A SPECIES

It's getting harder and harder for me to write these blog posts.  The more I think about things, the more I see that they are connected and the harder it is to talk about any one thing without bringing in everything else.  I also have been preoccupied with writing another play which will be produced in January.  It's called 'A MISUNDERSTANDING' and it's very much about the themes of this blog, but it is also, I strongly believe, a compelling and funny and moving play.  The last one I did on these topics was called 'DISINHERIT THE WIND.'  It received some reviews like, "one of the most compelling plays to have ever been staged,"  "I wish I could give it ten stars but I am compelled to give it a maximum of five,"  "Come to the Ruby theater to find out what really great theater is all about."  Now there were also criticisms.  Everyone appreciated it, but some, especially those who were not very concerned with these big issues of 'Who am I,'  What is life,' and 'Why we are here,' thought it went on a little too long.  If you've never thought much about these big questions, being exposed to them, even in dramatic life and death arguments, may be more than you can  handle.  So, this new play is more accessible.  The characters go through more interesting changes and it is just as much about relationships between people as it is about theories and facts.  Also, importantly, it's quite a bit shorter.  So here it is:

I know this blog is read in Jakarta, Helsinki and Buenos Aires, so it may not be convenient for you to make your way to the Ruby Theater in Los Angeles in January (it runs thru the beginning of February).  But.....if you can make it and you are ordering tickets, use the code 'SEEKER' and you will get a half price ticket.

So now, let's talk about a species and just what that means.  First of all, and obviously, it means a group of creatures that share similar characteristics.  This, in and of itself, is a powerful argument against Darwinian evolution.  Some of these species have shared the same characteristics for hundreds of millions of years.  According to Darwinian evolution, characteristics are retained because they give a survival advantage over other creatures.  Supposedly, these characteristics have been arrived at by a series of random mutations, which just happened to give such a survival advantage.  And as these tiny advantages accumulated, a new species was formed.  The only such occurence to have ever happened, to our actual knowledge and experience, was the mutation that causes sickle-cell anemia in malaria infested countries.  The malarial parasite, which breeds within red blood cells, cannot breed within a sickled red blood cell and with no place to settle and reproduce, is eventually eliminated.  Sickled red blood cells are also poor carriers of hemoglobin molecules, so they cannot distribute oxygen efficiently through the body.  A person with one sickle-celled gene has a mild case of anemia, but is also able to survive childhood malaria.  A person with two sickle-celled genes has severe anemia and dies before he or she even has a chance to contract malaria.  This is hardly a recipe for building whole new worlds of species and phyla and kingdoms of creatures.  This mutation, like all mutations, is either a disability or a neutrality, not an improvement.  The human organism is either unaffected or damaged  by mutation.  It just so happens, in the case of the malarial parasite, that this damage makes another and more deadly disease survivable.

What is the survival advantage to having a five pointed maple leaf?  As opposed to a six pointed or four pointed leaf?  Look around you in a field or a forest.  You see a riot of shapes and colors.  Do you really believe that each of these has a survival advantage over all the others and that is why they have been retained for millions of years?  If survival were the only issue, we would all have settled on the most survivable shape, the most survivable covering for our bodies, the sharpest teeth, the strongest jaws, the fastest reflexes, etc.  In other words there would be nothing delicate, or beautiful, or remarkably varied about our flora and fauna.  It would be a very drab, efficient world of creatures who had no joy in life, but just were there because they had 'survived.'  I don't see that.  Except when corrupt human leaders make their subjects' lives so grim that their only issue and desire is daily survival, I see a world of creatures enjoying life.  Yes, there probably is some algorithm that keeps birds flying in formation.  And, also, birds fly in formation because they love to fly in formation.  Flowers turn to the sun to get energy, and, also, flowers love the sun.  How many creatures on this planet love the warmth of the sun?  How many love the coolness of water, to drink or to immerse themelves in, on a hot day?  How many carnivores love to hunt?  How many creatures love their offspring, even for a short time?  How many creatures love the act of reproduction?  Our purpose is not to survive.  Our purpose, the way our lives have been designed, regardless of what species one happens to be, is to enjoy, to love, to relish this experience.  Survival is a necessary condition for us to continue having that experience, but it is not the reason for it.

