EIGHT

DARWIN’S EVOLUTION

Since Charles Darwin’s time, we rightly see life as evolutionary, and evolution as a fundamental creative function of life. As expressed in his first book, The Origin of Species, he explored how a single-celled creature in some primal ocean could end as the vast diversity of plant and animal life presently on Earth. He observed how myriad life-forms went beyond their original state through mutation of their genetic material, selectively filling in the new form from the possible profusion of matter found.

In the years since The Origin of Species, we have discovered through the electron microscope the double-helix molecule we call DNA, with its corollary RNA, and the wonders therein. This can be seen as a key element in Darwin’s proposal, and a monkey wrench in certain of its ramifications.

DNA: Thing, or Activity?

We might consider DNA (mentioned in this book’s introduction) as a phenomenon bridging the gap between reality as matter-substance and reality as a phenomenon of mind—an experience or venture as in imagination or mathematics (neither having substance but both having great creative power).

Of itself, this double-helix making up DNA is as “next-to-nothing” as they come. It measures less than ten atoms across, far more narrow than a photon of light. This is why light microscopes never discovered the DNA molecule. It is so narrow it simply passes through a photon without registering an effect. So this elusive DNA substance-thing had to await the electron microscope to make its entry as a bona fide, electronically real scientific object.

The actual strands Nature has paired together to make this helix are made of four basic compounds repeated over and over in varying combinations. The resulting strand is some six feet long, and the number of combinations of these four compounds is astronomical. This hairline six-foot phenomenon folds up in a nearly infinite number of ways, each way capable of bridging the gap between being-as-potential and being-as-real in our ordinary sense.

A living cell is a nest for such DNA folding, each folding theoretically able to unfold and be put to work to create a different material substance or thing. Yet, were this next-to-nothing double-helix molecule extracted from each of our body’s approximately seventy-eight trillion cells and hooked together end to end, that double strand would stretch from Earth to the moon several billion times. This makes for a considerable stretch of our imagination—but recall that imagination is the capacity to create an internal image not present to the outer senses, which can then be used to enliven some particular potential waiting around in limbo for expression. (Thus, poet Blake considered imagination Divine—the way we are made in the image of God—remembering it is our image that goes into the making, as with any strange loop.)

In reifying DNA as we often do, we too easily grant it a material thing-substance status we can mentally handle, like building blocks in the sandpile. That is, we too easily cross the line between mind and its imagination (our ability to create images not present to the senses, as found in mathematics, for instance), on the one hand, and catalog events imaged as actually “out there” in a supposedly real, material world of realized potential, on the other.

DNA defies explanation or definition within a Darwinian evolutionary creation. From where could such a riddle as DNA have come, lest we fall into “creation ex nihilo” (out of nothing), which is a no-no in all standard requirements for really-real as held by science-says.

Near hilarious was the Watson-Crick “trans-spermal” proposal-explanation: that the first DNA our good Earth experienced, triggering evolution, arrived on our planet by an asteroid or meteorite from some solar body that had indeed synthesized or created such a miraculous combination. According to the Watson-Crick theory, this material phenomenon-sperm, caught up in a material object, ejected out as a meteorite or some similar conveyance, traveling through space, to land on and grace our planet—as though our planet could not of itself bring about life. This embarrassing “infinite regress,” similar to flying saucers or Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, is entertaining but somewhat lame, coming from Nobel laureates, halos and all.

DNA: Form and Content

DNA’s molecular form-structure functions like a blueprint for a building, simply a proposal or imaginative suggestion, in effect, providing the outline-directions for constructing a “thing,” but no content to realize, or make real, that imaginative possibility. The content for the form-proposal comes from the environment. (This is admittedly a variation on the infinite regress trap, or an evasion of it.)

Mutation is a rearrangement (even scrambling) of a particular DNA form-guide, the possibilities of its scrambling being virtually infinite, as just mentioned. The content for “filling in” the new form comes from the vast profusion of life-forms, or perhaps raw, formless matter in the environment, if such befits that particular new DNA arrangement.

Only some of those mutations continually taking place survive as new life, however, as only some find an ecological niche, giving a content suitable to their form. Each mutating form can then move beyond the limitations that lay within it before undergoing such change, which is an expression of evolution, and we are each the current end-result of such form-content adaptation and change.

Stochasm’s Lots and Lots

Stochasm, as we have seen, is a Greek term for randomness with purpose. Academic science has long accepted randomness and denied purpose, a strange mental block. Creation moves stochastically, that is, through a purposeful randomness in a profusion of potentials, vast quantities from which any particular blueprint might find its needed content.

