

The End of Evolution

John Bottrill, Ph.D.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 John Bottrill

Other titles on Smashwords by Dr Bottrill

The Trouble with France

The King's Toads

More King's Toads

Practical Palmistry

The Edinburgh Grail

No Carrots for Dink

Replacement in Heaven

The Templar Heresy
The Cover:-

The Tower represents current scientific dogmata built on false premises, as examined in this book. The energy symbolised by the lightning represents nuclear war, a solar flare, the surge of heat from Carbon emissions etc. Any one will bring the Tower down. People will try to escape the chaos and destruction - to Mars? ......please!

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The End of Evolution

This book is an intelligent questioning of various scientific theories we are asked to accept. It's not a particularly scholarly treatise, despite all the research involved. It's a 'must read' - especially for first year university students before their minds get ossified by established dogmas.

You like to feel you know where you stand. This book will suggest to you you're standing on quicksand. To get out of such metaphorical quicksand you need a metaphorical rope; the usual one is called belief – blind acceptance of what you're told by a professor or a Prime Minister – especially a Prime Minister. The further a belief is from reality, the more firmly it is held. Grasp the rope firmly; this book will shake it.

This book doesn't espouse any particular philosophy or approach. The orthodox dogma is that there is a pattern of development called Evolution. We accept it because it's easier than not accepting it. The evolutionary approach is often used to study the development not just of life, but of the universe, life, history etc. Since the approach is not appropriate in such cases (if indeed in any), facts/evidence have to be warped to produce a coherent picture. Newspapers do the same with the information that's fed to us. And if the facts don't fit the picture, either the facts are not true or we're stupid....

The text ranges over history, philosophy, physics, climatology, anthropology, geology etc. using difficult words like exsanguination, phthisis and automobile. It will present facts/ideas that may be new to you, but assumes a reasonable background of general knowledge.
Table of Contents
Chapter I. How did the universe evolve?

Problems with the standard view

The present consensus is that the physical universe – with the particular laws and constants vital to our existence - just popped into being from 'nothing'. 'Nothing' existed (an oxymoron, if ever I've heard one) until, at a point of time without warning, there occurred a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago and something existed - the universe as we know it.

As far as I can understand Hawking, the Bang was an unimaginably tiny point at an extremely high temperature and infinite density. You can't have a point in 'nothing'; 'nothing' doesn't contain points. Time can be said to be a measure of motion. With no matter there can be no motion: ipso facto, there can be no point of time. It's not clear how the Bang's tiny point can have had density without mass if there wasn't any previously. Was there mass previously? Can you have temperature without mass?

There couldn't have been nothing before the Bang. Something can't become nothing; nothing can't become something. The problem here is mass from nothing; the problem for evolutionists is life from nothing; the problem for anthropologists is Homo Sapiens from nowhere. I'll look at evolution in the next chapter. This one will examine the first problem.

If the 'Big Bang' was a moment in time, there must have been a previous moment \- something must have happened before the event. Did time exist before Big Bang? If it didn't then how could have Big Bang occurred temporally? If there was no time then, there must have been no moments and no sudden bang. If time is a 'function' of space/matter, and no matter/space existed at that point, did the bang create time also? No time means no matter; how then did a big bang type explosion occur? Later, I'll examine the proposition that time is not a function of matter.

Anyhow, the bang point then expanded rapidly creating space and matter. It did not expand into space, since space did not exist. Space was created and stretched resulting from the creation of matter. Space and matter are interdependent – they are part of the same phenomenon and could not exist separately. Is mass a property of space, or vice versa? But where did mass come from? The Big Bang violates the Law of the Conservation of Energy because it can't account for whence all heat and matter comes. The law of the Conservation of Mass governs mass which exists. With no mass there's no law, or are such laws even more fundamental? Do the laws of Physics exist simply because it's their nature, or are they just descriptions we've worked out? Are they a language – the language of Physics? I'll look into this further at the end of the book.

The law states that matter cannot be created or destroyed, so the singularity must have contained all the mass of our present universe. If so, did the law pertain at that point? Were more than a trillion, trillion, trillion tons of matter created by the bang? Were they there before, or have they grown since along with space? Um.

Hawking's 'point' sounds rather like a black hole, although Hawking doesn't specifically call it one. Our universe contains black holes created from mass. So, if the bang was a black hole, it must have depended on a pre-existing universe and the creation of the universe was not from nothing. If it was not a black hole, then any comparison with one is misleading. All we know then is what it wasn't, which doesn't produce a helpful hypothesis.

The 'Big Bang' may be better described as the 'Big Bounce' - a previous universe existed before this universe. The previous universe may have contracted and formed that infinitely dense mass, forcing a re-expansion that would become today's universe. Our universe may have 'bounced' into existence. This approach has the advantage that it avoids the Conservation of Mass problem.

The Big Bounce theory is based on the idea that the universe expands and contracts, each time bouncing into existence. This means something must always have existed, whether matter or energy. So, some sort of universe existed before there were gods. Many unrelated and widespread traditions are based on such a premise That proves nothing, but it's interesting and is dealt with below. How often has this happened previously?

Hawking suggested that the moment of creation conjured up universes like bubbles, big and small. If the bubble were 'sufficient', it would last and expand; if not it would collapse – like soap bubbles. And if there were more than one such bubble/universe created, several might survive. How would this relate to the idea of parallel universes? More on this later.

Another theory suggests that the Big Bang was not a point, but occurred everywhere in space. That's interesting since we now know that space is not empty; it contains its own energy. When space expands, it forms matter. I do not claim to understand this.

Anyhow, to get back to the results of the Bounce/Bang. The tiny, tiny point, hot and dense, immediately expanded at least 100 times almost instantaneously. Such exponential doubling would be faster than the speed of light. Did the universal constants apply at that instant? Since there wasn't any light until much later, evidently not. Expansion led to rapid cooling, permitting the creation of matter - a dense plasma of neutrinos, neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons, and photons – all within 14 seconds.

Where did the heat go? Entropy requires that there must have been colder areas of space to absorb the heat or we would exist now at billions of degrees. But space was still being created if the universe was indeed expanding after the Bang. If the Big Bang took place everywhere in space, one wonders how temperature would have dissipated in such a short period of time. It's an entropy problem.

_"The only way to cool [the gas] is for something else, which is even colder, to take heat away, And the only candidate constituent of the universe that could have been even colder than the gas is the dark matter."_ (Barkana R: Astrophysics,Tel Aviv University). So, what is Dark Matter, and where did that come from? No one knows, but it makes up an unobservable 85% of all the matter in the universe; our normal matter makes up just 15%.

After the Big Bang, the universe existed as a dark expanse of hydrogen and radiation (the Cosmic Microwave Background). Some 380,000 years after the Bang, matter in the light-less universe had cooled to -270ºC – enough for atoms to form. The cosmic background radiation had been the only thing keeping this gas hot. Apparently, now the hydrogen began to 'clump', although nobody seems to know quite how.

Did this create gravity or did gravity cause the clumping? Apparently, warping of space produces gravity; gravity warps space-time. Is there evidence for this, or is this just theory? The universe did not begin in space-time: it is space-time. Orthodox teaching is that protons and neutrons collided to make hydrogen, which in turn went on during ºthe next half a billion years to give rise through nuclear fusion in the first stars to deuterium and lithium.

"...the standard view of the universe at the present time is that everything is supposedly receding from everything else, so if one extrapolates this back to the time of the Big Bang, how do particles _that are receding from one another subsequently collide with and annihilate each other? On the other hand, if the meaning of the idea that space exploded everywhere during the Big Bang just means that particles scattered in every direction, why would high temperatures necessarily interfere with -- or lower temperatures facilitate -- the rate of collisions?"_ (Whitehouse L: Cosmology and the Reality Problem).

Why are the farthest stars receding more rapidly that the nearer stars? If you take a balloon, pain spots on it, then blow it up, the faster it expands, the faster the spots will recede from the centre. As you go further back in time, the universe becomes more compact and warped. It would only become infinite at the singularity if it had been infinite to begin with.

During the next 1.6 million years later, gravity began to form the first stars from clouds of gas. The 'Cosmic Dawn' of the first massive ultraviolet stars occurred some 180 million years after the Big Bang: nine billion years before the birth of our Solar System. _"Astronomers have detected a signal from the first stars as they appeared and illuminated the universe, in observations that have been hailed as "revolutionary."_ (The Guardian 1.3.2018). They absorbed background radiation and died as black holes and supernovae around 250 million years after the Big Bang.

This gave rise to second generation stars, which could form carbon, oxygen and iron, silicon, and sulphur – the bases of life as we know it. These stars died as novae or supernovae and blasted the heavier elements throughout space. Carbon results from the fusion of three Helium atoms; when there are four, you get Oxygen.

This allowed planets to be formed around subsequent generations of stars. Elements other than hydrogen are only made in stars; planets are formed from the debris of exploding stars. Gravity then slowed the universe' expansion down. But by five billion years later it had begun speeding up again. Why?

A learned TV programme assured me that a swirling disc of star debris began to form tiny grains of minerals, which eventually formed clumps and even planets. But meteorites/asteroids are not clusters of elements; they are mineral rocks. This array of scientific observations has been stitched together to create an evolutionary progression. It's like taking several primate skeletons, arranging them in some sort of order, and calling it human evolution. It's all supposition; it's called science!

We are fed explanations like this because scientists are hobbled by the 'not-to-be-questioned' idea of continuous evolution. There may have been 'evolution', but there's precious little evidence and lots of 'it-has-to-have happened' and 'we may suppose'. The point of this book is to examine evidence for such evolution, where it exists.

Getting back to orthodoxy:-

" _Just 4 percent of the universe is visible, comprising all the matter plus all the energy. Dark Matter constitutes another 24 %, and the other 72% Dark Energy, whatever that is. "The leading theory for dark energy is that it is a property of space....Albert Einstein was the first to understand that space was not simply empty. He also understood that more space could continue to come into existence."_ (McCoy: Fringe: Smashwords 2014).

Einstein believed Dark Energy to be a property of space itself. Expansion in effect produces more space; it also produces more energy which then results in further expansion. "Another explanation for how space acquires energy comes from the quantum theory of matter. In this theory, "empty space" is actually full of temporary ("virtual") particles that continually form and then disappear." (McCoy; Fringe). This apparently gives rise to 'Vacuum Energy' ie. 'something from nothing.' Space is not a vacuum and it's not nothing. Nothing is the total absence of thingness. Two bodies separated by nothing must be in contact. Two bodies separated by space are not in contact. Therefore, empty space is not nothing.

This would set the Big Bang free of its violation of the Law of the Conservation of Energy. As space expands/stretches, more vacuum energy is necessarily created fuelling faster expansion. Since the farthest stars are receding faster than the nearer, does this mean that the stretching of space is not uniform? If so, why?

Cultural Theories

Astrophysics seems to be getting nearer to the Big Bang and the origin of the universes. If there was an origin, there will necessarily be an end – they go together. And ends are followed by new beginnings. Does the Big Bounce theory confirm this? A quick look at various traditions proves interesting. These exhibit an amazing uniformity but throw no light on the evolution scenario propounded above. They come down on the side of Intelligent Design/Creation.

Judaeo-Christian

_'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).' 'And the earth was without form, and void";_ void of what – land, life...? But the 'Heaven' that God created in the beginning is not the same as the 'Heaven' he created in in Genesis 1:6/8.

As a non-Christian, it sounds to me as though the submerged earth is the remains of something earlier but now void and flooded. Time for a new creation – a similar story to the Big Bang theory? It's not clear how light could be created from darkness, but the scientific discoveries of the 'creation' of the first stars do explain this.

'In the beginning was the Word... and the Word was God.' God is a word/vibration! Spoken words are vibrations- like String Theory!

Norse

In the beginning, there was only an empty abyss called Ginnungagap. This chaos had no form, no sound and no light. It existed between the mists and cold of Niflheim and the roaring flames and light of Muspelheim. When the heat and smoke moved across the gap and met the ice and waters, the cosmos was created. At Ragnarok, the cosmos will collapse into it once again. Again here, light and dark were separate, but the mists smack of the latest physics discoveries.

(Völuspá, "The Insight of the Seeress") _"That was the age when nothing was;_

There was no sand, nor sea, nor cool waves,

No earth nor sky nor grass there,

Greek

 Nereus, son of Gaia

The Greeks too thought that everything started with Chaos. From Chaos, Gaia emerged and produced a son, Uranus. He soon fertilised her to produce Cyclops, Hydra, and Titans. It does sound rather chaotic.

Hindu

 Vishnu

In the Vedas we read:- 'A vast dark ocean washed upon the shores of nothingness and licked the edges of the night. From the depths a humming sound began to tremble. It grew and spread, filling the emptiness and throbbing with energy.' The sound is known as 'OM' – a vibration/word of God.
Chinese

In the beginning, there was an egg. Inside the egg was chaos since Yin and Yang were mixed together. Nothing was clear, because everything was without form; there were only vague possibilities. When at last the egg burst open, Pan-gu emerged. He separated the opposites and the cosmos took shape.

Islam

According to the Quran, the heavens and the earth were undifferentiated - all was just one thing. Then, it split apart and went through a phase when it was smoke-like, swirling around until each principle could agglomerate – matter and antimatter? Aztec

In the beginning there was nothingness. It stayed that way until a god created itself who was able to create dualist reality – good/bad, chaos/order.

Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl, being male and female, was able to have children by itself (what a horrible thought!). Here again is the emphasis on Dualism.

Many ancient traditions agree that everything began with a vibration/sound. And now physicists confirm this with String Theory and Vibration, It's taken a while to get to what we were told thousands of years ago! So ancient cultures, so widely spread in distance and in time, came to similar inductions. – everything was created out of nothing. It all began with a sound/vibration, and so it will end.  Ouroboros

And ancient traditions share another thing. Almost all include the Ouroboros (a Greek word meaning 'Great Serpent'.) Jung explains this as a symbol from the Collective Unconscious (like a racial memory). The Ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal. This symbolizes the cyclic nature of the universe: - creation follows destruction, life out of death. And when it appears as a figure of eight – a symbol of eternity, does this suggest that creation depends on the destruction of a previous universe? Perhaps the universe is not created or destroyed, but rather just played out again? Could people so far apart in time and space have come up with similar beliefs? If not, could these be explained by their common contact with a previous widespread culture? I'll look into this in Chapter V.

Return to The End of Evolution
Chapter II. How did the Earth evolve?

Earth was 'born' some 4.5 billion years ago. The next 4 billion years are rather a mystery.

There were many changes to the Earth in that time, but they didn't show the uniformitarian evolution propounded by Hutton and adopted by Lyell and Darwin. That would involve long-period stability and gradual change. But the Earth has in fact been subject to disasters, impacts, catastrophes, floods – all producing sudden and unpredictable changes. It's difficult to reconcile this with either evolution or determinism.

During that period, millions of years of continuous volcanic eruptions released hundreds of thousands of tons of SO2, methane and other aerosols into the atmosphere. This drastically caused blocking of the sun's rays, producing runaway glaciation despite the heat released from the volcanism. Ice caps formed, and the entire planet went into deep freeze.

This usually only happens at the poles but, if the ice sheet extends far enough towards the equator, it causes further cooling by reflecting more sunlight. The global ice ground the rock surface underneath smooth and became several miles thick. This produced an icebound planet called 'Snowball Earth'. And there were three such episodes in the Precambrian, which lasted four billion years - see below. At that time, all the land was one supercontinent.

The table below contrasts the grand sweep of the Earth's history with the beginning (and end?) of our civilisation - considerably less than 1%. It took 4.5 billion years for the Earth to get into the state it's in now. This was not evolution in the Darwinian sense; more a series of knocks. But then the eventual arrival of Homo Sapiens around 200,000 years ago was not evolution in the Darwinian sense either (see Chapter IV). (The dates on the table below are not supposed to be accurate- just a look at Earth's development.)

The smoothed-off rocks of the Great Unconformity later became covered with new rocks of the Cambrian period. Swiftly, the Earth became covered with new life from nowhere – all with no antecedents. All those years of history are missing. One place where you can actually see the event boundary of the Great Unconformity is within the Grand Canyon. Another is in the St. Francois mountains in Missouri.

 Flattened by ice striations

Why do we have our moon? Why do other planets have moons? One theory is that we 'captured' the moon as it sailed past. This could be true of moons on the outer planets, since many have differing compositions to the planet. But astronauts are said to have brought back samples of moon rock nearly identical to similar ones on Earth. Was the rock chipped off the surface, or was it meteorite debris? The most likely theory is that the Earth was impacted soon after its formation by a smaller body called 'Thea' c.4.53 million years ago. The two planetoids merged and melted, giving us a large iron core. The Earth may have still been only partly solid anyway, so the unconsolidated debris would have rotated to form the moon, which was ten times closer than now. At that time, Earth's year consisted of some 400 earth days. It has taken a lot of knocking about to get to 365·25 days.

 Asteroid bombardment

It would have been pelted by the same stream of asteroids as the moon. In that case, similarity to meteorites found there and here is to be expected. If of course the whole thing was a hoax designed to siphon off public funds for nefarious government projects, such similarity would be essential, wouldn't it? Perhaps we'll go there one day....

The illustration is interesting in that all the current land masses show similar peppering. But this is a Mercator projection; if history were rewound, today's continents would not have existed. We don't have much idea what the surface would have been.

 Halley's Comet 1682

At that point just after the rest of the solar system had formed, the Earth had no water, and neither had the moon. Where did water come from? There is a theory that it came from comet impacts (comets do have water - Halley's comet, seen on the Bayeux Tapestry 1066 AD, throws off water as passes it appears to have a tail). And the Younger-Dryas comet was substantially composed of water, so why not others? Difficult to imagine how many hits, given the volume of our oceans! Amphibolites in volcanic basalt rocks in Northern Canada contain drops of water. They came from Space, and contained water when those rocks formed 4·28 billion years ago (a mere 300 million years after the Earth coalesced!). The Precambrian lasted 3·5 billion years and ended with the Earth's surface covered by water!

If we got it that way, how is it that Mars also was blessed at that time but not the moon or Venus? Perhaps Venus wasn't there; is it a captured comet? The problem then becomes – where did the comets get it previously? Some meteorites have been found to contain opals; these consist of hydrated silica. Salt grains in space rocks do contain water.

One claim is that a comet that sailed past became Venus when it settled into its current orbit. It had no water; it still doesn't. But we have, and so do the moon, other moons and planets. The moon does have mountains and plains - formed by seismic activity and apparent weathering by wind and.....water? How else do plains develop other than from sea beds? But the moon could not have had seas if it always had the same face turned to the earth. They would have frozen. And, if it revolved at one time, why did it stop?

Venus is rather large to be just a comet. But if it did scoot round the Solar System throwing water out madly, that might partly explain its present lack. Velikovsky suggested that a large comet had repeatedly passed close to the Earth on an eccentric orbit in the fairly recent past.

"All cosmological theories assumed that the planets have evolved in their places for billions of years... Venus· was formerly a comet and joined the family of planets within the memory of mankind... We claim that the Earth's orbit changed more than once, and with it the length of the year; that the geographic position of the terrestrial axis and its astronomical direction changed repeatedly and that at a recent date the polar star (the star toward which the North Pole pointed at the time) was in the constellation of the Great Bear." (Velikovsky: Worlds in Collision, pg 361). (I include this as an interesting theory.....)

According to this hypothesis, the comet had an elongated orbit which periodically spiralled always more closely past the Earth, eventually being captured by the sun as the planet Venus. This caused severe disturbances each time, as can be seen in ancient legends. Before we even had probes to send out, Velikovsky accurately predicted that the planet, about which little was known, would have its eccentricities. Its rotation would be retrograde (anti-clockwise like Uranus), with its day longer than its year. It would be much hotter than previously expected with a thick sulphurous atmosphere.

There is some support for Velikovsky; God knows he needs it! "Current theory holds that Venus initially spun in the same direction as most other planets and, in a way, still does: it simply flipped its axis 180 degrees at some point. In other words, it spins in the same direction it always has, just upside down, so that looking at it from other planets makes the spin seem backward." (Scientific American 5.6.2001). Why does the Earth's axis move? Accurate analysis and prediction are impossible, but Milankovich claimed it is cyclic.

Most retrograde satellites are thought to have formed separately before being captured by their primary star. The alteration in rotation of Venus could have been due to its repeated disastrously-close approaches to the Earth while still a comet (see Chapter V). Babylonian and most Mesoamerican traditions took great account of the movements of Venus. According to the Dresden Codex, the Maya knew the Venusian year of 384 days. How would they know that, and why would they even be interested? Their calendar was capable of predicting Venus for at least 64 million years. Sic!

There is a Chinese astronomical text that refers to Venus as being as bright as the sun in daylight. In the Vedas is the claim that Venus seemed on fire, with a tail dark in the day and bright at night. The Samoans also have a tradition of Venus having horns. Pliny c.90 AD said " _Sometimes, there are hairs attached to the planet."_ Many of the old gods had horns – even Moses.

