Bare Bones Biology 091 – Evolution

Last time I told you what I know about the reality of our human position on the earth, and more importantly what we don’t know and therefore cannot control. Next I’ll tell you a little why and how story of the past couple of hundred years that have grown our destructive modern economies.

The theory of evolution was a brilliant breakthrough that took place a couple of hundred years ago. After that, it was studied rigorously until the evolutionary scientists and the geneticists realized they were all studying different parts of the same creature, and they got together. Now, 200 years later, we know a great deal more about how this beautiful life form, the whole earth ecosystem, manages to survive through the millennia by changing in response to changing conditions. We know that these changes are mediated for the most part by organisms that, by their interactions with each other and with the environment, carry the genetic information for the life of the whole system forward from one moment of time to the next. The correct term for this kind of study is evolutionary ecology. We left Darwinism in the dust at least a hundred hears ago.

The corposystem and modern politics and economics do not want us to know about evolutionary ecology, I guess because they have a strong foundation in that little nonsense phrase: “Survival of the fittest.” You have heard me say many times: “That’s not how it works.” I didn’t tell you how it does work for two reasons. One is that I don’t completely know how it works – nobody does – the other is that evolution is so complicated that most people don’t even TRY to understand how it really does work. Not even a massive computer could do the job because we don’t know all the parts of the whole earth ecosystem, so we can’t plug the information into the computer. We don’t even know all the species that do the work of keeping us alive. That’s why biologists are concerned about us humans killing them off – the other species – without even knowing what they are and how they contribute to our well being. The bottom line is that our modern corposystem is partially justified by a false or fake belief in survival of the fittest.

It is true that tooth and claw is an important reality of life. It’s also true that tooth and claw is a necessary component of life because it contributes to the flow of energy through the ecosystem, but tooth and claw is only a subset of how evolution works. How does it work? I lay out the background in pages 32 onward in Bare Bones Ecology Energy Handbook you can download from my website, FactFictionFancy. The shortest version I can tell you in a five-minute spot is that life evolves by generating functionally effective systems out of pre-existing systems.

A cell is a functionally effective system that is made of thousands of molecules – the key is that all these molecules work together perfectly. The problem, from our point of view, is the millions and millions of functional systems that did NOT work together perfectly within the system and so they became extinct. The way evolution works is to generate millions and millions of functional systems, by recombining the older systems, until a new system emerges that works together positively with the whole of life. That one SYSTEM (species) out of all the millions that unbalanced the systems of life, that one survives over time to become a part of the living whole earth ecosystem. We are unbalancing the life systems of the earth. The difference between us and all the other species is that we KNOW these things.

And the reason I am trying to explain this to you is that I see some new social movements coming up that are based on the reality of evolution instead of the failed models that were in part based on a false view of evolution. I’ll talk more about these in future.

Bare Bones Biology 091 – Evolution
KEOS FM 89.1, Bryan, Texas
Audio download available next week
here and at

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