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.