SOM - Evolution

 

To understand where we came from, understanding evolution is essential. A loud voice from a minority of religions is distorting what it is and how the theory developed. When I was rethinking my beliefs, I had to go back and review it.

Before Darwin, alternatives to religious origin stories were being floated. Then the Galapagos Islands were discovered off the coast of Ecuador. That country has continued to protect them, like the treasure they are, to this day. The climate there changes often, putting pressure on the flora and fauna, and the islands create places for the species to isolate and evolve into new species, making it a living laboratory.

Darwin travelled there soon after they were discovered and collected data. He followed that data to create his seminal work, The Origin of Species. He was a religious man and knew his ideas would be controversial. He struggled with publishing them. Sorry for the history lesson, but I didn’t want to clumsily introduce evolution. There are many misconceptions.

There were errors in the theory and it was not complete. Darwin included in it that he did not know what the mechanism was for how species evolved. That’s DNA, it was discovered later. I’ll leave it up to you to look up “theory” or anything I’ve said for more details. A key to my “spirituality of materialism” is that scientific methods were employed. That includes the principle that we are never 100% certain about our conclusions. So, any errors that have been found in Darwin’s original work do not result in the dismissal of the full set of data, the evidence, or the logic applied to them. Conclusions based on them may change slightly, but the basic ideas have stood the test of further scientific inquiry.

In my search for a spiritual practice, I have found that all of them include “mystery”. The Old Testament has a story of Moses not being allowed to see the face of God. Jesus taught in parables. Muslims don’t allow images of Muhammad. Buddhism has very little to say about the origin of the world. I have never understood why religious people have a problem with science changing, and continuing on a constant search for more answers. Answers almost always lead to more questions. This seems to me to be a spiritual quest, to know ourselves better. When universities began in the 9^th century, they were closely tied to religions. We seemed to have lost that the search for meaning and the search for facts came from the same curiosity about ourselves.

But I digress, or is this my central theme? I’m still figuring that out.

The importance of evolution, and that we are evolved from what we call “non-living” matter, is that it means each of us is not special. And no one is special for knowing that each of us is not special. The parents I had, the school I went to, something I saw on TV that I don’t remember, Matt Dillahunty and Aron Ra, all added up to me thinking my knowledge of the history of the universe is meaningful. Some people think it’s sad that I think meaning comes from something as inert as billions of years of protons rearranging themselves into my brain and my guts. But the people that think that, went to a different school, and listened to different podcasts, and their protons arranged differently.

I think the sadness comes from the thought that each of us has very little effect on the whole of the universe, or even on parts of this planet within our lifetime. Even for the names that we know from history, the people who are said to have had a great impact, do we know who they were, or what it was like to be around them? Very few people will know me, but that’s true for those famous names also. We know the thing they did that made an impact, but not much more. “Insignificance” is another topic I’ll need to get back to.

Evolution is not just new species and it’s not just DNA. It’s a long line of tiny changes, with millions of individual combinations. It takes thousands of years for a complex species like ours to develop. The fun and the joy are in experiencing those unique combinations. With language, we have added another dimension, a way to pass on thoughts and ideas within a lifetime and through the ages. Using the theory, we can look at our primate cousins and have a sense of how we developed as social creatures when we lived in the jungle. We can look at early language and symbols carved into rocks and paintings on cave walls, and get a sense of how we developed moral codes and ethics for living together.

The Spirituality of Materialism

 Okay so, I've said it before, I'm going to start a new series. And, they fizzle out. We'll see this time. 

Lately I have been inspired by Robert Sapolsky and others to see the world as a long series of amazing events, too many for one brain to hold. 

I'm past the "I debunk everything" stage of non-belief and into, well, that's what the series is for, into what? We'll see. Many people go through a year or more of anger when they feel they have been lied to all their lives. Some never get over that. I'm over that. Some get just as fundamentalist about their new belief system as they were before. It's merely coincidence that they are scientifically accurate. Anyway, there are a lot of people in the world. I'm interested in finding common ground. 

Here's the phrase that I woke up with the other day,

My spirituality comes from the awareness of the accumulated knowledge of who we are and how we got here. 

