he supposes that because he can not think of a proof, a proof does not exist--and will never exist. Fractal Evolution suggests a new perspective on the matter: Is a biological cell a single organism? Yes. Is the human being a fractal of the cell? Yes. Is the human being a single organism? Yes. This has to be the case. Singularity is a primary characteristic of the fractal series including cell and human. Is the planet a fractal of the human being? If the answer to this question is "yes," we must conclude that the planet is a single organism. Is the planet self-conscious?

156

The Ark
"A self-conscious single organism?"" you ask. Yes. "Impossible!" you say. "The planet doesn't do the sort of self-conscious things we do! It just rotates, it just is ... it doesn't write poems, it doesn't suffer low self-esteem, it doesn't see a psychiatrist, it doesn't ...." Hold on there a moment! Let's not be "speciescentric" about the matter. Why should we suppose that self-conscious singularity will express itself in the same way at different fractal levels? Before we get lost in irrelevancies, let's remind ourselves of the fact that all organic behavior, including self-consciousness, has a physiological basis. What is the basis of self-consciousness? The cellular basis of consciousness, as indicated earlier, is the integral membrane protein (IMP) network. We've spoken mainly of the assimilative function of the network, its role as the "huntergatherer" mechanism for the cell. Components of the same network have a protective function, i.e., they identify toxic substances, for instance, and cause the organism to move into the flight mode. Physiological basis of self-consciousness The IMP complexes doing this work represent the progenitor system to the immune systems of multicellular organisms. Now, within just fifteen or twenty minutes of your birth, all the cells in your body were coded as "self" cells. What is it in your grand organism that is conscious of your self cells, i.e., that is selfconscious? Whatever it may be in ultimate terms , self-consciousness originates as a necessary capability of the immune system. Your immune system has the job of differentiating not-self cells from self cells, and of taking appropriate action to "handle" not-self cells. So ... even if you are the most ignorant of human beings, even if you've never heard of Darwin, even if you haven't mastered the articulation of a single word of the "King's English," you are nevertheless (congratulations!) a self-conscious entity. Self-consciousness is a capability of the immune system. "But what about all my poems?" you exclaim, what about my degrees? Don't they count? Aren't they the works of self-consciousness?" Yes, yes, yes. These things are evidence not only of self-consciousness, but also (and more important) evidence of greater-self consciousness,--consciousness of your greater self or selves.

Schismism Earlier, we advanced the hypothesis that human beings are the planetary equivalents of immune cells. At a certain level (aboriginal consciousness) all of us know we are part and parcel of the planet, i.e., that the planet is our greater

157

The Ark
self. As we in the civilization called "Western" went our separatist way, we generated belief systems that were more and more contradictory to aboriginal consciousness. Thus today we find ourselves on an ideological cliff ... Darwinism, or Schismism as I sometimes call it. Life is a fortuitous affair, a meaningless abyss. The real key to helping the planet (and its residents) Fortunately, our true-science brother and sister immune cells have been hard at work over the past decades building new "wholesome" philosophical and scientific visions of existence that are in accord with our increasingly unified, holistic New Physics. Among the most important of these is Fractal Evolution, which provides a theoretical basis for proving the Gaia hypothesis. Proving the Gaia hypothesis (and not genetic correction) is the real key to changing this planet from a war zone to a peaceable kingdom. Once it is fully understood by us humans that we are all part of one greater organism, and that what we do to others we do to ourselves, then war and violence in all forms will disappear from our reality. A short but important "to do" list While we are waiting for Lipton's theory of Fractal Evolution to appear in book format, there's much we can do now to prepare the way for the new understanding and a new basal paradigm, Scientific Holism. To assist our fellow humans in opening themselves to the possibility the Gaia hypothesis is correct, let us get to work instituting three major changes in the sphere of philosophy of science. Specifically, the three recommended changes are: [1] Discard the socalled "anthropomorphic fallacy"; [2] remove Darwinism as the orthodoxy in biology and evolutionary science, and [3] re-establish philosophy as the "science of science." Briefly, let's consider each change....

