- BEYOND DARWIN -

A complementary aspect to his theory of evolution.  Disease as a mechanism of evolution, infection as a therapeutic tool, and sex between the biological kingdoms.

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LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- BEYOND DARWIN -

Let’s break down evolutionary development into five steps. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species suggested this idea to me. At the end of Chapter 7, “Miscellaneous Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection” he wrote: 

“…Abrupt and strongly marked variations occur in our domesticated productions, singly and at rather long intervals of time. If such occurred under nature, they would be liable to be lost by accidental causes and by inter-crossing. In order that a new species should suddenly appear, it is almost necessary to believe, in opposition to all analogy, that several wonderfully changed individuals appeared simultaneously within the same district, [italics mine]. 

“Against the belief in abrupt changes, embryology enters a strong protest. The embryo serves as a record of the past condition of the species. Hence existing species during early stages often resemble extinct forms belonging to the same class. It is incredible that an animal should have undergone abrupt transformations and yet should not bear even a trace in its embryonic condition of sudden modification, every detail being developed by insensibly fine steps. 

“He who believes that some ancient form was transformed suddenly through an internal force or tendency will be compelled to believe that many structures beautifully adapted to all the other parts of the same creature and to the surrounding conditions, have been suddenly produced; and of such complex and wonderful co-adaptations, he will not be able to assign a shadow of an explanation.” [Author’s note: except for disease, perhaps]. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Abridged and Edited by Charlotte and William Irvine, 1978, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., p. 61. 

Without additional clarification, Darwin’s theories run aground on a shoal of scientific details charted more recently. His evolutionary theory rests on five points.

1.    All species produce offspring in excess of the number that can survive.

2.    Adult populations in any region tend to remain constant, and therefore there is an enormous death rate. (Most biologists believe the first part wrong, the second part largely correct.)

3.    There must be a struggle for survival, which the majority of creatures lose.

4.    The competitors vary in many small characteristics, and these will affect the chances of survival.

5.    The result of those preconditions is that the organism best able to survive them transmits its more adaptive traits to future generations.

Taken from Fred Warshofsky’s Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe, Readers Digest Press, New York, 1977, pp. 103-104.

Gordon Rattray Taylor summarizes Darwin’s complications in The Great Evolution Mystery. I take this quotation from Michael Crawford’s and David Marsh’s The Driving Force – Food, Evolution and the Future, William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1989, p. 30.

·      The suddenness [to paleontologists, “sudden” means happening in only a few million years], with which major changes in pattern occurred and the virtual absence of any fossil remains from the period in which they were alleged to be evolving.

·      The suddenness with which new forms “radiated” into numerous variants.

·      The suddenness of many extinctions and the lack of obvious reasons for such extinction.

·      The repeated occurrence of changes calling for numerous coordinated innovations, both at the level of organs and of complete organisms.

·      The variations in speed at which evolution occurred.

·      The fact that subsequently, no new phyla have appeared, and no new classes and orders. This fact so thoroughly ignored is perhaps the most powerful of all arguments against Darwin’s generalization.

·      The occurrence of parallel and convergent evolution, in which similar structures evolve in quite different circumstances.

·      The existence of long-term trends (orthogenesis).

·      The appearance of organs before they are needed (pre-adaptation).

·      The occurrence of “overshoot” or evolutionary momentum (e.g. how organs once useful became overdeveloped, such as the tusks of the saber-toothed tiger and the antlers of the Irish elk).

·      The puzzle of how organs, once evolved, come to be lost (degeneration.)

·      The failure of some organisms to evolve at all.

Even though many diseases increase mortality, some might benefit their host. Could “domesticated” pathogens have introduced immune, digestive, neural, and other specialized cells where none existed before? Did mutagenic microbes make new mutations inheritable? Could successfully adapted tumors have become physical mutations? Could DNA, whether so-called “junk” or from some other source, have reactivated or been injected into members of a host species that lacked them previously?

Those possibilities are dismissed as heretical today, pigeonholed under clumsy rubrics like “endosymbiosis” and “horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes.” Scientists are resuming the study of oncogenes, transposons, plasmids, plasmagenes and episomes: micro-organic savings banks, post offices and stock exchanges whose halls echo with the complex intercourse of DNA. 

Could our bodies be “bacterial clouds”: multi-generation starships constructed with, by and for microorganisms to transport their DNA (so-called “junk DNA”?) in safety and comfort across monstrous stretches of space-time — from your armchair to the refrigerator, say, or across the galaxy? 

A theory of adaptive mutation through benign disease processes could settle many arguments between evolutionary gradualists and catastrophists. 

