Evolution: refocusing the imagination

“You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus”, wrote Mark Twain.

And it’s not just what we see with our eyes that’s the problem; the out-of-focus imagination applies to an even greater and more disastrous extent to our thinking, specifically to the frequently unexamined concepts, assumptions, beliefs and prejudices acquired through education, contemporary science, media and culture etc. Perhaps it really is true that a lot of what is called thinking is merely the rearranging of prejudices.

For example, are people’s beliefs and attitudes to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, soundly based i.e. on a careful analysis of all the available information, not only that from official or mainstream media sources, accompanied by a setting-aside of personal prejudices? Or are they heavily coloured by such prejudices – antipathy towards, or fear of, people of different colour, race and religion; even by the desire to see in this a struggle for supremacy between Christianity and Islam? And how many are aware that, regardless of the circumstances, all war has been illegal since 1928[1]; or that, according to the Nuremberg Rules, aggressive war of the kind waged by the US and UK in Afghanistan and Iraq is held to be the greatest international crime[2], making those who pursue it or support it de facto war criminals? Why have so many people accepted, or at least not openly challenged, the official account of 9/11, or the arguments on which the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq and the continuing wars there were and are based?

And what of that much older struggle for truth: between the positions of those who maintain that the basic ‘substance’ of the universe is energy (and matter), that life and consciousness are merely ‘refined potentials’ of matter and the chance products of a random process called ‘natural selection’; that there is no meaning or purpose to human existence; that humans are superfluous to the earth, which would be better off without them - and those who see no evidence in fact or logic for those assertions and who are confident that the primary reality is spiritual and that what we call ‘matter’ is a secondary reality; that there is indeed meaning and purpose to our lives, that we are not here by chance and that evolution is a primarily spiritual process?

For many, perhaps most, in the ‘developed’ world, that issue has already been settled, and settled decisively, in favour of materialism and Darwinian evolution theory. That, at least, is what contemporary culture – and especially modern science - predominantly asserts. The message is repeated constantly and to a large extent subliminally: natural history presenters routinely insert ‘Darwinian’ explanations of animal origins and behaviour between the stunning images; nothing is questioned, not even the most extraordinary symbiotic relationships between insects and plants (such as that between the fig wasp and the African fig-tree featured in an earlier New View), which Darwinism can only ‘explain’ by assertion.

The many technological marvels with which the privileged minority of the world’s population are today surrounded seem to confirm the triumph of a science fundamentally committed to materialism, while efforts to preserve a spiritual understanding of the universe and of man’s place in it are constantly undermined, not least by the fact that the failures and betrayals of organised religion, both past and present, give spirituality a bad name.

But that does not mean that the lies and false assertions should go unchallenged. Indeed, it is vital that they are exposed and countered. Untruth should not be allowed to stand; it would be a betrayal, especially of the young, who have come to earth with hope and idealism and a thirst for truth. Parents and educators surely have a special responsibility to give them the spiritual nourishment they seek. It is not a task which demands a university degree in science or philosophy (that would rather tend to disqualify one), but it does demand some time spent in dialogue, research and hard thinking - grappling with concepts, some of which may be unfamiliar.

As to reading, Rudolf Steiner would be the obvious resource. But there are difficulties here. Much of the most interesting and relevant material is scattered across several thousand lectures in hundreds of separate volumes; it is too much to ask of the average parent or seeker after truth to plough through even a fraction of them. The Philosophy of Freedom – Steiner’s seminal work, which provides the logical and philosophical basis for everything else - is far from easy to digest. But there is an alternative: to read and reflect on just two of the works of Owen Barfield, probably Steiner’s greatest interpreter in English (though because Barfield had made the subject-matter entirely his own, he rarely refers to Steiner). They are his Saving the Appearances and World’s Apart. Barfield was one of the ‘Inklings’, the Oxford group which included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who described Barfield as “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers”.

Armed with Barfield, it is not difficult to begin peeling back the layers of superstition, false dogma and simple bad science. When we refocus the imagination, we discover that most of the claims of science in relation to the evolution of the earth and of humanity turn out to be mere assertions based on very unsound assumptions. We might begin by making an important distinction: between what is good science and what is bad science or pseudo-science. The emergence at a particular time in human history of the deep need to really understand the world in which we live through a process of rigorous examination and experiment was a major milestone in human evolution. That is what ‘science’ is: the pursuit of true knowledge, a pursuit which cannot legitimately rule anything in or out a priori. Thus the “a priori commitment to materialism” which American evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin asserted was fundamental to science is in fact the denial and corruption of science.

