(Published in GralsWelt Special Issue 11/2003)
THE RISE OF LIFE
From the origin of the species
Anyone who asks about the origin of plants, animals, and people will find the answer, which was valid for most scientists well into the 19th century, in the Bible:
“God made all kinds of animals in the field, all kinds of cattle, and all kinds of reptiles on the ground. God saw, it was good. Then God said: Let us make people in our image, like us ... " (Genesis 25:26).
It also seemed clear that the species would not change; they could stay as God had decided they were good to be.
Even the ancient Greeks hardly knew any better. Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation, which seemed to be confirmed by observations: flies were made from rotting meat, and fleas from dust.
Some ancient authors had a different opinion, but the spontaneous generation of primitive organisms (which were not mentioned in Genesis, see above) and the immutability of species (theory of constancy) were unchallenged for many centuries. Even the great systematist Carl v. Linnaeus (1707-1778) was still a proponent of the theory of constancy.
The question of the origin of species thus remained a purely theological question to which natural scientists could and should not contribute.
Relics of the Flood
In caves or deep layers of the earth, remains of animals that could not be assigned to any known species were repeatedly found. Where did they come from?
They were believed to have perished in the Flood because Noah apparently forgot to take some species onto the ark. Or was there no space on the ark for the giant dinosaurs? Perhaps Noah was unable to capture a Tyrannosaurus Rex? I would understand!
With the increasing number of ancient animals and plants found, these simple biblical explanations became increasingly questionable, and better answers had to be sought.
The cataclysm theory
A final attempt to bring biblical traditions into agreement with scientific observations was made by Georg v. Cuvier (1769-1832).
He suspected that living beings were periodically destroyed by universal catastrophes, and then re-emerged; either through new creation, or through immigration from areas that were spared from the disasters. This could explain many of the mysterious fossil discoveries in accordance with the biblical account of creation.
It was only towards the end of the 20th century that we became aware that life-threatening major disasters had actually occurred in the history of the earth. The extinction of the dinosaurs, the flood (or Atlantis) catastrophe and possibly many more could have been caused by impacts *) or gigantic volcanic eruptions.
The cataclysms discarded in the 19th century could therefore have had an impact on the development of life. For example, it is questionable whether the rise of mammals and thus human development would have been possible without the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Inheritance of acquired traits
The idea that living things adapt to their environment is very old. Already ancient oriental cuneiform texts tell that the giraffes originally only had a short neck. In an effort to reach the leaves on the tops of the trees, her neck stretched more and more (1, p. 46).
The Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829) also observed that certain characteristics or properties of living beings change due to the influence of the environment, and he suspected that these changes are passed on from parents to their children through inheritance. Lamarck's theory was easy to understand and was able to explain many observations, e.g. breeding successes in domestic animals, satisfactorily. Darwin also counted on the inheritance of acquired traits.
The theory of evolution broke away from the biblical story of creation.
From now on it was a profane task of the natural scientist to fathom the history of the development of life.
“The thesis of Darwinism says that the species are varieties that have become constant, the varieties are species in formation, and the emergence of new races is a product of the struggle for existence which, as a kind of natural selection, has favored certain specimens. This way of thinking makes nature an institution in which things are English, namely: firstly, free-trade, in that the competition decides, secondly, correctly, because only what is least shocking, the most suitable, survives, thirdly, liberal, because it prevails “Progress” and the nouveautés are always improvements, fourthly, but also conservative, because the struggle for progress takes place “organically”: in slow transitions and through majority victories. English is also the naive equation of artificial breeding with natural selection, a colonial notion that conceives the earth as a large animal farm and vegetable plant, and the inability to think of the past as generally different from the present: everything must be "so similar" as it was received today, at least with the use of the same transformative forces; On this point, Darwinism is the biological counterpart to Lyell's geology, which traces everything back to actual causes, imperceptibly effective, still “current” causes today: very characteristic of an unheroic age of learned myopia and microphilia *), of political daily worship and the world ruling Journalism." Egon Friedell (3, p. 1155).
*) Myopia = nearsightedness, microphilia = love for the little one.
Adaptation through selection
According to 20th century materialistic thinking, a mechanistic theory of the origin of species was in the air, and Charles Darwin (1808-1822) was by no means the only one to think in this direction.