Discard the Anthropomorphic Fallacy


Currently in science, the chief heresy is the commission of the so-called "anthropomorphic fallacy." We may define anthropomorphism as a mode of hypothesis which represents other-than-human realities in terms of human characteristics. Science's definition of anthropomorphism arose in the mideighteenth century as part of the awakening of the Western mind to the weaknesses of the then dominant Biblical paradigm. Does God Almighty really have a flowing white beard? and does He sit on a golden throne in Heaven? "No," said science. "That sort of imagining is an example of the anthopomorphic fallacy ... viewing of life in subjective terms rather than in objective, scientific terms." Anthropomorphism is obsolete

158

The Ark
The concept of anthropomorphic fallacy may have had some value in the past, but the advent of the New Physics rendered the concept obsolete. The New Physics demonstrates that the observer is inseparable from that which is observed. "According to quantum mechanics," writes Gary Zukav, "there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself...." [15] In other words, in the new scientific understanding, human observation is necessarily anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism is fact, not a fallacy; it is a simple condition of human observation. It's interesting to observe that what turns out to be fallacious is the concept of objectivity. "Scientific objectivity" is a myth. "Objectivism" a fallacy For those interested in turning tables, this appears to be a good time. There are many dyed-in-the-doctrine orthodox scientists out there who need to be instructed in the fact that to the degree they hold to their belief in the reality of objectivity, they are committing the "objectivism fallacy."

A New Orthodoxy in Biology


Our current orthodox biology and evolutionary theory is materialistic to the core. The New Physics renders any form of materialism--whether philosophical or scientific--obsolete. Materialism is as fallacious as objectivism. The material realm has no "primacy" whatsoever over the non-material realm. The Frankenstein complex The doctrine of the "primacy of the DNA" (which is being converted these days to the "primacy of the DNA/RNA") is the latest ideological stronghold of orthodox biology. The doctrine maintains that all human behavior is an expression of the DNA and RNA. On the basis of this doctrine (which is not correct), the orthodoxy is building a multi-billion dollar a year industry that has for its goal the achievement of world peace through genetic engineering. Naturally, this goal has been welcomed with open arms by many of those in current circles of political power. In addition to the "military-industrial complex," we now have a "Frankenstein complex" to deal with--a complex of powerful people and institutions dedicated to the proposition that man can, and must, build a better man. The predictions of orthodoxy

159

The Ark
In a recent article, futurist (for the orthodoxy) Joseph F. Coates makes 83 "assumptions" about the year 2025, nine of which concern control of the environment, and modification of people, through genetic engineering. Assumption 4, for instance, reads: "In several parts of the world, the understanding of human genetics will lead to explicit programs to enhance people's overall physical and mental abilities--not just prevent diseases." Assumption 5: "The chemical, physiological, and genetic bases of human behavior will be generally understood. Direct, targeted interventions for disease control and individual human enhancement will be commonplace. Brain-mind manipulation technologies to control or influence emotions, learning, sensory acuity, memory, and other psychological states will be available and in widespread use." [14] Bodies are biological robots The scientific reality is that primacy is in the environment. An organism, whether a cell or a human being, is an environmental response mechanism--a computerized robot. In the case of the robot-cell, the DNA constitutes the memory, and the keyboard is the IMP network of the cellular membrane. Who or what is the operator? The operator is, or is in, the environment. Who we are isn't in the body. Who we are is running the body. The Biblical paradigm, interesting to note, is much more in accord with this scientific understanding than the Darwinian paradigm. Some may object that to view human beings as biological robots is to depreciate human life. Not at all. One important implication of the robot concept is that the death of the body, the explicate form, doesn't necessarily affect in any significant way our implicate selves. Impermanent though our bodies be, we are immortal. The "second coming" of evolutionary science What is required now is a biology based not on denial of the reality of the metaphysical realm, but on the New Physics understanding that the implicate and explicate orders are inextricably interwoven. Unfortunately, the pioneers of New Biology--James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Rupert Sheldrake, Bruce Lipton and others--are largely ignored by an orthodoxy that is deeply entrenched in the academic, corporate and governmental worlds. The concept of Fractal Evolution outlined in this book is one that the present orthodoxy can ignore only at its peril. It will not be long before the concept is widely known and embraced. Ignorance of Fractal Evolution will be considered prima facie evidence of scientific illiteracy.