Environmental catastrophes could have suppressed the immune system of dominant species and brought on pandemics of heightened mortality, fragmentation and genetic drift. During such disasters, whole herds would have been annihilated or transformed into more viable new species. Since every animal suffered alike, their descendants skipped “transitional” stages. This evolutionary process of selective die-out is modeled in Kropotkin's book, Mutual Cooperation.

It is interesting to note that species with a long history of genetic stability show relative immunity from many diseases -- sharks, mollusks, lichen, fungi, ginkgoes(?). Focused scientists should take note.

This evolutionary blueprint left the fragmentary fossil record our paleontologists puzzle over today, minus the “missing links” that Darwinists keep predicting and failing to find: a bad sign for a theory.

On the other hand, behavior seems to have evolved under environmental influences, following a more gradual, Lamarckian path. Given varying circumstances, certain deviants went crazy in specific ways. If this new craziness increased their reproductive success, it passed on to succeeding generations and was ingrained in species memory. 

Someone may appear to act crazy, but that craziness may be a survival factor under altered circumstances mere “normals” could not handle. When chaos looms, a deviant response may be more efficient than the one that works dependably under normal circumstances.

Species extermination rarely resulted from predation, endemic disease and selective competition; more often from massive ecological disruption: asteroid strikes, volcanism, ice ages, massive flooding, long droughts, human encroachment, etc., followed by lethal pandemics resulting from lowered immunity across the board.

Thereafter, a few survivors replaced the masses of the dead, and then multiplied to fill in the gaps. The distinguishing traits they shared became “Darwinian mutations.” But they would not have necessarily “improved fitness.” On the contrary, they would have reinforced statistically average traits shared among a handful of survivors of that species. Rare individuals, more adapted to a special niche, would be for the most part wiped out along with the majority. Only an unstable environment lethal on a semi-permanent basis would promote the survival of a radical mutant, assuming the whole population hadn’t been annihilated : a frequent occurrence. 

The planet has caught a cold, and we are it. 

To recognize its place in the scheme of things, humanity must consider iself an Earth pathogen — not its dominator, lord or even failed caretaker. Like most disease organisms, we have evolved through progressive relationships with nature. Any population that failed to reach the next higher level, dropped to a lower one and languished obscurity or disappeared. 

Someone suggested that children pass through similar stages with their parents. I have not raised a child this time around; so I’ll not go there.

Level One: The organism is frail, simple and poorly adapted. It only survives under optimal circumstances. Opportunistically, it establishes precarious toeholds in empty niches and hosts with impaired immunity. Its growth is sluggish or static; its simplicity is a grave weakness. The slightest disturbance threatens it with annihilation. 

Level Two: A much tougher organism invades a new host, overwhelms its defenses and kills it by explosive growth. The invading organism commits suicide by outgrowing its habitat. 

Within decades, the Black Plague killed off almost half the population of Europe. Human growth rates flattened for a century until some unknown mechanism stopped this rampage cold. After all, no plague survivor acquired Black Death immunity. Could every town rat have died? I’m told there were never enough rats back then (based on dug-up remains) to confirm their vector status. And we need to explain many legends of black-clad specters seen waving what looked like scythes in the air just before nearby communities collapsed from the plague. 

The basic difference between Level One and Level Two is that the actors – host and pathogen – have traded places on the power scale. In any case, each actor is almost always weakened by a decline of the other.

Level Three: A sophisticated organism controls its growth, attenuates its harmful effects and accepts the losses it incurs from host defenses. Host and pathogen survive to reproduce, even though neither may flourish as well as they did before. 

Syphilis took this course during the Renaissance, as did the flu at the end of World War I (sic) and now with us. Both diseases mutated from subtle takers of children, the weak and the elderly into runaway killers of vigorous young adults, and then back around again. Actually, I’m told syphilis evolved from a universal childhood disease quite benign in the Tropics because everyone was almost naked and touched each other ceaselessly; into a fever tucked away in the warmth of the genitals under layers of clothing the former version couldn’t penetrate so easily, spread by sex and much more destructive during Roman times and perhaps prior. That disease and others may have undergone a similar transition long ago, but that does not alter the facts today.

Level Four: Insofar an infectious agent evolves, it develops a symbiotic relationship with its host. Those disease symptoms that remain benefit the host as much as the invader. Positive and negative effects balance out. 

Sickle cell anemia strengthens its host’s immunity to malaria, perhaps the deadliest human disease. Actually, malarial fevers have burnt out some cases of syphilis and may thwart other diseases. 

