The Fifth Level of Evolution

The theory of evolution is well established by scientific evidence, but is far from explaining everything. Some puzzles remain pending whose resolution does not seem to be immediate:

• The origin of life. We do not know how, when and where it happened. There are many theories, but none has been proven and are very difficult to prove, because the origin of life, rather than a scientific fact, is a historical fact. It is not enough if we were able to reproduce it in the laboratory, it’s necessary to find documentary evidence that this is how it happened, not otherwise. It’s very likely that these tests cannot be found, because the paleontological traces of the origin of life have surely been lost.
• The mystery of the change in level. Throughout the history of life on Earth, living things have gone through several successive levels:

Why I am not an animalist

Bullfight in Benavente
in honor of Philip I.
Attributed to the Flemish painter
Jacob van Laethem

I have written two previous posts in this blog (this one and this one) attacking animalism in its inflamed form, which occasionally makes its way into the media. These two posts have given rise to many comments in their Spanish version, as some of my readers identify themselves rather with the animalistic position than with mine. In this post I’ll try to explain some of the reasons why I think as I do.

First, as my readers know (for it’s the subject of the most read post in this blog, about 35,000 visits), I don’t consider man as just another animal (as some, but not all, animalists think, and they use this argument to deny that man can have more rights than other animals, or to assert that animals should have the same rights as we do).

The political correctness of animalists

John Maxwell Coetzee

In an article in the Spanish major newspaper La Vanguardia, the writer Quim Monzó recalls a campaign organized by the City Council of a Catalonian village to move people to collect canine excrements, with a poster where a pig-like dog appeared to tell its master: "I am your dog. Don’t make me look like a pig. Collect my excrements." The poster provoked numerous complaints from local animalists, who considered it an insult to pigs. Quim Monzó adds the following comment:

As expected... we are now hearing the slogan that the time has come to eliminate all phrases that trivialize the suffering of animals. [The animalist association] proposes that we stop using expressions like "kill two birds with one stone" or "be treated as a guinea pig”... We must not say "take the bull by the horns". There is also an English expression "bring home the bacon," which should not be used either.

Monzó has given his article a significant title: Idiots, idiots everywhere.

I would not dare to call animalists idiots, but I must accuse them of irrationality. Do they really believe that some pig was offended by the campaign for the collection of canine excrement, or that whenever we say don’t be a pig (or any of its synonyms) to rebuke a dirty person? I am afraid that pigs are not even aware of our use of language. The only ones who bother about this are animalists, and until proven otherwise, we must assume that they are human beings.

Is man a kingdom of nature?

Amount of information available to different species

Among all living species, there is a special one: ours. This has been said since antiquity, and has only been questioned in the last half century. Many biologists argue that the human species is one among many, that it cannot be considered superior to any of the others, either bacteria, insects, or other mammals.

There is, however, a quantitative and perfectly objective criterion that makes it possible to prove that the human species is unique, completely different from all others: the amount of information that each individual can handle.

For unicellular beings, the only information available to each individual is their own genome, which is easy to quantify: their bit value is approximately equal to twice the number of nucleotides in their genome. For viruses, from 10 to 50 kbits; for bacteria, up to 10 Mbits; for a unicellular eukaryote, up to 25 Mbits.

If we move to multicellular animals and plants, the size of the genome increases, and with it the amount of information it contains: about 200 Mbits for a nematode, up to several Gbits for vertebrates. For man it is estimated at about 6 Gbits, not much larger than the genomes of other mammals. In fact, the living being with the largest genome happens to be a fish.

In addition to the genome, vertebrates have a second source of information: their nervous system, especially the brain. The total amount of information contained in a brain is estimated at about 10 kbits for amphibians, 10 Gbits for reptiles, 200 Gbits for mammals.

Here man is unique: in proportion to the human body, our brain is larger than that of any other living species and is capable of storing no less than 10 Tbits (10 trillion bits), 50 times more than most mammals and a thousand times more than our own genome. It can be said that, with man, life crossed a critical point. For the first time in history, a single individual is able to reach such levels of information handling.