Re-establish Philosophy as the Science of Science

160

The Ark
Philosophy in the first Enlightenment--the period of the ancient Greek philosophers--was the mother science. The first mathematics, the first physics, the first biology were all parts of philosophy. The first guidelines for the quest we call "science" were established by philosophy. Indeed, the first great scientists were philosophers. Guiding lights of ancient philosophy The early luminaries in philosophy were never forgotten by Western man. We talk about them still ... Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. Their influence appears again and again in our history, to provide new direction, new momentum, and new vigor to the quest for truth. What was it that was "reborn" in the Renaissance? Here is a dictionary definition of the Renaissance: "Transitional movement in Europe between medieval and modern times beginning in the 14th century in Italy, lasting into the 17th century, and marked by a humanistic revival of classical influence expressed in a flowering of the arts and literature and by the beginnings of modern science." It is interesting indeed that when James Lovelock was casting about for a good name for his hypothesis, he hit upon the ancient Greek name, "Gaia." Also interesting in this connection is the fact that the provisional name of an emerging and highly important science of life is "Chaos." Chaos is from Greek mythology. It refers to the original source of existence. The end of Darwinism "Where chaos begins, classical science stops," writes James Gleick in his Chaos--Making of a New Science. "For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in the fluctuations of wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side--these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities." [16] In the 1970s, Gleick continues, "a few scientists in the United States and Europe began to find a way through disorder. They were mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists, all seeking connections between different kinds of irregularity.... A decade later, chaos has become a shorthand name for a fastgrowing movement that is reshaping the fabric of the scientific establishment...." [17] The realm of Chaos, as these scientists have discovered, has its own order. It is not "disorderly" at all. Because of its inevitable connotations of disorder, "Chaos" is not the best name for the realm being considered. That realm is, in

161

The Ark
the phrase of David Bohm, the "implicate order." One day perhaps, physics will define itself in terms of focus rather than in terms of chronology (as in "classical physics" and "New Physics"). In the university of the future, physics may be divided into three "focuses"--implicate, explicate, and unified. "Chaos theory" would be subsumed under all three, but especially the third focus. Whatever the academic fate of Chaos, this theory (as well as the Fractal Evolution theory), is the death knell of Darwinism. "Fortuitism" in any form is simply no longer acceptable as solid science. A job for philosophy At the time of this writing, most biologists get their paychecks from the old paradigm people--the big corporate dinosaurs and the federal government (Tyrannous Rex?). For this and other reasons, it is most likely that the fall of the Darwinian orthodoxy in academia will be initiated not by the biologists, but by the philosophers. Philosophers of the world unite! in the understanding that your proper field is the science of science. You have nothing to lose but your inferiority complexes.

References:
[1] Black Elk, as told through John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks--Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Tribe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972 [1932]) 176. [2] Black Elk 8. [3] Gary Snyder, The Old Ways--Six Essays (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977) 29. [4] Snyder 34. [5] Lovelock ix-x.

162

The Ark
[6] Lovelock ix. [7] The Lives of a Cell--Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Bantam Books, 1975) 4. [8] Thomas 171. [9] Thomas 171-72. [10] Thomas 172. [11] Thomas 173. [12] "Voluntary self-extinction" is the slogan of "These Exit Times," Portland, OR. The bottom-line premise of the editor is that "Our biggest problem, destruction of the Earth biosphere, is undoubtedly a symptom ... of over- population." This quotation appears on page 8 of issue number 4, 1994. The principal cause of the degradation of the biosphere may be found in the "philosophy" of our current basal paradigm, Materialistic Scientism. Viewing the Earth and its life forms as nothing more than material resources opened the door to incessant violation and despoliation. [13] Lovelock vii-viii. [14] Lovelock ix. [15] Zukav 31. [16] Gleick 3. [17] Gleick 4.

163

The Ark

Chapter 15 The End of Human Evolution


"The universe is a teaching and learning machine. Its purpose is to know itself.... The creation of a universe starts by the separation of a part of the void, which is outlined in a sheath of light to form an ovoid egg. Then polarization of protomatter occurs. A discharge passes through the two poles of the ovoid and sets the protomatter moving. The black-white hole nucleus is the center of the source of all matter in the universe. It is possible that this universe is just a tiny cell in much larger structure."

