Evolutionary Quantum Leaps

I hope this post is not too abbreviated to make make sense to many. It has been written because I have found out this week that I must go through a by-pass operation that I have more than 10% of failing and there’s a chance I might not even make it. There is nothing quite like facing one’s own mortality to make one focus on priorities.

One of mine has always been to write about the long view of the processes that have taken place in the 4.6 billion years since planet Earth first formed as a huge mass of molten rock. My interest is focussed on finding clues that will help me understand why we humans evolved - our place in the whole scheme of things and generally why we are prone to behave the way we do.

Interestingly, it appears that the laws of nature are such that evolution has happened in quantum leaps. When you study how it all has progressed, you see clearly that for long periods of time, one kind of process will be getting more and more complex until Boom - there is a new unpredictable, unimaginable and more sophisticated process that emerges - a quantum leap to a new level is reached which then itself becomes more and more complex until another 'emergence', or leap occurs and so on.

For example in the beginning, the planet finally cooled down so that the tiny basic fragments of matter were able to come together to form atoms. As the temperature cooled further and the atoms bump into each other at slower speeds, they often interpenetrated and exchanged or shared electrons making a bond between them – like sodium metal atoms and chlorine gas atoms do when they collide. The sodium and chlorine disappear because, joined that way, they made an entirely new substance when they collided called sodium chloride, the compound we know as table salt. Boom, that kind of process was a quantum leap from Physics that just deals with matter and the forces that act on it to Chemistry that has to do with the creating of totally new kinds of matter.

As Chemistry proceeded to become more and more complex, huge new compounds formed and they joined with others in chemical reactions until some systems became so large and interdependent with many self-catalyzing reactions that groups of compounds began to reproduce, and change. Boom, a quantum leap to totally unpredictable advanced process life. Biology is so different from the Chemistry that sustains it - it is recognizable as a quantum leap.

Single celled life forms that we call bacterium first developed and as they became more complex, intercommunicative and interdependent over a long 3 billion years, they finally cooperated and joined together to form multi-celled beings - animals and plants. Over the following 70 or 80 million years during the Cambrian explosion, the rate of evolution accelerated by orders of magnitude and major diversification of all living things occurred including the sprouting of our branch of the tree of life. A few 100 thousands of years later big brained homo sapiens evolved. Boom – a quantum leap to humans who form a whole new Psychological level so like but so different from other animals .

This is pretty broad-brush stuff that could include many more levels. These ideas have arisen from the Earth's fossil records as studied by paleontological scientists. If you are having trouble reconciling the scientific evidence and your concept of a great designer, ‘God’, you could simply change that aspect of your belief to accept ‘God’ as the Creator of the Laws of Nature.

The sun keeps shining, fueling a push to more complexity and now logically, as we humans communicate, and become more interdependent [it's easy to see our drive and success in doing that] we are the ones being pushed to be part of another emergence or quantum leap, For an overview of those ideas check out the highlighted site.

What have we learned from all this about ourselves and possibly our purpose? To me one of the main messages is that the looming possibility of destroying our beautiful sustaining planet, is a global crisis that we all need to cooperate in preventing. Perhaps through supporting the new technologies and also cooperating in working toward less adversarial societies that lead to greed and ecological destruction. Unless we support enlightened national leaders I cannot see them ever becoming globally cooperative enough to agree to the measures necessary. Let's hope nature gives us time to smarten up and prevent further global tendencies towards the destruction of our planet. Rie