The convincing effect of Darwin's theory of selection is that it can apparently explain the development of the full abundance of life from the most primitive beginnings with a few simple mechanisms:
* Overproduction of offspring quickly leads to overpopulation unless most of the young individuals die before they can reproduce.
* The individuals of a species are never completely identical.
* Through the "struggle for life", the less well adapted individuals are eliminated. The more capable have a greater chance of passing on their genetic makeup to the next generation.
These are - very shorthand - the basic ideas with which Darwin wanted to explain the origin of plants and animals from a "primordial germ". Not only did he recognize the evolution of species as an important motor for the development of life, but he apparently also discovered the mechanism that regulates this evolution: selection.
During his lifetime, the laws of inheritance were still unknown, no one knew about the mutations, and the genetic code was only discovered a few decades ago.
But the basic ideas of Darwin set the trend for a century of biological research, and his theory of evolution, in modified form, remains a foundation of modern biology. The diversity of plants and animals can thus be understood as a "tree of life". Art on Art developed from the "experiences" of its predecessors.
Life, the incomprehensible anchored in every religion, is based only on complicated physics and chemistry. Accordingly, life does not need any transcendent forces; it develops independently of the creative hand.
Was it just a coincidence?
The theory that the mutations, the spontaneous changes in the genetic material, are purely coincidental has been the cause of heated discussions to this day. Accordingly, there is no goal for evolution, and no predictions can be made about its future.
The development of life is ateleological (not goal-oriented), it has no other purpose than the optimal use of the ecological situation. All living beings are products of chance. In the lottery of life, they either won one of the rare grand prizes (then there is still one), or they disappeared.
This notion of an “aimless” development not directed by any God or only to be foreseen today has an impact on many areas of our life in which progress is spoken of: science (purposeless research), ecology, economics, politics, social sciences, etc. Almost everywhere There is a lack of clear ideas about the goals to be achieved through technical progress as a means to an end.
RANDOM AS A DEVELOPMENT PRINCIPLE
Against Darwin's theory of evolution, the objection that is often made is that no complicated structures can arise through chance. An example often cited would be how long it would take monkeys pounding on typewriters to randomly produce a line of Sheakespeares:
"To be or not to be: That is the question."
This sentence consists of 41 letters or punctuation marks or spaces. A typewriter with 32 keys (26 letters and 6 punctuation marks) is chosen. Then the probability of finding the exact sentence would be about 1 / (5 x 10 to the power of 61). If one assumes that a line with 41 keystrokes (2460 keystrokes per minute) is possible per second, then from the beginning of the universe 15 billion years ago until today it has been possible to write about 5 x 10 to the power of 17 lines. The desired result would only be hoped for after many more billions of world ages, so that one can confidently speak of "impossible".But that's not how evolution works according to the theories of neo-Darwinism!
Rather, one imagines the matter in such a way that hits once scored are retained. In our example (which, like all comparisons, lags a bit) one would find at least one, or even several, correct letters in the right place in the first, at the latest in the second run. Then, with the help of the principle of chance, all that remains to be done is to look for the rest. The desired result can be found in a reasonable time, provided that a control instance (the selection) leaves the appropriate letters and allows the rest to be searched for.
Here is a practical example from the recently attempted technical applications of the random principle, which sometimes deliver unexpectedly good results:
“Optimal coffee blend.
Unfortunately, a particularly tasty type of coffee is also particularly expensive. This is bad for the coffee producers because they make little profit from it. If you could mix cheaper types of coffee - let's say five such types - with a mixture that does not differ in taste from the most expensive type, but is cheaper, that would be of enormous advantage for the coffee industry. The same coffee cup size has been filled from five different storage containers, each with slightly different proportions of the individual cheaper types of coffee. The subjects - they were students - were always asked whether the variety tasted better or worse than the previous one. If it tasted better, this variety was further modified, if not, it was discarded. This resulted in an ideal mixture that tasted just like the most expensive variety, but was cheaper - at around 25%, it was even much cheaper. A wonderful business for coffee roasters, and you can hardly say anything against that. " (10, p. 366).
Neo-Darwinism
The tools of evolution, as seen by today's neo-Darwinism, are supposedly simple and manageable:
* Mutations, accidental changes in the genome.
* Selection, the touchstone of life that allows favorable mutations to happen and rejects unfavorable ones.
* In addition there is the “lottery of genes”, the traits inherited from the parents through random combinations from their genetic makeup.