But, if there is any truth in the bypass theory, it could have been Mars rather than Venus. Many ancient records suggest that Earth used to be troubled by other planets passing too close on their irregular orbits around the Sun. Either these planets – Mars, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter - had not settled into their current orbits but orbited elliptically, or they were in stable orbits and it was Earth that orbited elliptically around them. Occam's Razor obliges us to suppose that the simplest solution is the correct one.

In fact, it now seems that Jupiter was the original planet. It, like the other outer planets, has water. Mars once had water; Mercury may have traces in its deep polar craters. That leaves Venus; if it had any water, that would now be in its outer clouds – there isn't any. Despite some of the celestial evidence below, its globular shape precludes it being a trapped comet. So, it's a mystery – why it should have anything to do with carnal love is part of it.

Earth once orbited 92·25 million miles from the Sun - not today's 93·0 million miles. 100,000, 40,000 and 20,000 years are values that show up for changes in the Earth's orbit/spin according to Milankovich. Such periodic changes produce variations in the amount of sunlight, and therefore climate changes. With Earth orbiting in a 12:1 timing with Jupiter, 30:1 with Saturn, and 85:1 with Uranus, both its rotation and year were affected.

Axial tilts used to occur every 41,000 years, but changed to every 100,000 years – the Milankovich progression. The Earth reaches its perihelion every 20,000-22,000 years, and wobbles in its orbit in cycles of 100,000 years. So what? Well, it's not like clockwork, but it seems that, when these events coincide, there is an ice age. And there have been many. Earth's perihelion is now in January; 18,000 years ago, it was in July.

Roughly every 100,000 years, the Sahara swings from dry to wet, echoing the Earth's ice age cycles _. "We've assumed that ice ages have been the key thing in making the Sahara dry versus wet. Now we show that it's primarily these cyclic changes in Earth's orbit that have driven wet versus dry periods."_ (David McGee: M.I.T.). Milankovich was right. From the point of view of ancient priestly observers on Earth, heavenly disturbances would look the same whichever planet passed the other. But they would note the bypass in their calendar records. Eventually, they could predict when there would be a bypass.

When bypasses occur regularly, physics demands that the passing body will cause the other planet to move so as to align its spin axis to move towards the same direction as that of the approaching body. This is known as spin-resonance. Repeated passes would produce the same spin axis tilts. The Mars/Earth passes may be such an example. It's possible to make a stab at dating such passes from ancient literature – the Old Testament for one. There was a hail of stones from the tail of a comet during the Battle of Jericho in 1451 BC. Don't quibble about the date.

Mars had a 108-year cycle and a long 720-day orbit. The bypasses contracted the orbit of Mars from 720 to 687 days, and similarly expanded that of Earth from 360 to 365·25 days. Bypasses occurred regularly on October 24th and March 21st, as heralded in ancient records, though some flybys were closer than others. Once in every 540 years, the flyby was especially close. The final outside flyby put Mars into its present orbit. This is one theory, at any rate.

Earth has an axis tilt of 23·44 degrees; Mars' is 23·98 degrees. What a coincidence! Venus however has a tilt of only 2·7 degrees with a temperature of 462°C and no seasons. At least, that's the theory – interesting, though the only 'proof' is ancient records. Mercury too is a mystery; such a planet should not have a solid iron core like Earth's, but it has. So why is it there?

" _Some event turned on precession about 700 BC. Here is the why of the case: it was the path, a unique "outside" or "nightside" or "dark side'' geometry of that final flyby. The wrong-side flyby led to the circularization of Mars' orbit. It meant the end of the Mars-Earth Wars era."_ (Patten D and Windsor S.: 'Catastrophism and Ancient History' Volume XIII Part 1 January 1991). Um – is this further support for Velikovsky.

All this would account for the birth of astrology and the emphasis on Venus – the movements of the planets would certainly have affected people's lives. They would have needed to know when the next disaster was due. Astrologer priests would have predicted the next bypass. This presupposes the existence of writing and numbers – difficult without 'zero'. But even without these, previous ancients recorded disasters on tablets and cave walls. Why the concentration on Venus, if it had never brought disaster? All very interesting, but..... The spiral symbol is a mystery, but would fit

Newgrange Ireland

such regular disasters from a passing planet. Such spirals are found on rocks in Portugal, Ireland, France, Göbeklı Tepe, U.S. etc. Left-hand spirals are often balanced by right-hand ones - to record the dual bypasses of Mars/Venus....? They date from before 3000 BC. The spirals above from Newgrange, front and rear of the barrow, seem to counterbalance each other. It's as though an approach flyby was always followed by a return. Interestingly, Van Gogh saw stars and planets as spirals – especially in his Collioure days.

At this particular moment in Earth's history – although the sun's diameter is about 400 times larger than that of the moon – the sun is also about 400 times farther away. So the sun and moon appear nearly the same size as seen from Earth. And that's why we on Earth can sometimes witness that most amazing of spectacles, a total eclipse of the sun. All created for us, or is that just a coincidence? The Rig Veda, which records the making of the universe and the Solar System, has 10,800 verses. 108 and 540 appear in the Grimnismal, a Scandinavian Edda. Shiva has 108 attendants; Krishna has 108 also. The Odyssey records 108 suitors for Penelope – poor Odysseus! The sun's diameter is nearly 108 times the Earth's diameter. The distance between the Earth and the sun is almost 108 times the sun's diameter. Not only that - the distance between the Earth and the moon is also 108 times the moon's diameter. Sic!

Impacts

3·9 billion years ago or earlier, Earth suffered a massive bombardment with resulting crater formation - over 600,000. Each planet has its own resonance. If indeed Mars had an elliptical orbit, resonance between Jupiter and Mars could well have deflected, and even produced, the asteroid belt. Jupiter itself can tug at the orbits of nearby asteroids, making them elliptical. Apophis, discovered recently, may possibly hit us in 20 years' time. Even if not, its elliptical orbit ensures its return one day.

 Mars craters

The impact theory is interesting in that it seems that we were bombarded by meteors and comets for the next billion years or more. The Earth has been fortunate to have a thick atmosphere which burns up small meteorites. Mars has over 600,000 impact craters mainly on one face – odd, if the planet has always rotated. The moon, on the other hand, which does not now rotate, has been battered all over. Um. Jupiter's gravity disturbs the asteroid belt, deflecting meteorites towards the Sun. Any planet or satellite in the way gets battered, and perhaps its life forms annihilated. Already, a growing number of such events have been identified.

It's beyond the scope of this book to detail all the buffets and upheavals the Earth has suffered. Most were one-off deals, not bypasses – they don't occur regularly. Perhaps the most well-known is the impact at Chicxulub on the Yucatan coast which apparently wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago – the K-T cataclysm. The body was the size of Everest – six miles wide!

 K-T boundary with Iridium layer

Iridium is made when a star goes supernova. All Earth's iridium comes from the resulting debris/meteorites. The comet that hit Earth 66 million BC. was rich in it. If the asteroid impacted the Yucatan Peninsula obliquely, it must have altered the Earth's rotation.

The inner core rotates separately, so impacts that strike obliquely cause shifts in the crust. And indeed, it did. The North Pole shifted several degrees to the Yukon causing worldwide devastation from wildfires and a far-reaching tsunami 300' high. SO2 that was blasted out combined with water in the atmosphere producing acid rain, and killing vegetation and hence herbivores. Temperatures dropped at least 5°C. Surviving animals starved. It also left a discontinuous layer, rich in Iridium, worldwide.

Impact events like the KT can cause an atmospheric blow-out. The fireball blasts a hole in the atmosphere, propelling debris into space. Some incandescent stuff falls back producing fire-storms: other debris slowly circles the planet before falling back. But that has cooled to the temperature of space - minus 192° C. 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub impact in the Yucatan produced a crater 93 miles across. But even small impact events can produce atmospheric blow-out. When the debris falls back to the surface, that area suffers an immediate deep freeze.

Another impact, a mere 300,000 years after Chicxulub, produced the 300 miles wide Shiva Crater - created by a body 25 miles wide. It obliterated part of the 30 miles thick granite layer of the early Deccan Traps, but then set off intensified volcanism (see below). The subsequent worldwide climate changes from this and the previous impact were responsible for the extinction of many species - including the Dinosaurs.

 Deccan Traps

There are impacts you can go and see. The Meteor Crater in Arizona - dated at 50,000 BC - was the result of an impact when a 300,000-ton lump of nickel-iron (like the Earth's interior) roughly 150 feet in diameter and travelling at around 40,000 mph impacted the Earth. This left a hole a hole nearly a mile across and c. 600' deep, raising the temperature more than 1000° C.

 Meteor Crater

Ice Ages

Recent ice ages were less severe than previous ones. The height of ice caps relates to the drop in sea levels - it's the same volume of water. Ice ages are usually associated with a pole shift: but the pole shift just by itself would not cause an ice age: it would only shift the ice-bearing region. (Currently, the Earth is lopsided – the Arctic and Antarctic sheets are not diametrically opposed, and the continents and oceans are not balanced.) Ice sheets can cover several continents at the same time, leaving a fertile covering from dusts deposited on the ice sheet.

The Pleistocene era (2·6 million years to about 11,700 years ago) climate was generally miserable – wet, stormy and with frequent glaciations. Life for humans in the last 200,000 years must have been tough. Needles don't seem to have been invented until c.60,000 BC, so animal skins were held together by leather strips through holes made with a sharp stone. The imagination boggles. Sea levels rose at least 420'. From around 17,000 to 9,000 years ago, ice came and went. When there wasn't ice, there was volcanism.

At the beginning of the Pleistocene, Central America rose and joined the North and South. This interrupted the thermohaline circulation; temperatures dropped several degrees rapidly, producing a protracted ice age that plunged the planet into another deep-freeze. By 18,000 BC the icecaps started to withdraw, and the climate warmed until the Older Dryas. The Older Dryas event 12,400 – 11,500 BC. interrupted the warming period. It may have been caused by an asteroid impact on the Hiawatha Glacier, Greenland, which would have caused enormous tsunamis.

The Older Dryas ended with a brief thaw of 800 years to be followed by renewed ice in the Younger Dryas glaciation 10,800 - 9,600 BC. The Sacajawea impact, which caused the Younger-Dryas c.10,800 BC. was a massive comet strike in the Pacific Northwest. Causing major flooding, it covered much of the continent with the so-called Black Mat. Heavy celestial battering accompanying the main Sacajawea body led to strong tectonic convulsions with widespread volcanism – the effusive type with massive thicknesses of basalt - resulting in colossal tsunamis.

The eruption of 10,800 BC was a humdinger. The neighbourhood crust consisted of rocks full of sulphurous sediments, so that the contact of magma and water, which caused the eruption, blasted steam and gases into the upper atmosphere, where they remained. It also blasted thousands of tons of ash into the lower atmosphere. With drastically reduced sunlight, global temperatures plummeted and more or less stayed plummeted.

But then things not only warmed up around 9,650 BC. but did so virtually overnight! According to Robert Schoch of Boston University temperatures shot up by more than 25°F in a few decades. (If the current rise should ever get anyway near that, life as we know it would be doomed.) If Plato is to be believed, a climatic disaster caused a massive upheaval around 9,600 BC. - 'There were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night ... the island of Atlantis was ... swallowed up by the sea and vanished.' Um. Bison, Mammoths and Mastodons went extinct in the warmer following two millennia, partly through enthusiastic assistance by the indigenous population. History is likely to repeat itself, as history does -'those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.' Present global warming will see a rapid increase in extinctions, aided by overpopulation and contingent food shortage.

 Cyril

Around 10,800 BC., Cyril had been happily wandering through a Siberian meadow, humming and thinking little mammoth thoughts (he was only a baby). The day before had been strange with an ear-splitting sound wave and later a hurricane. But today was sunny and _temperate as usual, and he spotted some buttercups still flattened by the winds. "Goody, goody," he thought, "my favourite treat". "I must rush and tell the others - they deserve to know."_ And he felt so noble that his tail stood straight up. _"On second thoughts, perhaps just another mouthful first– they won't know"._

In mid-chomp though, something didn't feel right, but he never found out what it was. The temperature plunged to minus 150°F in minutes. It wasn't until 1901 that he was found still in deep freeze, his mouth full of fresh buttercups. Cyril was not alone. Animals and humans by hundreds of thousands froze to death on their feet in minutes. Some seem to have suffocated – their blood was still red. It wasn't just an Arctic phenomenon: many animals lived in temperate zones like Cyril but froze too. Bones and bodies were amalgamated by the resulting flood. You can meet Cyril at the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg. The temperature plunge is a fact, but it's still a bit of a mystery.

Many, though not all, extinction events are caused by an ice age. Many large deposits of mingled bones, skins, shellfish, plants etc. all over the planet are evidence of sudden and catastrophic destruction of life. But why the haphazard mingling?

Many catastrophes _"involved a widespread flood of waters which not only killed the animals but also buried them under continuous beds of loam or gravel.... the same catastrophe was accompanied by a very sudden change of climate in Siberia, by which the animals that had previously lived in fairly temperate conditions were frozen in their flesh under the ground and have remained there ever since.".... "The fact of the bones occurring in great caches or deposits in which various species are mixed pell-mell is very important, and it is a fact undenied by geologists that whenever we find such a locality in which animals have suffered together in a violent and instantaneous destruction, the bones are invariably mixed and, as it were, 'deposited' in a manner which could hardly be explained otherwise than by postulating the action of great tidal waves carrying fishes and all before them, depositing them far inland with no respect to order."_ (Howorth H: The Mammoth and the Flood 1887). This account may be 150 years old, but modern conclusions support it.

"Such, then, is the kind of evidence which is to be found all over the world of the sudden death of an enormous number of animals of very recent and modern times. Some of these creatures died in latitudes that were almost at once plunged into an Ice Age which preserved them by freezing. Some of them died in more temperate zones and were accumulated by the action of torrents of water sweeping hither and yon as the Earth reeled, before the waters had been sufficiently gathered together in one place to expose the dry land. And, finally, some were accumulated and rammed together forcibly and indiscriminately into clefts in the rocks which served to sieve them out of the draining waters."

_"The suddenness of the event is everywhere attested, in the Arctic by the extraordinary state of preservation of mammoths and other creatures, and in the more temperate zones by the very fact that predators and preyed upon came to a sudden end together. Even within the waters, the movements of silt and water-washed materials were sometimes so sudden and overwhelming that fishes were trapped before they had the few seconds necessary to react in a characteristic defensive way. Some bivalved forms, in fact, were overwhelmed so rapidly that they did not have time to close. Furthermore, we may conclude, I think, that the catastrophe which was worldwide profoundly affected world climate."_ (Custance, Arthur, "Catastrophe and Reconstitution": Custance Library Doorway Papers 2006.)

Earth during the last Ice Age c.20,000BC.

Certainly, between 13,000BC and 8,000BC mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, giant bears and many others died out. But how far the Younger Dryas and how far human hunting was responsible is still up for debate. By 18,000 BC the icecaps started to withdraw and the climate warmed until the Older Dryas glaciation around 12,000 BC. The melting ice caused global sea levels to rise about 420'. A brief thaw, and then around 10,900 BC a meteor at least 10 miles wide hit the Earth near Mt Sacajawea, Oregon. The 10 miles wide Sacajawea meteor made an impact crater about 650 miles wide.

The comet/asteroid landed at Sacajawea near Lake Agassiz. Apart from the flood from the lake, the impact also produced worldwide wild fires and volcanism – the Lachersee volcano in Germany caused havoc, for example. Nevertheless, worldwide temperatures dropped 5°C. Goodbye to Cyril and the warming climate trend, resulting in an extreme ice age - the Younger Dryas which lasted until 9,600 BC. Civilisation with megalithic architecture, then began to re-emerge at Göbeklı Tepe in Turkey.

The glaciation it caused - the Younger Dryas glaciation 10,900-9,650 BC - must have been catastrophic - even more devastating to life than the Chicxulub impact event that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. It plunged the Earth into an icebox, caused mega-flooding and knocked the Earth sideways. Before the impact, the year had only 288 days; subsequently, the days shortened to 360 – see Chapter 5 for more. There was a great shift in the Earth's mantle around 10,513 BC from the Sacajawea impact, moving the North Pole from Hudson's Bay to its present position. The flooding was worldwide.

The tilt of the earth's axis is changing currently as the magnetic north moves toward Russia. Report from around the world mention sunrise earlier or sunset later. North of the Arctic Circle, there used to be 4 hours of twilight; now the sun just appears. There has been no impact, so it's likely the cause is the excessive global warming. It is leading to the melting of the polar ice caps. The huge mass of Antarctic ice acts as a stabilizer to maintain the Earth's equilibrium. When it goes, the tilt may be as sudden as it has previously...

Ice Ages and Extinctions

So why are there ice ages? There is some evidence that they with their climate changes are related to the Milankovich cycles. (So far, hidebound beliefs have prevented sufficient research into this.) The initial slow slide into glaciation is often followed by bursts of warming and a rise in sea levels. We are statistically due for another ice age. Ice sheets form when warm seas evaporate, and the moisture then deposits on cooler areas. The albedo of the ice reflects the sun's rays, producing further cooling. 1996-2015, the Caspian Sea level dropped nearly 3"/year. Once glaciers have begun to form, it seems to be an ongoing process. A continued trend could result in continental ice sheets by 2100.

The Carboniferous Period 286 - 360 million years ago is so called because coal was produced when fossil organic sediments accumulated in swamps devoid of oxygen. During the subsequent ice age, volcanic dust settled, and sediments from the resulting floods and more dust produced a heavy stratified cover which compressed the buried vegetation. Thus, coal is not found on the surface when the ice finally disappears, but buried under other strata.

You can't always rely on ice core records – they are not tree rings. The sheer weight of the ice distorts the underlying strata, and may even squeeze them out completely to form the folds of mountains. So, some strata may be missing. Vegetation and unconsolidated sediments are compressed into sedimentary rocks.

To change the nature of the carbon into anthracite or bituminous coals needs an incredible pressure of 75000 tons - eg. an ice sheet two or more miles thick. Peat is metamorphosed into bituminous coal deposits. For ice sheets to be that thick, there must be an equivalent drop in water levels. (The Antarctic ice cap is currently that thick - when it melts, sea levels will rise by several hundred feet. Goodbye London – could be a good name for a musical!

One theory suggests that when land masses are more or less continuous from pole to pole, an ice age will occur via a shut-down of the thermohaline circulation. This happened when Central America rose to join the two other continents at the beginning of the Pleistocene – the air temperature dropped several degrees within decades, and a lengthy ice age followed. The continents are like scum drifting over a molten subterranean layer. Current global warming will trigger cooling in the North Atlantic as the Gulf Stream is swamped by Arctic ice waters. It will also result in floods, storms, droughts and plankton reduction. From 1992 to 2005, there was a reduction of 30% in that warm current...... Apart from that, current levels of C02 are higher than in the past 100 million years...... And CH4 levels are now twice as high...... Sic!

The Cretaceous is marked by the Chalk – a worldwide continuous deposit protracted for 35 million years – there were no icecaps at that time. The last great ice age in the Pleistocene came to an end at the beginning of the Holocene c.9000 BC. But there have been others since then. Krakatoa set off the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536-660 AD. (2ºC cooler) which led to significant migrations south, thus leaving the remains of the Roman Empire open to invasions. Things improved in the Early Medieval Warm Period from 950-1200 AD. (1.2-1.4º C warmer), though in Mesoamerica a decline in rainfall produced extended droughts during the 9th century, leading to the collapse of the Maya. The Little Ice Age from 1300-1800 AD (0.6º C cooler) enabled markets and fairs to be held on the Thames.

  Thames Frost Fair 1684

Volcanism

The Permian-Triassic mass extinction 250 million years ago saw 95% of marine species and 70 percent of those on land disappear. It's known as 'The Great Dying'. The amount of C02 from the volcanic effusions caused a serious drop in oxygen levels. Life did not start to recover for over 8 million years.

The land surface at that time existed as a supercontinent, called 'Pangaea'. A massive impact event 250 million years ago, probably in what is now Russia, caused the largest outpouring in earth history of 550,000 cubic miles (over 770,000 square miles) of basalt; the Siberian traps. It lasted for about 6,000,000 years, and raised air temperatures by at least 5°C.

 Pangaea

The pyroclastic explosions were dangerous enough; they were augmented by the basalt intruding over proto-coal beds. But there was an additional complication. Ocean temperatures also rose - more in shallow waters \- releasing the hydrates and thus enough methane to raise world temperatures an additional 5°C. Not much survived.

_"It is not unique to have large volcanic provinces erupting. These types of eruptions have happened over and over again throughout geological time but they're not always associated with cooling events."_ (Wordsworth R:assistant professor at John A Paulson School, Harvard). Once started, runaway glaciation spread from pole to pole. How can heat cause ice to form? As we've seen, volcanoes always produce sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, which reflect the sun's heat.