--Itzhak Bentov

This morning, the morning of the day I finish this book, I saw President Clinton. I waved as his campaign bus rolled by the Green Bean Espresso in the little town where I live. Bill waved back. "Hello!" the loud speaker on the bus blurted out, "Thank you, thank you very much!" Half a dozen other buses rolled by in quick succession. "Thank you, thank you very much!" said the Clinton bus, now a block up the road. "His face looks awfully red," my companion, a lady from Germany, said. "I hope the struggle's not getting to him." I smiled at her. "You're a very sweet lady." "I have a lot of compassion for him," she said. "It's a hard game he's in ... being the president of this country, which should be ten countries!" Yes, I mused to myself, a hard game ... too much responsibility placed on the shoulders of one individual. At the Constitutional Convention, there was considerable discussion of the desirability of having several presidents, not just one, head the executive branch. Now we have one president instead of three only because no one at the Convention could see the magisterial George Washington sharing the executive power with anyone else....

164

The Ark
"Struggle, struggle everywhere," I replied, "and not a moment ... to think. These days, we Americans are always focused on competition, it seems. We live from one competitive event to the next...." "Now I suppose you're going to blame it all on Darwin!" she said. "Of course!" I laughed. "Well you know," she said, "life is a struggle--for most people. You for instance. You've been struggling for years to finish this book of yours on paradigm shifting, or whatever you call it!" "Life does involve struggle," I replied, "but it's not the sort of gladiatorial, do-or-die struggle that the Darwinists have been promoting as the ultimate truth of existence." "Then why don't you discuss in your book what is the real struggle?" "Okay," I said. "I will."

The Struggle of Life From time to time, we find ourselves changing our picture of the world, and our lives, because of our acceptance of certain new information. "What?--the Earth is round? My teachers always told me it was flat! Well okay, seeing it's round, I guess I will sign up on your ship, Mr. Columbus." A fair understanding of any phenomenon is often not possible until certain key information presents itself. If Darwin had had the advantage of all the data provided by the electron microscope, for instance, he might have provided the proof of Lamarckism (!) instead of producing his well-known theoretical basis for "The Age of Meaningless Struggle." Missing information Darwin was working in the dark and really didn't know it. Like most of his contemporaries, he looked up from this work from time to time, saw a bit of life, and concluded that life was indeed, as the Rev. Malthus had said, a constant nasty struggle. He had no experience comparable with that of Petr Kropotkin, the Russian naturalist who learned by living through many harsh Siberian winters, that co-operation, "mutualism" as he called it, is the key to evolutionary success,-- not competition. If Darwin had spent just one winter in Siberia with

165

The Ark
Kropotkin, his theory of evolution would have included--and emphasized--the truth that the abilit y to co-operate is the most important measure of "fitness." To this day, Darwinists take the view that all life forms are involved in an endless struggle for survival, and that the main events in this struggle are always battles for dominance. A really scientific understanding of struggle eluded us all until it became clear that the moment-to-moment work of the planet and everything on it is homeostasis--maintaining the balance. What we call struggle must be understood in relation to the homeostatic processes by which the balance (of organism and environment) is maintained,--by which life is sustained. The keys to homeostasis Today, we understand "environment" as a spacetime phenomenon. Space and time are inextricably interwoven. Maintaining organismic balance in the spatial aspect of environment is the work of the cell membrane,--the basic membrane providing a base of operations, and the complex membrane (i.e., IMP network) providing all the mechanisms of interaction. The IMP system must be in the membrane because the membrane is the interface between environment and the inner domain of the organism. Environment also has a temporal (time) aspect. How does the organism maintain balance in the temporal aspect?--in the realm of time. Maintaining organismic viability in time is the chief responsibility of ... that much, much misunderstood system, the reproductive system. The job of the reproductive system, as we know, is to generate new organismic components and, of course, whole new organisms. Now, if the reproduction (mastery-of-time) system is to work effectively, there has got to be-necessarily--an efficient means by which old parts (and organisms) are replaced with new parts (and organisms). That is where struggle comes in. The two modes of struggle There are two natural modes of struggle--struggle in the form of playcontending, and struggle in the form of real-contending. Two wolf cubs "playing" are newly created organisms getting ready to play adult roles in the wolf pack--the greater organism. (The wolf pack is itself an organism, composed of individual-organisms. Various individuals are responsible for the various lifesupport activities of the pack.) In contrast, struggle in the form of realcontending is striving which serves the real and immediate needs of the wolf pack. When the pack is chasing down a deer, for instance, this is a type of realcontending called "hunting."