In many individual cases, biologists have been able to show how these mechanisms work; but only for minor adjustments. Nobody has yet proven that significantly changed new species can arise in such a way, or even how large transitions were possible: from fish to reptile, from reptile to bird, from reptile to mammal.
The fossil finds are very sketchy, many intermediate stages are missing. Perhaps the assumed inifinitesimal (infinitely small) transitions from species to species never existed; because not every transition stage must necessarily improve the chances of survival.
A reptile would be at a disadvantage in the struggle for survival if its resilient scales were replaced by more sensitive feathers. The gradual conversion of the forelimbs into wings should also reduce the chances of survival of the stubby-winged hopping on two legs until usable wings and the indispensable feeling for the flight dynamics are developed. Only now is a new dimension open to the bird, with possibilities that a reptile can only dream of.
Since 1909 experiments have been carried out with fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), which can reach up to 30 generations in one year. They were exposed to radiation or chemicals that increased the natural mutation rate up to 75,000 times and produced numerous mutants. However, in nearly a century of Drosophila research, there was not a single improvement, let alone new species; Above all, crippled, i.e. less viable specimens emerged.
One theory of broken equilibrium suggests that long phases of evolutionary standstill were followed by short episodes in which new species emerged very quickly, even spontaneously. Such leaps in development would then require “major mutations”, simultaneous, appropriate changes to numerous genes that can hardly be accidental. This theory explains, with unproven assumptions, the lack of links in the chain of fossil discoveries, but cannot show how new species arise.
From the simple to the complicated
The more complicated a living being, the more information - i.e. genes - it has to carry in its cells, the longer the strands of its DNA ***) have to be. The question of how DNA strands elongate (in humans they are around 2 m long, in bacteria only a few millimeters) should be answered by chemists.
As early as the 1980s, Prof. Bruno Vollmert, Director of the Polymer Institute at the University of Karlsruhe, came to the conclusion that such chain molecules do not form by themselves, i.e. that spontaneous generation is not possible. And the elongation of the DNA chains required for the ascension of life is highly unlikely. Unless the necessary reactions are specifically controlled and nothing is left to chance (11).
One can therefore confidently assume that the much-cited “self-organization of matter” remains a dream of neo-Darwinists that has not been proven by any observation, but refuted by many facts.
Nobody can doubt that there is life on earth. How it came about, which creative forces brought about and promoted its development, remains a mystery.
The brainworm
Some life forms have adapted to their environment in such an extraordinary way that an adaptation in small steps, as required by the theory of evolution, seems to be almost impossible. The so-called "brainworm" provides an extreme example:
“The lancet leech (Diocrocoelium dentriticum) is a suction worm that parasitizes in the bile ducts of the liver of sheep and cattle. The eggs produced by the adult worm get out with the faeces of the host animal. There they are ingested by small land snails (zebrina, helicella) that feed on the droppings. The snail serves as the first intermediate host; Miracidia larvae develop in it from the leech eggs. Such parasites always have great losses on the way from one host to the next, especially if their eggs are shed with the excrement of the host animal; because animals usually do not eat their own droppings. The parasite is much more likely to find its way into what is known as a vector or intermediate host, in this case snails. From there it is still a long way to a new cattle or sheep.
This is why the parasite inserts a few multiplication steps in the larval stage, increasing its number of individuals: The larva develops into what is known as a sporocyst, where daughter sporocysts develop, and in each of these numerous cercariae - these are still larval stages of the lancet gel. These cercaries secrete a slimy shell in which they - packed in hundreds of them next to each other - leave the snail through its respiratory cavity.
Now they lie in the grass and are easily found by ants who eat the mucus and with it the cercaria, around 50 pieces per meal. The cercariae are not digested in the ant, but rather bite through the wall of the stomach and migrate into the body of the ant. The ants body wall is also made up of chitin, and chitin does not heal. So that the ant can continue to live, each cercaria seals its hole with a dark brown chitin glue - the only known parasite that mends its host. The ant repaired in this way can live on for over a year. For W. Hohorst and G. Graefe, who studied the life cycle of this parasite so thoroughly, the dark spots in the light chitin were a convenient tool for counting how many cercariae an ant was infested with. The cercariae grow in the ant - their second intermediate host - to a cyst stage and then wait until they come back into a cattle or sheep.
