Evolution- You're doing It Now

You may not believe in evolution, but, it hasn’t stopped.

As Helen Blavatsky postulated in her book, ‘The Secret Doctrine’, everything is always evolving.

Galaxies are moving at speeds that are unfathomable to us and yet appear still as they slowly change and grow, or even collide, and they grow and change together.

So, if things that big are evolving, then of course, we are, too. We’ve been walking around upright in this current configuration for around 100,000 years. The planet has been around for the better part of 5 billion years. And, as our sun is evolving too, we’ve got about 7.5 billion more years until it expands and engulfs us prior to a becoming a red giant, then falling in on itself and becoming a white dwarf star.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, you can probably go ahead and eat that last donut.

Wait- did you say donuts?

Well, of course, donuts! We’re a sophisticated advanced civilization. We even have crullers. Not sure what they are, but we have them.

We didn’t see crullers and croissants at Dunkin’ Donuts in the 70s. Donuts, as a thing, an industry and a commodity, have evolved. Changed over time, adapted differently by regions and connections between them.

I mean, c’mon, if donuts can evolve, then, c’mon!

Everything does evolve. Everything changes over time in some way due to environment or events. Storms, people, earthquakes, people, seasons, people, catastrophic events, people- there are many causes for myriad physical changes in the world.

And there’s always us.

Our physical evolution can be traced fairly well across the last couple hundred thousand years, from bipeds to hominids, neanderthals and homo-sapiens. Archeology shows us this. In other words, there are people who really know how old we are and can tell you how they know.

Blavatsky would be proud. So would Charles Darwin.

Because the dominant understanding of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution- ‘survival of the fittest’, mistakenly understood as ‘natural selection’- is the start and stop for many, considered not as proof of evolution, but a basic competitive law of life, one that God desired when He created man. So, Darwin is used to reject Darwinism.

But, that’s not what he said. ‘Survival of the fittest’ and ‘natural selection’ meant adaptation. The one that can survive to reproduce is the one to pass on genes. Whether that’s by strength, innovation or mutation, that is adapting to the environment.

One of the things that Darwin examined closely in the Galápagos Islands was the Finches. Tiny birds that were spread across the islands. He found that they differed, sometimes wildly, from one island to the next. As did the topography and resources. The food, the trees, the land, all varied, and he found that the Finches had adapted different features and skills on each island, from colors to size to beak shapes to eating habits and nesting, he saw adaptation.

This is also stunningly displayed by the Lemurs of Madagascar. These primates range from just inches to a couple of feet long. Each differing part of Madagascar, like Galapagos, has different challenges for life, different food to eat, and each has developed its own different types of lemurs.

Yes, I’m going somewhere with this.

Blavatsky’s version has us evolving consciously. Our sentience itself is evolving as we, just like Darwin’s birds, have acquired different features, languages, cultures and traditions in each separate region, and have seen them combine as we connect around the world. We mentally evolve as individuals and as a community, and the more communities interact, the larger the common sphere of evolution.

And, with the internet, that’s become a global reality. It has caused humanity to quickly evolve to an entirely new level, where technology is a mandatory paradigm and fluency in it is tantamount to being able to read and write.

You can’t know anything about history and not see that humanity has evolved, from huts to stones to suburbs to high rises, from walking to riding, from carrying to shipping, from dying at 30 to living to your 90s.

Our physical evolution may appear stilted- it isn’t- but, no, we’re not going to grow gills or third eyes in anyone’s lifetime. This evolutionary advancement isn’t a physical thing, unless you consider it an evolution of the brain itself, which, actually, it could be.

Scientists have compared pre-civilization skulls to now- so, we can hedge our bet a bit here, and say that brain research has been able to map and objectively imply varying levels of sentience, intelligence, and social learning over a span of 7-10 million years. The oldest fossilized (not human) brain that’s been examined is 521 million years old.

What does that tell us about evolution? Well, it would first tell us if the brain has typically grown or shrunk, but it would also tell us if there could be more neural pathways or less, more brain cells or less, more density or less. Because those cels and neural pathways are the machinery that manifests our consciousness- the computer we think on.

The last brain evolution was in homo-sapiens, between 35,000 and 100,000 years ago. So, we likely have the same pathways as biblical age folks. Could we be adding neural pathways in each generation, as technology and culture become more sophisticated?

No.

Scientists who look at this kind of thing say our brains are actually getting smaller. We still may just be in the toddler age of sentience, and the pathways that allow self-awareness came along with the brain growth of homo-sapiens- the mutation that evolved with us.

So, then how long until we read minds and see the future?

Adaptations like those observed by Darwin can take millennia to happen. And, they mostly happen because a mutation allows an individual to feed better or hide from predators, enabling them to live to pass on the mutation.

Mutations get passed on and become features. But, so do skills. And, once you have language, so does culture. That’s what this evolutionary step is all about. Our mutation in the brain. This is what became new about humans that led to us having donuts.

It’s our sentience. Our consciousness. Our ability to think in abstract terms, to remember and recount information and events, to retain and use language to communicate, and to make shit up out of thin air and lie through our teeth.

This, now, all of it- politics, kitten videos, web scams, online shopping, trolling, incredible technology, vast access to information, vast use and misuse of it, access to history, and the ability to communicate with the masses- is us evolving. Learning to get the hang of this new skill- consciousness.

We can use it for goodness and niceness, instead of e-vil. But, sometimes that doesn’t turn a buck, so we have shenanigans. Because what’s evolving here is not just our language, culture, and technology.

It’s our very souls.

That’s what our sentience, our self awareness, really is in practicality- the essence of our moral and reasoning foundations. Who we are, what we do, how we treat others, the decisions we make when we know what we get out of it or don’t, the desire to devise harm or revenge against others, the valuation of things, justification of actions, the value of life itself, for oneself, for others, for those unseen.

This collective morality may have been evolving for a hundred thousand years. We can only guess as what point in time or in what form humanity achieved our level of sentience, self awareness. Archaeologists studying human fossils have pegged Homo-Sapiens from 200,000-300-000BCE, as the first humans with intelligence, tools, and what they call Behavioral Modernity. But, they may not have had the same level of cognitive ability as we do until that 100,000-35,000BCE window of our latest hardware update.

But only the last 6000 years of history is fluid. While the pyramids may be as old as 10,000BCE., we can’t trace records back too much farther than Mesopotamia, c.4000BCE, Legends and religions, like Hinduism and Judaism, point to the 6000 years most popularly cited. Both Krishna and Abraham are said to have lived between c.4000-6000BCE.

And, while the books inspired by them each have their own stories, rules and magical take on creation, they are still among the only real records we have of the evolution of the soul and the community. From the 200 laws of the Hittites and the Code of Hammurabi at the time of Moses and Tutankhamem to the classic Greeks of c.500 BCE and the teachings of Buddha c.350BCE, there is a record of human spiritual evolution, and a consistency in the messages they carry.

We have it within ourselves to do great things, and to make ourselves bigger together than we could ever be apart. It’s important to see the ones we get right- changes that improve our lives, things that we have in common that give us a solid base for our community. The social progress that reassures us that things are getting better.

Like, having both Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme donuts in the same town.

Now, that’s evolution.

C.2024 Cousin B