The eruption of Santorini around 1,500 BC. devastated the lands of the Mediterranean (see chapter VI), although many inhabitants didn't survive the resulting flood to say so. Five times more powerful than Krakatoa, even more powerful than a hundred atomic bombs exploding together, it was one of the largest volcanic events on Earth in human history. The resulting tsunami swamped the coastal regions of the Mediterranean. Even more destructive and far-reaching was the pyroclastic flow that travelled over the surface of the sea. Icelanders still keep a wary eye on Mt Katia, which erupted continually 900 – 1900 AD. Iceland is merely a crust over a mantle plume, so more was bound to come. And it did.

  Laki fissure

The eight-month eruption of Laki in 1783 changed the course of history. Its effects were unusually long-lasting and widespread. The lava that spewed from over a hundred craters and cracks resulted in a new volcanic chain. The ash was the main problem – it poisoned the fish, killed half the livestock and a fifth of the population. That was the local part. Europe, the Far East and America all suffered climate effects – exceptional cold and heat, flooding, and crop failures. That was the worst part. The French peasantry endured this for several years before they revolted against a government that had no idea how to deal with the crises – rather like several governments today.

The eruption of Tambora in 1815 produced 'the year without a summer' in 1816 - it spewed out so much ash. And a similar, but lesser, event was the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 in the Philippines. The gases and ash reduced global temperatures by 1°F, but only for a year. Many previous ones were much more devastating. Each time there is intense volcanism, the Earth's crust deforms as material inside pours outside. This puts a strain on the local plates, causing a realignment and subduction.

Krakatoa erupted in 1883 when a cataclysmic explosion blew the island apart. The walls of the volcano cracked, and sea water seeped into the magma chamber. The resulting super-hot steam then produced an explosion 50 times the size of Hiroshima. It had happened before in 534 AD - ash and dust blotted out the sun for two years, causing crop failure, famine and rough weather, even as far away as Britain. It may have affected the result of the Battle of Camlann c.537 AD at which the leader of the Celts – Riothamus, aka King Arthur, died.

So the scale of some eruptions is catastrophic, leading to extinctions across the planet. One such was the eruption of Lake Toba in Sumatra around 200,000 BC – the largest eruption for a million years. It was a super-volcano in a caldera from a previous eruption. 2,800 tons of ash settled 5 ft deep, extinguishing all life for hundreds of miles around. The cloud, 30 miles high, spread across the planet making it difficult to breathe. Worse – the six billion tons of hydrogen sulphide released combined with moisture in the upper atmosphere, forming sulphate radicals. These formed a layer reflecting light, leading to a global winter and an ice age.

The temperature dropped severely. A 10-year volcanic winter would have wiped out most humans. With no sun, vegetation died, and with it the herbivores and their predators. One estimate suggests the population of Homo Sapiens (which had appeared not long before!) that did survive could have numbered less than 3000. But that would have left a gene pool too limited to re-establish the Sapiens race, unless there was interbreeding with other humans - Neanderthals, for example. More on that in Chapter IV.

Other super-volcanoes erupt periodically and just as disastrously. The largest Yellowstone eruption occurred 2 million years ago. But it has erupted at least a dozen times since, and is due for another any time. The roof of its magma chamber will collapse. The resulting explosion is likely to extinguish almost all life, whether by gases or ash. It will solve America's political problems.

Massive volcanism produces massive amounts of dust and gases. These in turn produce cooling/shading; snow and sea evaporating to end as ice. As the sea level falls, so does the snow line - increasing the area of ice. A possible 13% decrease then in sunlight from the dust/gases would cause even the oceans to freeze.

Or it could be a Chicxulub-size strike. In that case, would we be aware of it in time? In time for what? The comet IRAS-Alcock-Iraki passed close by, noticed at the last minute, fortunately not on a collision course with us. In March 1989, an asteroid passed only 700,000 km from the Earth. It was discovered after it had passed. What if we had known earlier? What could we have done about it? Nothing. NASA has now been given extra funds to deal with the next event, so that's a comfort.

Or are the millions of dollars, siphoned off from God knows where, mainly to enable NASA to tell the government when to disappear into bunkers. Perhaps the US government could go to Mars – not the general population of course. But who would do the menial jobs there? And who would form the population to be governed? The planet is desolate and inimical to human life. Perhaps we ruined it previously before coming here.

This is just speculation; what is certain is that those dollars are going somewhere. Besides, the US government has been caught with its knickers down. The rate of climate devastation is set to increase. There simply won't be enough time left to transport all the essentials of our civilisation to Mars. And an impact is not a question of 'if'; it's a question of 'when'. It could well solve all our problems. The media carry news stories of a possible colonisation of the Moon and Mars. Why would humanity flourish there? Vast sums go into preparation for it - or do they? Governments and the super-rich are alternatively constructing shelters on Earth - from what? The shelters include storage of seeds for replanting - after what? Work it out for yourself, not that it matters; there's nothing you or anyone else can do about it anyway.... More on this solution in Chapter VI.

Sea Levels

Every major catastrophe – impact or volcanic – produced a rise and fall of sea level. But climate change and an alteration of sea level has often resulted in the extinction of one or more species. Successful species otherwise don't just die out – they adapt (micro-evolution).

At a coastline, the tide sweeping in and out produced a shallow sea - the continental plain. When the sea level dropped, the continental plain became a coastal plain which received sediments from rivers. It was fertile, so it was cultivated. When the level dropped again, the same thing happened, but lower down. The population naturally repeated the exercise. Rivers spewed from the melting ice down the mountains and forming valleys and canyons. The flow continued into the sea, forming deeper canyons as the retreat continued. When eventually the sea returned it covered the deep-sea canyons, which can still be seen today.

The greatest land canyon is the Grand Canyon, 1 mile deep, but the ocean canyons dwarf it. The bottom of the Mariana Trench is 7 miles down, produced from the colossal draining of Agassiz and Ojibway. Fish and birds could once again take up the annual pilgrimages their ancestors had used. In view of crustal shifts, some have to travel great lengths. Eels/salmon migrate from UK to the Sargasso Sea. They couldn't during ice ages because the sea had sunk too far. When it rose again, they returned - racial memory kicking in? Holocene Sea Levels between 9.200 BC and the catastrophe of 5,000 BC rose by 190'. After that catastrophe, the rise then slowed to a mere 5' between 5000 BC and 3800 BC. The warm-up following an ice age results in a collapse of the ice sheet, dumping rubble into the sea – as in the Storegga Event.

The catastrophe of 5,000 BC involved a mega tsunami caused by the Storegga Underwater Landslide between Norway and Iceland. The continental shelf off Norway's mountainous coast is comparatively narrow and steep. The great ice sheet over Siberia had scoured the land underneath and pushed the debris to an underwater terminal moraine. All might have been well but for a major earthquake, which caused debris on the 300-mile-wide continental slope to cascade down the slope as a turbidity current. This triggered a gigantic tsunami – perhaps 500' high – which caused flooding in Scotland, Norway, and eastern North America up to 40 miles inland. There's a lot more about sea levels in Chapter 5.

About 450 million years ago, the UK could have been found in the southern hemisphere, and Antarctica on the equator! 35 million years ago, Antarctica split from South America and moved south. There had been a warm current sweeping round South America, warming a temperate Antarctica. Now it was cut off by a cold current. With sun now reaching it only weakly, Antarctica cooled down. Even so, the coast of Antarctica 21 million years ago, was habitable. In fact, the coast was ice free as late as 4000 BC as sediments from Antarctic cores show. The modern sonar map shows the actual surface of Antarctica under its ice blanket; the land was flatter before glacial erosion.

Antarctica as it will be when the ice cap has melted

The earliest map of Antarctica was published in 1532 AD by Oronteus Finaeus. It must have been compiled from some incredibly ancient source because it shows the continent to be ice-free; the last date it was so was around 4000 BC. It means that someone navigated around it before then. No civilisation with that expertise is known to have existed at that time – yet the map was compiled. Oronteus noted that some of his source maps dated from c. 331 BC., and came from the Library of Alexandria. Cores taken in 1949 confirm the ice-free status in 4000 BC. Antarctica has 90% of the world's ice in its two-mile-thick cap. If it all melted, it would raise sea levels by about 260'.

Oronteus Finnaeus map Very early map showing Antarctica ice-free
The Great Flood

The worldwide flooding caused by the Sacajawea event came from the huge Lake Agassiz, which formed as the ice-sheet covering much of North America melted. The lake in fact formed about 13,000 years ago from the melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Sacajawea was not far from the lake. The impact in 10,900 BC. caused the lake's wall to collapse, the sudden rush of waters cutting Niagara Falls and pushing through Hudson's Bay. By 6,200 BC. Lake Agassiz had regrown, it had also amalgamated with Lake Ojibway. When the ice wall collapsed this time, the waters blasted through to Lake Superior and also Northwest to the Arctic Ocean via the Mackenzie River. Thence, they poured into the Atlantic Ocean, producing its sea-floor gorges.

Apparently, the fresh water overcame the Gulf Stream, preventing the warm current reaching Northern Europe and raising sea levels by 13'! Low-lying settlements around the world simply disappeared. Temperatures dropped markedly for 150 years. Over the past few years, we have observed the Gulf Stream slow. It will be a Catch22 situation. People will use more heat to keep warm; the subsequent increased use of fossil fuels will then make things worse, needing more fossil fuels. Australia should do well out of it.

"We are talking about a lake the size of the UK emptying very quickly. We don't know the exact time, but we are talking about a catastrophic flood." Bateman M: Sheffield University.

" _The cause-driver for the Y-D event was an impact of a very large celestial object about 10+ miles in diameter, centred near Mt Sacajawea, Oregon and leaving an impact crater about 650 miles wide. From all appearances the object penetrated the Earth's crust continuing through its mantle and exiting near the Taklimakan Desert in Western China, leaving Great Flood a blowout crater of some 800 miles in width. If the internal water table, (which is suspected of being three times the amount of all other water on the surface) was penetrated, it is quite easy to understand how the 'fountains of the great deep' flooded the whole world to a level about 800' above the then current water table."_ (Jensen J: Earth Epochs). This needs more research.

" _There is an impact crater in the Pacific Northwest (Sacajawea impact crater) and a larger "exit wound" crater on the opposite side of the globe (the Taklimakan Desert in Western China), the primary impact point is near Sacajawea Peak in North Eastern Oregon. It is a complex crater with a clearly visible crater rim The cause-driver for the Y-D event was an impact of a very large celestial object about 10+ miles in diameter, centred near Mt Sacajawea, Oregon and leaving an impact crater about 650 miles wide.'_

From all appearances the object penetrated the Earth's crust continuing through its mantle and existing near the Taklimakan Desert in Western China, leaving a blowout crater of some 800 miles in width. If the internal water table, (which is suspected of being three times the amount of all water on the surface) was penetrated, it is quite easy to understand how the 'fountains of the great deep' flooded the whole world to a level about 800' above the then current water table."

_This may seem all rather unlikely, but there is some evidence. There is evidence of a vast reservoir of water, equal to three times all the oceans together 400 miles down. It isn't liquid water; pressure has caused a mineral called Ringwoodite to absorb the H20 molecularly, so it's locked up." There is something very special about the crystal structure of Ringwoodite that allows it to attract hydrogen and trap water. This mineral can contain a lot of water under conditions of the deep mantle. The Ringwoodite is like a sponge soaking up water."_ (Jacobsen S: Northwestern University.)

_"The water molecules are actually stuck in the mineral structure of the rock. As you heat this up, it eventually dehydrates. It's like taking clay and firing it to get all the water out." (Wysession M: U. of Alberta). He has called his discovery "The Beijing Anomaly," since the phenomenon only occurs at Sacajawea and Beijing. Nevertheless, "That particular zone in the Earth, the transition zone, might have as much water as all the world's oceans put together."_ (Pearson G: University of Alberta.)

The date of the Sacajawea impact c.10.500 BC would seem to fit the Great Flood. _"Most of the legends around the world of a great flood retain a universal theme, which is ...the fountains of the great deep opened up and flooded the whole earth...." It must be very close to accurate, because it is a similar worldwide legend and there is almost no other mechanism that could raise ocean levels over 811' in a short period of time, recede 175', then stay at that level for a thousand or so years, then recede back to the ocean level of the 2nd Ice melt surge._

In late 2014, announcements of a great underground ocean of water beneath the Earth's crust were discussed in several so-called 'scientific' papers. If there is an ocean of water underground that is greater than the ocean on the earth's surface, all that has to happen for the 'fountains of the deep' to open, is to have the crust penetrated by a very large asteroid, exposing the underground ocean, where it might 'gush' out for some period of time, raising the current ocean levels by a substantial amount. The earth's crust is slightly porous and the water would eventually drain back down into the crust, exactly as it does now. My candidate for that exact scenario is the Younger-Dryas impact event in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, the Sacajawea impact event of 10,800 BC.

_I contend that is exactly what happened 12,900 years ago. A massive comet strike in the Pacific Northwest (The Sacajawea Impact Crater) penetrated the Earth's crust to a depth that released a vast amount of the subterranean water reservoir into the oceans, causing a global flood some 800' above the then ocean level, or about 500' about current sea level. That level is established by the discovery of the salt water line at over 255' up the side of the Great Pyramid when the casing stones were being removed by the Caliph of Cairo while gathering broken limestone for the rebuilding of the City of Cairo following the great earthquake of 1304 AD."_ (Jensen J: Earth Epochs).

The pyramid was originally gleaming white, covered with limestone blocks, and visible for miles. They have disappeared, apart from the rubble the Caliph used in his rebuilding of Cairo in 1304. But what about these blocks weighing tons that must have taken hundreds of men decades to emplace after the main pyramid had been built millennia before? Where did they go? And why should there have been much rubble? The pyramid had already stood for over 3000 years. Why would the facing stones, carefully locked into position, have fallen at all? If they didn't 'fall', there can't have been any rubble.

So, are there other candidates for "the Great Flood"? (More in Chapter V)

The Sacajawea impact c 10,500 BC caused massive flooding and the start of the Younger Dryas ice age. The end of the Younger Dryas saw the bursting of the final barrier to the melt-water from the Laurentide Ice Sheet c 9,600 BC, according to this theory. The Black Sea Deluge theory claims that the resulting tsunami and subsequent rise of the oceans blasted through the narrow neck at Gibraltar, flooding first the Mediterranean and North Africa, and bursting through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea. The temperature in Northern Europe rose 10º C in ten years.

Possibly, the Storegga event. "But another theory has it that the Storegga event was not the end of the story - there followed a second and stronger one. At the same time. a mega-tsunami from the Caspian Sea resulted in the breech of the Bosporus Strait, the flooding of the Black Sea and possibly the Noah story. Cores show a thick layer of mud deposited widely. For both events to have been temporally contiguous, there must have been a catastrophic event – an impact" (Jensen J: Earth Epochs). Why mention this? Because the island of La Palma off Spain is so unstable that any sizeable earthquake will result in half the island sliding into the sea. The tsunami is likely to be well over 100' high by the time it hits New York. Again, it's not 'if'; it's 'when.'

La Palma fault

Were any of these the basis for the 'Great Flood'? There are numerous opinions. Cayce, Bauval, West, and Hancock place it around 10,500 BC (the Sacajawea impact), Plato 9,600 BC. and Egyptian records c. 8,900 BC. The most likely choice would be 9,600 BC, the end of the Younger Dryas and the drowning of Atlantis – according to Plato. The end of the Older Dryas c.12,000 BC resulted in meltwater overflowing the Caspian Sea, which then spilled over into the Black Sea. It had an ongoing effect – around 7,500 BC the Black Sea burst through the Bosporus sill into the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean.

Following the mega-disaster event of 5,000 years BC, there was a cultural explosion (reminiscent of the sudden and inexplicable explosion of life after Snowball Earth at the beginning of the Cambrian). The various cultures had no obvious common ancestor either. How can cultural paradigms arise without supra-ordinate organisation? The cultures of Assyria, Egypt and the Indus valley didn't just evolve: they sprang up more or less fully formed. That said, although all had techniques of agriculture and advanced constructional technology, the knowledge was spotty. Each had its own peculiar legal and political system with written records. Where did all their knowledge come from? Who taught them? Plato's Atlantis theory would explain this. Later cultures also evolved explanatory legends.

A three-mile fall in sea levels would cause a six miles thick growth of ice caps. This would mean 40% of the surface is above the snow line. The population would, of course, seek refuge in the new fertile lands lower down. These would indeed be fertile from the sea ooze full of minerals resulting from the drop in sea level. When eventually the levels rose, all the careful husbandry would be covered by shallow seas and limestone deposits. A continuing rise in levels would result in deeper water and further deposits of ooze.

This may be so, but it's arguable. A recent hypothesis takes a longer view. There have been many climatic changes since the last glacial maximum around 19000 BC. The ice began melting after the last major ice age around 18,000 BC. But the melting did not go smoothly; it produced several major floods – c.12,500 BC (the Older Dryas), c. 9,600 BC (the Younger Dryas), and c.5,500 BC (the Storegga slide).

Catastrophe of 1,462 BC

The most recent catastrophe occurred about 3,462 years ago ie.1462 BC – the eruption of Thera in the Mediterranean. Since then, only Tambora in 1815 ejected more material. The effects impacted cultures for hundreds of miles around. It was in fact an earthquake that Great Flood felled the mud walls of Jericho around that time, according to Garstang and Kenyon who excavated them in 1919. And earthquakes there were a-plenty. Coasts around the Atlantic were battered by tsunamis. According to one theory, there may have been a change in the Earth's axis, moving the North Pole from 16.5º to its current 23.5º. Some cultures refer to the sun standing still as the axis suddenly tilted, a day longer than usual, the sun stopping near the horizon, a hail of stones, and earthquakes.

The upheaval also caused the greatest disaster in Mediterranean history. The inhabitants of Thera (now Santorini) heard a warning rumble - nothing unusual - and went on with what they were doing. Then the island exploded - ash and rock fragments blanketed the eastern Mediterranean up to 50 metres deep, but surprisingly most of the inhabitants escaped. This, the second largest explosive eruption in human history produced a pyroclastic flow that spread over the surface of its accompanying tsunami. That swamped the islands of the Minoan empire and rushed on towards Gibraltar, growing in power as its path narrowed.

Battered on one side by Atlantic tsunamis and now another from the East, the land bridge between Spain and Africa gave way, the Gibraltar breach opening the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. It was soon 2 miles wide – now 15 miles. This theory contradicts the others described above. But the recorded measurements are a clue. The Rock of Gibraltar must have been uplifted and overturned by a violent event - the oldest rocks are on top with younger ones below. That's this theory.

It belonged to the Moors until 1492, Spain until 1713, and Britain for the three centuries since then. Spain, of course, still claims Gibraltar and occasionally makes entry difficult – not that you'd want to go there anyway. It's not clear whether Spain ever intends to return to the Arabs the North African ports it still holds.

These are some of the theories relating to the Great Flood. You can read more in Chapter V.

Return to The End of Evolution

Chapter III. Does life on Earth show evolution?

a. Theory

Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, wrote this poem:-

" _Hence without parent by spontaneous birth_

Rise the first specks of animated Earth;

From Nature's womb the plant or insect swims,

And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs.

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves.

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom.

New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing."

Darwin's theory asserts that life is formed spontaneously - by chance. And life gives rise to more life. But a physical universe is not alive: it cannot develop life sua sponte. Atoms cannot decide to join together to become a molecule. Compounds cannot just decide to split a cell in asexual reproduction. Such processes are characteristic of life - an organising process which does not proceed from matter; it is non-material.

Life processes can be manipulated – experimental embryology, for example. Such manipulation necessitates a mind behind it - this seems to me logical, but I have no explanation of what mind could manipulate a universe. There are various claims but, as far as I can determine, they consist of beliefs, not evidence; belief is the enemy of knowledge.

_"Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence."_ (Futuyma D: Evolution 2017).

Darwinism is today's creation myth. The point is that, if things evolved by chance, they are remarkably lucky to have evolved to fit so well the environments which other chance impacts/eruptions etc. have created. It almost looks as though they have evolved on purpose. But Darwin's two chance mechanisms - 'natural selection' and 'mutation', are ipso facto not purposeful. Natural selection has no consciousness; it cannot decide what is a good or bad way for living things to develop. But such is the prevailing belief. _"Chance becomes a sort of providence, which, under the cover of atheism, is not named but which is secretly worshipped."_ (Pierre-Paul Grassé, former president of the French Academy of Sciences).