Five thousand years ago, with the invention of writing, man crossed a new critical point, a consequence of the previous one. We have become the only species with a third source of information, a memory external to our body. With the arrival of computers and Internet, this information has been made available to everybody and is still growing. Currently it is estimated that it has exceeded 100 exabits (100 quintillion bits, or 10²⁰ bits: one followed by twenty zeros). Every human being, apart from what is contained in the brain, has access to extra information ten million times greater, as if we were connected with ten million brains apart from ours.

The attached figure summarizes this and combines (on a logarithmic scale) all sources of information available at any time for the species capable of handling most information, depending on the time elapsed from the origin of life to the apparition of the said species, in billions of years.

C.S.Lewis

Man is so different from all other species, so overwhelmingly dominant, that we should be considered a kingdom of nature. I have indicated in another post that, for better or worse, our effect on the rest of living beings (the biosphere), the atmosphere and the whole Earth is greater than that of all the other animals together. When biologists claim that man is a species like any other, that the history of life shows no progress in any direction, the least that can be said is that they don’t know what they are saying. Or perhaps they have been carried away by extra-scientific ideologies that try to denigrate man and deprive us of our dignity, so as to be able to kill us when we hinder (through abortion or euthanasia) or to manipulate us whenever some people wish it (see The abolition of man, by C.S.Lewis, 1943).

The same post in Spanish
Thematic thread on What Is Man: Preceding Next

Manuel Alfonseca

The anthropomorphism of animalists

Flag of the animals in
Animal Farm, by George Orwell

A year ago I published an article in which I showed with multiple arguments that man is not just an animal, despite attempts by materialists to reduce us to that level. In fact, many animalists seem to do exactly the opposite: they inadvertently raise the animals to the human level. They do this even with insects, as when they speak of the horror suffered by a caterpillar being devoured by a hymenopter larva, although they reserve their special compassion for the higher animals: birds and mammals.

In their campaign against animal acts in circuses, animalists use the following motto:

A circus is a prison

They usually say the same of zoos, even though modern zoos have little resemblance to those of the early twentieth century, the so-called menageries.

Questions for materialist atheists

Steven Weinberg

There is a website (10 questions Christians must answer) that offers 10 questions to believers in Christianity. If they consider and meditate these questions deeply, they are supposed to convince themselves that their religious beliefs are absurd, that the best they can do is convert to atheism. This website (and others like it) gave us the idea that these contributions are double-edged, as the same procedure can be used for the opposite purpose: one can also be skeptical towards materialism. Therefore we are proposing here a few questions and offer a link to the atheistic page to give the reader the chance to compare both approaches impartially and draw their own conclusions.

1.      Consider this assertion: Nothing exists but those things with which science can experiment. Do you believe this because of scientific reasons, or it is a dogma for you?

Is man just an animal?

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Modern biologists frequently say that man is not special, that we are just a species among many. Thus, for instance, Colin Tudge writes this:

Phylogenetically we are an outpost, a tiny figment of life, just as Earth is a cosmological nonentity that no other intelligent life-form in the Universe would bother to put in their celestial maps.

(The variety of life, Oxford University Press, 2000).

This is just the indiscriminate application of a pseudo-scientific dogma that few biologists would dare contradict, which can be expressed in one of the following equivalent ways:

• All species of living beings are equivalent; no one is superior to the others.
• There are no criteria that make it possible to compare the importance of different species.
• Man is not superior to chimps, ants, bacteria...
• Evolution has no direction.

Cultural evolution and biological evolution

Cultural and biological evolution are similar because natural selection acts in both cases. Cultural productions compete against one another and many become extinct. As in the case of living beings, not always the best win. Chance has an influence. In this way, for instance, Windows-95 threw OS-2 out of the market, even though at that time the second operating system was better. Another example is the result of the war between the three competing models of video recording: Betamax, 2000 and VHS.

In the same way that living beings exhibit genetic variability (many varieties of the same gene co-existing in the same population), there is also a cultural variability, represented by the co-existence of old and new makes and models of the same product. At times of big change in the environment (we are just now experiencing one) a cultural product may escape extinction thanks to its variability, by combining versions and producing something new, better adapted to the new circumstances.