A constant background count of human diseases tremendously old and sturdy but marginally lethal, crowds out newer, more deadly but quite vulnerable organisms. Without this old crowd of microscopic competitors, the worst newcomers might destroy humanity in a few months’ spread without symptoms and a few weeks’ of mass plague. That is, everywhere on Earth except in military laboratories where such organisms are pampered pets grown in nutrient-rich but otherwise sterile environments and taught deadly new tricks. See Levels One and Two above.

Level Five: A sophisticated organism’s growing usefulness to the host overcomes the harm it inflicts. Under its gentle influence, new internal organs appear like additional scoops on an ice cream cone. They house new functions — perhaps as benign tumors. The infection makes a new home for itself in its host’s strengthened body. In return for this survival benefit, the host’s genes mutate and reprogram themselves. The infection and host merge genetically into a more complex and adaptive spawn. 

It’s inter-Kingdom sex! The outcome of this sexual intercourse (it can’t be called anything else, even though current science dogma considers that taboo) is a new entity stronger than the sum of its original parts. 

Take that, you devil-take-the-hindmost Darwinians. Refute it as worst as you can.

The disease relationship humanity maintains with Earth teeters between Levels Two and Three. We graduated from Level One to Level Two by learning the usefulness of weapons and tools. Transition to Level Three would advance our civilization past mere weapon technology. 

Instead, our weapon managers ignore runaway population growth, resource depletion and environmental impacts. They replace this promising graduation to Level Three with technical, societal and moral preparations for omnicide (“Kill everything!”): the only alternative their weapon hypnosis allows.

Level Two human overpopulation is a complex Earth disaster that promises to collapse civilization and annihilate us, just as a colony of primitive pathogens destroys itself by irritating its host beyond toleration.

In any case, the standard outcome of evolution beyond Level Five may unfold as follows. After the symbiotic newcomers share a long and comfortable interlude of adaptive stasis (as did the dinosaurs and other species for millions of years), some new genocidal crisis poses them an unsolvable test and sends them back to Level One, or replaces them with the next wave of evolutionary candidates.

In any case, I believe that our eternal soul takes a pick from whatever lifeforms persist in any stretch of spacetime, the way we’d chose an outfit to wear on the street this morning.

Info elites evolved through the aforesaid disease Levels with their proletarian hosts. While they seemed mighty, the rich have at best shifted from Level Three to Level Four in their relation to the poor. Any public benefit they achieve only partially compensates their clumsiness. The slightest breach of the peace threatens to drag them and us – our heads banging the stair steps – to lower Levels and annihilation. 

If we rally around Level Four and establish an Information Commonwealth on the way to Level Five, we may thrive. Future transitions between higher Levels could seem to appear spontaneously compared to the thousands of years aquiver between Levels One and Three.

Please note: I have numbered these levels like the steps of a staircase. They could just as well succeed each other in reverse order or skip levels entirely.

In the same way, the Community of Dissidence has maintained its Levels Three and Four with respect to Conspirators of Greed. 

Level One lasted until the Time of Prophets when marginalized peace martyrs (Buddha, Zarathustra, Mani, Jesus, Mohammed and their adherents who died nameless) hung imperial crossroads with their broken or burned corpses. At this Level, local info elites certified weapon mentality by misrepresenting the martyr’s teachings then passing that falsehood to posterity as sacred truth. 

Level Two was crossed when clueless weapon dissidents KO’d the decomposing body-politics of royal and imperial weapon technologies. They didn’t know what to do next. They only saw an unfair system to be overthrown. Just like us, they mistook mere indicators of societal disease (tyranny, corruption, greed, etc.) for the principal cause (weapon mentality) and tried to mitigate each of them blindly. Then they swallowed the same toxin and normalized its symptoms — institutionalizing, perpetuating, modernizing and perfecting weapon mentality in the process. 

Included here are the  revolutions patriarchal, urban, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Capitalist, industrial, American, French, Fascist, Communist and Anti-colonialist, among others. In short, every circular, short-circuit, positive feedback revolution with paradoxical outcomes that history bothered to document.

Modern civilization vacillates between Levels Three and Four. Weapon managers and dissidents flail each other without rhyme or reason while body counts, environmental destruction, overpopulation and unsustainable industries swell beyond control. 

Learners can climb to Level Five once we fully grasp the weapon/peace dialectic, marginalize weapon mentality and restore global peace to its rightful place. That transition will reduce most of those toxic spills of their own accord.

What is stopping us now? The collective paralysis we experience every time there is a serious appeal for peace.

IN FRENCH

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net