As much as you searched, you found in the body of each infected ant one less cyst than the stomach wall had points. But it was finally found, in a completely unexpected place in the sub-canal ganglion (i.e. the brain) of the ant. This brainworm, as it was called, now has two peculiarities: First, it changes the behavior of the ant from this point. In the evening, when it gets cool, she does not go home to the nest, but climbs a blade of grass and bites the tip of it. The ant sleeping on the blade of grass can now be swallowed the next morning - before it is warmed up - by grazing cattle - and the parasites have then returned to their final host, where they develop into ready-made lancet leeches. But - and this is the second specialty - the brainworm itself dies. He can no longer infect a host. He sacrifices himself for the other cercaries ... " (12, p. 140).
Can anyone imagine that such a complicated and in every respect highly strange, closed chain of behaviors came about through accidental changes in hereditary characteristics?
Evolution - what for and where?
It is obvious that one of the best-established theories - Darwin's theory of evolution - has weaknesses and needs to be expanded or supplemented. A distinction must be made between evolution and the theory of evolution.
The evolution, the development of life from the simple to the complex, is so well documented by innumerable fossil finds that it does not seem sensible to look for other models; eg to construct a natural history based on the Bible.
But the established theory of evolution, which aims to explain the ascent of life solely through the random interaction of variation and selection, has obvious weaknesses. It is largely a myth, not a scientific theory, and it needs to be significantly improved or dropped in the 21st century.
Darwin's selection theory was the most influential scientific theory of the 19th century. It worked far beyond the field of biology. The much-quoted "struggle for life" (not a happy translation of Darwin's "struggle for life") was carried over to all possible areas.
Even influential political and economic tendencies rose to derive the necessity of ruthless, even inhuman competition from the “struggle in nature” **). The struggle in nature, which ensures the essential movement in a natural environment, was interpreted too largely until one finally no longer orientated oneself to the natural necessity of movement, but thought the manifestations to be found in nature, even their apparent ones To take cruelty as an example.
Humanity, consideration, cooperation and the voluntary balance between give and take, and Christian charity are much less spoken of and even less acted upon.
Only a few of the representatives of such models of thought have realized that the Darwinist approach can only work if living beings are different from one another. Because without variation there can be no selection. This also applies to humans. So - if you understand it correctly - the work of the famous Englishman also includes a call for humanity and tolerance, which does not, however, fit as well with the widespread striving for success as the "struggle for life".
After all, the neo-Darwinian evolutionary hypotheses are also an expression of an attitude that refuses to even consider something higher - even a creator. This basic attitude naturally radiates to all areas of life; the widespread appreciation of the theory of evolution is just one of many symptoms of this.
But purely materialistic thinking and striving has already brought unspeakable suffering and inconceivable calamity. It is time we saw through this wrong approach and let go of it.
Continued Part V.
Endnotes:
*) Impact = the impact of a planetoid or comet on earth, which can cause enormous devastation.
**) "The struggle in nature" is the title of a lecture of the Grail Message in the light of truth by Abd-ru-shin, who corrects this concept.
***) DNA = deoxiribonucleic acid, the strands or chains on which the genetic information is encoded.
Literature:
(1) Blacker, Carmen / Loewe, Michael "World formulas of the early days", Eugen Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1977.
(2) Eichelbeck, Reinhard "The Darwin Conspiracy", Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1999
(3) Friedell, Egon "Kulturgeschic.hte der Neuzeit", CH Beck, Munich 1931.
(4) Grün, Johannes “The creation, a divine plan”, Verax, CH-7537 Müstair, 2000.
(5) Hagl, Siegfried “The gap between science and truth”, publisher of the ralsbotschaft foundation, Stuttgart, 1986.
(6) Hagl, Siegfried “If it wasn't a miracle”, publisher of the Grail Message Foundation, Stuttgart, 2000.
(7) Junker, Reinhard / Scherer, Siegfried “Evolution. A critical textbook. ”, Weyel, Giessen 1998.
(8) Lay, Rupert “Die Ketzer”, Langen Müller, Munich undated
(9) Maddox, John “What remains to be discovered”, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt aM, 2000.
(10) Nachtigall, Werner, "The great book of bionics", DVA, Stuttgart 2000.
(11) Vollmert, Bruno “The living beings and their macromolocules”, E. Vollmert Verlag, Karlsruhe 1983.
(12) Wickler, Wolfgang / Seibt, Uta “The principle of self-interest”, DTV, Munich 1981.