That knowledge has increased in accuracy tremendously over the last several centuries and it includes everything that came before, from our earliest common ancestor that looked up at the sun being blotted out in the middle of the day and wondered why that happened. 

To add a little to that: 

Materialism means dealing with matter, inert matter. 

When I say we came from matter, that sounds non-spiritual. Let's not forget about energy. This body I inhabit (I'll get back to that bit of language) generates energy. That's why you can touch that screen and it responds. 

I'm not going to veer too far into cosmology. There are many better ways for you to learn about that. But, real quick history of the material universe. 

There was something, or some cosmologists call it nothing (another thing to get back to) then there was spacetime. That burst of energy left behind some matter, mostly hydrogen and helium. The same forces of nature that exist today caused those atoms to combine and change into other atoms then form stars that cooked up a wider variety of elements then planets and eventually life. And there's all the stuff we don't know so we make up names like "dark matter". 

Knowing the details of that billions of years old story may or may not inspire you, confuse you, confound you, or make you laugh because you think it's nuts. 

I will continue on from here with a couple ideas in mind. Call them premises, conclusions of science (which never operates with 100% certainty), basic facts, it's not important. It's actually more important that we agree that we don't know how it works or where it all came from. I'm not seeking ultimate knowledge. I only need the building blocks of the world, the human size things we interact with, not quantum weirdness, and not sure I even need relativity. 

The simple ideas

The forces of nature have remained constant since a few minutes after the point that we call the beginning of time, the Big Bang, the furthest back we can trace the known universe. 

• For most of that time, we (our human ancestors) had no idea how those forces worked. 

Really, most of the time we weren't here. Pre-hominids go back a few million years. Somewhere around 200,000 years ago our species began. Written history can be counted in the 10's of thousands. 

• We (as a species, our ancestors) developed language to describe the forces. 

Gods made thunderbolts, one drove the Sun around, other spirits brought the seasons. Every culture that had a written or oral history has an origin story. 

• That language carried not only attempts at explaining all the life and how it came and went plus the movement of the heavens and the earth, it also carried the values that drove us toward larger tribes, working together to protect ourselves and grow and flourish. 
• 
  
• All that led to agriculture, architecture, bridges, aqueducts, sailing, mountain climbing, nations, more languages, and, it gets complicated after that, but it also gets more accessible because we are able to pass on more knowledge and build on it. 

This is where the description of what I'm talking about gets difficult. One way all of this is expressed is "The Pursuit of Happiness", but it took me a while to get comfortable with that, it seems too self-centered and hedonistic. Or, there's "The Survival Instinct", which seems kind of animalistic, dog eat dog. "Spiritual" means something different to just about everyone. 

I used "spiritual" in the title here, so this may be a good place to end the introduction. I've laid out a direction, a beginning at least, and pointed to the hazards of the discussion ahead. We'll see. 

Superior Hiking Trail Caribou Trail

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3 Campsites
Stunning views and a beautiful lake

https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/caribou-river-wayside-to-lutsen/#section_4

This is a skip way up the shore since last time. I can't believe we missed two years of hiking. Ruth did a camping trip with some friends, but 2023 had some nasty weather to deal with. I don't know what happened to 2022. 

2024 started out with very little snow, we found ourselves hiking in January. It's been a winter of either mud or ice, but we got lucky. The elevation changes were not dramatic, so that helped. We followed the directions to Caribou Trail, the road, which is also Co Rd 4 and a short drive to the trailhead. It's a small parking lot. We passed it once. 

No problem finding the trail from there. The white markers let us know it's a spur trail. Normally I don't mention them, but this one was 

One more trip around the sun

 Nick Cave says, 

"We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self — This is me! Here I am! — in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces.

Then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person — I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world."  -- from Faith, Hope, and Courage

I can get that. The trouble with a lot of these types of musings is they come from people who have found comfort in their later years. Maybe that came from some hard work, and maybe from some luck. When you're young, you can't predict how those forces will play out. So the old repeat the old truisms, that are true, except, not always. 

If they were always true, then people who are working three jobs would have enough to feed their families. 

We are stuck between centuries of traditions and an uncertain future. The one got our ancestors through adversity and the other we can only imagine. When I read the stories of those ancestors, I can feel their sense of being in this same place. I see myself as the result of their dreams.