First off, I suspect that you believe you are much too busy working on your millions of current species to listen to my pleas. But you do have self-created responsibility which gives me the audacity to venture into your good and bad characteristics. I do thank you for fashioning a consciousness for me, but it does question if you designed one for yourself. You were amazingly quick, this time around, and 13.8 billion years ago (bya) to accept your job by taking only a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang to realize you had only a single force to work with, so you set the thermostat down a tad to create gravity, the weak and the strong nuclear forces, and electro-magnetism.
You played with these, via trial and error, for 10 billion years, enjoying the chaos of explosions and collisions before coming up with a solar system and a planet with the right chemicals to create organisms that could self-replicate. What a fantastic environment for experimenting! You created trillions of species, an awesome accomplishment, but, you did take some 3.8 billion years to fashion billions of organisms like me, each with a personal consciousness which does make us question you, and to ask what is your purpose?
Your exuberance has led to at least one species, homo sapiens, who is beginning to question your strategy while exploring what meaning or purpose it has.
Over 99% of the species you created are now extinct. This does question your methods. Those currently existing number 1.6 billion that we humans have already described, a figure only 20% of what we assume we have yet to find and study.
Your planetary creation is so complex and your humans so limited that we must channel our abilities into numerous specialties:
Our biological scientists tell me that you have devised 5 x 1037 DNA base pairs, weighing 50 billion tonnes, leaving a biosphere on this Earth of 4 trillion tons of carbon, so you have plenty to still play with.
How trustworthy are you? You have allowed me a brief lifetime with amazing, but limited, intelligence, quite insufficient to find out, yet you also give me a curiosity to do so. Is that fair?
To be fair myself, I cannot blame you for those multitudes of factors over which you have no control. You awoke amid a maelstrom that would devour anything less persistent than you.
But, Evolution, do you not have many flaws yourself? Have you not had a one-track mind? Having created Life, you have an insatiable desire to diversify it. You have sought reproduction without considering compassion. You did start out with asexual which is faster, easier, and still used. Was it not some 1.2 bya that you dreamed up eukaryotic bisexual cells with long-term goals and adaptability to changing environments?
When you divided us into males and females you made reproduction brief and pleasurable for the male but lengthy and burdensome for the female who is saddled with gestation times in days such as: mice 20, rabbits 33, dogs and cats 60, pigs 114, goats 140, bears 210, chimpanzees 227, orangutans 260, humans 266, cows 284, and elephants 640.
By giving males, in most species, superior physical strength combined with stronger sexual drives, but without superior intelligence, you have caused enormous harm to billions of females. In fact, my blog #143 Rape vs Love, published 27 January 2016, describes some of them. Your negligence is revealed shamefully in today’s society that has encouraged the emergence of women to full equality. We are seeing increasing scores of men, who otherwise contributed much to humanity, having their careers and respect wrecked due to a failure to control the sexual impulses you gave them.
Evolution, have you not overreached yourself and therefore need a rest to contemplate what you have done and how you can correct flaws? Something is wrong when the environments you evolve, with their varied humans, result in so many who believe that you do not exist even though they can easily see manifestations of your work, and even indulge in it themselves.
We humans, who do believe in you, suspect you are far from perfect. Your DNA creates humans that visually belong to one sex, yet are endowed with feelings that belong to the other.
You evolved us to where we can discover our cellular composition is only 10% human with the rest bacterial, 99% of which are beneficial. Being much smaller, bacterial cells provide less than 3% of our mass. So, who is in charge? Who really runs the show? Who actually is composing this blog?
Or, is this a good lesson in the importance of co-operation? If so, why can we not do a better job of commuting with, and taking care of, each other?
Our sub-conscious mind has always been an integral part of us so why is it only recently that our conscious mind became aware of it and how it accomplishes all those household chores, seldom bothering our much slower conscious mind that sometimes acknowledges that our gut feelings need to be considered?
The most frightening examples of your lack of empathy lie in your creations. You have given us pain and pleasure receptacles to guide us not only among natural phenomena but also among your numerous and bewildering living organisms. I give you credit for the plant kingdom in which life and growth depends on inanimate contributors like sun energy and water. Your Animal kingdom is a cruel battleground where survival is a kill-and-eat necessity. Eaters must be immune to the pain and suffering not only of the eaten but of their relatives. Your lack of balance is criminal. Yes, we humans are quite guilty ourselves, but you set the stage.
Actually, many of us do thank you for giving us, and a few other air, land, and sea creatures, the intelligence to know the harm we do, but we still need the will and ability to enforce changes.
Humans, after placing themselves as number one, have rated creative intelligence in this order for the highest 15 animals: orangutan, bottlenose dolphin, chimpanzee, elephant, crow, African grey parrot, pig, rat, squirrel, racoon, veined octopus, pigeon, dog, portia labiata jumping spider, and ant. Evolution, are you grooming any of these as replacements when you tire of us?
I suspect, Evolution, that you are now using us to do your work for you such as evolving intelligent machines, but you have not given us sufficient intelligence to do the job minus the frightening risk of exterminating ourselves.
Perhaps your biggest goof was to introduce Greed that has enabled a few humans to become oligarchs, manipulating the rest of us into destroying ourselves. You must know that humans have killed, over 7,000 years, the same number, 8 billion, humans that currently exist.
Terrifying is the fact that sores of intelligent and well-meaning scientists have been used to create nuclear arsenals that leaders claim they need for coercion that they call protection. As reaction time is so limited, responsibility for use has been delegated to a frightening number of military personnel across the globe.
This is a topic deserving of its own blog, so here I will just remind you of just two examples of escaped exterminations and the risks of relying on human fraility:
During the Cuban missile crises when Krushchev had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba to counter missiles the US had set up in bordering Turkey, the US employed aerial and naval exercises, implying an invasion of Cuba was imminent. The USN also dropped dummy depth charges on Soviet submarines that were nuclear armed. To the sub crews they appeared real so Commodore Vasili Arkhipov was highly tempted to destroy his attackers - a move that would have ended all of us. He refrained and the world avoided catastrophe.
In 1957 at the Ballistic Missile Early Warning site in Thule, Greenland, electric pulses were bounced back off the moon that happened to be in direct alignment with a Soviet launch site. Reactions raced to the highest levels to the Norad deputy commander, Air Marshal Roy Slemon, RCAF, the man on duty to make the final decision. He quickly, but carefully, assessed the political status that told him a strike was unlikely so he called off a real retaliatory strike. It is dangerous to assume other humans will posses the same wisdom.
Evolution, your current playground on Planet Earth is only 10 billion years old, yet is well on its way to self destruction. Do you really want it to end so soon? There is so much more you could do here and we could have another 1.75 billion years before our sun loses its ability to sustain life.
Sadly, Evolution, everything we are aware of is mortal, but, really, we now have the ability and knowledge to try co-operation. We could work together to increase our longevity, minus the aches and pains of ageing, to limit reproduction to sustainable numbers, all of whom could have a much more enjoyable experience on this tiny, but fortunate, speck in the immensity of creation?
Accept, and enjoy, the challenge!
Ye Olde Scribe
georgesweanor@comcast.net
www.yeoldescribe.com