Peeling back all the layers in detail would be the work of several volumes, not merely of one short article. What I offer here is a kind of simplified ‘shopping-list’ of the main issues, questions and approaches, the aim being only to provide a stimulus to investigation and reflection. It derives in part from the experience of a course I gave last year to the first-year students of the teacher training course at the Edinburgh Rudolf Steiner School in Scotland – which alerted me to the extent of the unawareness of the very real problems which surround the current orthodox view of evolution.

Some preliminary ground rules:

a) question everything: take nothing on authority

b) look everywhere for the hidden assumptions, especially in ones own thinking

c) be prepared to set aside current beliefs, at least for long enough to allow one to consider unfamiliar or ‘foreign’ ideas with an open mind

1. Distinguish ‘evolution’ from ‘Darwinism’: evolution is a recognisable fact; Darwinism/neo-Darwinism (the modern synthesis of classical Darwinism and genetics) is a hypothetical mechanism for the observed progressive development of life forms, including humans.

2. Consider carefully what is meant by ‘evolution’ in all its usages: biological, social etc. Do cars and aeroplanes ‘evolve’, for example?

3. Think critically about the primary evidence for biological evolution: the fossil record. What assumptions are made by evolutionists? What are the main challenges which the fossil record presents to the Darwinian theory? The large gaps in the record were a major problem for Darwin: they have not been closed. Stephen Jay Gould called them “the trade secret of palaeontology”. Find out why the ‘tree of life’ model had to be abandoned and why the classic sequence showing humans evolving from apes has no basis in fact (cf. the new book The Upright Ape by Aaron Filler which presents evidence to show that apes in fact evolved – or perhaps ‘devolved’ – from humans).

4. Examine the assumptions which underlie current assertions about the age of the earth: the (materialistic) assumption that all processes in nature obey purely physico-chemical laws which remain everywhere and at all times the same – in outer space as well as in the deep past. Early assessments of the age of the earth (by Hutton and others) assumed that the ‘physical’ processes of erosion currently observed could be reliably projected backwards into historical time. More recently, determinations of age have come to be massively dependent on the parallel assumption that the rate of radioactive decay has been constant through time – a fundamental error equivalent to using the metabolic rate of a 70-year old to predict the future growth of a child.

The great majority of the rocks of the earth are of biological origin i.e. they derive from living substance. This is especially obvious in the limestone and coal measures, but there is evidence that even granite has a biological origin. It is legitimate to consider the entire earth as having been once truly ‘alive’ – where everything was a life process – before it gradually hardened into ‘solid’ matter. Thus if the current earth is the ‘70-year old’ mentioned above, back-projection of its current ‘metabolic rates’ will produce vastly distorted estimates of its age.

5. Bio-logy is the study of, or knowledge about, life; but modern biology doesn’t know what life is! It merely asserts that life must have suddenly appeared ‘by chance’ from inorganic materials i.e. from non-life. It is forced to assume this as a result of its a priori commitment to materialism. There is no evidence to back up the assumption. All attempts to create life in the laboratory have failed. All our experience is that life only comes from life. An honest science would concede this and adopt it as its default hypothesis. That it does not do so is the clearest sign that it has abandoned proper scientific principles.

Studied without Darwinian preconceptions, comparative embryology – as detailed in Sir Gavin de Beer’s Embryos and Ancestors (revised edition of 1951) – provides the concrete evidence for the primacy – in the sense of coming first and being the archetype - of the human form, from which all plant and animal forms can be derived.[3]

6. Familiarise yourself with the basics of quantum theory! This is absolutely vital to the refocusing of the imagination which has to take place. It is the starting-point of Barfield’s Saving the Appearances. Since at least 1930 it has been known that the familiar world of appearances is something that in a very real sense we ourselves create out of what quantum physics has discovered experimentally to be a sea of swirling ‘particles’ – potential ‘matter’ which only ‘collapses’ into visible form when it is ‘observed’ by a conscious observer. Orthodox biology continues to refuse to take on board quantum reality, clinging to a new imagined ‘fundamental entity’ in the gene. The major unanswered question for biology remains the origin of form, as biologists such as Adolf Portmann, E.L. Grant Watson, Brian Goodwin and others have recognised. Watson’s book The Mystery of Physical Life is a classic which should ideally be read by all biology students (and many others). It is not a valid answer to say that form is ‘encoded’ in the DNA as the ‘blueprint’ from which organisms are constructed; quantum physics ‘explodes’ all forms and challenges biologists and evolutionists to ‘think again’.