Each of the great oaks out in my yard drops untold thousands of acorns each year, while comparatively few little oak sprouts appear the next year—far fewer sprouts than acorns. And of all those little oaklings popping up, even fewer survive. Perhaps only one mighty oak will actually make it to maturity every fifty years or so. Otherwise, the woods outside my door, hardly orderly at best, might be a real jungle.

With insects the numbers are astronomical. An astute biologist calculated that if a single fly were to survive, grow to lay its own quota of eggs, which in turn survived, on and on, within a single year the Earth would be covered by a layer of flies some three feet thick. Fortunately the ecological niche for flies has its constraints, and only the fittest of that multitude survive, maintaining the vigor and productivity of the fly-herd, irritating me but making room for all of us.

Stochasm and Embryogenesis

At birth, the human female has some five to seven million prospective eggs on her ovaries, this “egg” being not much more than a bundle of DNA. The six-foot human-DNA-molecule “folds” its infinitely flexible double-helix into that microscopically tiny molecular form, according to environmental signals of which configurations of folding might best succeed in that environment. Those environmental signals change continually over time, and between birth and maturation, that number of prospective-lives-in-egg-form (hugely profuse to cover all conceivable bases) is reduced to a “mere” three or four hundred thousand. As different environmental signals flood the mother-body, those DNA configurations not matching these endless environmental shifts are processed out: simple, pragmatic practicality for humans or flies.

When ovulation begins some twelve to fourteen years after birth, those remaining several hundred thousand bundles of DNA continue to be selected as best suited, or “matching” the ever-changing environmental conditions then present. From this pool of potential there are some eggs further “selected out” regularly, as maids-in-waiting, to be encased within that membrane we think of as the “shell of the egg” (not quite like that breakfast egg this morning), and readied for the drop down that famous tube to await her suitor. This process of “membrane” formation—completing the egg—takes considerable time, from selection from the mass to readiness for its nuptials. A lineup of a scant few dozen much-selected egg prospects are in the assembly line at any one time, undergoing their final maturation, nuptial finery coming up, misfits still being weeded out right down to the wire. In the course of a woman’s long life a scant few hundred eggs at best might make it down that tube, where an even more minuscule number get fertilized, and far fewer still go the full nine months to completion of a whole new human.

As for that male suitor involved, the situation is markedly different. We human males are born without a sperm to our name and don’t start production of such creatures until just about that time when human females begin to ovulate, somewhere in the mid-teens.1 Once that male machinery is turned on, however, the numbers involved are staggering. Not only does the male produce sperm constantly round the clock (continually updating that output as current environmental signals indicate, and with quite a different selective process than with female’s future-oriented nest egg); a single lucky offering the male might get to make will loose into that sacred river between four to five hundred million contestants for the prize. From the moment that huge swarm hits the stream, however, massive selectivity sets in, and by the time the Grail is actually reached there will be but a handful of hearty swimmers left. (That bundle of DNA called a “sperm” is propelled up that stream by a ridiculously long tail, which has its own remarkable history, as described in this book’s introduction.)

But, according to new reports, which may be based on facts giving grounds for romantic hypotheses catching our fancy (at least mine), Nature has one more selection to make from even these stalwart survivors. Those few sperm reportedly form a circle and navigate around the egg (that egg being many hundreds of times larger than those tiny sperm), at which point the egg apparently decides for herself which suitor is resonant with her—that is, which best matches her own DNA patterns and expectancies (assuming such natural process is allowed to take place and no virtual reality such as a test tube has intervened). At the precise moment of proximity the egg opens a tiny portal in that membrane wall of hers and admits the winner of the prize, closing quickly lest a lesser rival should crash the nuptial party. Such selectivity does not lend itself to the usual mechanical notions we assume but indicates a “resonance” between egg and sperm that may lie outside our usual molecular-materialist notions.

At this point of entry, the long tail of that mighty sperm drops off, since no longer needed (implying it would clutter up that sacred space were it carried inside, while actually the “tail” doesn’t exist as a substance-thing, only as a force or process, also detailed somewhat in our introduction). At any rate, consider the enormous selectivity involved in bringing about the conception of just one of us humans.

And the selectivity does not end at conception. Estimates are that as many as 90 percent of all fertilized eggs may spontaneously abort by or around the tenth day after conception. It may be that the neural tube begins its first preliminary cellular division-growth at that point, but whatever the specifics, if the supportive environment is not sufficient or cell division is faulty, the attempted conception is abandoned and Nature opts to try again. In such cases, most women are not aware of having conceived and aborted, since these earliest embryos are too tiny to be noticed. A woman might be “late in her period” or feel she has skipped one, never aware of Nature’s selectivity at work. Other natural abortion periods seem to center around the history of this neural tube and the embryonic phases opening around the third, fifth, and seventh months after conception. If these early formations are not up to standard, Nature blithely gets rid of the attempt and clears the deck to try again. There are, after all, hundreds of thousands of eggs left and seldom a dearth of eager male donors.