The parallel is quite impressive. What we call a species in the biological world, may be considered similar to a civilization. But there are also deep differences between both phenomena.

While studies about biological evolution get back in time to one century and a half ago, those about cultural evolution are more recent: not even half a century. One of its pioneers, Richard Dawkins (who invented the term meme for cultural elements equivalent to genes) made the mistake of considering biological and cultural evolution as identical processes, forgetting their differences. Cultural evolution is almost exclusively typical of man and exhibits new phenomena, emergent features that make it quite different from biological evolution:

This is what science says about human life

With respect to current discussions about abortion, protection of life, and the rights of the pregnant woman, I think it timely to recall the scientific consensus about human life:

·        The life of every living being generated by means of sexual reproduction begins with the fertilization of the female by the male gamete, i.e. with the formation of the zygote. That is the point in time when a new being appears, of the same species as its parents, whose genetic endowment (its DNA) is different from that of its parents and any other living being of the same species, except for identical twins. This new living being will keep its genetic endowment until its death. This is the reason why the eggs of sea turtles and other endangered species are protected, because they are individuals of those species.

·        In every species of living beings who do not go through metamorphosis (including all reptiles, birds and mammals, and of course man) there is no sharp change in their development from the zygote to death. The different phases we use to make out (embryo, fetus, neonate, child, teenage, adult and old) are arbitrary, without any discontinuities. Not even the birth is anatomically discontinuous (it consists in cutting a blood vessel; physiologically it has other effects). There is no doubt that in all those phases, from the first to the last, the same individual is involved.

·        In every placental mammal (including man), the first phase of the life of the new individual takes place inside the body of the mother. Pregnancy is equivalent and replaces development inside the egg, which in reptiles and birds takes place outside the mother’s body. In both cases, maternity begins in fertilization, not in birth, whose equivalent is the rupture of the egg shell. A woman is a mother from the moment she becomes pregnant.

What is man?

Since about one century ago, after the consolidation of evolutionist theories, and getting from them philosophical consequences without a scientific basis, many biologists assert that man is an animal like any other, one between millions of species of living beings, and it would be impossible to set criteria to help us decide if one species is more advanced or more important than any other.

Is this true? I think it is evident that those criteria do exist, that we should not be denied the ability to compare and judge, two capabilities that have made our technological advances possible. I’ll mention just two of those criteria:

·         The origin of life, about 4000 million years ago, did not have an immediately observable impact on the physical aspect of the earth. Just a few changes in the water hue, or the apparition of cyanobacteria reefs. Nonetheless, the action of life on Earth continued slowly and culminated about 1000 million years ago in a new composition of the atmosphere with about 20 percent oxygen, which made respiration possible.

Multi-cellular living beings changed deeply the physical appearance of the Earth: the dominant color of continents turned green. Of the three kingdoms at this level of life, plant produced the largest impact, while fungi and animals are practically imperceptible from outer space.

In the last centuries, the situation has changed: for good or evil, the human species by itself has modified the aspect of our planet. The surface of the tropical forests is decreasing; many living species are in danger; holes in the ozonosphere turn up; the night sky is full of light; and, for the first time in history, the Earth has become an emitter of low frequency electromagnetic waves (radio and microwave), which makes our existence detectable by hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligences. A single species has done this in a terrifically short time, compared to the history of the Earth.

·         On the other hand, in very recent years, most members of the human species have become able to access a huge amount of information, an ever growing amount, over one quintillion bits (10¹⁸). Compare this figure with the information accessed by the members of any other species, from bacteria to chimpanzees: between one million and 200 million bits, seven to twelve orders of magnitude below ours. The information at our disposal may already be higher than the total amount of information accumulated by all the hundred million species of living beings considered to have existed from the origin of life, assuming that it makes sense to add it all together.

Is man a species like any other? No. For some biologists, biological classifications should give man at least the rank of a kingdom of nature, for it is very different to all the other species. Man was considered different during most of the history of mankind, until some biologists in the twentieth century started their continuous and surreptitious work of undermining human dignity.

Spanish version of this article
Thematic thread on What Is Man: Next

Manuel Alfonseca