" _The chain of coincidences such eminent professors believe in so flies in the face of reason that their doing so leaves outside observers utterly amazed. According to these professors, a number of simple chemical substances first came together and formed a protein - which is no more possible than a randomly scattered collection of letters coming together to form a poem. Then, other coincidences led to the emergence of other proteins. These then also combined by chance in an organised manner. Not just proteins, but DNA, RNA, enzymes, hormones and cell organelles, all of which are very complex structures within the cell, coincidentally happened to emerge and come together._

As a result of these billions of coincidences, the first cell came into being. The miraculous ability of blind chance did not stop there, as these cells then just happened to begin to multiply. According to the claim in question, another coincidence then organised these cells and produced the first living thing from them. Billions of impossible events had to take place together for just one eye in a living thing to form. Here too the blind process known as coincidence entered the equation: it first opened two holes of the requisite size and in the best possible place in the skull, and then cells that happened by chance to find themselves in those places coincidentally began to construct the eye.

_As we have seen, coincidences acted in the knowledge of what they wanted to produce. Right from the very start, "chance" knew what seeing, hearing and breathing were, even though there was not one example of such things anywhere in the world at that time. It displayed great intelligence and awareness, exhibited considerable forward planning, and constructed life step by step. This is the totally irrational scenario to which these professors, scientists and researchers whose names are greatly respected and whose ideas are so influential have devoted themselves. Even now, with a childish stubbornness, they exclude anyone who refuses to believe in such fairy tales, accusing them of being unscientific and bigoted. There is really no difference between this and the bigoted, fanatical and ignorant medieval mentality that punished those who claimed the earth was not flat."_ (Yahya H: Atlas of Creation)

Random variations and natural selection should, according to the theory, be able to produce continual change in species. Species do develop/change – micro-evolution; wolves and dogs are an example, but dogs are not likely to become cats. Species may eventually die out unaccountably, having reached the limit of their possible adaptation. They have an essential nature that can only change up to a point.

Different combinations of already existing genetic information do produce variations, but the genetic information has not fundamentally changed. Variation always takes place within the limits of genetic information, but is not evidence for evolution – reptiles don't give rise to birds – Archaeopterix was a dinosaur, not a bird.

It is true that morphology in species parallels changes in the environment. If that changes drastically, a drastic change in morphology will occur if the species' limits permit; it adapts – micro-evolution again. But some life forms have remained unchanged for millions of years showing no effects from mutation or selection – good design? Their disappearance results from catastrophic change in the environment, or from built-in obsolescence.

" _There is nothing that natural selection contributes to the theory of evolution, because this mechanism can never increase or improve the genetic information of a species. Neither can it transform one species into another. Those that are unfit will disappear. For example, in a deer herd under the threat of wild animals, naturally those that can run faster will survive. That is true. But no matter how long this process goes on, it will not transform those deer into another living species. The deer will always remain deer. Neither can it transform one species into another. Through natural selection, only the disfigured, weak, or unfit individuals of a species are selected out. New species, new genetic information, or new organs cannot be produced."_ (Patterson C: Natural History Museum, London).

Darwin did his best within the limits of research available to him. Genetics was unknown in his day. From his point of view, if one example of evolution existed, the principle was established with no limits. Unlimited variation has never been demonstrated, despite Darwin's claim."

In 1844, Darwin rebuffed other scientists who had already propounded the same objections as Pattersons' above. _"That a limit to variation does exist in nature is assumed by most authors, though I am unable to discover a single fact on which this belief is grounded"._ And yet he was not dogmatic; that particular trait characterises his subsequent supporters _. "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree......If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."_ (Darwin)

Richard Dawkins once said that Darwin's theory of evolution is as well-established as gravity. The corollary would be that gravity is as well-established as evolution, but no one has ever made that claim. And in fact, it has now been shown that the nature of gravity is not what was previously accepted.

Darwinism has been swallowed as the only theory that explains the emergence of life and its subsequent evolution without depending on divine origin. But it doesn't explain the emergence of life. A scientific theory would be able to demonstrate the creation of life in a laboratory- it's never happened. In Roman jurisprudence, should any falsehood be detected in a witness statement, the whole of his testimony would be regarded as invalid. Similarly, should any claim in the theory of evolution be proven to be impossible, the whole theory cannot be valid. It seems to me irresponsible for authority figures to gloss over the total lack of hard evidence, or dump the problem in the lap of a being for whom there is no hard evidence either.

Darwin's theory of evolution is _"the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else"_ (McCoy: Fringe). There is a great deal of peer pressure to conform to established/accepted truth in the academic/scientific community Deviations from the consensus are more likely to ruin a promising career than to establish the truth. Many scientists keep silent, and will even support distorted evidence. _"A conceptual theory will draw to itself all agreeing data, while pushing away whatever does not confirm the theory."_ (Novum Organum: Sir Francis Bacon 1620).

The belief that life on earth arose naturally from non-living matter is just that – a belief. In any contest between unpalatable facts and blind belief, belief will always win hands down. _"Even if there were no actual evidence in favour of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories."_ (Dawkins R: The Blind Watchmaker 1986). That's exactly the way science proceeds!
b. Evolution

" _Nothing is constant except change"_ (Heraclitus). Is such change random or is it mediated by an underlying pattern?

Sexual reproduction is an essential part of evolutionary theory. An asexual being will just divide and produce subsequent generations more rapidly than a sexual being. And it will pass on all its genes automatically. A sexual being can only pass on 50% of its genes, combining with another 50% and using time and energy. From the evolutionary point of view, sex is a disadvantage. Let 's face it – it's the ancillary reward that makes it work at all! But sexual reproduction just appeared from nowhere – why? Discussing the finer points of evolutionary theory is meaningless when its foundation is 'rocky.'

The current theory is that earth was born from the remaining mass of dust and gas surrounding the new star. (Another theory holds that the earth was 'captured' as it passed by the sun.) The dust coalesced 4.5 billion years ago (according to current theory), and life was somehow generated in warm seas some 2.5 billion years ago, Would they have been 'warm' at that point? The 'warm pond' theory is just a theory with no concrete evidence. But life did appear around then as single-celled bacteria, though not from chance in warm ponds.

3.5 billion years ago, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Stromatolites existed in the ocean built of cyanobacteria, which could interact with the surroundings and produce oxygen which they excreted - oxygen then was poisonous to life forms. Over the next 2 billion years, they multiplied to an extent that produced the Great Oxygenation Event. Very interesting, but where did the cyanobacteria come from in the first place?

Fragments of a meteorite at Allende, Mexico show traces of amino acids. Such bodies also sometimes contain non-living compounds like viruses and retroviruses, which can of course alter the genetic make-up of cells they infect. Since these are the basis of life as we know it, that suggests they must have come from somewhere where similar life forms existed. So, could our evolution be the result of viral infections?

The first life-forms, Prokaryotes, were single units lacking a cell nucleus. They can be seen preserved in Precambrian and subsequent rocks. Life is the ability to harness energy which Prokaryotes did, and has survived unchanged for billions of years. The 'fossils' that Prokaryotes left, were like itself - single-celled bacteria with no nucleus, and hence no possibility of ensuing variations. But they antedated Eucaryotes, a single-celled bacterium with a nucleus, which appeared suddenly from nowhere a billion years later. The nucleus bit is important because it enables the creature to reproduce itself, possibly with variations.

Such diverse creatures as molluscs, jellyfish, arthropods, even vertebrates share the pax-6 gene in their eye development. Did they have a common ancestor from which they slowly evolved, or were they individually designed using a basic coding. That's heresy for evolutionists (more on this later). Darwin specifically repudiated evolutionary intention. He admitted himself in 'The Origin of Species' that, if it could be shown that an "irreducibly complex" object suddenly appeared, his theory would fall. A nucleus is such an object – it has to be constructed from simpler, but still complex, parts. No nucleus could possibly be suddenly created by a lightning strike in a warm pond and, if no nucleus, no cell -no eye either.

It's the same problem with the Tbx4 gene in the development of hind limbs in terrestrial animals and hind fins in aquatic mammals - common ancestor or design? Speculation has continued into the 'Common Ancestor' theory. One single source is essential, but there wasn't one. The two original models - Prokaryotes and Eucaryotes - were very different, but bred true – no evolution even after 2·.5 billion years! Darwinism collapses at its very basis. Why is it still taught? The common scientific approach is simply to ignore the problem and continue as before.

Predetermination/chance

The evolutionary record shows development proceeding, but then being halted by an asteroid impact or some other catastrophe. Are such interruptions purely fortuitous, or do they have to occur to make room for new species? What would happen if they didn't occur? Looking at species which have survived unchanged from their first appearance – nothing at all! The appearance of new species does seem to correlate with disasters. Is this part of a pattern?

Could simple cells have arrived by comet on a collision course, as indeed water did? Maybe, but that doesn't help. It merely pushes the question back - where did the comet get the cells from in the first place? Besides, the Earth's surface must have been ready to support the new life – cool enough,, O2 ,CO2, S, N etc. And an asteroid couldn't possible explain the entire new crop of species subsequently appearing at the end of the Precambrian. They appeared fully-fledged, so could not have evolved more or less instantaneously by chance. This looks like design.

There are so many problems with using Darwinism to explain how life forms developed. It used to be held that birds developed from dinosaurs because dinosaurs had feathers – like Archaeopteryx. But Archaeopteryx wasn't a dinosaur. Dinosaurs didn't build nests; they just dug a shallow hole – like reptiles. Penguins don't build nests either – neither do cuckoos – but they're not reptiles. All other birds do – their knowledge of nesting architecture is innate – from where? Are the non-nesting habits of penguins and cuckoos examples of microevolution? Why do/did birds and dinosaurs share this common habit?

The basic problem of the philosophy of evolution is the same as the problem of reality. Does life exist because it must; does it derive from something else; does it proceed as it does because it is pre-patterned, or is it wholly dependent on chance? If the universe is predetermined, Hiroshima did not change the future – or was it part of the pattern? The flap of a butterfly's wings can have far-reaching effects. But for the effects to exist, the flap has to happen and time has to pass. What was the happening that caused the appearance of Homo Sapiens?

Are physical laws there so that we must exist? Or does our very existence presuppose such laws? Are they there so that life itself can exist, or does life exist anyway and necessitate such laws? The probability that these laws exist in the combination they do by chance is almost zero.

The physiognomy of both animals and plants enable us to place them into separate groups/families/genera. But this does not prove evolution. 'Natural selection' means 'survival of the fittest'. One species may have many interfertile forms – cats for example. One form may die out, followed by others. The ones that survive are the fittest simply because they survived. Or did they survive because they were programmed/preselected to survive? Heresy!
c Problems -Co-evolution

The Orphaeum, a beautiful flower from South Africa, cannot reproduce without help. It depends on the local carpenter bees for its pollination. Why only these? Because they are the only bees whose wings vibrate exactly at middle C, and only females at that. The vibration is essential for pollen to be released from the stamens. It can be grown in Europe, but there aren't any carpenter bees there. They are co-dependent. That being the case, did one appear before the other. How did it survive? Or did they 'evolve' together....? Early primates could only see blue and green. Plants thoughtlessly developed red fruits – to be more attractive? So, the poor primates had to develop the necessary cone cells to distinguish red fruits against a leafy green background and thus distribute the seeds. This only makes sense in the context of design; it could not be the result of random selection.

There are other mutualistic symbioses such as the relationship between clown fish and Riterri sea-anemones. Anemones are carnivores and need meat proteins. The anemone's tentacles have stinging cells for protection, but clownfish have immunity. The anemone provides protection, the clownfish brings food back to eat safely, and the anemone gets the leftovers. Since neither would survive without the other. they couldn't have evolved independently.

Fig-wasps depend on fig trees. Each of the 800 species of fig trees is pollinated by just one or two species of fig wasp. How did that come about? The wasp visits one fig tree, collects pollen and stores it on its body. It then flies to another similar tree and then – wonder of wonders- actually spreads it on the flowers' pistils. All this through random evolution – what a clever wasp to survive the slings and arrows of 34 million years! While the Cretaceous generally had a reasonable climate, the subsequent periods varied greatly. Neither the morphology of the trees nor of the wasps changed, although many other species did not benefit from such a mutualistic stability.

What about bees? We all know about the bee dance to tell the others which way to go for pollen. But how do the bees know? It can't be the duration of flight, because that is partly determiner by the wind speed and direction. How do the bees calculate direction and distance? Bees developed alongside angiosperms in the Cretaceous – each needs the other. When did they learn their skills? Angiosperms developed during the Cretaceous – they would not have survived without bees. which developed alongside.

Such relationships only make sense if created to order.
d. Problems – life

" _One day, a lump of clay, pressed between the rocks in a barren land, becomes wet after it rains. The wet clay dries and hardens when the sun rises, and takes on a stiff, resistant form. Afterwards, these rocks, which also served as a mould, are somehow smashed into pieces, and then a neat, well-shaped, and strong brick appears. This brick waits under the same natural conditions for years for a similar brick to be formed. This goes on until hundreds and thousands of the same bricks have been formed in the same place. However, by chance, none of the bricks that were previously formed are damaged. Although exposed to storm, rain, wind, scorching sun, and freezing cold for thousands of years, the bricks do not crack, break up, or get dragged away, but wait there in the same place with the same determination for other bricks to form._

When the number of bricks is adequate, they erect a building by being arranged sideways and on top of each other, having been randomly dragged along by the effects of natural conditions such as winds, storms, or tornadoes. Meanwhile, materials such as cement or soil mixtures form under "natural conditions", with perfect timing, and creep between the bricks to clamp them to each other. While all this is happening, iron ore under the ground is shaped under "natural conditions" and lays the foundations of a building that is to be formed with these bricks. At the end of this process, a complete building rises with all its materials, carpentry, and installations intact.

_Of course, a building does not only consist of foundations, bricks, and cement. How, then, are the other missing materials to be obtained? The answer is simple: all kinds of materials that are needed for the construction of the building exist in the earth on which it is erected. Silicon for the glass, copper for the electric cables, iron for the columns, beams, water pipes, etc. all exist under the ground in abundant quantities. It takes only the skill of "natural conditions" to shape and place these materials inside the building. All the installations, carpentry, and accessories are placed among the bricks with the help of the blowing wind, rain, and earthquakes. Everything has gone so well that the bricks are arranged so as to leave the necessary window spaces as if they knew that something called glass would be formed later on by natural conditions. Moreover, they have not forgotten to leave some space to allow the installation of water, electricity and heating systems, which are also later to be formed by coincidence. Everything has gone so well that "coincidences" and "natural conditions" produce a perfect design. If you have managed to sustain your belief in this story so far, then you should have no trouble surmising how the town's other buildings, plants, highways, sidewalks, substructures, communications, and transportation systems came about."_ (Yahya H: Atlas of Creation ; vol 1; chap 7). Difficult to swallow? But Darwinian evolution is based on a similar progression. And the sequence described above is not a plan for the evolution of humans – merely of a single cell!

_"Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 1012 grams, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world."(_ Denton M: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis 1985)

Chandra Wickramasinghe at University College, Cardiff wrote _"The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution."_ He was later dismissed for advancing the theory, unpopular with colleagues, that life came to earth from space – a reasonable hypothesis. I've already mentioned the 'Warm Pond' theory. The formation of the peptide bonds necessary to build a protein cannot take place in water ('Le Châtelier Principle'). So, life could not occur suddenly in the ocean.

Proteins are the components of amino acids, which may be right or left-handed. Any organisms generated from them might be either. (Tossing a coin a million times would give half-a-million of each by chance). But all living organisms have left-handed symmetry, so chance cannot be the basis of life – design? "Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide (chain of essential substances} right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for survival." (Hoyle F and Wickramasinghe C: Evolution from Space 1981).

Simple bacterial life showed up a billion years after the formation of the earth. Not until some 2 billion years later did celled creatures appear. And another 1.4 billion years came an explosion of disparate genera. Before the Great Oxygenation more than two billion years ago, the environment was sulphurous. That's not to say that extremophiles did not exist, merely that there is no evidence of them. Charnia, a single-celled creature, unrelated to anything later – a failed experiment perhaps - did exist in the later Pre-Cambrian seas – you can see a fossil in Leicester Museum. Later, sponges developed in the oceans, only to be frozen solid. The most ancient fossils are Pre-Cambrian, and nothing like Cambrian fossils.

The Cambrian explosion remains a puzzle. The organisms which had existed up to that time were unicellular, Now complex and complete invertebrates emerged suddenly without any link to them or any transitional forms. They had no antecedents! And what an explosion the Cambrian was! Not only did almost all phyla emerge abruptly but the new life-forms differ radically from each other – trilobites, snails, sponges, jellyfish. Trilobite eyes were more advanced than ours! Similar explosions at the end of the Cambrian and in the mid-Carboniferous, producing different fauna and flora, cast further doubt on gradual evolution. Whole species were replaced by new species in spurts concurrent with extinction events. They appeared suddenly and fully-adapted to the changed environment.

" _The aspect that makes life special among chemical reactions is that it carries with it a set of instructions."_ (Carroll S: The Big Picture 2016). For life is not just chemical reactions. It's not in fact anything to do with chemistry, or indeed matter at all. Cells are its material manifestation. They are like computers storing data and instructions for self-replicating. No aggregate of mindless molecules would be able to do that. In addition, you need an inherent power source to direct the system. But how does a non-material system direct a material system?

Some genera, which can't interbreed, have some of the same genes eg.Tbx4. This cannot be accounted for by Darwin's theory. It stretches credulity to accept that the very different environments which they separately enjoy, are filled so appropriately from such a limited forbear. Since they are built on the same genetic basement, they couldn't all have simply evolved the same genes by chance. More likely that they are based on previous genetic coding with modified additional coding to fit them for their 'slot'.

From Darwin's point of view, all genetic coding should be random and haphazard. The alternative would be directional, which implies intelligent design. Darwin himself admitted, "The case must at present remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained."

" _Directions for the reproduction of plans, for energy and the extraction of parts from the current environment, for the growth sequence, and for the effector mechanism translating instructions into growth - all has to be simultaneously present at that moment [when life begins]. This combination of events has seemed an incredibly unlikely happenstance, and has often been ascribed to divine intervention."_ (Homer Jacobson: 'On the Origin of Species' 1859).

" _To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of 1,000 volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying, and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason"_ (Denton M: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis: 1985).

" _According to Darwinian theory, the pattern for wolves, cats, squirrels, ground hogs, anteaters, moles, and mice each evolved twice: once in placental mammals and again, totally independently, in marsupials. This amounts to the astonishing claim that a random, undirected process of mutation and natural selection somehow hit upon identical features several times in widely separated organisms."_ (Kenyon D & Davis P: Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins 1993)

Life is only generated from life. Each living cell is formed by the replication of another cell. No one in the world has ever succeeded in forming a living cell by bringing inanimate materials together, not even in the most advanced laboratories. No scientist has ever been able to take something not-alive and make it into something that is alive. You can't create life from inanimate matter. Worse still, no scientist can explain the fundamental difference between animate and inanimate matter – life and non-life. The problem is that we don't know where or even how to look.

So, life must either have originated from other life or by intelligent design. Central to all life forms is coding and information processing. Explaining the origin of those is worse than speculating on the origin of life. Where did they come from – God? But divine creation is an awkward get out. If life was created, why create only simple life? If you can create life according to your specifications, why not something useful and complex? When did consciousness arrive on the scene? An ape is conscious, but is it self-conscious? Does it understand that it will eventually die?

The subject that renders evolution theory meaningless from the very outset is the question of how life first appeared on earth. Panspermia is the doctrine that life arrived on Earth from somewhere in space. Undirected panspermia means that hardy bacteria, perhaps even prokaryotes, came here entirely by accident delivered by a comet or meteor. In fact, two groups of prokaryotes (archaea and true bacteria) appeared about the same time. Unlikely that two functioning life forms would have evolved simultaneously by chance.

For the first billion years or so, the Earth would have been molten or far too hot. Admittedly, these bacteria were virtually indestructible – they must have been, since they have survived 4 million years unchanged from their pre-Cambrian fossils! No, the conclusion must be that they arrived from elsewhere, which suggests there is likely to be life elsewhere. The question is – was this random undirected panspermia or was it directed by intention?

Anyhow, the bacteria quietly worked away without oxygen. Earth consisted partly of iron, and iron loves oxygen – look at rusty old Mars. The delivery of these extremophiles may have had a purpose, or at least a result – the production of oxygen. More advanced organisms would require oxygen for their metabolism. So not until enough oxygen has been created to oxidise most of the free iron could advanced life-forms develop. Prokaryotes could not have produced the Great Oxygenation event - even after 2 billion years. Was that the result of chance or intention?

And then the Cambrian explosion – new life burgeoned, but not based on the hard-working prokaryotes. The metabolism is completely different. Where did these new forms of life come from? How did the first fully-developed cells, engineered to utilise their specific surroundings, get there in the first place? How did they manage to evolve into complex fauna and flora in a relatively short space of time?

