We have brains, slightly bigger than apes but not much. Our DNA is 98% the same. We have more forebrain, and so think differently probably. But when I look around and see what we do with our big brains I'm not impressed. If I were a visitor from another planet I would look at this conceited species that tells itself that it owns the planet and yet is busily destroying it, I would think homo sapiens a cancer.
After a long life and many years living close to nature, knowing myself part of nature, I think our view of evolution is too human-centered. I see nature as a marvelous chaos of life and death and change and movement. Nature tries everything, absolutely everything. Animals that have no legs, two legs, four legs, six, eight. A tail that is functions like an arm, a nose that serves as long arm and fingers. We expect left-right symmetry but on closer look it is the outside only. And a surprising life form with five arms, seven tentacles. Life forms that can live in salt water, or only in sweet water. Beings deep in the ocean who make their own light where sunlight cannot penetrate. Nature makes roosters with gold feathers, and roosters with white feathers that flows like hair. Next door there is one all black cat with yellow eyes and the other all black cat has green eyes. I lived for some months in a forest of redwoods. Huge, enormous trees, fairly close together. On sand. Hardly anything grew underneath; the four months that I lived there it never rained. But every morning a thick mist came in from the ocean not far away. I learned that redwoods absorb through the whole surface of the tree all the thousands of gallons of water they need to survive for a thousand years. A wealth of variation almost unimaginable.
It is hubris to think we can design a better planet, as IBM advertises. Arrogance to put animal genes in a plant seed, modifying one species to eradicate another we don't like. We've tried this selective eradication for half a century or so, and I don't think it ever worked as the scientists assured us it would. Whoever thought that it was our job as humans to change the world. For thousands of years we showed that what our unique strength is to adapt to an incredible variety of different environments. We learned to survive in ice and snow, we survived in deserts and knew to find enough water. We lived at altitudes where oxygen is thinner, and we lived in steaming jungles. The same species, adapting to many different aspects of a world. Then, suddenly, we were sold the idea that we could and therefore should change an environment to our blown up needs, rather than to change our life style to the environment as we found it. We succeeded in messing up the planet to such an extent that we may have made it a serious danger to our own survival.
I cannot see evolution as a simple tree, us at the top. I think evolution is three or more dimensional. Sideways, up, down, diagonal, pushing the edges in all directions. Evolution, nature, cannot possibly be solely for the purpose of coming up with Man; it is so visibly random. The evolution of humankind was random, an accident. As all accidental creations we have some promising new features and other aspects that are dangerous to our environment and so, to our own survival. Minds are probably a wonderful thing, but we must learn to use them. We've gone off track. We've developed aspects of ourselves -- ego, greed, selfishness -- that are not sustainable. We have other aspects, like thinking we rather than me, collaboration rather than competition, that were working just fine for thousands of years. But lately we downplayed those because we told ourselves we must control nature, each other, Life itself. We've allowed ourselves to become control freaks.
It's time we rethink who we are, and how we relate to what is. It's time we learned to trust and love nature again. Nature is who we are, what we are. Nature is not environment, nature is what is in us as well as outside of us. We are one not only with our fellow humans all over the world but with everything. With plants, trees, volcanoes, rocks, oceans, fish, tigers, hawks. It's all one, jostling, loving, fighting, eating each other. We eat and we are food, we excrete what is needed by others. It all works together. Not a machine, but a live chaos.
Scientists tell us that all the energy of the universe is running down, entropy.
Life is anti-entropic, life keeps creating life.
Evolution is not to make humans, and then we can take over to make the changes we think best. How self-satisfied, conceited, and yes, stupid, can we get. We're not special, we're not smarter than anything or anybody else. We're different, that's all. Everything all around us is different. That's what makes it work. We've forgotten that all ecologies work because of an immense variety of species. It all works because each species has its role, "niche" as it is called in ecology. Scarab beetles, rats, hyenas, are the garbage picker-uppers. Animals eat plants, what they excrete is fertilizing plants. Insects, birds, find honey inside flowers and doing so fertilize the flowers. All swarming Life is connected, dependent on each other, as a multi-dimensional spider web. When an ecology looses that diversity it becomes sick and old and dies. That has happened we now know. The planet has lost 70, 80, maybe 95% of its species at least five times in the last many millions of years. Think dinosaurs.
What I've learned again from the Eiseley book is that after each "extinction" the planet has blossomed with periods of intense creativity, evolving ever more wonderful creatures to assure the biodiversity that is essential for Life on this planet. That one species can own, control, and so destroy the Life of a planet is DEVOLUTION. That should be unthinkable to a thinking species.
We need to get rid of money, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we're on the way to doing just that -- although not without horror and pain. Of course we must stop wars; the most wasteful of all our wasteful behaviors. Oh, I can think of a lot of things that need to be fixed here, today. A broken healthcare system, an insane economic system, a so-called infrastructure that is not very structural any more. A judicial system that has very peculiar ideas about who is "a person." But we find our way with a nest of wasps on one side and a broken sewer on the other. Not to worry, it will all collapse and then we start over again.
To spring up with renewed vigor and creativity, creating new forms, new species, new capacities, more brain, different brain, less brain -- who knows. I find it quite easy to imagine a new kind of human that can move from here to there without a car or plane. A new kind of human that communicates with other humans -- and who knows, with dogs and cats -- without words; mind to mind. Why not? Who says we can only have five senses. I think we may already have seven or eight. I think it is quite possible to think of a new and better model human made open to each other's hearts and minds. If we had compassion, which some people already have, meaning knowing what another feels, we could not do the horrible things we now do to each other. If I feel what another feels I could not possibly torture her, or kill him. If I can sense another's hunger, how can I over-eat?
I don't think any of these and other qualities are spiritual, or supernatural, or abnormal. They are already part of us, but not developed; not fully evolved.
Why not give nature a chance to do what it does best: experiment, try this, try that. What survives is what adapts to changed circumstances. Not survival of the fittest if we think of "fit" as healthy, or clever, or powerful. The fittest are the ones who fit in. Survival is always making do with what is, and making do becomes the new natural.
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