Job of the leader

166

The Ark
One wolf has the very important job of being the pack leader. It is the job o f the leader to do what is necessary to insure the continuing survival of the pack. Usually, this mission translates into two sub-missions: Lead the pack to food; and lead the pack away from danger. Replacing the brain What happens when the pack leader begins to lose his ability to lead the pack successfully? The leader faces serious challenges from younger males. So long as he can beat them off, he remains the leader. But one day, the inevitable happens ... Old Jack is defeated. Off into the dark forest Old Jack limps,--to live out his few remaining days. What has happened? In terms of individualorganisms, Fierce Fred has replaced Old Jack. In terms of the pack-asorganism, however, the understanding is very different ... what has occurred is that the reproduction system of the pack has replaced the brain, the leadership organ. "Struggle" not a battle for dominance The Darwinian definition of the "struggle of life" as an endless series of battles for dominance is not valid. It is not quite correct to say the view is "reductive," because even a reductive (reduced) explanation has a degree of validity. As the Darwinists see no purpose whatsoever in life, they cannot ascribe any purpose to organismic struggle. Struggle, for the Darwinists, is purposeless. This is simply not true. Struggle has a purpose, which is ... to enable organisms to maintain homeostasis. From a slightly different perspective, we might say that the Darwinist interpretation of existential struggling as "battle" is invalid for two related reasons: (1) "Battle" is an inadequate metaphor for existential struggle; and (2) the "battle hypothesis" is an example of crude anthropomorphic fallacy. There is a type of anthropomorphism which cannot be avoided, and there is a type which can, and should, be avoided. I call the latter "crude." The idea that existential struggle is battle is drawn more from the literary world than from the natural world. The Social Darwinists were especially wrong-headed--first in reading the existential struggle as battle, and second in giving warfare a kind of glorious status, as a necessary regulator of populations and, further, as a necessary condition of evolution. Quickly, these ideas took the form of the infamous Dr. Strangelove hypothesis, that "war is the health of the state."

Struggle is keeping the balance

167

The Ark
Generally, when we see struggle in nature, what we're seeing is simply the striving, or contending, process by which organisms "keep the balance," maintain homeostasis. Earth organisms are physical entities, and thus they are inevitably worn down and worn out. Homeostasis requires that they be replaced, and the replacement process is sometimes not pleasant, especially for the individuals being replaced. Ask Old Jack.

Modern War and ETs


Natural struggle may be unpleasant, but it is pure picnic compared with the sorts of lethal, diabolical warfaring developed by man, especially Western man in the Darwinian Dark Ages. The film "Shaka Zulu" offers one of the most brilliant representations (I know of) of the difference between natural struggle and demented "modern" Western warfaring. This film ought to be required viewing for Westerners. We need to see, and to take responsibility for, the diabolical warfaring mind-set that we as a civilization have created and that we will continue to create so long as we subscribe to the Darwinisms. If Darwin was right, man would be doomed If the Darwinian philosophy of evolution is correct, then man is doomed to extinction. What it translates to in the end is the insane command,-- "Shoot everything and everyone around, and who's left standing wins." Today, in the popular culture, one of the big themes is extraterrestrials. Not long ago, the Fossil Record acquired an interesting addition ... specimens of fossil organisms from Mars! A former C.I.A. remote viewer, Dr. Courtney Brown, has just published a book in which he describes his encounters with a dozen different extraterrestrial civilizations and his discovery of his soul. When the C.I.A. begins to acknowledge not only the existence of "ETs," but also the reality of the soul, you can be sure the world is really changing! Are the masses ready for ETs? Not not so long as they are mis-guided by the Darwinisms. If popular Darwinism is correct in its belief that success in mortal combat is the key to evolution, then we humans would have been wiped out by ETs a long time ago. The very fact that we still exist suggests that the extraterrestrials have an understanding of life and evolution that surpasses that of the Darwinists.