Another possible example of panspermia from space is the sudden appearance of the octopus 270 million years ago. Squid existed at that time, but octopi are much more advanced. They are incredibly intelligent, have well-developed brains and nervous systems, advanced eyes and a complex genetic basis. Their 33,000 genes could not have resulted from a genetic change in squid. But all life on earth uses the same four-letter DNA language. Whether this spread throughout genera as the result of gradual evolution, or whether it shows intelligent creation using the same genetic basis is debatable. Either way, it suggests that octopi proceed from the same origin as everything else with a singular, genetic code – either a common terrestrial ancestor or a common extra-terrestrial origin.

Scientists have actually tried hard to prove the Darwinian hypothesis. Miller and Urey in 1953 set up an experiment at the University of Chicago to demonstrate the production of amino acids on a lifeless earth. They used an electrical discharge like lightning on a mixture of gases at 100°C, and were able to synthesise three amino acids. Great excitement, but none of the acids were left-handed as is necessary in living cells, and none had been present in the early Earth. They tried again with a more likely atmosphere of CO2, H2, N2, and H2O, since neither CH4 nor NH3 had existed in the Precambrian. This time they got nothing.

But even if it had worked, there would have been the awkward fact that the Great Oxygenation event would later have destroyed any amino acids that existed anyway. Urey later admitted "All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did."

Micro-evolution yes -Darwin's Finches for example. Such morphological changes don't depend on mutation. Other changes likewise have nothing to do with evolution. People live longer nowadays because of medicine and good nutrition – cf, 19th century. Social behaviour is changing – more people are 'out' as gay. This has nothing to do with genetics: men are as bisexual as they have always been. Rats and chickens can be taught to solve problems to get food. This is behaviour shaping, and some results do appear to be passed on. What price Lamarck now?

Macro-evolution does not happen and never has happened. Nevertheless, scientists in general cling to this belief. And this belief seems to have taken away their reasoning ability. Worse, some will even collude in adjusting or even creating 'evidence'. For example, the theory "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", which is still taught in schools, depends upon misinformation. A human embryo as it develops displays developments characteristic of those of a fish, then of a reptile, then of a human, thus demonstrating how life evolved from water to land. As proof, Häckel produced a set of cleverly-modified drawings from his research.

In fact, the fish 'gills' in the human embryo are the early manifestation of what will actually become lungs, but the ear canal and glands. Poor Häckel was eventually exposed. This should have caused evolutionists to examine their 'evidence' more closely. But they turned a blind eye, as scientists do to such heresy, and Häckel was able to claim justification in that that he was only doing what other scientists and politicians do. Sic!

In conclusion:-

" _Studies have shown that life cannot emerge unless there is a fine tuning between the four basic forces of nature (gravitational, electrical, and strong and weak nuclear forces). In fact, to have some of the elements necessary for life (e.g. carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous) they have to be made in the interior of stars with proper conditions of temperature, density and so on. The creation of these necessary conditions in turn, depends sensitively on the initial state of the cosmos and the relative strength of the basic forces. The cosmos appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings"._ (McCoy: Fringe)

e. DNA

The Darwinian idea is that random mutation in a sex cell produces an improved gene. The individual then procreates madly in view of the uncertainty of life to ensure this improvement is passed on. There is no proof that such is its intention; it may just enjoy procreating madly. Through time, the theory has it that this should crowd out the previous inferior version and give rise to a new species. But evolution appears to have proceeded in big spurts called "punctuated equilibrium", involving widely different species at the same time. The Cambrian Explosion 580 million years ago is held to be proof of this theory.

When the globe unfroze and the ice melted 4 billion years ago, the multitude of Cambrian genera simply emerged all of a sudden - each with no ancestors, but with its own gene sequence. All previous life had consisted of single cells. In later spurts, whole genera were replaced suddenly by new genera, fully-adapted to the changed environment, and often in tandem with extinction events.

" _The most puzzling event in the history of life on earth is the change from the Mesozoic (the Age of Reptiles) to the Cenozoic (the Age of Mammals). It is as if the curtain were rung down suddenly on the stage where all the leading roles were taken by reptiles, especially dinosaurs, in great numbers and bewildering variety, and rose again immediately to reveal the same setting but an entirely new cast, a cast in which the dinosaurs do not appear at all, other reptiles are supernumeraries, and all the leading parts are played by mammals of sorts barely hinted at in the preceding acts._

_Furthermore, when mammals suddenly made their appearance, they were already very different from each other. Such dissimilar animals as bats, horses, mice, and whales are all mammals, and they all emerged during the same geological period. Establishing an evolutionary relationship among them is impossible even by the broadest stretch of the imagination."_ (Simpson G: Major Features of Evolution 1953).

" _Those searching for specific information useful in constructing phylogenies of mammalian taxa will be disappointed. All of these demonstrate that all living beings appeared on earth suddenly and fully formed, without any evolutionary process."_ (Lombard R: Evolution). It's inexplicable, and certainly nothing to do with Darwinian evolution.

a. Random genetic mutation is almost always detrimental. Over 99% of genetic mutations kill living cells – it's called cancer!

b. Only 5% of DNA is hereditary/coding material; the other 95% is non-coding. Any mutation to effect a hereditary physical change has to be in the sex cells.

c. One individual would be unlikely to be sufficient; it would need several individuals from the same population undergoing the same mutation in the same gene at the same time.

d. Assuming this mutation rendered individuals more attractive, they would then get together and procreate madly; otherwise they wouldn't. But, even if they did, evolutionary changes can't occur within one generation. Assuming the new gene were passed to the next generation, inbreeding in an inward-looking group always produces harmful genetic defects. So, the group would die out, not take over. What price "survival of the fittest"?

e. Since punctuated equilibrium always includes many vastly different genera at the same time, the mutation effect would have to happen in all genera at the same time, and again at the next burst.

If there is no such mechanism as punctuated equilibrium, the Cambrian explosion and subsequent ones is inexplicable. With no such thing as traditional Darwinian evolution or punctuated equilibrium, that leaves this inquiry in limbo. But it's better to know that you don't know than to believe that you do, except of course in politics.

Talking of 'limbo' – the development of hind limbs in terrestrial mammals is controlled by the Tbx4 gene. But sometimes whales and dolphins are born with hind limbs, rather than paddles: terrestrial mammals however are never born with paddles. This suggests that the gene was originally in place for limbs. So, the ancestors of cetaceans were terrestrial animals with legs, which evolved into paddles. Or did terrestrial mammals evolve from cetaceans? Both genera have the same gene – a good example of evolution. They must have had a common ancestor – mustn't they? How else to explain it?

For one thing, if it were really evolution in action, you would expect to see the survival of only the fitter genus. For another, as the gene's expression changed over generations, the intermediate animals would have been so severely handicapped by the nascent limb/paddle that they would not have survived. Besides, just having paddles is not sufficient for an aquatic animal to survive. Their lungs function differently, and their circulatory system is different. These would have had to evolve alongside the limbs. The claim that both genera were created by an intelligent designer provokes a question. Why put the same gene in both marine and terrestrial mammals when mistakes/throwbacks could occur? They both have a similar structure but, since they would have been designed a for different environments, a separate gene could have been used.

I.T. programmers often use an existing structure to develop a new programme. This involves commenting-out/turning off unneeded sequences. All perfectly sensible – but wouldn't an intelligent designer have had the ability to start from scratch to ensure his new life-form would be perfectly adapted? Even so, the genetic coding would necessarily be very similar - best explained by intelligent design, rather than random mutation/selection. Programming new forms is best explained by a designer, not natural selection. Matter itself has no organising principle for life; coding is non-physical and requires intelligent design.

" _From two elementary notions – random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment – have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain."_ (Gould S: "Structure of Evolutionary Biology 2002). It's amazing!

" _Mousetraps are designed – leave out any part and it doesn't work."_ (Carroll S; The Big Picture 2016). Mousetraps don't evolve: better mousetraps have to be designed. It's the same principle with eyes. If you live in the sea, you can't see far – yours is a small world. If you move onto the land, you can see farther - makes evolutionary sense.... or does it? You wouldn't in fact yet have evolved sufficient distance vision to make sense of anything - a distant approaching predator for example - so your genes would not be passed on.....

" _Even something as complex as the eye has appeared several times; for example, in the squid, the vertebrates, and the arthropods. It's bad enough accounting for the origin of such things once, but the thought of producing them several times according to the modern synthetic theory makes my head swim."_ (Salisbury F: Case for Divine Design 2006). _"The trilobites 450 million years ago used an optimal design which would require a well-trained and imaginative optical engineer to develop today"_ (Raup D: University of Chicago).

Darwin wrote _, "...Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.....if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.....To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."_ The eye is such an organ: all its parts are necessary for the thing to function.

When a chick is ready to hatch, it pecks a hole in the shell. How does it know what to do? Was the first fully-fledged hen surprised to find that some of her eggs produced fledglings' heads poking out, others not - a random response? Luckily, one must have been a cockerel, another a hen who together produced offspring, more of whom also would have displayed the pecking response to hatch - again by chance? Even more luckily, such continuing progeny would have shown no deleterious effects of inbreeding. All rather unlikely – such behaviour in fledglings is better explained as programming.

Chickens again to the rescue:- "In 2007, researchers at the University of Linköping in Sweden created the henhouse from hell, designed to stress the chickens that lived in it.....The discombobulated birds demonstrated a significant decrease in their ability to negotiate their way through a maze to find food.....When the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, they conceived and hatched chicks that also demonstrated poor skills at finding food in a maze—even though they had never been stressed. The research went on to demonstrate that the mothers' exposure to stress had resulted in a gene expression that the chicks inherited." ('DNA'; 12.5.12)

This chicken's epigenetic effect has also been demonstrated with rats and humans. Some rats were trained at both Edinburgh and Melbourne universities to solve a task. Similar rats were not trained. Each group was then bred for 50 generations. At both universities the line from the trained rats learned tasks faster than their ancestors. But horrors! - the untrained tats showed the same ability to learn faster. No amount of finagling with either Darwinian or design theory can explain that.

_"If a geneticist had suggested as recently as the 1990s that a 12-year-old kid could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by studying harder now, that scientist would have been laughed right out of the hall. Not so now."_ (Shenk D: 'The genius in all of us' 2011).

And now for some total heresy. Evolution has been explained by Darwinism and by intelligent design. But the reactions of the chickens, children and rats are better explained by Morphic Resonance.

" _This is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future."_ (Sheldrake R: 'A new science of life' 1981). Jung would have liked this.

Each species has its own essential nature, which can be extended, but not changed. No species can give rise to something different. Each has its own morphogenetic field, but more – each component (tissues, organs, cells) has its own field, the lower regulated for its expression in due order by the higher fields. Each field triggers the appropriate response from the genes. The theory would explain why, when a patient has an organ transplant, memories/impulses from the previous owner seem to want to manifest. Morphic resonance is a non-material and a-temporal causal influence - like life itself.

The blob of fertilised cells develops into a blastula, and continues to self-organise into tissues. Self-organisation is evident both in life development and in non-life development - the crystallisation of water, for example. In life, however, a further influence supervenes – chaos. The child grows into a perfect specimen, but begins to age at the same time. The ageing process is retarded by life. When life ceases, chaos has full sway. Does this apply more widely? Does the development of human society necessitate its concomitant breakdown - war, civil unrest, regime change until there is no more human society? Eugenicists would produce a Brave New World except that chaotic breakdown would ensure that it could never happen. _"Directions for the reproduction of plans, for energy and the extraction of parts from the current environment, for the growth sequence, and for the effector mechanism translating instructions into growth-all had to be simultaneously present at that moment [when life began]. This combination of events has seemed an incredibly unlikely happen-stance, and has often been ascribed to divine intervention."_ (Jacobson H: "Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life", American Scientist, January 1955). Again, this is best explained by Sheldrake.

e. Problems – fossils

To rely on fossils to prove evolution is a waste of time. _"The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find-over and over again - not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another."_ (Ager D: "The Nature of the Fossil Record", Proceedings of the British Geological Association, Vol 87, 1976)

" _Eighty years' study of Darwinian evolution has not taught us how birds descend from reptiles, mammals from earlier quadrupeds, quadrupeds from fishes, nor vertebrates from the invertebrate stock"._ (D'Arcy Thompson: On Growth & Form). _"Most of the fossil record does not support a strictly gradualistic account of evolution."_ (Carrol R: Vertebrate Palaeontology and Evolution 1987). 'Strictly gradualistic' is the sine qua non of Darwinism. There should have been a steady evolution as families proliferated; there wasn't, but there should certainly not have been any pauses or retreats.

There are several long periods in which nothing happens – support for the Punctuated Equilibrium theory. But then, there is no evidence of any transition between one primitive species and an advanced one based on it. Darwin fully expected that millions of transitional forms would be found in fossil records. They haven't been. True, there are sequences of progressions – in horses for example, but change in size is not a species change – they are not in the process of becoming another life form.410 million years ago, the Coelocanth existed - it was a fish, despite some claims that it had lungs and primitive limbs for walking on earth. It is often claimed that morphology changes as the environment changes. The earth today is very different from the early Cambrian, so it's a wonder that the Coelocanth still exists now with no changes and no adaptation - frogs and salamanders similarly. Species don't just die off: they adapt. And when they do die off, it's because they are obliterated in mass extinctions. There is no fossil evidence for gradual transitions by natural selection; for abrupt transition – yes. Giraffes didn't slowly grow longer necks. There are small horses and large horses, but one doesn't gradually become the other. They are all just horses; none proceeds to another life form.

f. Conclusion

The geological record shows evolution proceeding well, but then being halted by an asteroid impact or some other catastrophe. Are such interruptions purely fortuitous, or do they have to occur to make room for new species? After all, the asteroid was always on a collision course with the Earth anyway. The mystery is the new crop of genera subsequently appearing. They appear fully-fledged, so could not have evolved more or less instantaneously by chance. This looks like design.

The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that it was selective for traits eg polar bear. He went to his deathbed protesting that he'd been misinterpreted: there was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution. Thomas Malthus proposed a theory of evolution occurring by the process of natural selection.

Return to The End of Evolution
Chapter IV. Human evolution

Humanins 'evolution' mirrors the same progression as the 'evolution' of life \- it occurred in spurts, not as gradual Darwinian evolution. Evolution over all species equally occurred in spurts. There were no insects; then there were insects. There were no flowers; then suddenly there were flowers. Humanins showed up quite late on. We still discover 'new' species. Have they been around for millennia, but just not discovered, or are they in fact new species?

Early mammals were mostly insectivores – mouse-like creature that ate fruit/insects and meat that the dinosaurs had left. When dinosaurs towered over them, they wondered where the sun had gone. Later on, if it were a Composagnathus, they soon found out. They survived the Cretaceous extinction in their burrows, and continued on for several million years without evolution.

Pro-simians/pre-simians (Lemurs, Lorises, Tarsiers) appeared out of the blue soon after the extinction of the dinosaurs. There is no fossil evidence of any insectivore-prosimian evolution, nor of a following prosimian-monkey evolution. There are no transitional bones: they just appeared. The monkeys that appeared c.35 million years ago in the Oligocene had a different gait from pro-simians. Instead of jumping from tree to tree, monkeys swung from branch to branch. But they continued to co-exist together. Apes made their appearance 25 million years ago, the dominant species until protohumans appeared 20 million years later.

Interestingly enough, Lemurs, Lorises and Tarsiers (all varieties of prosimians) continued to exist alongside the various changes in dominant species for 50 million years - stasis. They are essentially the same now as they were then. Eat your heart out, Darwin. Eldredge and Gould look satisfied - their Punctuated Equilibrium theory of evolution does not preclude such progressions.

Primates have no connection with monkeys - apes' arms and legs were about the same length. They walked on all fours; monkeys swung. Monkeys can stand upright, occasionally but apes are heavily-brachiated and quadrupedal. The difference in gait would make physical relations between humans and apes difficult. Apes could not have bred later with another humanoid species to produce Neanderthals. When we walk, we plant the heel or the entire foot (if you're flat-footed) and thrust forward with the big toe. In between, our momentum causes a swing to the side and then back to compensate for the torque. Some men lurch from side to side with compensating contrary body movement – it's rather attractive. Apes and monkeys can't do that. Our bodies are designed for the way we move, so we can't have evolved from apes or monkeys.

But hips wear out (knees too - ask any old lady) caused by the stresses involved in walking. The proto-humans at Laetoli in Tanzania 3.5 million years ago, discovered by Leakey, had a less stressful gait in that their ankle was at the centre of the foot which came down flat, thus obviating stress. But being bipedal is not an evolutionary advantage – no other mammal relies on it. Movement is easier the way monkeys do it, and big cats can outrun humans any day. Surely an intelligent designer wouldn't have made that mistake? It doesn't sound like survival of the fittest.

There are many differences between primates and man. Man is constitutionally bipedal not quadrupedal; human skin is unprotected from sunlight: we have hair on the front; primates have hair on the back which does protect them, primates have few genetic disorders; humans have over 4000 just waiting to manifest, Neanderthals were well-muscled \- Homines Sapientes aren't– survival of the fittest? Is this the result of blind evolution? It seems more likely to have resulted from the modification of genetic codes of previous designs - with some genetic codes being edited or merely suspended. On the other hand, it would be a poor designer who would produce such anomalies!

How did Homo Erectus, who appeared c.300,000 years ago, suddenly transform itself 200,000 years ago into Homo Sapiens with the power of speech (did Erectus even have a Hyoid bone?) and an advanced physiognomy? Erectus was merely capable of managing everyday experience. But in us, evolution has produced minds capable of comprehending quantum theory and general relativity. If the Darwinian adage "nature never over-endows a species beyond the needs of everyday existence" applies, such a leap is unique. Isn't evolution supposed to be gradual?

Maya head showing result of binding Paracas head

The Paracas strain in Peru around 1,000BC., was unique. It had elongated skulls – like those produced from binding. But, the cranial capacity was over 25% greater than Homo Sapiens – a characteristic that has to be inherent, not man-made. And the skulls have only one parietal plate: we have two. The strain did not evolve from any previous line.... It had mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far. But a few fragments I was able to sequence from this sample indicate that if these mutations will hold, we are dealing with a new human-like creature, very distant from Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.... _"I am not sure it will even fit into the known evolutionary tree."_ (Foerster B: The mysterious Paracas of Peru 2018). Being so different, they could not have interbred with Homo sapiens, and so died out.

Neanderthals must have been remarkably adaptable in that they lived 200,000 – c.30,000 years ago throughout the inhospitable Pleistocene in tandem with Homo Sapiens. They were human in that they could interbreed with Homo Sapiens who appeared in Europe around 45,000 BC. Like primitive man, they used primitive tools, could cook, and physically at least were capable of speech. Their rudimentary cave markings suggest that they were capable of abstract thought. Indeed, one theory holds that early Homo Sapiens interbred with Homo Erectus to produce hybrid Neanderthals (Neanderthal and human DNA is 99.7 percent the same). This proves nothing, since chimp DNA is 99.8 percent identical to our own. We share genes with other humanoids – Neanderthals, Denisovans, but also share genes with pigs and chimps! Evolutionists don't claim we came from chimps or pigs (apart from Eugene McCarthy), so why should we share genes? The only answer is gene recoding – intelligent design.

Neanderthals evolved in Europe. They could run faster than Homo Sapiens. It is claimed that early humans were having sex with Neanderthals 100,000 years ago. It's also claimed that early humans evolved in Africa and expanded out of the continent around 60,000 BC. Crossing the Red Sea in bats. How did they know how to build sea-going boats? They could have crossed to Europe at Gibraltar- there was no separation at that time. If you cling to the African origin hypothesis, it's awkward to explain the wide variation in human species a mere 40,000 years later. After the supposed spread, mankind acquired different colours and physiognomy. At the same latitude, you have redskins, white Europeans, yellow Chinese....why? Micro-evolution....really?

Cro-Magnons, suddenly appeared in Europe around 120,000 BC. looking unlike anything previous. They had a more prominent chin and less prominent brows than Neanderthals – very similar to modern humans. Again, like the Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons used tools, cooked, talked, buried their dead, used tools, made cave paintings and wore animal skins. But they moved on from Neanderthals in that they lived in huts not caves. Their remains have been found with flax cloth - how did they know about weaving then? Like Neanderthals, Co-Magnons were better muscled than Homo Sapiens.

Homo Sapiens (who antedated Neanderthals – no evolution there) is popularly supposed to have migrated north from Africa in waves from 60,000 years ago. Why migrate? The Pleistocene had warm and cold periods. During warm periods, humans would not have needed clothing or lacked food, so why migrate? During cold periods it would have got colder the further north they fared. They would now have needed clothing – so why migrate? And if they tried, the cold European winters might well simply have finished off the exploit. Tibetans survive – yes, because they have Neanderthal genes. On the other hand, humans were thriving in southern China in 75,000 BC, so logic suggests that, if there was migration from Africa, there must have been multiple migrations.