7. Genetics has become such a major part of modern evolution theory that it is essential to examine at least some of the many serious objections to its claims. Two books I would highly recommend are: What Genes Can’t Do, by Lenny Moss; and Who Wrote the Book of Life?, by Lily E. Kay. Kay traces the historical process by which the central biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis came to be metaphorically represented as an information code and a writing technology – and consequently as a “book of life”. The work of The Nature Institute[4], and its newsletter In Context, are also invaluable. The Institute has recently begun a project to collect all reports of unintended and/or deleterious mutations and side-effects resulting from the practice of genetically modifying organisms.

8. Find out about ‘Goethean science’ and its method of ‘gentle empiricism’ which approaches living forms as integrated, purposeful beings whose secrets can be discovered if we approach them with respect and reverence. The mystery of form can never be approached by disintegrating organisms into their imagined constituent ‘parts’: they are not collections of parts, but integrated wholes which can only be understood when they are approached as such. Goethe was able to see plants in all their phenomenal diversity as modifications of a single archetypal form. In a letter from Italy to his old professor Johann Gottfried Herder written in May 1787, he says that he is “very close to discovering the secret of how plants multiply and are organised, and that it is the easiest thing that can be conceived. I have clearly and without doubt identified the principal point, where the germ lies; I see everything else as a whole …”. In fact, the growth of the annual plant reveals the secret of evolution, delivering the hypothesis which can and must replace Darwinism. It is to be found in Goethe’s “principal point” – the germ or growing point of the plant, which continually creates out of itself all the varied forms of the plant, from the differently-shaped leaves to the flower. The revelatory insight is that the ‘germ’ and growing point of evolution is in fact the human being – the microcosm which explains the macrocosm.

9. The philosophy and practice of Biodynamic agriculture reveals more of the secrets of growth and form, including especially the role played by the solar system and the Zodiac. Experiments using the technique of capillary dynamolysis[5] can reveal effects from beyond the earth and qualitative differences between various forms of agriculture.

10. Become aware of the misuse of language inherent in the assertions of orthodox evolutionary biology, where words which only make sense within the human context of purposive, meaningful behaviour are used routinely in descriptions and explanations of the behaviour of organisms which the orthodoxy asserts are the result of a mindless, purposeless process. (Cf. the essay by Canadian Don Cruse at http://www.difficulttruths.com/mythesis.html).

These ten points only scratch the surface. There are many other approaches to the mystery of life and evolution in addition to the mainly scientific one I have presented here. The main point is that there are very good reasons for not accepting the current orthodoxy in science (or in politics and world affairs). If lies and half-truths are allowed to persist they become destructive, weakening our sense for truth and undermining our moral sense. The acceptance of the official account of 9/11 allowed the worldwide demonisation of Muslims and the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq which have already cost millions of lives. As the saying goes: “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing”.

The acceptance of the lie of materialism, and of its companion lie of evolution by random mutation and an impersonal ‘natural selection’, perpetuates a dangerously false view of nature - a view of it as ‘mere stuff’ which we are free to experiment on at will - and an equally dangerous and false view of human beings as mere ‘clever naked apes’. We owe it to our children and to the future of humanity to challenge those lies. A healing approach specifically to the urgent environmental problems which surround us can only come from a re-awakening to the reality of the co-dependent evolutionary relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, and to the debt we owe to the sacrifice of the beings of that world which allowed themselves to be ‘enchanted’ into ‘matter’.

Paul Carline

Newhall

26.02.08

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[1] In 1928, sixty-three nations, including Britain, America, France, Germany and Japan, ratified the International Treaty for the Renunciation of War (also known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact), which states: “The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the name of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies…” (Art.I) “…the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin … shall never be sought except by pacific means.” (Art.II). The treaty is still in force.

[2] “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. (Nuremberg War Crimes trials; incorporated into the Nuremberg Principles enacted by the UN General Assembly in 1950).

[3] Cf. my article at http://www.transintelligence.org/articles/darwinreexamined.htm

[4] A non-profit organisation based in Ghent, New York State, committed to offering radical, holistic perspectives on nature, science and technology. The excellent In Context newsletter appears twice yearly.

[5] ‘Capillary Dynamolysis’ is a technique invented in the early 1920’s by a co-worker of Rudolf Steiner, Lily Kolisko, for studying the formative forces in organic and inorganic substances. Simply google ‘capillary dynamolysis’.