Tag: Evolution

Today is the 199th birthday of Charles Darwin and 2008 marks the 149th year anniversary of his book, On the Origin of Species, where he advocated and provided scientific evidence that showed all species of life evolved over time from common ancestry through the process of natural selection.

Today is also a good time to reflect upon what Darwin’s ideas mean to Americans.

     Welcome to the Pony Party Special Hands-Free Edition, brought to you tonight by Dr.  Phil, for so astutely diagnosing Britney Spears as being “in dire need of help.” Thank you, Dr. Obvious. The guys down at the tractor pull were saying this last year, and the four-year-old next door phoned it in way before you did. But the good news is you’re now a leading contender for the first annual Bill “Diagnosis by Video” Frist Award for practicing medicine without any apparent medical knowledge.

    And now, without further ado, we present a very special Pony Party segment — “Now Who Looks Like a Dope?” complete with re-creations from the Los Angeles Chapter of the Archives of Overhead Cell Phone Conversations.      

I don’t accept it, you know, as a theory.

If you have 18 minutes, check out this video link below (sorry, no permalink).  It is Carolyn Porco, lead scientist on the Cassini Saturn mission, talking about one of the greatest human achievements in exploration that has barely raised eyebrows in our terminally dull population.  She is the awesome, and she knows how to talk about science to stupid people like me. 

“The conflict dates from the day when one man, flying in the face of appearance, perceived that the forces of nature are no more unalterably fixed in their orbits than the stars themselves, but that their serene arrangement around us depicts the flow of a tremendous tide—the day on which a first voice rang out, crying to mankind quietly slumbering on the raft of Earth, ‘We are moving!  We are going forward!”

“It is a pleasant and dramatic spectacle, that of Mankind divided to its very depths into two irrevocably opposed camps–one looking towards the horizon and proclaiming with all its new-found faith, ‘We are moving’, and the other, without shifting its position, obstinately maintaining, ‘Nothing changes.  We are not moving at all.’  These latter, the ‘immobilists’, …
forbid the earth to move.  Nothing changes, they say, or can change.  The raft must drift purposelessly on a shoreless sea.”

“But the other half of mankind, startled by the look-out’s cry, has left the huddle where the rest of the crew sit with their heads together telling time-honored tales.  Gazing out over the dark sea they study for themselves the lapping of the waters along the hull of the craft that bears them, breathe the scents borne to them on the breeze, gaze at the shadows cast from pole to pole by a changeless eternity.  And for these all things, while remaining separately the same–the ripple of the water, the scent of the air, the lights in the sky–become linked together and aquire a new sense: the fixed and random universe is seen to move.
No one who has seen this vision can be restrained from guarding and protecting it.  To testify to my faith in it, and to show reasons, is my purpose here.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, THE FUTURE OF MAN, 1959

More on Teilhard next time…If anyone wishes to add graphics, I will say thanks.

Well, not really–that’s just what I am called because I actually believe conspiracies are an important part of our socio-political reality–so I will cop to the plea no matter how bad it sounds. Of course, we have all seen conspiracies in our lives and no one doubts it. What we have trouble is understanding that those in power are in power largely because they are part of groups or cliques that work together often in conspiracy to gain and maintain power. We seem to be of the opinion that things just “happen” and that things are unconnected. We are surprised when we find our government lies to us. Why that surprise exists has always astonished me–government always lie, always will lie, and currently lie. If they did not they would lose power. What we have to do is understand how power works.

About 25 years ago, I woke from a good night’s sleep filled with words.  The words went something like this:

—If evolution is now the evolution of consciousness (and I believe it is), ergo, whatever species is evolving in consciousness must become aware of increasingly more aspects of the totality of being, must become aware of that part of being which is death— 

When awareness of death began dawning in the evolving consciousness of homo
sapiens (although animals have some sense of death, they don’t wake in the morning thinking, ‘I’m going to die some day’), the human species reacted largely with fear, denial, and avoidance.  This ‘significant’ awareness of death in the evolving human consciousness seems to have coincided with the transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal orientation in society.

I state these only as interesting possibilities, to be examined, thought about, researched, felt with the heart, contemplated…

Early literatures, like the Gilgamesh Epic, have themes of searching for the fountain of eternal life.  From fear and attempted denial, the effort to escape, the effort to transcend death, became a driving force of western civilization, and led to much of our cultural and technological progress. 

Through various religious constructs, humans sought to continue existence in an afterlife where we join our loved ones who have gone before, to continue where we left off, so to speak.

Other means of ‘escaping’ death were such devices as fame, power, control of nature, wealth.  So, if you are as rich as Walt Disney (of the Happy, Magic Kingdom) you can, at that  moment of imminent death, have your body frozen in cryonics until science comes up with a cure for whatever it was from which you were about to expire.

But I apologize for being on the brink of slipping into sarcasm and humor in what is a  very serious subject.  Yet I love to laugh!

There are many means by which we have attempted to avoid and deny.  Find your own examples.

But, as the psychologists say…

  “Whatever we deny is bound to come back to haunt us, writ large, barring the
  way forward!  Saying, “This denied content is what is blocking the way
  forward.”  Saying, “Deal with this.  Integrate this.  This psychic content
  is what is barring your way forward, is barring your further growth, is
  barring your evolution…”

Our very attempts to avoid death, our attempts to dominate nature, to control natural processes in a non-integrated manner–have brought us to this point where we have created…

  DEATH WRIT LARGE ACROSS THE PLANET

…saying, basically, deal with this, integrate this, awareness and acceptance of death is the way forward.

And so the very threat to our survival is the gateway and the impetus to our evolution forward. 

—With the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s way of thinking, and thus we drift toward unimaginable peril—

With our technological advances we have taken into our own hands the power which was once attributed only to Gods.  This mandates that we evolve man’s way of thinking to become at least somewhat more equivalent to the thinking of the Gods.  Evolve or die!  Thus it has always been.

Be excellent to each other…we’re in this together…this is all we have…

(A rehash of a dKos diary from 8/27/2007 in honor of President Al Gore).

Science was the boring class you had to take in school where the teacher droned on and on about stuff you already knew, or didn’t care about.  No, not really, although that is the only thing a lot of people know about science. 

Let’s try a different definition.  Science is the systematic gathering of data and the forming of theories to explain this data.  This is a better definition, but kind of dry.  Science is really all about model building.  (No, not model cars).  The models I’m talking about are mathematical, or systematic models (called theories).

Note :  Don’t use Wikipedia for reference material,  I’ve learned since I wrote this that information from Wikipedia is alway suspect because Anyone can edit it. It can be a useful tool when doing research, but realize that it is not a source you want to reference.

(I was brand new at the time)

More below the fold.

A paraphrase:

—With the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s way of
  thinking; and thus we drift toward unimaginable peril…

  paraphrase of Albert Einstein

With the splitting of the atom, humans took on the technological power which was once attributed only to the gods.  But the second part of the equation, man’s way of thinking, did not make a similar leap. 

Thus we are involved in balancing the second part of the equation.  We are involved in the evolution of consciousness.  This evolution is imperative

for the survival of the species. 

Survival depends on adaptation to this evolutionary imperative. 

Will we make it? I don’t know. 

Yet I do know that this is the challenge.

I will contribute more of my ramblings on this subject soon.  Thanks