EVOLUTION and the INTERNAL  EVOLUTIONARY MECHANISM © John Latter 99   (jorolat@aol.com)

INTRODUCTION

   Man`s last common ancestor with Chimpanzees lived about 5 million years ago and since that time our new brain has evolved. This puts us in the curious position of using a product of evolution to try and find or understand the process that has ultimately brought it into being. Perhaps consideration should be given to possible limitations arising from this relationship and from characteristics of the new brain itself. The fundamental question “Is evolution an entity or a natural process?” may not be as simple to answer as it first seems. Statements such as “Evolution does this” or “Natural Selection acts on that” can give the impression that evolution and natural selection are agencies or entities that act on organisms without being an integral part of them. If not part of natural life they must be, by default, supernatural thereby giving potential for cultural conflict with older entities such as God. The possibility that this ambiguity may be of psychological origin raises the question “What does Psychology have to do with the Evolutionary Process?”. Though they are both aspects of Life it is because psychology can colour our perception of any reality, including that of evolution, that a relationship may exist. The following example illustrates this quite well:

   When Galileo stood in front of the Inquisition he was forced to recant his belief that the earth revolved around the sun. Even as he did so he was reputed to have muttered  “Eppur si muove” (“Yet it does move”) and the last years of his life were spent under house arrest. Though hidden behind a charge of heresy the behaviour of Galileo`s contemporaries can be seen to be of psychological origin for the following reasons:

   1) The lack of natural curiosity in what he had to say. Considering the reality of the Heliocentric Theory this is a graphic illustration of how psychological responses can unknowingly replace natural ones.
   2) When psychological adjustment to life is disturbed the need to punish the perceived cause of the upset is commonplace. The act helps restore inner balance, is usually rationalised and made easier when a group of people share the same condioned responses. Note how this makes Reality, at best,of secondary importance.
   3) Most significant of all: The years of house arrest were a violation of Galileo`s natural right to Be by people whose natural rights were no greater.

   Society has changed immeasureably since the 17th Century but human psychology hasn`t, we are simply more aware of it. In searching for the reality of the evolutionary process how can these “invisible” effects of psychology be circumvented?. One possibility is to assume that the evolutionary process is entirely natural and that all organisms are naturally integrated. If the new brain is a product of evolution then it follows that any relevant theory is a product of a product which, if no attempt is made to take into account the nature of non-intellectual life, runs the risk of being “free-floating”, i.e. egocentric. No matter how well such a theory accounts for what is known there will always be exceptions and modifications to be made. This will be complicated by the projection of new brain characteristics and concepts onto organisms that did not have or do not have a new brain. These limitations can be minimisedby looking for evolution`s external reality .

  If all Life has evolved from single-cell common ancestors that lived over 3.6 billion years ago and if evolution is a natural process then there are two inevitable conclusions:

  1) An internal evolutionary mechanism must exist in every organism because any alternative takes us back to the supernatural.   2) This mechanism can be found.

    Looking over the shoulder of a surgeon operating on an exposed new brain gives no indication of it`s intellectual capabilities though we know they exist, similarly observation of other structures may not reveal all of their functions. The following will propose a model of an internal evolutionary mechanism and how it may operate which will then be compared against observations and problems of current evolutionary theory. Some examples from nature that particularly demonstrate its apparent operation will be also be described.Three experiments conducted by different people some time ago will be used to illustrate how a suggested method of testing can “target” the internal evolutionary mechanism. The first experiment subjected successive generationsof mice to physical trauma, it`s effect on the proposed model would have been indeterminate and indeed there were no discernible results. The second, performed on rats, was “out of focus” but succeeded in inducing a genetic change consistent with the expectations of the proposed model. The major surprise being how easily this was achieved in an organism as evolved as a rat. The third experiment unknowingly followed the method of testing exactly, a genetic change was induced in caterpillars that would have been predictable to quite a high degree.