Why is evolution imprisoned within biology. The idea that something is subject to outside forces that will over time leave influence within it, is at the core of biology. Animal, plant, fungus, or microbe, it doesn’t matter, we are all slowly sculpted on the genetic level over generations. We all are expression of our environment, all influenced by by our surrounding. Penguins with their fatty bodies is a way the antarctic found to express birds. Birds in more tropical regions have had to conform themselves, on the biologic level, to a much different environment, so they look different. [ I want to point out environment is very much alive. While variations such as temperature and mineral content of soil can be thought of as inanimate, the microbes swimming in our drinking water, the plants playing with our neural system with their phyto chemicals, the predators who keep our instinct sharp, and so much more are our living backdrops. They all have their own agendas ] . This all is simple or at least it seems to me. There are some who don’t see this as a world view, which I am honesty 100 percent ok with. Some are not content that people don’t believe in evolution, obviously, but not me. If you don’t “believe” in evolution I have full faith that you have some comprehension of evolution on some level, but for cultural, ideological, or political reasons deny the idea of it. The heart of evolution is the simple ideas that it is better to live than to die. That we are similar to our ancestors. That why we call having children “reproduction”. We are (re)producing. No one denies this language because it is not politically charged. So if you don’t “believe in evolution” fine. Conversion is not my intent in writing this. however my bias assumption is you would if it was rebranded. Maybe I'll try to do that someday, but right now I wish to encourage believers and nonbelievers alike to evolve what the idea of evolution is.
We are all the collections of Trillions of cells. Each one with its own story. Each one trying to in its own way to get acquire food, and avoid death, and do whatever else make a cell happy. Its has a incentive to work within the balance of its environment, our bodies. If a group of cells act to individualistic with no regard to the environment we get tumors. This can cause environmental catastrophe on a cellular level, which we would perceive sickness and possibly death. None of these cell can have an understanding of being a human, no more than we can understand what being a cell is like. We have to speculate and form metaphor as our consciousness is the culmination of whatever consciousness each of our trillions of cell have. Within each cells are many expression of its environment. A bone cell has the same DNA as nerve cell. It is the somatic bio region that determines the nature of the cell. Whether it is a bone, nerve, skin, whatever cell. Just as where a bird is located on the globe determines its characteristics.
In the evolution debate where is the Richard Dawkins of epigenetics. How come the idea that cells are not fully determined by a genetic code and are subject to their environment not getting more attention . I would guess it would undermine how we practice medicine culturally. Is there a more objective way to judge a cultures medicine than by observing how healthy people are within that culture.? How healthy are we really? Mentally, physically socially. It's hard to say because we can’t really know what past cultures were truly like to live in them. Again we speculate and confuse what we see for what was. We can look at other cultures, but after centuries of industrializations we are blurring into copies of each other's cultures.
If we go in the opposite direction we can see we all one of billions of people on this planet. We are one of trillions of the individual species in the world. We work in ways the most enlightening among us can perceive only vague fragments of. Just as we are to complex for any of our cell to understand, we incapable of perceiving the nature of these meta-organism. It is my belief though that we are constantly engaged in the process of co- creating these entities. I think we as individual in these systems can be understood by us as cultures, religions, governments, corporations. I think for every structure we have a name for their are countless patterns of organization that we have no understanding of. Ultimately all these structures have to fit together in in pattern that is global. Just like cell form into organ which form us as an organism we then form organizations which are as connected to each other as our heart is to our lungs.
Would not each of these groups, like each of our cells, have there own motivations. It seems to me that a culture of any kind could very easily be an a different evolutionary trajectory than the people within that system. Just as we don't often care about when our cells die on an individual level, why would a corporation or government care about the individuals that comprise it. Could there not be organizational structures that prey on people that embody different structures. Is the prison system not a self organized structure comprising of millions of nervous systems that slowly digest other humans in it millions of concrete stomachs? Who really benefits from this system? I understand people are making money off of this system but that not the same as benefiting from it. And this is but one system. It's a system we have an understanding of. I suspect there are countless more systems wreaking havoc on us that we don’t even have the biological ability to understand.
In one of the darkest book written, at one of the darkest time George Orwell “1984” describes what I consider to be an under acknowledge aspect of industrial war. He does away with any comprehension of war on a human level. He does not talk about the greed or madness of leaders. In his dystopia the reader never meets a monarch of any kind, just an endless supply of bureaucratic russian dolls . He doesn’t spend time about cultures gathering resources gathering resource, although I would certainly put emphasis on that. He see war in all its horror as merely a way to destroy what people spend there life making. If we see the human organism as the final manifestation of a biological patten than what sense does this make . If we can perceive of us being mearley pieces in a much larger pattern then this start to become logical. If we have a factory that somehow feed off human energy and shits out boats, then it’s evolutionary motive may be to consume as much energy as it can. If it can trick us into destroying what it's produced by say creating a political calamity where we actively drop bombs on these boats then we will be more willing to feed this organism whatever it is, with whatever essence we are feeding it with.
Conventionally this phenomenon of using war to jack up production is seen as an opportunity for some to war profit. And while this is true would it not be necessary for those profiting to internalize the logic of this industrialized organism for them to be in the position to profit. How many morally principal people would rise in rank within such a hierarchy? Not many I guess. Seems to me people rise through the ranks of these organization whether they are religious corporate, governmental;, whatever by superimposing the motives of these organism as their own motives. Power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely. But does this power that talked about so much have an agenda that's foreign from ours. I say yes. I think this corruption process that so many talk about is not simply a leader becoming weak, but is actively corrupted by an entity that we can only perceive in a distorted way. Whatever it is it is smarter than what we can comprehend and will attempt to pick the most vulnerable people who are charismatic enough to sway us under their spell for those crucial positions.
I mentioned at the beginning of this thought that I don’t care if you or anyone else believe in evolution. I stand by that. What I do care about is is trying to widen the frame of consensus reality to the point where we'll can start having these conversations. I happen to like evolution as as a tool to understand all this. That all life is adapting to its environment, which is full of life and consciousness from the tiniest bacteria cell to some gaian entity that is in a constant state of flux, is the closest I come to a spirituality. The idea that we don’t have natural predators because we can’t detect these predators seems like a belief a species could only have after another organism tampered with its brain.
I argue the more opaque communication becomes between understanding the intrinsic motives of a culture and our own needs as cell within this system, is the cause of our sicknesses. Having a language, which I believe evolution has done, to communicate these ideas is to me the best way to reform these systems whether they be governmental, religious, or corporate. There has to be an understanding that any culture has a natural immunity to rid itself from anything that threatens it. When a group forms to say to “find a cure for ______” ,then the internal logic of the group itself has not only a motive to not find a cure because that would mean its death, but of spreading anxiety about ______ as that is what is feeding it. It can do this by either increasing the rates of _______, or by increasing awareness of ________. Most people within these structures, I believe are earnest in their struggle to find a cure, but the internal logic of this culture will no more allow it anymore than we would allow a few of our cells find a cure for our nutrition. If individuals within these groups begin to accomplish their mission they will be purged by the cultural immune system.
Is this cynical? I don’t think so. What I think is cynical is ignoring all the damage and wasted energies that started as collective altertism. If we indeed have such good will should we not implement it in a more cunning way? After all Whatever these entities are they are, I don’t feel they are are necessarily any more hostile to us any more than we are hostile to any of our cell. I do believe they are other in a way we can’t possibly understand, but we can at least understand some aspect of them through the lens of evolution.
