Evolution & Technology

It's a foggy, rainy, and quiet Sunday morning. I got up at 5:10 a.m. this morning to take my daughter to the airport. All morning my mind has been racing, like it always does. My brain is nothing but organic mass, mostly made of water. Once oxygen is cut off the whole damn thing is dead forever, in just a few minutes.

So, today I'm thinking about how the Universe created technology from just a few simple compounds. Let's start with the sun, which is mainly a roaring furnace created and held together by gravity. Gravity is really the force in the Universe that makes everything, yet I'm having a little trouble understanding it.

How It All Began

From one article I read the first cells of life began in a pond, which was swishing back and forth. It didn't happen overnight, but rather over hundreds of thousands of years. We only live 70-80 years, so such a large span of time is difficult for us to comprehend, but it's only a blink of the eye in cosmic time. Over time in the primordial soup, simple heterotrophs began to form and ate other organisms for energy.

So, how can a warm pond with organic compounds turn into a human being in just 3.5 billion years? What forces drive a bunch of amino acids and proteins to become so vastly complex? Well, I'm guessing it has to do with the drive for heat dissipation and energy efficiency.

Moon & Asteroid

Of course, I do not believe evolution can be driven forward without change and adversity. Thus, I think our drive to create utopia by eliminating disease, war, and all sources of conflict is not all good because it will stop evolution.

If it were not for the moon and its daily gravitational pull, I doubt that life could have formed on this Earth. Also, some asteroid hit our planet millions of years ago and knocked it off its axis, which gave us the seasons. It is the seasons that provide the climate variety that forces organisms to adapt and thus pushes the process forward. So, without a moon and tilted axis I don't believe life could have evolved. In addition, for life to occur I believe a planet must be relatively stable and it has to be in the "Goldilocks" range from a sun. I'm guessing that only a few planets meet all this criteria, and that is why I think life is rare in the Universe.

From Sun to Brain

I love my cat and dogs because we share a common ancestor - marsupials. Now, I know that the southern United States is a very religious place, and a lot of people will just call me an idiot or say that a demon jumped inside me. But, I'm actually sort of smart, so religionists shouldn't brush me off so quickly. But that's a topic for another day.

So, what amazes me is the vast complexity of even a tree. How does a tree know to grow straight? Yes, I know the tree can detect gravity (geotropism), but how do the particles in the tree detect the gravity and then guide the growth of the tree? HOW? DAMNIT, HOW??? Please don't tell me that "God just does it." Then, a tree may adapt its growth pattern based on light (phototropism). So, part of the tree is saying, "I need to grow straight up to better handle the weight," and another part is saying "you need to grow at this certain angle to catch more light?" How are these decisions reconciled in what we think is a dumb tree?

And when you get to the human brain the functions are vastly more complex. What makes us conscious of sight, how do we remember, and how do we tie dozens of tasks together to do something like drive a car?

Religion

At the gym the other night, while on the treadmill, another epiphany hit me. Religion is a static, structured source in many humans that provides definition to the unknown. Our brains like to connect everything together and we like to have an explanation for everything. Prehistoric humans did not have science, and once they invented fire they could sit around in the evenings and start pondering the universe, like I am doing today. They forced upon themselves explanations for the stars, cold weather, predators who ate them, and so forth. These ideas were carried on to the first agricultural civilizations who needed reasons for droughts, locusts, and epileptic seizures. The Egyptians developed many of today's Western religious ideas and they mastered the art of using religion to provide order in their society. Well, it worked, somewhat, until royal family members and factions started getting DIFFERENT ideas about their religion.

Religion is a conservative force that tends to protect the status quo and order. So, here is my epiphany: it is religion that keeps our human evolution in check with the development of our technology. Already, our brain and society are having trouble keeping up with and adapting to such developments as the Internet and then social media. Look at how these two technologies alone have completely changed EVERYTHING in our society and social order. And social media is simply an evolved offshoot of the Internet, which, in turn, is an offshoot of university computer networks. HOLY COW, look at how everything is evolving in some mysterious forward path. Without religion, our technology would have skyrocketed past our ability to cope with it. I guess we should thank the Catholics for persecuting Galileo and Copernicus.

What's Next?

Some people take offense when I say, "You come from a monkey." "That's an insult," they reply. "God made my ancestors 6,000 years ago out of a handful of dirt." So, it's somehow less offensive to be called "dirt" than a "monkey?" Maybe, just because dirt doesn't throw its shit at you at the zoo? Yes, my ancestor was a monkey-like creature, and before that it was a marsupial, and before that I was a pond of warm goop.

Where evolution goes with humans will be determined by how well critical, rational, and skeptical thinking can override structured, delusional, and mythical thinking. Throughout our country and the world we see daily conflicts and wars along these two lines. I thank Islam for keeping a billion human brains in check and preventing them from contributing significantly to the general pool of knowledge. Now, to clarify that statement, I know there are many wonderful and brilliant Muslim doctors and scientists. I'm just saying that, in general, Islam as a religion has evolved particularly well, and it's control mechanisms, which ensure its perpetuity, seem super efficient. So, overall, the great efficiency of the controlling religion has thwarted the development of the scientific and technology side. We see this same scenario with fundamentalist Christians who are pushing intelligent design in public schools. Nothing personal, folks, but there is no such thing as intelligent design because you can't even use the scientific method to set up and monitor an experiment. The intelligent design movement is just like the monkeys throwing shit at the onlookers at the zoo. It's merely an attempt to gum up the thinking, rational side with prehistoric mythology, which, for some freaking reason, they feel the need to defend.

I do see positive change in the U.S. as the rational side of us is slowly beating out our collective irrational side. I don't know where this effort will take us, but I know that in the end we will be happier, more peaceful, and live more sustainable lives.


Photo credit: tanakawho / Foter / CC BY-NC