If Darwin were right, each creature would proceed over the generations with their own unique set of mutations and everyone would be different.  There would be no species with identifiable taxa, or characteristics, that have survived for thousands of generation.  We would all be a mish mosh.

Species not only share taxa, they share an understanding of the world.  A species is a way of experiencing the world, and each member of a species has some understanding of each other.  That is part of the joy of these lives that were designed for us.  We enjoy companionship, whether in the form of hanging out on street corners, or swimming in schools, or flying in formation, or working together on building a hive.  The mutual understanding between species members allows each one to not die of loneliness.  

Also, although we understand each other, we don't do so completely.  We are all very slightly different from each other and, yes, that does help us survive various microbial invasions and threats, but it also means that we have the capacity to surprise each other.  This capacity to surprise one another makes our lives interesting and our relationships exciting.  So, yes, it makes us, as a species, better able to withstand environmental and microbial threats, but it also makes our lives more exciting.  We survive microbes, but we also don't die of boredom, as we would if the behavior of each of our species mates was absolutely predictable.

As a species we also share a set of desires.  A human child has a powerful desire to walk after about a year.  This desire is connected by design to their developing eyesight and knowledge.  The desire to walk correlates with their ability to identify objects that they know and that they would like to get closer to. This period also corresponds to an enormous growing curiousity about the world.  But of course it would.  This is the particular world that you chose to experience when you attached to this organism, so, of course, you want to touch and see and smell and listen to every part of it.  This is where and when you wanted to be born and the family and the situation that you wanted to be born into.  

As opposed to a human newborn, a  horse newborn, a foal, has an overwhelming urge to stand up a few seconds after it arrives here.  This is connected to its overwhelming desire to suckle its mother's teits, to drink its mother's milk.  And those cannot be reached unless the foal stands up.  So the desire, the design of the legs at birth, the level of muscular coordination at birth, the recognition of one's mother, the knowledge of how to suckle and the desire for horse milk over any other, are all part of the inheritance, above and beyond genes, that is part of the designed life of the species called horse.

And every species is designed as a particular way of life.  Every mammalian species recognizes its mother and craves her milk.  And the milk of each species is the absolutely perfect food, nutritionally, for that particular species.  The adult members of the species seek out, crave, consider most delicious, the very things that are the most nutritionally beneficial for them.  The dung beetle unwaveringly makes its way through the kitchen, past the smells of baking pies and roasting meats, to get to where the truly delicious smells are coming from, the septic tank.  Dung, for the dung beetle, also happens to be its most nutritionally beneficial food.  What we consider delicious and attractive, or dangerous and repulsive, with some individual differences, particularly in humans, is also part of the inheritance, beyond genes, of a species. 

Members of a species learn from their parents and other mature members of that species.  What is remarkable is how well they learn.  We know from our human experience that learning cannot take place if there is no interest in the learning.  So each young species member is born with an interest, a desire, to learn the things that they will be taught, and a desire to do these things well, and a pride when they actually accomplish the goal of doing them well.  You think otherwise?  You have been taught, what?  That instincts are a substitute for experience?  Really?  The instinct that we most often discuss is the fight or flight instinct.  Yes, good fighting or good fleeing will help one's survival.  But that depends on an accurate perception of a threat.  The instinct is not randomly, or continuously kicked in.  It starts, if it is to be effective, by an accurate assessment of a threat.  Otherwise, the creature would be expending lots of wasted energy on imagined or exaggerated threats, which would take away energy from when he or she really needs it.  Also, to be 'good' at fighting or fleeing, is a total act of consciousness.  It means that you are reacting swiftly and accurately at each moment to what the prey or the predator is doing.  Rather than a substitute for consciousness, the fight or flight instinct is an instigator of a hyper consciousness.

A species, then, is a way of life, a way of experiencing the world and perceiving the world, and is designed with a set of innate desires that are there from birth and unfold at appropriate times, that coincide with the tasks that are required of the species member and make the things that you do and the interactions that you have pleasurable and interesting.  That's why you chose to be a squirrel in the first place.  Why would you do such a thing?  Because each of these choices has their own joys and dramas, each of them is very short lived in terms of our eternal lives, and each of them has something for us to learn in our continued development.




If you have any comments or questions regarding this post or the sanity of it's author, please let me know and I will try to address your concerns.  Thanks.