Because I have an iconoclastic side to my personality, I sometimes find myself taking playful swipes at currently accepted dogma. Outside of certain religious ideologies, evolution is one of the most dogmatically held belief systems of our current age, so I can’t resist proposing an alternative theory. I’m not saying I think the following is what’s going on, but I would be curious to know if anyone reading this can come up with a well-reasoned argument that would demonstrate this to be impossible. In the meantime, for anyone who likes having their minds torqued out of their usual ways of viewing reality: play around with this concept and see if it might make some kind of crazy sense.

 

 

Okay. Currently, many physicists and cosmologists believe that outside our dimension (and other time-space dimensions), all time is simultaneous. Our perception of time as a linear sequence of events is the result of our physical status as residents of a time-space dimension and the structure and function of our neurological systems. As observers, we bring particular probabilities out of the realm of infinite probabilities and into physical existence by directing our attention to these probabilities. Rather than our consciousness beginning at our birth, accompanying us through our chronological lives, and then evaporating at our death, our consciousness may be an entity that is continually created in the present, with built-in pasts and probable futures stretching away from this present focus in practically infinite directions.

 

The current popular concept of evolution as continuous progress toward greater biological complexity and diversity is rooted in the concept of and belief in linear time, as well as, unfortunately, a certain amount of biological narcissism. Humans like to think that we are the apex of evolution and that other, less biologically sophisticated creatures are charming (or not-so-charming!) examples of nature warming up and practicing for our appearance and development. In addition, there is the concurrent belief in increasing diversity: that life started with little complexity so that only bacteria and algae occupied the planet for millennia, whereas now we have many different phyla from single-celled organisms to flowering plants, socially complex arthropods, and neurologically complex vertebrates.

 

Yet, as numerous evolutionary biologists have pointed out, there is no evidence of smooth and continuous progress. No evolutionary “line” exists; at best, we can envision evolutionary development as a tree with numerous branches and twigs. In addition, the fossil record shows that the greatest explosion of diversity took place in Cambrian times, and the most plentiful and successful organisms currently existing in the biosphere are still the microbes. The adaptation that has been observed since Darwin first presented his theories has been local adaptation, not global, and it has taken place on the level of small selective advantages, not on any macro scale.

 

 

Finally, so many gaps and missing links exist in trying to fit the biological and fossil data into Darwinian theory that the Creationist camp has taken this as proof that an all-knowing and all-powerful God has specifically and personally designed each and every creature. But just for the fun of it, let’s consider a different explanation.

 

 

The evolutionary relationships that we see existing between similar species could be an imposition of our beliefs and conceptualizations upon these organisms. Instead, they may represent similar versus distant probabilities—probable creatures that can survive successfully with any number of slight variations in the basic structure (such as Darwin’s famous finches, with their myriad variations), while other probabilities are less similar, with workable structures that are vastly different from one another (such as the marvelously anachronistic horseshoe crab). Rather than organisms evolving from one another, those that exist at any one time might represent a continuum of all the probable species that are viable under those present conditions, with gaps occurring in nonviable areas.

 

When we observe the presence of a system or class of molecules in a wide range of organisms, including ones that we think of as “primitive” or biologically simple, we take this as evidence of this system being “conserved” vertically in evolution over millions or billions of years. Looking at it another way, however, this conservation could be a much more lateral one: evidence of an excellent, desirable, workable design throughout the biological kingdom under our present physical conditions. An example of this would be the endorphin receptors and ligands, which have been discovered not only in vast numbers of cells in the human body, but throughout the animal kingdom, including invertebrates. Like chemistry, biology has basic working units that could be viewed as analogous to atoms and molecules, such as membranes, chromosomes, microtubules, etc. Rather than mitochondria and chloroplasts being symbiotic or opportunistic bacteria that “invaded” cells or other bacteria (though I must say, this theory is delightfully ingenious), they might instead represent one of these workable units. The mitochondria, chloroplasts and bacteria represent the same level of biological organization. A eukaryotic cell would be one more step “up” in the gestalt of biological organization.