One for the "X-files" ...

168

The Ark
If there are any "hostile" space entities out there, it is likely they are not space Darwinists, but simply components of the cosmic excretory system, the garbage-species re-cycling crew. If we as a civilization persist in basing our lives on the unwholesome paradox that survival is self-destruction, we may leave the cosmic crew with no other choice but to re-cycle us! Now it may be that re-cycling isn't so bad. It may be that the Darwinists and all their followers will be beamed up to spacecraft and conveyed to a reeducation facility on a distant planet, where the orthodoxy is Lamarckism! Such an event might give me a moment's gratification, but my real preference is that we, as a civilization, throw out our pseudo-sciences--the whole range o f sciences based on Darwinian biology and evolution, and that we devote ourselves to establishing true philosophy and true science as our guides to life. In this universe, the name of the game is evolution. That which doesn't evolve is terminated and re-cycled into something that does evolve. At this very historical moment, the human species is being given a chance to choose. Shall we continue to play out the Darwin script until there's nothing left of our species? Or shall we embrace a truly scientific view of existence?

It's Our Choice ...


The basic choice we now face is the choice of basal paradigms. Never before have we had the opportunity of picking our own basal paradigm. Now we do.... Now, and for a short time, we have the ability to choose. We have an historic opportunity. To re-cap the situation ... As stated before, our current dominant basal paradigm is Materialistic Scientism. Scientism means, in our context, "science as religion." Newton established classical materialistic physics; when Darwin set forth a theory of biology and evolution that was materialistic, science became the exclusive property of the materialists. Thereafter, the world of academics fell to the materialists, slowly but surely. The Old Testament of Scientism is Newtonian physics; the New Testament is Darwinism. When any vision operates as most fundamental truth, then it acquires a religious status; it becomes "sacred truth." Sacred truths are, of course, infallible. Historically, the establishment of infallible doctrines has proven useful to the power-seekers, the priests of power. Over a relatively short period of time, the Roman Catholic Church was able to establish a world-wide empire. In part, this success story rested upon the the Church's establishment of the New Testament

169

The Ark
"canon" (a group of infallible doctrines) as the official truth of existence. In part, the achievement was due to a political alliance of the Catholic Church with the then greatest power on Earth--the Roman Empire. For all of its great power in the past, its great pomp and ceremony, and its seemingly endless influence in all of our lives, the Roman Catholic Church is not credited, officially, with successfully coaching a single human being through the mine-fields of life on Earth and into the Heavenly fields of the Christhood. What went wrong? Some of the most wonderful people of all time, as well as some o f the worst, were leaders in this Church. Why did this Church fail in fulfilling its primary mission?-- to turn people to Christ. Teachings of the cell Consider once again the prototype of evolutionary success, the single cell. The primary success of the cell is due to two factors: One, the creation of selfhood through the creation of a basic impermeable membrane; and two, the creation of that membrane into a semi-permeable "living" membrane, via the introduction of the IMP network. If we apply the "teachings" of the cell to the situation of Catholicism, we may conclude that the failure of the Church-organism was the result of two events-the replacement of the teachings of Christ by Church canon; and the elimination of the Christian Gnostics, who were the "direct receivers" of divine information. The stable base of the Church ought to have been the Christ teachings ... period. The "inspiration" side of the Church ought to have been the Gnostic applications of the teachings. Historic opportunity for Catholic Church to become catholic Nothing of what I say is meant as condemnation of Catholicism. Indeed, I believe that this institution has within it the capability of re-establishing itself on a proper basis, the Christ teachings, and of serving as a vehicle for the unification of the world's religions. Much depends upon the abilit y of theologians in this Church to seize this historical opportunity to set the first Christian house upon its proper foundation. Orthodoxy, particularly when it's obviously wrong, breeds contempt. As seventeenth and eighteenth century science revealed, more and more, the inadequacy of the Catholic canons relating to Earth science and history, the Church--and "Creationism"--became the target of much contempt. Newton and his followers took on the work of turning that contempt into a practical machine for burying Creationism and "all the other nonsense & superstition" which the anti-Creationists blamed for the sorry condition of mankind. Invisible church underlying invisible government