The Toba eruption 76.000 years ago is supposed to have reduced the human population to 3,000-5,000 pairs, so the late African migration hypothesis falls down on dates. Perhaps the Neanderthals, in some ways a better design, deliberately kept us out of Europe. They just started to die out around 45,000 BC, making room for us. Or did we just outbreed them? If Homo Sapiens really began in Africa, he doesn't seem to have got very far in nearly 200,000 years. Leakey claimed to have found fossils around one million years old that resembled Cro-Magnons. This was heresy and Leakey was promptly pooh-poohed. But in 1995, the skull of a boy 800,000 years old was uncovered in Spain. Records need revising.

Early humans lived as hunter-gatherers wearing furs and skins held to the body by a thong belt and by pins at the shoulder. A pointed stone on hide strips would later give way to awls and cordage to give a closer fit. Eyed needles have been found at Denisova Cave in Siberia 50,000 years old. At the Dzudzuana cave in Georgia, spun and dyed flax cloth was found from 30,000 years ago. Sewing and weaving were not new. How could they suddenly have conceptualised pounding animal hair into felt, or growing and putting flax though the various processes needed to weave fibres. Who taught them about looms – Neanderthals perhaps....? This suggests wearing such clothes may date back further.

Primitive man learnt to chip knives, hunt, make fire etc. by communicating with others. Birds learn to break shells by watching others dashing them onto a rock. (If that's not the result of learning by communication, it has to be inherited learning, and Darwin would never admit such a Lamarckism). Progress does not simply depend on previous events having occurred; that's Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance from repetitions. Humanoids have existed for 200 thousand years, but little 'progress' occurred until after the last Ice Age (c.12,000 years ago).

Why did humans wait over 200,000 years before suddenly inventing agriculture around 10,000 BC? What genius conceptualized the gradual development of wild seeds into usable grains which could then be cooked into bread? Was the Agricultural Revolution that followed the result of trial and error from previous experiments (how did they know what to look for?). Was it the result of teaching humans how to do it (who could have taught it?), or was it just a blinding revelation? Did one primitive man wake up with the bright idea of starting agriculture and all its various ancillaries?

" _Ye gods, I'm fed up with dried berries and grass seeds, Myrt!"_

" _Can ee do better, clever clogs?" She looked doubtfully at the berries._

" _I suppose I could grow wild grasses and take the strongest to develop with cultivation so as to produce barley."_

" _What be that, then?"_

" _Oh, never mind - you wouldn't understand. Of course, I'll need to fertilise them. What could I use for fertiliser, I wonder?"_

" _Well, ee fertilise Oi," she smirked coyly, adding a couple of nuts._

" _Not.... quite the same thing, Myrt", regarding her with distaste. "Um...how would I harvest the crop? That's a new word – the tribe will be impressed with that."_

" _You never cease to amaze me. And you've been amazing that Agatha too, haven't you? She was only saying the other day...."_

" _Errr - Yes...., I know, I'll invent a sickle. And then, of course, I 'd have to grind the grains – another new word!"_

" _Hmph! Words – just words!" She ate the nuts herself._

" _But how would I do that? I'd have to do it to make flour – lucky I somehow have a concept of flour!"_

" _How about the concept of rabbit? That's if ee want owt to eat tonight."_

" _Don't bother me with trivialities. I have ideas that will break our dependency on passing animals. What will bread taste like? What is bread anyway?"_

Myrtle squinted at him. "God knows where ee do get all this crap. Bread indeed! Us can't live by bread alone, whatever it is. So, piss off, and get that f****** rabbit!"

The man would have had to be a genius to come up with the whole schema by himself. There would be no point in cultivating grain without being able to conceptualise the end product. So, the knowledge must have been communicated to him and his descendants, but from whom was the communication? That alone makes nonsense of the idea of gradual human evolution.

There is an alternative explanation. Plato said in the 'Meno' that the mind/soul has always existed along with ideas/concepts. When we are born, we come pre-loaded with these; our senses enable us to identify and recognize the electrical stimuli we receive in our brains as ideas that we already possessed but hadn't realised.)

The point of all this is that the Darwinian substrate for the gradual evolution of humans is a specious as it is for other species. The various forms of humans and then the start of clothing, agriculture etc. just appeared suddenly; they did not evolve over millennia. And humans could not have evolved from early primates who have 48 chromosomes: humans have 46 chromosomes. That's what makes us superior, I suppose. So, the "pre-human" bones found as fossils record other primate history, not ours.

Where do we modern humans come from then? If we didn't 'evolve' here, and there is no evidence in the fossil record of transitional forms to produce us, then how did we emerge? Were we artificially designed/created? Primates have nipples – what evolutionary use/advantage do they have in males? If we were created totally from scratch, why include them? I do not claim to know the answer.

From mediaeval bestiary

Plants and animals in the wild do not tend to breed mutations; their genes remain constant. When negative mutations occur, they are unlikely to be passed on. What pig wants to mate with a pig with two noses? I wouldn't, if I were a pig. I would say 'Go away', or words to that effect. There may be some micro-evolution – Darwin's finches – otherwise species remain static over millennia. There are no examples of macro-evolution (one species becoming a new separate species.). At some point, similar hominin species appeared. They continued as they were over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years until one or both went extinct. I can see the attraction of the Punctuated Equilibrium theory – stasis - then sudden explosion.

Mediaeval wild man

The human groups discussed above seem to be good examples of stasis - as do wild plants. The design of Homo Sapiens is based on previous similar patterns. When there is actual mutation from previous patterns, genetic disorders accumulate. Domesticated plants and animals show numerous defects in their gene pools from hybridisation. But do we, as a 'new' species actually have any? Well, Sapiens has over 4,000 genetic defects in its common gene pool – glaucoma, idiocy, club-foot – but none of these from hybridization! Where do all these defects come from then? The species had them from the beginning – recoding of previous models?

" _Genetic diseases may look the same in a pig as they do in a human, so disease research with pigs will be much more applicable to human medicine."_ (Beever J: University of Illinois). Pigs look different to Homo Sapiens, but their genetic profile is very similar. One scientist claims that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees - (The Chimp-Pig Hypothesis: McCarthy E, Stony Brook University), often referred to as the 'Monkey-F******-A-Pig hypothesis'. McCarthy claims _"there is one animal that has all of the traits which distinguish humans from our primate cousins."_ He points out that when necessary some pig tissues and even organ parts can be used in human surgery. All rather unlikely, though it would explain the prohibition on eating pork in Judaism and Islam. He has been ostracised, as he probably expected - scientific confirmation bias!

Apart from outward resemblance, the big difference between man and ape is that an ape is an animal. Its level of consciousness is no different from a horse or a pig. But man can think, imagine, communicate, understand etc. Experiments have shown that animals and plants can all feel. Despite physical similarities, there is a fundamental, and perhaps non-physical, difference - often referred to as the soul. I do not propose to go into that here.

Darwin commented that humans don't fit into the evolutionary line from chimps or gorillas. Other primates are covered in body hair – thickest on the back; humans on the front. Head hair and fingernails - stop growing in primates; they continue in humans. Humans have throats capable of speaking. Primates have little subcutaneous fat, unlike humans. This means that, if wounded, primate skin draws together; in humans it separates and needs stitching. Primates only have sex when the cycle is right. Hominins have big thumbs, unlike apes who don't have properly opposable thumbs. You need a big thumb for flint-knapping - you try it. Is this evolution or design?

Primates have relatively few genetic hereditary disorders; humans have c. 4000. Darwinist would claim they come from interbreeding with other species. Hybridization seems to pile Ossa on Pelion - defects in sub-species A are added to sub-species B to produce sub-species C – bad design. Since our mitochondrial DNA proves that we are a new species only 200,000 or so years old, how on earth could we have developed 4000 genetic defects? Many of the defects should in time work their way out by simply not being passed on. But 200,000 years is not long enough either to accumulate so many defects or to lose them. So whence did they come?

It happens in domesticated hybrids because the whole faulty gene package of one is added to the faulty gene package of another when they reproduce. In each case, the new example has the whole package in its genome. The process is the same with human species – the faults are built-in from the beginning - Chinese, Aboriginals, Inuit have the same symptoms; they share the same design. Like a new website, our genetic coding was based on re-coded previous designs - there is no other logical explanation. Domesticated hybrids are created by us. And there is a pattern in primate development; newer species are more sophisticated. It does sound horribly like design.

So how do we fit in? Prof Berger at Witwatersrand University says, _"What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of human-like creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa. Only one line eventually survived to give rise to us."_ But all primates share one characteristic - the body develops to its optimum, but its telomeres unravel, producing ageing. This is built-in obsolescence – ie. design!

Domesticated species are different from wild species – they are designed to be. This pattern is also true for humans and primates from whom we evidently did not evolve. 'Chalk and cheese' comes to mind. Primate developments consisted many species of proto-humans – Erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Naledi etc. that came and went. Homo Sapiens were hunter-gatherers for some 150,000 years following the migration of big game. During the often harsh climate of the Pleistocene, they dressed in skins, supplementing their diet with leaves, fruit, and fish. Their lifestyles changed very little until about 50,000 years ago. New artefacts appeared and Homo Sapiens suddenly expanded throughout Eurasia with the disappearance of the Neanderthals. We haven't disappeared yet, although we're about to.

But we were still hunter-gatherers until the appearance of hybridization in the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 BC. How did that concept just arrive? And we built Tiahuanco, Gobetli Tepe, Stonehenge using advanced engineering. 13,000 years after that a major advance – the Industrial Revolution. Now another revolution – the IT age - into which we shall now be catapulted -won't it be great....! (See the next chapter).

I offer this for what it's worth.

Naledi and human skulls

Paracas were not the only anomalies in the human story; hobbits (Homo Naledi) were another. They were only 4'5" tall, and had a brain the size of chimps'. Nevertheless, they lived on Flores for 40,000 years a quarter of a million years ago, and buried their dead in underground temples. So, they were capable of ritual behaviour and abstract thought.

Legends in very many folklores also refer to giants. But aren't they just fairy stories? Fairy stories are based on oral tradition. There are none about 'Doms' or 'Squiils'. That's because they've never existed. But there are fairy stories about Witches and Giants....

Sumerian tablets from c.4,400 BC record giants to have existed before the flood (c.5,000 BC). These 'Nephilim were descended from ' Sons of God'. They were very long-lived – like the early Jewish patriarchs – over 18' tall and strong.

Spies returned from Canaan c.1,450 BC and reported to Moses;- _"And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."_ Numbers 13:33. Anak was one of a race of giants, and his children were called Anakim - the tradition is that Anak's bed was 'nine cubits in length and four cubits in width' (13' 6" by 6'). Joshua then went on to cleanse the area of giants.

Around 1,500 BC, giants were over 12' tall. Around 1,000 BC Goliath and his Anakim family were only 10' tall – like the Patagonian giants discovered by Magellan in 1,500 AD. (Goliath's height was 'six cubits and a span' (9' 9").

Giants of various sizes have been found all around the world. There have always been giants born occasionally – double recessive genes? Sancho VII of Navarre, one of Richard the Lionheart's lovers, was 7' 5" - a giant in those days. Gog and Magog in London. And Sherborne Abbey has a sepulchre of a man over 8'.

These 'mighty men which were of old' also show up in the Greek traditions of gods coming down from heaven, marrying women and producing 'Titans' and giants. In Greek mythology, the giants were born from the blood that fell to the earth when Uranus was castrated by his Titan son, Chronos.

Other traditions also speak of giants. In Norse mythology, Gilling was the frost giant who was a bit of a fool. He went out in a boat without being able to swim, and drowned. Ymir was a primeval giant who was born from dripping venom in Ginnungagap. The construction of Teotihuacan was attributed to the Quinametzin Giants in Aztec mythology.

Some characteristics have survived genetically. Michelangelo's statue of Moses has horns – like the Nephilim, and his offspring had his Nephilim genes. (The Catholic explanation that Moses has rays of light is impossible for any rational inquirer to accept, apart from priests.) "There were giants in the Earth in those days "(Gen.6:4), who were the children born to the 'Sons of God _, 'both before and the Flood'._ The 'Sons of God' were human-like in appearance and function, and they 'went in unto the daughters of men' and produced offspring who were horned giants, called 'Nephilim'. (Who the Sons of God were is debatable, and unimportant here. You can read more in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Book of Enoch).

Both the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Book of Enoch say that 'Watchers' came to the earth and produced giants as offspring! Some of the giants even seem to have had the characteristics of that elder race - the Sons of God. They taught humans their knowledge:-

Kasdeja, who _"Taught the children of men all the wicked smitings of spirits and demons, and the smitings of the embryo in the womb, that it may pass away."_

Azazel, who _"Taught men to make swords, knives, shields, breastplates, the fabrication of mirrors and the workmanship of bracelets and ornaments, the use of paint, the beautifying of the eyebrows, the use of stones of every valuable and select kind, and of all sorts of dyes, so that the world became altered."_

Barkayal, who _"Taught the observers of the stars."_

Penemue, who _"Taught the bitter and the sweet, the use of ink and paper."_

Gadreel, who _"Introduced weapons of war."_

That's interesting as a possible explanation of whence humans got their knowledge of agriculture all of a sudden. Another interesting point is that Sumerian lists of kings have them reigning with incredible longevity. Hebrew scriptures later say the same about the patriarchs - Methuselah. Jews don't accept that their histories derive from non-Jewish sources, so it looks as though there may be some truth in such claims. If Earth at one time had a year of only 260 days, that might explain it.

Return to The End of Evolution
Chapter V. Does history show evolution?

200,000 years of human progress with no bread or milk! What were we about? We tend to think of human history as a steady progress – dates in history books over the past 4,000 years. But it hasn't been steady; it has occurred in spurts. We were still hunter-gatherers until the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 BC, which started history as we think of it. How did the concept of hybridization just arrive?

And then, around the same time, the engineering feats of Tiahuanaco and the lower layers of the Great Pyramid. How could early farmers suddenly have developed the skills to build those - or were they taught? Later masonry marvels: Göbekli Tepe, Mohenjo Daro, Stonehenge, still impossible to replicate with modern techniques, add to the mystery. 12,000 years after the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution produced our 'superior' civilization. And now with Artificial Intelligence we shall be catapulted into.... ? Won't it be great!

"Homo Sapiens may have appeared on the scene, around 200,000 years ago, although their lifestyles changed very little until about 50,000 years ago when they invaded Eurasia. Limited intermingling with Neanderthals left them with 3% of Neanderthal genes. This is the orthodox version - that there was inbreeding between various human species, even though we have no idea where each of them originated. They may have been separate experiments whose similar genetic coding was adjusted to produce an improvement. For hybridisation does not always lead to a happy result. Neanderthals were then either outbred, driven to extinction or simply came to the end of their period, as had so many proto-humans – planned obsolescence?

_What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of human-like creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa. Only one line eventually survived to give rise to us,"_ (Berger L: Witwatersrand University). This suggests that humans showed up in different places at the same time. What could that mean?

200,000 – 10,000 BC.:- For at least 200,000 years, modern humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Why did it take them so long to develop things like city-states, agriculture, art? Largely because of the below-average climate during the Pleistocene, they had to exist in small groups. So, they didn't need social organisation, and food was plentiful. But a Mesolithic village has been discovered at Howick, Northumberland, dating around 10,000 BC. This suggests some hunter-gatherers had come together, were no longer nomadic and could realise the advantages of division of labour.

9,600 BC Floods from the Younger Dryas, and the end of Atlantis (according to Plato). "There were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful night..... the island of Atlantis was.....swallowed up by the sea and vanished." It's interesting that Plato got the date right, and that he knew the history nearly 9,000 years after the event.

8,500 BC.:- Humans started to grow in numbers in the Fertile Crescent about 8,500 BC, and in China around 7500 BC. The warmer climate and wetter conditions from the end of the Younger Dryas meant land could now be used for cultivation and husbandry, though how men came to have the know-how is usually glossed over..... It's inexplicable in evolutionary terms – best not to ask (and anthropologists don't). With increased food production came the tendency to group into organised societies, and the development of specialities – government, shopkeepers, metalworkers etc. Small societies later amalgamated to defend their self-interest and, once in, difficult to get out – much like the European Union today.

This is the usual doctrine, but there are anomalies. There is evidence of extensive building works at Tiahuanaco, Göbekli Tepe, and Giza before 10,500 BC., which I'll talk about later. Jericho, and its famous walls, was founded before 8,500 BC. The Danube Valley culture, one of the oldest in southern Europe, covered a vast area by 5,500 BC. Populations expanded in the Americas and from the Fertile Crescent into Eurasia.

7,500 BC.:- Çatalhöyük in Turkey, one of the oldest cities was flourishing by 7500 BC, contemporary with Jericho. Like many other settlements of the period, Monte Tecla on the Spanish-Portuguese border for example, there were no streets. Houses were entered through a hole in the roof, and bread was baked communally. Most walls were plastered and decorated. If the whole set-up had come together to deal with a need, you would expect levels of society, professions, an army – but no. This suggests either an egalitarian society, perhaps a monarchy, or barracks for workers. Marshes were drained and the land became fertile, and eventually the dust-bowl we see today. Although there was no writing, no wheels or carts to transport anything, the whole new development suggests high-level knowledge. And for it all to hang together, there must have been organisation – by whom?

7,200 BC.:- But not all was not plain-sailing with other settlements. The melting ice after the Younger Dryas meant the continuous rise of global sea levels (20'-30' per century) in the early Holocene, and the disappearance of coastal civilizations worldwide. The sea level after the final Dryas melts was some 400' higher than before. Narrow tree rings from an oak tree indicate that there was a cold snap in 7272 BC. in Europe. 7,000 BC was warm and wet, and subsequently sea levels settled down with the end of the Dryas melt, and mountain dwellers could return to the coasts. The complete range of professions such as bakers, carpenters, metalworkers, engineers, scribes and bureaucrats are found later in Sumer – taught by..... the gods?

6,400 BC.:- An ice core from Greenland shows a temperature drop around 6400 BC, then a warm-up followed by the Storegga Slide around 5,000 BC (see below). A mega-tsunami swamped coasts around the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. Poor coastal dwellers! 6000 BC onwards there are once again signs of human activity closer to the sea. The plough appeared in Central Europe and Mexico, and irrigation in the Middle East

2874 BC Egypt had a 365-day calendar. "Egyptian science medicine, mathematics and astronomy were all of an exponentially higher order than modern scholars will acknowledge. The whole of Egyptian civilisation was based upon a complete and precise understanding of universal laws... Moreover, every aspect of Egyptian knowledge seems to have been complete from the very beginning. The sciences, artistic and architectural techniques and the hieroglyphic system show virtually no signs of a period of 'development'; indeed, many of the achievements of the earlier dynasties were never surpassed or even equalled later on."(West J: Serpent in the Sky 1993).

2700 Sumerian King Gilgamesh ruled the city of Uruk, Mesopotamia. 'The Epic of Gilgamesh', first recorded c.2200 BC, relates the story of the Great Flood - the source of the Noah story?

2500 - 2100 BC Khufu began to try to rebuild the Great Pyramid on its earlier base. The Earth's axis may have been tilted _. "There were sudden climate changes, floods from abrupt sea level changes and seismic activity. 75% of towns/villages disappeared"._ (Cambridge Ancient History). There is some suggestion of an impact based on widespead debris around 2360 BC. And another more severe one around 2,020 BC. Global climatic changes, a mega-flood and subsequent drought and dust ruined more than one empire.

For empires do rise and fall. What happened between 2,300 and 2100 BC resulted in extreme climate change. The Sahara, which had formerly been a sea floor for millennia, but had been green for 5000 years, now became a desert. The Old Kingdom in Egypt and the Akkadian Empire fell prey. The Old Testament records Noah's flood as part of a global event about 2,345 BC. The dry spell 2,350-2,075 BC in the Middle East was disastrous. In Egypt social and economic upheaval from subsequent desertification was recorded by a priest:-

"The fruitful water of Nile is flooding,

The fields are not cultivated,

Robbers and tramps wander about and

Foreign people invade the country from everywhere.

Diseases rage and women are barren.

All social order has ceased,

Taxes are not paid and

Temples and palaces are being insulted.

Those who once were veiled by splendid garments, are now ragged.

Noble women wander around the country and lament:

"If only we would have something to eat."

Men throw themselves in m?" the jaws of crocodiles -

So out of one's senses are people in their horror.

Laughter has ceased everywhere.

Mourning and lament are in its place.

Both old and young wish they are dead."

"Men don't any more sail to north, to Byblos.

"Where do we now get our cedar for our mummy coffins and oil to balm?

"

Translated, collected and commented by TN.

And in Akkad:-

"The large fields and acres produced no grain

The flooded fields produced no fish

The watered gardens produced no honey and wine

The heavy clouds did not rain

On its plains where grew fine plants

'lamentation reeds' now grow."

