A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 17 – Evolution
Evolution is the master theory of biology.
Most of my big essay on energy and the human journey presents scientific findings, largely because most of the essay covers prehistoric events. Most of the essay also covers life on Earth before the rise of humans, so there is a great deal of evolution in it. Evolution is the master theory of biology, for good reason. Darwin’s greatest contribution was the idea of descent with modification. It certainly applies to all complex life, and to bacteria to a degree. DNA changes are a key aspect of evolution, but as with materialism and science, DNA theories could become dogmatic and quasi-religious, similar to how the Higgs boson was called the “God particle.”
When Barbara McClintock accepted her Nobel Prize, she spoke of the quest to find out how life directs its evolution. While seemingly random errors in DNA replication can cause mutations, as with consciousness and life, the deterministic, materialistic aspects of evolutionary theory fall far short of accurately describing reality. DNA studies became a fad in science. DNA was given an overburdened theoretic role, which seems to be waning, and the rise of epigenetics was overdue. As far as scientists today know, DNA is only a blueprint to make proteins, kind of like a schematic for making boards, nails, rivets, and other building materials. DNA says nothing about how those materials are put together or who builds that house and why.
As I recently wrote about quantum theory, I doubt that humans will ever fully understand what happens in cells. It is bewilderingly complex, and no one human mind will ever understand it all. Immune systems are part of how complex life works, and an astute observation that I recently read on why today’s medical science has such a poor grasp on immunity is that research has been directed to developing profitable pharmaceuticals, not toward understanding how immune systems really work.
Such studies will always involve evolution, which describes how life has changed. As with the beginning of our universe, if there was one, scientists only have inspired guesses about how life on Earth began. I accept that however life on Earth began, it initiated a journey that continues, several billion years later, and evolution is the best explanatory theory that we have.
Evolutionary theory has been good at describing the changes in life on Earth, at least before the rise of humans. But since humans became behaviorally modern, evolution has taken a backseat for the changes of the past 100,000 years or so in the human journey, as technological and cultural changes have far outstripped the pace of evolution. Humans have also domesticated many species through selective breeding, and scientists have opened another Pandora’s box by directly manipulating DNA. It could be said that humans have invented new kinds of evolution.
A comprehensive perspective of our world needs to incorporate evolutionary theory into it, which requires scientific literacy. A great deal of what I present requires scientific literacy to understand, but no more than it takes to understand those two big essays (1, 2), at least for what I am trying to do. Popularized science is plenty for my task.