170

The Ark
Basically, what the anti-Creationists did was establish a new church-Materialistic Scientism--on the basis of reductive materialism and on the basis of the political model of the Roman Catholic Church itself! The original Vatican of this church was London. The original council of this church was the Royal Society. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, or Royal Society for short, was incorporated in 1662 with the sanction of Charles II. Within a year of its incorporation, it entered into active correspondence on learned questions with philosophers and scientists in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Within ten years of incorporation, the Society was considered by the British government to be semi-official. Side by side with the development of this Society was the development of British intelligence. Indeed, the establishment of the British Empire as such owes much to these two organizations. Do you happen to know who were the two most influential presidents of the Royal Society? Isaac Newton and T.H. Huxley. Which discoverer of the principle of "Natural Selection" was a member of the Royal Society--Alfred Russel Wallace or Charles Darwin? Charles Darwin. What well-known naturalist of the nineteenth century is buried in Westminster Abbey right next to Isaac Newton? Charles Darwin. There has much talk in the United States over the past few decades of an "invisible government" that is presumed to be running things. It is still not known that underlying this invisible government is an invisible church! Once this is better understood, it will be easier for all those who desire the establishment of truly open, equitable government to deal with what they perceive as "the enemy." The supposed enemy is simply a bunch of people, many of them quite powerful, who were educated under the canons of Darwinism. Most of these people sincerely believe that our world, and our species, will have no future unless they, the members of the responsible elite, find a solution to what they regard as the Great Threat to the species and the planet and the elite ... overpopulation. The canonical basis of this elitist group and their Church of Materialistic Scientism is the Darwinisms--Classical Darwinism, Social Darwinism, and NeoDarwinism. Fortunately, it is possible to remove all three of these pseudosciences from our academic institutions, from our popular culture, from government, and from our lives and the lives of our children ... and to do so without violence. Indeed, most of those in the Darwinist faith, I am convinced, are ready to listen to common sense and convert to real science. For the past hundred years, this planet has been under the management of state socialism. Look around. See the results....

171

The Ark
A time for choice ... It's our choice. Yours and mine. Do we stick with dog-eat-dog Darwinism? Do we follow the many priests and politicos of Materialistic Scientism? Or do we give our attention and our allegiance to the establishment of a new, truly scientific basal paradigm? ... to be called perhaps "Scientific Holism."

The End/Beginning
At this moment, we are in the end period of human evolution. A major indicator is the emergence in our time of scientific holism as a more and more pervasive mode of thought and practice. Sooner or later, all of us will be following the lead of New Physics and understanding our particular subjects of interest in wider and wider, "holistic" contexts. Before too long, all of us will be able to say, along with the Romantic poet William Blake, we are able to see "Eternity in a grain of sand." Scientific Holism inevitable ... the sooner, the better Sooner or later, Scientific Holism will become the new basal paradigm of not only Western civilization, but of the human species. When this occurs, that will mark the end point of human evolution. Why the "end point"? When we can see, from the scientific point of view, that the original basal paradigm underlying the species--the Aboriginal paradigm--is correct, we will have come full circle. At the end point is a new "unified consciousness." What will be unified in this consciousness is the reverential attitude of the aboriginal peoples with the New Science understanding of the Western peoples. As it becomes real to us that the Gaia hypothesis is correct, we will begin to see other people, and indeed all other life forms, as aspects of ourselves ... as relatives. Homo sapiens is, and always has been,--a one thing. We the People are one.

The Blending
In the end, the human drama will not seem as brutal as it now seems. Rather, our focus will shift to our achievement.... Humankind is the immune system of the planetary organism. In order to learn how to do its job, the species had to do two things: It had to create a mechanism by which the highest truths known to the human species would be remembered always; and it has to create a mechanism for knowing (and for dealing with) new things.