(Quotation from H. Weiss: The Sciences, May/June 1996)

The Antarctic was ice-free as late as 4,000 BC, and the Sahara was a green savannah with lakes from 7000 BC, but this ended before 2,000 BC. Recent (1996) reviews of Persian Gulf sea levels indicate that levels were up to 2 meters higher than at present during the period 4,000-2,000 BC. But, after the climate change, sea levels in the Mediterranean dropped 300' around 2,200 BC Civilizations all over the place collapsed - Crete, Greece, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and China - from drought and dust, some of which seems to have been volcanic. Climate change produced a severe cold snap in Greenland. More mass migrations of Indo-Europeans moving north into Europe from the Middle East, Persia and India. Germanic Vikings migrated to Scandinavia.

2215 BC The Exodus? In July 2215 BC. a bright comet, with the usual tail visible by day and night, was recorded by Egyptian scribes – pillar of smoke, fire by night?

c. 2215 BC, the Akkadian empire collapsed and Ur became prominent. Rise of Assyria

2150 The Great Flood according to the Jewish calendar.

2100 _BC "A major climate event occurred in the area where a large number of Indus settlements were situated.....Taken together with other evidence from Meghalaya in north-east India, Oman and the Arabian Sea, our results provide strong evidence for a widespread weakening of the Indian summer monsoon across large parts of India 4,100 years ago."_ Hodell D: (Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge).

c. 2000 BC: Harappa and Mohenjo Daro began to flourish in the Indus valley. They had started 1,000 years earlier, and now showed the sophistication enjoyed by Romans 2,000 years later. There were wide streets, public baths, indoor plumbing and sewage though, unlike Roman cities, little evidence of social stratification.

1750 BC Hammurabi, Amorite king of Babylon, conquered Mesopotamia, and founded an empire with a system of mathematics based on 60.

1600 BC eruption of Thera, with the force of many atomic bombs, was one of the largest in the last 10,000 years. The sudden drop in temperature caused by the lingering ash cloud caused collapses of Bronze Age cultures– Mycaeneans, Hittites, Egypt (New Kingdom), Minoans. It could have caused the plagues of Moses – darkness, pollution etc.

1550 BC Migrations from the Indus Valley led to de-urbanization. India and Iran were occupied by fair skinned Aryans from Mesopotamia.

1,450 BC A remarkable event, referred to as "the long day" in the Eastern Mediterranean and "the long night" in Mesoamerica. A celestial impact knocked the Earth sideways, causing the sun to stand still (defeat of the Amorites? - Joshua 10:12-14.). It was catastrophic in some areas, less so in others.

1,400 BC Iron was first used by the Hittites. The Sahara is now completely desert

c.950 BC Fall of Troy? (Troy VII at Hisarlık lasted from c.1300 to c.950 BC.)

536 AD An Icelandic volcano erupted, followed by a prolonged drop in temperature. This was repeated in 540 AD and 547 AD. with crop failures and storms. It led to the large-scale migrations southwards causing the decline of the Western Roman Empire and invasions from Europe and Scandinavia. Droughts in Mesoamerica resulted in problems for the Maya who finally disappeared with the Spanish Conquest in 1600s.

The cold climate lasted until 900 AD. when a period of higher solar radiation moved us to the Medieval Warm Period between 900 and 1300 AD. A volcano in El Salvador in 536 AD, followed by two others in Iceland, is thought to have resulted in the Little Ice Age. It cemented the fall of the Roman Empire. This lasted until the late 19th century - most people have heard of the Ice Fairs on the Thames.

Domestication and Agriculture

" _The earliest traces of life we can detect at the present time are found associated with rocks dated to about 3.6 billion years ago...but the fossil record, formed by simple animals whose hard parts have been preserved, is only 0.6 billion years old. It took the simplest, single cell organisms about 1.4 billion years to evolve. The next decisive step up in complexity to multicellular organisms took almost 2 billion years more. Mammals appeared on the scene about 200 million years ago and complexity took a quantum leap - like Agriculture and civilization!"_ (Crick F: Life Itself 1981)

The end of the Younger Dryas sparked the agricultural revolutionary period. The revolutions took place at various times in different parts of the world, depending on which local plants were chosen for development – Andes, Mesoamerica, Fertile Crescent, Egypt, Indus, Yangtze. Why the time differences? Did the knowledge spread across the Atlantic? Did the idea occur naturally? If not, who taught the techniques?

Flowering plants with no common ancestor are an evolutionary wonder: domesticated plants appeared first around 8000 BC – another revolutionary wonder with no antecedents. Did hunter-gatherer man suddenly conceive of of growing a field of wild plants? He'd then need a plough, animals to draw it, a scythe, a quern – yeast as well. Did he conceive of those too? If not, who taught our ancestors, and are they still here now? Cultivation alone would not produce barley from grass: plants have to be hybridised. You have to mix in genes from another plant to produce improved varieties. Primitive man would have had to know about genes too. If the whole process didn't just developed from the imaginations of a few Mesolithic men, it must have come from elsewhere.....

"There is evidence of cereal cultivation and goat herding in the Levant in the Fertile Crescent in 10,000BC, followed by Mesopotamia, China and Central America" (The Origins of Agriculture – Annual Review of Anthropology 1973). "Both agriculture and animal domestication occurred at different times and places, with different plant species, for different societies around the globe" (Flannery K: Molecular and Cell Biology, Berkeley 1973). In some instances, they occurred together; in others sequentially. "The spread of this new technology would have been a slow process. It is unlikely that wholly nomadic peoples converted to sedentary agricultural systems over-night. It is more likely that the transition was a slow one, involving both methods together for quite some time before finally settling down into a wholly agrarian existence." (Smith, 2001a; Smith, 2001b).

You can't have agriculture without stability, and nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers gave way to the formation of small settled tribes. This is the orthodox version. But, this coalescing happened when the tribesmen had never even seen domesticated plants or animals, let alone practised artificial selection. There would have to be settlements before agriculture could be practiced. But, since hunter-gatherers had never even heard of agriculture, why would they coalesce for that purpose? Tribesmen must have had a reason to band together, and it wasn't agriculture. The one that fits best is the old tradition of teachers going around introducing revolutionary ideas. There's no evidence for this, but then there's no other evidence either to explain what happened.

Anyway, people from several areas would have had to coalesce to develop a better way of life. Each area would then have had to develop techniques, germane to their area, that they knew would produce the desired result – ploughing, fertilization, harvesting etc. Which seeds to select that would eventually give rice, barley, wheat, sweet corn etc? But why did the whole process begin in the first place. How could they know about hybridising? This shows intention/design, not evolution.

It's like asking 'how did life begin'? There's no answer. You wouldn't start to build a car unless you knew what the end product would look like and do. How did they envisage the baking process with a new product, which couldn't go into full operation for millennia? And what about the ancillary support – ploughs, sickles, querns, yeast, ovens – to make bread? How could the hunter-gatherer of 10000 BC visualise bread? They must have got a vision of the final model and then stuck to it for millennia to make any sense of the whole process. The inference is that humans were taught their agricultural skills. But by whom?

"After at least 5,000 years of continuous agriculture, we do not seem to have improved upon the first selections of food crops of our scientifically ignorant ancestors. That hardly seems logical. This amazingly prescient selection of wild seeds seems not only more than a little surprising; it looks to border on being a minor miracle. There are an estimated 195,000 flowering plants that they could have turned into food sources and primitive man chose less than 0.01% to base agriculture upon. ......Our guts are still not adapted to digest uncooked grains. After all, we are not birds.... Our Paleolithic ancestors lacked the technology to harvest, thresh, process, and cook wild grass seeds. The seeds of wild species are miniscule, and they are attached to the seed heads, making them difficult to harvest and hardly worth the effort. If they lacked an extended experience with wild grasses, how did they know which ones to select to turn into wheat, rye, corn, barely, and rice? In other words, these are still the principal food crops that our civilizations are based upon." (Hart W: The Genesis Race 2003).

Just as cereal foods are not the result of natural selection, it seems that humans may not be the product of natural selection. Needing clothes/shelter etc. just for survival, we are not adapted to the environment. Some humans are lactose intolerant; humans as a species have lactase to digest the lactose in milk. That being the case, did we develop lactase as we developed our agricultural and animal domestication? If not, it means we had to have developed it before domestication – why would that have happened?

Some interesting civilizations

Tiahuanaco:-Lake Titicaca occupies the Altiplano between two ranges of mountains. The Altiplano plateau, 2.3 miles above sea level lies between the Occidental and Central Cordilleras. It boasts Lake Titicaca and other freshwater lakes. There are several dry, salt-covered lakes - once navigable before the sea level dropped. There is no run-off to speak of; it's watered by several mountain rivers, so is fresh water. Why then does the lake contain sea horses?

The city of Tiahuanaco is 800 feet above Lake Titicaca. Puma Punku is nearby. Tiahuanaco has ancient terraces for cultivation of corn on the bordering Andes mountain-side, even as high as 17,000'. But corn won't grow more than 11,500' above present sea level. So, either the Andes must have been created by subsequent massive uplift, or there must have been a dramatic fall of sea level.

  Puma Punku

"Tiahuanaco itself, at 12,500' above present sea level, is now some 12 miles from the lake. Currently, the lake is over 3,000 square miles in extent. A wharf-like structure and four possible warehouse bases suggest the city may have been a port on the shore of a much larger lake or perhaps, in view of the marine remains, even the sea?

  _Tiahuanaco_

_But why are the building blocks – several over 100 tons - so massive? Of sandstone, were they quarried, were they cut from soft sediments after ice retreated, or were they cast? How could Neolithic hunter-gatherers have cut such precise grooves and finished the blocks with polished surfaces? How did the builders produce the bronze needed to clamp some of the stones together? That requires smelting, and where would they get the tin? And why are so many huge stones lying tossed about as if by a giant storm or flood, or upheaval? Astronomical alignments point to some time between 15,000 and 12,000 BC."_ (Posnansky A: Tihuanacu, the Cradle of American Man 1945). Come to that, why is Tiahuanaco there at all? It does not seem to have any roots in the area.

Baalbek

Not all sediments harden fully before ice retreats. The withdrawal of the Older and Younger Dryas ice sheets left unconsolidated rocks consisting of silt, sand, quartz, and clay. Such rocks can be easily cut and shaped to produce blocks that can be fitted together perfectly. They will eventually harden with air and warmth. Blocks of unhardened stone can be easily shaped and fitted together perfectly. Baalbek, Göbekli Tepe, Machu Picchu etc. all exhibit such perfect interlocking blocks. Interesting, but why use at Baalbek a block that weighs 1.659 tons and other super-massive blocks that have to be moved and lifted?

The fossilized marine life which can be found in the lake and around suggests that Lake Titicaca was at one time at sea level. A tsunami then would have inundated the city, wrecking the buildings. when the sea eventually receded, it left only the solid walls, monoliths and six feet of silt. The area then lifted with the Andean upheaval and the Altiplano plateau was created, which filled in to form the lake.

It can't have been an ice sheet that caused the devastation, or no two blocks would have been left together. Equally possible – a world-wide devastating flood stopped construction of the city. But the blocks are scattered by a disaster. It was probably the Sacajawea impact that caused massive seismic activity which resulted in an overflow of the sea at that time. The wet period that followed the subsequent Younger Dryas in 9,600 BC was not limited to North America. And construction of the Great Pyramid was also halted at the same time!

Posnansky claims that Tiahuanaco was devastated when its ecliptic alignment shifted to 23.5º. This may have been the result of the Sacajawea impact c.12,500 BC.A large amount of water has to have inundated the city; when it receded, it left silt covering all evidence of an advanced civilization, leaving only the largest statues and monoliths still exposed. Scientists theorize that the area of Lake Titicaca was at one time at sea level, because of the profusion of fossilized marine life which can be found in the region. The area then lifted with the Andean upheaval and a basin was created which filled in to form the lake.

Lake Titicaca is drying up. There are few water sources to top it up from the Andes, although originally the land was fertile and wetter, and no rivers draining it. Why should it be there in the first place? It's one of a series of salt lakes – the oldest existed 30,000 to 23,700 BC, the youngest dated from 11,400 to 9500 BC. This suggests that each was formed when sea levels were higher. But Titicaca is currently 2,500 feet above present sea level - could this be possible? Tiahuanaco has structures like jetties and docks, suggesting that it once flourished as a port, although now it's 2.5 miles up a mountain. A three-mile rise and fall in sea levels seems a lot to swallow, so to speak. But cores from ocean beds do show up and down alternating sequences of shallow-water and deep-water deposits.

Tiahuanaco itself was built at least 12,500 years ago, according to one account, of enormous stone blocks, some weighing over 100 tons. They fit together so well that they seem to have been cast rather than carved. But the city now looks as though a bomb hit it. One theory is that the buildings were toppled by cataclysms as the Andes rose. But the Andean orogeny was over millions of years previously. It seems unlikely that the city existed 25 million years ago.

Following on the explorations beneath Titicaca by professional diver William Mardoff in 1956, Hugo Boero Rojo also found archaeological ruins 15 meters below the surface in 1980. _"The remnants found show the existence of old civilizations that greatly antecede the Spanish colonization. We have found temples built of huge blocks of stone, with stone roads leading to unknown places and flights of steps whose bases were lost in the depths of the lake amid a thick vegetation of algae."_ (Hugo Boero Rojo). Another researcher, Hans Schindler-Bellamy, claimed Tiahuanaco to date from 10,000 BC.

The ruins below the surface of Lake Titicaca, which contains sea horses even now, show beneath and around them a layer of the turbidites typically deposited by a flood. A crustal shift would cause a such a devastating flood, and in fact there was an axial shift in 10,153 BC resulting from a further impact. It affected the Andes, and Tiahuanaco's latitude shifted from 10° to 16.27° south. (Incidentally, the Himalayas have risen a further 10,000' (c.2 miles) within the time period of Homo Sapiens).

Kalasasaya

Based on radiocarbon 14 dating, contemporary orthodoxy has the construction of Tiahuanaco after 1,500 BC., and its collapse around 1000 BC. Posnansky attacked the question astronomically – a technique which has become more popular. He found indications that that the ecliptic of the Kalasasaya structure was 23 degrees, 8 minutes, and 48 seconds when it was constructed – see Posnansky A: Tiahuanaco, the Cradle of American Man 1945. This correlates with astronomical dating of 15,000 BC according to Posnansky. But several other scientists have determined the axial shift from 30° to 23.5° to have occurred around 9,577 BC (Cataclysm: Allan D. S. and Delair J. B. 1997). This would correlate with the Sacajawea impact and the Younger Dryas. Take your pick.

Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan:- in Mexico has several step pyramids along a straight corridor which aligned with the North Pole as it existed 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. Orthodox theory sets the city's construction at 200 AD. But this is plainly nonsense. 10,178 BC the earth's axis was about 30° from today's position. The sun currently sets on this axis on 13th. August and 29th. April - 260 days apart. The calendar of much of Mesoamerica was based on a year of 260 days – the solar year at that time.

Göbekli Tepe in Turkey shows evidence of construction around 10,000 BC. It seems to consist of T-shaped pillars with carvings. Capstones would fit into hollows – as at Stonehenge – to prevent their fall from earth movements. A force of several hundred men would have been required to quarry and move the 20-60-ton stones, which suggests a well-integrated society with technical skills. No evidence of dwellings in a surrounding town have been discovered.

" _Interpretation of animal carvings on the Vulture Stone, representing astronomical constellations, record the meteoric impact which caused the Younger Dryas around 10,950BC (the Sacajawea impact). So, the stones must have been erected after that. The earliest calibrated date of the organic content of some wall plaster from one of the enclosures (Enclosure D) corresponds to an incredible 11,530 BC ± 220 years"_ (Dietrich & Schmidt; German Archaeological Institute, 2010). An ice core from Greenland pinpoints the impact of the Taurid meteor stream c.10,890BC.

Vulture Stone

Around 8,000 BC, the whole site was buried under mud, gravel, bones, stone tools etc. Several other nearby mounds consist of the same debris, bearing out the story of a great flood. They show evidence of similar constructions, but have not been excavated yet. There appears to be evidence of an attempt at reconstruction c.6.000 BC _. "It appears Göbekli Tepe was, among other things, an observatory for monitoring the night sky. One of its pillars seems to have served as a memorial to this devastating event – probably the worst day in history since the end of the ice age."_ (Sweatman M; School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh). There is considerable debate about whether the debris used to bury the site came from the site itself or was gathered from farther afield. In the latter case, it would have been intentional and required a huge workforce and a well-directed organisation. Given that the area covers some 900 square metres, 2 metres high, it seems much more likely it was the result of a great flood.

Catalhuyuk

Çatalhüyük:- also in Anatolia, flourished around the same time as the reconstruction of Göbekli Tepe 6000 BC. There are no signs of social stratification or of writing. It shows none of the superior constructions of its predecessor. It was a small town, as opposed to a temple site with mud houses entered from the roof. This would make them virtually invisible; indeed, until the excavations, the locals were unaware that the site existed. Construction in this ancient towns was inferior to anything previous. Based on Darwinism, we might have expected a gradual conceptual development – tools, society, writing, maths laws, religion etc. But Sumer, Egypt and Harappa sprang into being with fully developed writing, trades, and knowledge. That sounds more like Punctuated Equilibrium.

Enclosed mud houses entered through the roof

Climate conditions were rather different then. 13,000 – 4,000 BC sea levels rose by 400', accounting for the levées built in what is now the Shinar desert around 4,000 BC. Around the same time Sumer also built brick cities (there were no trees), which also had extensive irrigation. The social stratification – engineers, bureaucrats, bakers, scribes etc. - was taught by the Gods.

The cold of the Younger Dryas lasted more than 1,000 years, so building must have been tough. But the melting of the ice after 9,600 BC gave way to a fertile land ready for the 'first' recorded civilization in the Fertile Crescent. Sumer is supposed to have been the first civilization, but Göbekli Tepe proves otherwise. Baalbek was in existence by 8000 BC, so humans were not just hunter gatherers until the Sumerians in 5000 BC, and then Egypt, the Indus and Danube cultures later. The significance of all this is the possibility that a civilization, antedating the orthodox start of writing, mathematics, engineering, even agriculture and husbandry, must have existed before the Younger Dryas and then been passed on, as Plato has it. And that is total heresy.

Incas:- Legends in the Andes refer to a visiting god, Viracocha, who created giants to build Machu Picchu and travelled the world with two assistants, as did Osiris, teaching technical knowledge. Viracocha eventually got fed up with men and created a great flood to eliminate them – women will understand that.

Machu Picchu

The Inca Empire lasted c.1,100 - 1,500 AD.:- "The Incas lacked the use of wheeled vehicles. They lacked animals to ride and draft animals that could pull wagons and ploughs... [They] lacked the knowledge of iron and steel... Above all, they lacked a system of writing... Despite these supposed handicaps, the Incas were still able to construct one of the greatest imperial states in human history." (McEwan G: The Incas: New Perspectives, 2008). But they constructed Machu Picchu – not with mighty stone blocks, but a considerable feat nevertheless. If they could only do it, with smaller blocks, did earlier civilizations have gods to help construct their monuments?

At 9,000' altitude, agriculture was difficult, as the inhabitants of Tiahuanaco had previously found, though the Incas grew cotton and wove fine textiles. The Inca empire had an extensive road system to facilitate administration. Bureaucracy seems to have been light – commerce consisted of exchange of goods, not money. Taxes consisted therefore only of an obligation to provide labour to the government. An interesting experiment!

Egypt:- The Sacajawea impact, the last great crustal shift in c.10,900 BC, cut short the construction of the Great Pyramid. It had caused a worldwide flood and inundation of the Mediterranean basin, leaving the weathered pyramid half-built. The sea level rose over 800' (minus 364' to plus 254').

Base of the Sphinx showing flood erosion

The great civilisation of Egypt dates at the very earliest from around 5000 BC, and the orthodox story runs that the Great Pyramid was built around 2600 BC, based on the earlier models at Saqqara. Be that as it may, the pyramid has some interesting features difficult to reconcile with the story. Around and up its eroded base are shells and a 14' thick layer of marine silt dated to be around 10,000 BC. According to Jensen:- _"The great Pyramid's base is 196' above current sea level. 10,900 BC sea level was 361' lower than it is today, which means the Great Pyramid's base at that time was 557' above the then sea level. If the inundation occurred c.10,500 BC (The Sacajawea impact)) that means the ocean levels rose to the highest salt water line at 254' up the Great Pyramid plus the GP's height above sea level of 557', or a total of 811'._

If sea levels then declined to about 78' above the base of the GP, (the heavy salt encrustation in the Queen's Chamber), and stayed at that level several hundred, to a thousand or more years, that would account for the salt water weathering on the tidal notch of the Plateau. The marine artifacts, shells, and residue at the base of the Great Pyramid were carbon dated to around 12,000 BC. That specific piece of data makes the 10,900 BC. Younger Dryas impact event the date when the inundation discussed in this chapter most likely occurred. At the Sphinx and the Temple, the first twenty courses of the Great Pyramid and the boat pits, which are at lower levels, the deeper water saturation has caused extensive erosion where seawater has absorbed into the stone blocks and wall linings."

