Meditation 43: Evolution

What is the significance of evolution? Why does it bring fear and apprehension to so many people?  Does it lead to nihilism? I see it as a bomb going off very slowly. The end is nothing for every species of life, and for life itself, according to the best available cosmology. It is not only life forms that evolve, but the universe itself.  This evolution follows the law of entropy in which things move from a more to a less organized state, concluding in a nearly perfect randomness.   The universe will eventually slow down until the temperature hovers just slightly above absolute zero. There will be not much in the way of movement. For a brief period, life thumbs it nose at entropy and says, "I am going to stay organized for as long as I can,” knowing that this will not be forever, when it becomes self-conscious.  Each life form is an experiment in living, one of the possible combinations and permutations of genetic material, or its equivalent.  Every species is a success in its own day, adapted for survival in a favorable environment that may cease to be favorable at any moment. When circumstances change, species die out that are unable to adapt, while others take their place, at least for a long time. However, there are physical conditions that will not tolerate life of any kind, like those in the centers and surfaces of stars.  Our middle-aged sun will one day become an expanding ball of incandescent gas.  When it reaches the earth, the end of the planet will arrive and bring the end for any forms of life that managed to endure so long, on or below its surface.

The true horror of evolution and the eventual extinction of life is the realization that humans are just another animal species. We, too, are an experiment in living.  We come from a long line of animals, going back to the beginning of life on earth.  Somehow, along the line, the brains of hominids changed in such a way as to support a number of novel abilities not found before to such a degree in the rest of the animal kingdom. It supported linguistic communication, making and using tools, coordinated hunting, close observation of nature, and the transmission of culture. These emergent qualities have allowed humans to colonize the planet and use it for human purposes.  We no longer simply adapt to the natural world but change it.  Whether this is ultimately for good or ill, we do not know, but somewhere we are anxious that it will be for ill. The dinosaurs died out because giant asteroids hit the earth, and the resulting debris and pollution broke the food chain.  Many animals starved to death that ate the animals that ate the plants that no longer grew.  There was no way around it.  Humans look ahead, but are they looking far enough?  Do the traits that have made human beings the dominant large animal species lend themselves to survival in the future?  Do the powers of thought give humans an edge in survival?  The saber tooth tiger had great fangs to tear the flesh of large herbivores. When the herbivores died out at the hands of human hunters, the fangs just got in the way of getting a square meal. They were great for tearing into a mammoth but useless for hunting mice. Let us hope that the human mind is more flexible than the mental equivalent of the tiger's fangs.