172

The Ark
In the human body, there is a process of cell coding that occurs within the first half hour of birth. After this coding process is completed, all the cells in the body are identifiable by immune cells as "self cells." Thus when a non-self cell is detected in the body, the immune system knows right way that it is an invader. Species-organism coding In the case of the species-organism, the coding process began long ago with the development of tribal codes. The Aborigines of Australia are perhaps the best example we have of original man. On the basis of available literature on this group, I would conjecture that the first step in tribal coding is utter openness to the dream process. In their "dreamtime," the Aborigines experience what they regard as the greater truths of existence. Further, they receive warnings and special directives. The dreams of the individual are shared with the group, and the group gives full credence to the dreams. The very first bible was the realm of dreams. Man's first means of learning the greater truths of existence was prototypic gnosticism-direct knowing through the dream process. All native tribes have distinctive symbologies, costumes, rites and rituals. These are all components of tribe-organism codes. For the most part, the code elements originated in dreamtime. For reference, I would recommend Black Elk Speaks , which contains a fascinating discussion of the process of transforming personal vision into tribal wisdom and ceremony. While tribal codes distinguish one tribe from others, they also connect the tribes to their common origins and original parents--Father Sky and Mother Earth. Further, they provide symbolic pathways for the linking of all peoples into one Earth-tribe. An excellent reference on this subject is a book by Ken Carey titled The Return of the Bird Tribes. According to the Carey vision of our history, the process of reintegrating aboriginal consciousness with the consciousness called "Western" began many hundred of years ago with the establishment of the Iroquois Confederacy in what is now Upstate New York. The necessity for Western civilization Presumably, aboriginal gnosticism was not enough, not a sufficient means of advancing the species to the condition of fully qualified planetary immune system. Aboriginal consciousness is so rooted in nature, it cannot apprehend what we might regard as the "unnatural"--all of those options that exist by way of oppositional relationship to all the natural options. Many tribes have recognized this reality, and some symbolize it by designating certain tribal members as "contraries," i.e., people who do things "the other way."

173

The Ark
How can a tribe know what it cannot know? This is the basic existential question that underlies the creation of the "civilized" peoples. The answer is: The tribe, or part thereof, must stop being what it is and become something else. In order to know things that could not be discovered by natural means, our species had to create a component, a society, that turned its back on the ancient wisdom, the "old ways," and that walked a separatist path. When we chart the basal paradigms of Western civilization, we find a progressive and systematic deracination (uprooting) of man from natural modes of knowing. Knowing that mankind is a one thing, I interpret this deracination not as madness, but as part of a purposeful strategy of self-education. The species wants to be "all it can be." Why? The only really qualified immune cell is a highly educated immune cell. Programmed into each of us human equivalents is the mandate: "Learn to know the unknown, and to use the unknown to the advantage of your greater self. If a threat to life functions of the greater organism is indicated, be prepared to neutralize the unknowns." Keepers and Finders ... Our Aboriginal brothers and sisters are those parts of our species that volunteered to contribute to the higher education of the species by being the "keepers of the ancient truths" and the practitioners of the sacred ways by which those truths were first obtained ... the arts of direct knowing. We Western civilization people are current representations of that part of the species that volunteered, long ago, to walk the contrary, separatist path. Our intention? Our intention was very honorable ... to find out whatever it is that can be found out by indirect knowing. After all, if direct knowing is a possibility, then indirect knowing must be regarded as a possibility. No one is fully educated until a master of all ways of knowing. The enlightenment at the end of the tunnel (vision) At the end of human evolution is a blended consciousness. The best of the aboriginal and best of the West. This end point is not just a destination, however. It is a beginning point. In a lucid dream, I saw this point. The Aboriginals of all time gather around a sacred tree, the Tree of Life, and call into their midst the Contraries of all time. Each shares with the others his or her experiences and the wisdom that has been learned. When the sharing is complete, the masks of time disappear ... and a golden mist covers all....

174

The Ark
When the mist dissipates, there is a new Earth. It shines like an Infinite Crystal. All who are there know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are facets of that crystal. The age of deracination and of terror is over. The age of enlightenment and exploration of the infinite begins....

Copyright 1997/2007 TDHall *** www.biofractalevolution.com

175

You might also like