" _Like Teotihuacan, the Great Pyramid also aligned with the North Pole when building first started 12,500 BC. In the 1970s a Japanese team funded by Nissan tried to build a one-third scale model of the Great Pyramid using the methods Egyptologists claim the ancient engineers employed. They could not duplicate a single step of the process. The ancients did not have jackhammers, dynamite, loaders, tractor-trailers, cranes, hoists, pulleys, dray animals or block and tackle devices. This is the kind of equipment it would take to handle megalithic stones.... the dominant architectural design in Egypt, Sumeria, Peru, Mexico, and China was the pyramid, though science has never been able to explain why or where these peoples obtained the advanced technological knowledge to construct such edifices"_ (Hart W: Settling an Old Controversy: World-Mysteries.com 2002).

The stone blocks weigh 2 - 50 tons. To move each one would have needed a squad of 20 or more men. First, they had to be quarried – more men \- and then lifted into position – even more men. Even with a huge workforce, they couldn't have moved more than few blocks a day – there are over 2.3 million in total! Moving 10 blocks a day would take 664 years! The Pharaoh would have long been a mummy before he took up residence. To get it built within one lifetime would require a block to have been fitted every ten minutes! Please!

Construction of the Great Pyramid was begun around 10,500 BC at the latest. But work was stopped by a disastrous flood caused by the Sacajawea impact, and the pyramid was not completed until 2,500 BC. The walls in the Queen's Chamber have a line of encrustation of salt, such as usually left by evaporating sea water. A salt water line at over 255' up the side of the Great Pyramid was found during the rebuilding of Cairo by the Mamelukes in 1341 AD.)

Herodotus (484-425 BC.) remarks in his 'Histories' - "I observed that there were sea shells upon the hills, and calcified high on the carved edifice itself [the Great Pyramid] ... and that salt exuded from the soil to such an extent as even to injure the pyramids."

The pyramid was only half built when Khufu came to power. It gave him the opportunity to immortalise himself by completing his ancestors' work as a tomb to his own glory. He ordered a sarcophagus to be installed ready for him (the approach passage to the King's Chamber is too narrow for the sarcophagus to have been put in later – it had to have been installed first and then the building to be finished. But the sarcophagus itself is either crudely carved or badly weathered. No Pharaoh would have accepted such a thing. So, was it there already? What about the elaborate wall décor that always accompanies a royal entombment? There wasn't any! Could the tomb builders have constructed such an engineering marvel but totally lacked artistic ability? Um.

There are three open boat-pits, one still containing timbers, that accord with the current orthodoxy of the re-channelling of the Nile to bring building materials for the final completion. The whole operation would have had to operate like clockwork – stones would have had to arrive at the pyramid on schedule. The river would have had to be rediverted for the two later pyramids. Was it? It all ceased when the Great Pyramid was completed! There is no record of such a superb organisation having been utilised for some other purpose. Business doesn't work like that.

The whole Khufu story sounds iffy. Rebuilding of the pyramid started around 2600 BC with Imhotep, a mysterious figure who received regular libations – libations yet! - for a mere human architect.....? Who taught him his considerable architectural skills in those early days? Why are there no contemporary pictorial representations of a pyramid? Why is there no textual information on the building of a pyramid or Sphinx?

Hebrew scriptures have the story of great teachers, like so many other cultures:-

1 Enoch 8:1 _'And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways.'_

' _Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraqijal astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon.'_

It's interesting that man seems to have got better advice from the Serpent and Enoch's angels, or the Babylonian gods, than from anywhere else. But how did such disparate cultures share so many traditions in common? Could they have shared knowledge from a previous civilization? Indications of early and great civilisations may be found all over the world. Stonehenge seems to be a sacred site, although it is not aligned to the current north pole. But around 11,000 BC it would have been as the pole was then. The current orthodox dating for Stonehenge is 3,000BC.

The Great Flood

Great floods occurred several times before and during the span of human history.

Many early civilizations showed up within a few hundred miles of the Black Sea. A remnant of the vast Tethys Sea (55 million years ago), by the time of the last great glaciation (20,000 years ago) it was just a freshwater lake. It still receives some fresh water from the Caspian, but salt water from the Sea of Marmara. The lower levels are contaminated with H2S, and are dead. Its connection to the Mediterranean may date from around 5,500BC as Ryan and Pitman suggested in 1997.

A study by UNESCO in 2005 suggests that the connection to the Mediterranean and ultimately the salt waters of the Atlantic was made 9,000 – 8,000 BC). This theory might accord with the results of the Sacajawea impact and bursting of lake Agassiz from the Younger Dryas. The resulting massive rise in sea level eventually broke through the Gibraltar barrier to the Mediterranean valley. The valley water level followed inexorably, causing civilizations to be uprooted, the flooding of the Black Sea and the creation of the Bosporus Strait. The Great Pyramid was begun c.10,000 BC but abandoned.

Mediterranean before Gibraltar

Apart from the steady flooding of coastal lands (20'-30' per annum, the climate was changeable and extreme. (We shall soon have these experiences ourselves). The early Sumerians were driven from their lands by a flood c.6,000 BC and fled like everyone else to higher ground.

Mediterranean starts to fill

Another likely candidate is the Storegga event c.5,500BC which swamped the coasts of Europe, causing a catastrophic deluge through the new Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean.

"A junior researcher on the sea-floor coring & mapping expedition of the late `60s that discovered the mother of all floods, the Gibraltar waterfall of some five-million years ago which re-filled the Mediterranean Basin - it had been isolated from the Atlantic several million years before by the collision of North Africa and Spain and was completely desiccated. Imagine what a furnace that must have been, with an average depth of almost a mile and the Calypso Deep over three miles deep! And then a waterfall that refilled the basin in less than a century and probably made the ground shake for a thousand miles. If any of our hominid ancestors were in North Africa by then they must have been terrified. a gigantic flood 7,600 years ago in what is today the Black Sea.

Using sound waves and coring devices to probe the sea floor, William Ryan and Walter Pitman revealed clear evidence that this inland body of water had once been a vast freshwater lake lying hundreds of feet below the level of the world's rising oceans. Sophisticated dating techniques confirmed that 7,600 years ago the mounting seas had burst through the narrow Bosporus valley, and the salt water of the Mediterranean had poured into the lake with unimaginable force, racing over beaches and up rivers, destroying or chasing all life before it. The rim of the lake, which had served as an oasis, a Garden of Eden for farms and villages in a vast region of semi-desert, became a sea of death. The people fled, dispersing their languages, genes, and memories. Ryan and Pitman imagine that this event propelled the migrations that may have spread agriculture into Europe and started the Semites, the Proto-Indo Europeans and the pre-dynastic Egyptians, among others, on their way." (Ryan W and Pitman W: 'About the Event that changed History' 2000).

Racial memories of past events occur in the literature of many civilisations past and present. 'By the word of God, the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished (2 Pet 3:5-7 KJV). In Genesis 1:2 the Earth is said to be a lifeless and uninhabited planet, drifting in the cold and darkness of the chaotic remains of the old universe. The planet is submerged in water. (This was in fact true, but how could the Jewish author of Genesis have known about prehistory?) An ancient Chinese text gives the year of the flood as 2,989 BC. The Flood features in 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' (2,750 C). Plato also mentions the flood in his 'Timaeus'.

Return to The End of Evolution
Chapter VI. Past extinctions

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that, if 1% of the 2 million species go extinct annually, over 10,000 species will have gone extinct this past year.

Until the Industrial Revolution, it was less than 20/year. There are around 2 million species today. But the annual rate of extinction is not arithmetic – a straight line progression; rather it is a geometric/exponential progression – an upward curve. This means that after a few years the rate rockets faster every year, with too little time left to do anything about it. By the time you finish reading this book, at least one will have gone extinct. And during your following book maybe 2 etc. That's 2+4+4 = 18 in just a few weeks! And these figures are ridiculously conservative.

There seems to have been a major change in climate. That long ago, no impact marks or great magmatic effusions have been detected. The causes may have been celestial flybys and also a drop in sea levels. Extinctions occurred in two phases – early and late. Some 85% of marine species disappeared in total.

Devonian 375-359 million years ago

Judging by the widespread distribution of iridium, tektites and shocked quartz, a major impact in Sweden started a mass extinction at the end of the Devonian. But prior to that, other extinctions had proceeded in distinct pulses over the whole period. During this time, there were major changes in climate, as evidence by changes in both marine oxygen and carbon levels. Plant life burgeoned in the first forests, died and was buried in layers. This transference of carbon from atmospheric CO2 to rotting matter (ready to be compressed into coal later), reduced atmospheric CO2 to a mere fifth. The ice returned and reduced marine life - fish and coral reefs – by 50%.

Karoo 360 – 260 million years ago

 The climate showed the same cycle of changes as before. Ice began to increase along with the Earth's albedo as CO2 levels decreased – the growth in vegetation and the rise of the Himalayas absorbed most of the atmospheric CO2. Worldwide cooler summers proved insufficient to melt each glacial advance. As more and more ice accumulated, layers of rotting vegetation were converted into coal. Then the pendulum swung back. The extreme cold drastically reduced the growth of vegetation – less CO2 absorbed resulted in the oxygen levels increasing and greenhouse warming. With the recovery of plant life came a wave of new giant fauna. One dragonfly had a wingspan of 25"!

Late Permian - 251 million years ago

This extinction over the supercontinent of Gondwana is known as "The Great Dying." Over 97% of all marine species and over 70% of terrestrial vertebrates - amphibians and reptiles became extinct – 57% of insects and plant life too. A significant drop in photosynthesis is evidenced by a change in carbon isotopes.

Whether there was an impact that set the whole thing off is debatable. There was an impact around this time– the Wilkes Land crater in Antarctica, the energy release travelling round the core to the opposite end of the Pangaeal globe - at present Siberia. But a meteor might be expected to have produce a worldwide dusting containing Iridium – there is no such layer at this event. A comet would have spread water. What possibly caused the actual extinctions was a massive mantle plume event in Siberia.

Pressure from the plume of magma suddenly penetrated the crust, leading to disastrous climatic events - wildfires and a continual greenhouse effect set off by an unfolding release of methane from hydrates in the sea floor. The eruption itself was continual for maybe a million years in western Siberia and formed the Siberian Traps – a continual outpouring of flood basalts that cover 2.7 million square miles in area with a volume of 1 million cubic miles – unimaginable. The basalt and greenhouse effect together produced ocean temperatures exceeding 40°C – lethal for marine life, since the warming water lost 80% of its oxygen.

End Triassic – 200 million years ago

After the Triassic extinction, life stood still for 8 million years before new classes of both flora and fauna appeared – but from what? Considering the mass extinction of insects at the end of the Permian, the explosion of flowering plants in the following Triassic 250 million years ago is noteworthy. Previously, angiosperms had been pollinated by beetles. The new flowering plants needed new insects – co-evolution? It was a problem Darwin himself couldn't explain. Dinosaurs had first appeared in the early Triassic, though reptiles and amphibians were the dominant land animals for half a million years. The mass extinction of the late Triassic 201 million years ago modified that. Many of the early dinosaurs died out and in total about 76% of all terrestrial and marine life species.

Again, the extinction was caused by massive eruptions of flood basalts lasting more than half a million years along the undersea rift zone resulting from the splitting up of Pangaea itself. SO2 and CO2 produced both a greenhouse effect, acidified oceans and raised atmospheric and marine temperatures. Methane, again released from marine hydrates as the sea warmed, would have intensified the effect.

End Cretaceous KT event – 66 million years ago

The Chicxulub asteroid that produced a large crater on the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago is usually blamed for extinguishing the dinosaurs. The asteroid hit at an angle of around 25° causing a pole shift toward the Northwest. It must have been catastrophic, with iridium and carbon in the worldwide resulting dust. So extensive is the carbon that wild fires must have consumed almost all of the world's forests. The crater is 120 miles wide and 20 miles deep – this from an asteroid 9 miles wide, travelling at 40,000 miles per hour. Debris was shot into the outer atmosphere – nuclear winter. The asteroid was lucky – it was vaporised, like animals nearby. As the heat spread round the globe, more distant animals simply roasted, and at the antipodes they starved. Massive floods piled vegetation, animals and sediments them into heaps. In Florida, you can still mine the bone deposits for phosphorus.

_"For the first few hours after the impact, rocky debris would have fallen back into the high atmosphere, creating a storm of glowing fireballs in the sky. The radiant energy from these would have heated the surface to boiling temperatures for some minutes, and would have been enough to kill many animals and plants on the surface. However, in regions of heavy rainstorms or snowstorms, these organisms would have survived the first few hours."_ (Cowen R: History of Life 2000)

But it wasn't the only cause. In what is now Western India volcanism had recently begun to pour out basaltic lava 66.25 million years ago. The Deccan Traps – flat beds of basalt – built up over 5 million years. They now cover over 200,000 square miles well over a mile thick, though this is a fraction of their original extent. Half lies under the Indian Ocean. Heat and expelled gases changed the global climate. At this point, it may be worth noting that half of the 1,500 or so billion tonnes of CO2 produced since the beginning of the industrial revolution are still in the atmosphere. We have caused the unprecedentedly rapid rise in global temperatures ourselves!

Eocene-Oligocene - 34 million years ago

An extinction at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary affected marine organisms more than terrestrial animals. It occurred at a time of major climatic change, not obviously linked with any single major impact or any major volcanic event. In the middle Eocene, the separation of Antarctica and Australia created a deep-water passage between those two continents, creating the circum-Antarctic Current. This changed oceanic circulation patterns and global heat transport, resulting in a global cooling event observed at the end of the Eocene.
Miocene 24 million years ago

A short-lived warming was followed by a prolonged period of cooling. A period of orogenesis produced significant alterations in atmospheric circulation, affecting also corresponding oceanic currents. At the same time CO2 levels declined. 34 million years ago, Antarctica began its ice build-up. Around 14 million years ago, it was frozen solid as a result of the rise of the Himalayas, whose weathering absorbed so much CO2. Temperatures in the Antarctic went into a sudden decline – a drop of at least 80ºC. By 18 million years ago, desertification had set in, producing savannahs with grazing horses.

Pliocene

Several apparently catastrophic sea level fluctuations ravaged coastal areas. Over a third of marine animals disappeared in this extinction event 3 million years ago. That said, around a quarter of modern fauna appeared at the same time. Rather a conundrum.

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene Epoch began about 2.6 million years ago and lasted until the end of the Younger Dryas - about 9,600 BC. The epoch was characterised by periodic ice sheets covering mainly the northern hemisphere, though Antarctica froze again. The climate was dry worldwide – most of Earth's water was ice - and temperatures were up to 10°C lower than today. As things warmed up from the South, forests began to reappear and later savannahs, and the edge of the retreating ice produced tundra.

Many species of larger mammals – mammoth, sabre-tooth, giant bears - simply starved and became extinct. Those that hung on were hunted to extinction by Homo Erectus, Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, who appeared at the end of the epoch. If that weren't cause enough, research now suggests either disturbances from Venus/Mars flybys, or perhaps the cometary impact which heralded the Younger Dryas put the coup de grace on the megafauna and almost on humanity too. Even so, primitive Stone Age cultures managed to survive into the Holocene as hunter-gatherers – See Human History.

Extinctions may be due to any one cause or a combination. It's certainly not Darwinian evolution.

Recent Ice Ages

UK Temperatures have varied during the last two millennia as solar radiation fluctuated. There was a cold period around 500 AD which resulted in colonisation of Britain from the Continent. Such can't be claimed for the Norman invasion, although it wasn't much warmer then. The Vikings had two centuries previously started to look for somewhere warmer to live, and had taken over Normandy. By William's time, they had reached North America. Things got worse in 14th century: not just the cold but increased rainfall. Crops were affected and often neglected. The Black Death (1348-9) in Europe made a bad situation even worse. Lords demanded the same level of return as before from a reduced population.

The Peasants' Revolt in 1381 was inevitable. They were cozened into submission by the government – much as we are today. In North America the original Viking settlements gave up in 15th century as pack ice increased. The 16th and 17th century Ice Fairs on the rivers in Northern Europe and even on the Thames have been immortalised in paintings. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) devastated the population of Europe, and the destitute found the climate would finish them off. In 18th century, the sea itself in New York harbour could freeze, though Boston was warm enough for a party, so they say. But relief was on the way in the form of the Industrial Revolution and its warming effect on the atmosphere. And now we even have oil-powered central heating. All of which leads to..... the 6th extinction before 2100 AD - in your lifetime!

_"By the end of the century, oceans will hold enough carbon to launch a mass extermination of species in the future."_ Rothman D. (MIT).

_"As the North Atlantic began to warm near the end of the Little Ice Age, freshwater disrupted the system, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). During the last ice age, some big changes in Amoc/Gulf Stream led to winter temperatures changing by 5-10°C in as short a time as one to three years, with major consequences for the weather over the land masses bordering the Atlantic. The [current] climate models don't predict [an Amoc shutdown] is going to happen in the future – the problem is how certain are we it is not going to happen? It is one of these tipping points that is relatively low probability, but high impact.":_ Caesar L. (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research).

Changes in the global climate - caused by ourselves or not – are even now producing the next extinction. Fish stocks have declined markedly – 90% of fish stocks are overfished since 1960 - less fish means pressure on food production and eventually civil unrest. Tigers, apes and lions are likely to disappear in the next 15 years. The most optimistic predictions expect probably a quarter of mammalian life and some 50% of all life to become extinct by 2100. THIS IS OPTIMISTIC.

_"Threats to the natural world are multiplying. Species are going extinct at an alarming rate. Unless we move quickly to protect global biodiversity, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth.":_ Wilson E: Harvard University Press. He estimated the loss at 27,000 species annually! The rate of extinction of vegetation is now over 500 times greater than before the industrial revolution. Fewer plants - less oxygen – less food. One National Geographic article announced that 50% of life forms will be extinct by 2100, though with the geometric progression of rising temperatures, this is likely to happen very much sooner.

Catastrophes destroy life, but not just catastrophes. It's not always possible to point to a specific reason – some life forms seem just to fade away. Some species - corals, mussels, crabs - have been here for millions of years. But individual members of a species have an inbuilt extinction programme; threescore and ten for us, although this is now being artificially extended. Perhaps a species as a whole has such a predetermined programme. If so, are we designed to be the architects of our own extinction? Perhaps now it's our time – and everything else's?

When CO2 dissolves into the ocean, life on Earth is at risk. It's happening again as at the end of the Permian. Professor Rothman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that by the end of the century at the latest, the oceans will be sufficiently acidic to result in mass extermination.

Earth is already on the way to its sixth mass extinction. You'll experience it coming in your own lifetime. It isn't just climate change; nuclear defences and volcanism will play their part. Nothing otherwise will prevent the inexorable growth in population.

Food shortages, the hole in the ozone layer, lack of fresh water, disease and air pollution are merely symptoms of the real problem. Banning diesel cars is just a political ploy to keep the electorate quiet. It's overpopulation that will finish us off. It has been estimated that 4 billion would be the optimal population for the planet. We need a drastic cut in our numbers by half. No government would dare to say such a thing, so the juggernaut is unstoppable.

The best thing to happen to Europe would be a pandemic. It would preserve the environment but remove the basic problem. By 1381 Europe had reached the maximum population level for the technology available. The Black Death thinned the herd and led to new economic opportunities and social mobility, though not without repression from those wedded to their own interests – the Peasants' Revolt. Humans are unlikely survive much longer unless there is a mass extinction – of humans. Malthus got it right!

The media carry news stories of a possible colonisation of the Moon and Mars. Why would humanity flourish there? Vast sums go into preparation for it \- or do they? Governments and the super-rich are alternatively constructing shelters on Earth - from what? The shelters include storage of seeds for replanting - after what? Work it out for yourself, not that it matters; there's nothing you or anyone else can do about it anyway....

Return to The End of Evolution
Chapter VII. Conclusions and further information

This chapter contains further or expanded information/thoughts on topics already discussed:-

Reality, Alternative realities, Climate change, Confirmation bias, Consciousness, Creation/Design, Goldilocks, Life, Perception, Time, the Coming Extinction.

Reality

At this point, I should say I'm not a deist. I am not upholding the divine creation theory; I'm just interested in exploring the various theories about the existence of the universe and even of reality.

All particles of matter have spatial properties – mass, size position etc. You've heard of the Uncertainty Principle. Electrons hurtle round at a constant speed the nucleus of an atom, thus changing their position. You can measure both speed and position, but not at the same time. The measurement is made with light, and this affects the electron, If you try to measure the position of the electron, that alters its speed and vice versa. So what? The point is that, until you actually try to observe the properties of the electron, you can't say anything definite about them. Only when you observe/measure them can you say anything definite - only then do they become real!

At the quantum level, particles exist only as "waves of probability", according to Max Born. Unobserved particles are just possibilities. Only when you do the experiment do they come to have real existence. The experimenter's intentions themselves make a possibility real. