And The Walls Came Crumbling Down

Remember that picture from school textbooks the one of life evolving on earth. On the far left was a single-celled organism and “progressing” up through the eons were sponges, mollusks, fish, and then mammals.  The mammals started as rodent-like things and they advanced to the epitome of complex perfection: man, modern man. That picture is the problem, or more precisely, the social mindset behind the picture and the ignorance of scientific fact.

By evolution or creation, the result was the same; at the top of the pyramid the ultimate creature was human. Humans are the most complex, thinking, social creatures — it doesn’t get better than this. If the conclusion is all things progress to complexity and man is the most complex (i.e., successful) by self-fulfilling logic, man is it.  And all observations need to bend to this conclusion.

However, instead of the orderly march to complex perfection that the image suggests, the reality, as shown in the fossil record, are a series of “experiments” in complexity; most failed rather quickly. It left a ragged set of branches with mostly dead-ends on the family tree. The complexity experiment has been run many times in life’s history. When the perfect conditions exist that allowed the relatively unstable experiments in complexity (complex organisms, like dinosaurs that can’t adapt easily to changes in their environments) to run their course, perturbations knocked life back to the simple and adaptable.

Complexity is not better; it is just another strategy and a risky one in a changeable environment. Complex organisms are in fact the deviant outliers. Complexity has its advantages but the pitfall seems to be that complex creatures die out after relatively short runs. If you were graphing it, most successful life would be massed at the y- axis (bacteria) and the outliers would be all the complex creatures straining out there over time several standard deviations from the norm.

In the long haul, the life-theater is filled with an audience of bacteria who applaud the next experiment as it entertains in its walk across the stage; dinosaurs; marsupials; and mammals. Not since trilobites have we seen such a display — they would say.

But in defense of the idea that we are the most advanced species on the planet and truly different form all other lesser forms of life, humans can fall back on a number of reassuring facts; the we are the only species that ...

• Humans are the only species to use tools – FALSE – Porpoises, crows, apes and others do so too;
• Humans are the only species to use meta-tools (tools that make other tools) – FALSE – Crows, parrots and perhaps others;
• Humans are the only species to use language, name ourselves – FALSE – whales, porpoises do this as well;
• Only species to pass on learning to the next generation – FALSE – Ravens, crows, (surely others);
• We can’t even claim wars, or emotion or, irrational behavior or ability to end life as we know it to our list of why we are the bomb.

But when all else fails and all the evidence demonstrates otherwise, we have the game winning play: We are the only species to have a soul. That’s it, we have it, and they don’t. Just because you can’t see it, can’t prove it exists and it has this slippery quality of existing in some humans and not others, it is still enough to justify our actions. We are superior; we should be able to do what we want with all other life just as we did with the other creatures without souls: African Slaves, Native Americans, Gypsies, Jews…

By: Douglas R. Eger