Mead and the Samoans

Another example of Nature’s profusion-selectivity in human reproduction is best told by Margaret Mead’s studies, found in her treatise, Adolescent Sterility. In her early travels among the Samoans of the South Pacific, she discovered that teenagers reaching (or approaching) puberty seek out and are given total sexual freedom. Indeed, anything less had never occurred to these people. At fourteen or fifteen years of age, when that tantalizing urge begins in earnest, children begin an intense and exciting exploration involving any number of partners—an exhilarating method of selectivity for that best fitting the overall ecological niche. (The Trobriand Islanders had a “children’s house” where the young could pursue their courtships, couplings, and adventures without interference.)

For three or four years this exciting and exhilarating pairing-off and trying-out took place. (Recall the intensity of your own adolescent “crushes,” which flourished in spite of the criticisms and fear-laden restrictions from the negative cultural environment to which most of us were subject.) Around eighteen years of age, permanent couples began to form, which eventually separated from the group, underwent the customary nuptials and went their private ways. Why so long a selectivity period? Because Nature, being an expression of love, loves herself—which is life loving itself and loving reproducing itself. Why shut down such a lovely, exhilarating, heart-poundingly exquisite experience as new young-love discovers? Why not let it run for several seasons? Nature’s loving nature constantly perfected sexuality from its most ancient lowly origins to its current perfection in her greatest creature, Humankind. So, as poet Blake asked: “How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight—closed to your senses five?” Nature loves sex since she loves herself, providing for it as appropriate and opportune, since it is also her great ally, keeping the wheels spinning (see appendix B for a brief report on two astonishing works by French physician Michel Odent—The Scientification of Love and The Functions of the Orgasm—which explain the universality of creativity expressed in sexuality and rightly place sexuality itself as the prime universal power and meaning).

Selection for Stability

Mead was puzzled by one major issue. In all that sexual exploration and partner-switching, no conceptions took place. No pregnancies occurred! What took place was, however, highly appropriate to the well-being of family, child, and society and, I would claim, was a most intelligent response of the heart and its guiding intelligence in Nature’s plan.

Once the couple had gone through their nuptials and lived together for a while, the young woman generally decided when she should have a child, prayed to her private goddess at one of the island shrines, asking permission, and soon became pregnant.

A couple of points should be made here: these people were famous for their marvelous (if quite large) physiques and healthy lives. Their family groups were stable. They had sown their wild oats thoroughly in those teen years, and had no need or interest in trying to be teenagers forever. Nature, having achieved her primary selective needs for the appropriate gene-matching and generational refilling of the ranks, could enjoy her great orgasmic sport at leisure. Further, every child conceived by such gene-matching, making for the best genetic results, was born into a compatible, settled, harmonious and stable setting where every child was wanted and totally nurtured, breast-fed for three to four years, and largely carried by the mother for that first critical year or so. Further, stair-step children (one born every year or so) did not occur. Offspring were reasonably spaced, a sibling coming along only every four years or so, were the first child a male, three years were it a girl.

Nature’s plan in these matters seems to be that so long as a mother is lactating she is essentially infertile, and these natural mothers nursed their boys longer than girls since males are far more fragile than females, require a longer and more protective nurturing, and do not fare well if a rival comes along too soon and competes for that breast.2 (Males also account for the majority of aborted, stillborn, or defective children today.) At any rate, these Polynesian people were in tune with and expressed Nature’s intelligence (intelligence being the capacity to move for well-being, which comes spontaneously without thought or effort, from the heart). And, as went the popular song of the ’30s (disapproved by my Baptist forebears), by simply “Doing What Comes Naturally.”

While these balancing factors were found in many preliterate “natural” societies, they would be a disaster were they attempted in a religious technological culture such as ours. You have to buy the whole package in such balances of Nature, not pick at her piecemeal while at the same time violating her at every turn, as is our practice today.

More, More for Less

Overall then, Nature functions through stochastic profusion, overproduction, and rigorous selectivity (as found with egg and sperm), according to need and in a rich complex of intelligent responses. We look out on a night sky with millions of suns blazing, among which untold number some may have the right conditions to grow themselves some planets, and of these millions of planets some will have just the right conditions for growing some life. In this infinitely vast universe, virtually an infinite number of planets and lives continually emerge and go their way. Darwinian selectivity and survival of the fittest have to do with the complexities of a most complex and yet simple-intelligent design of staggering brilliance, bringing about the most successful life-forms possible.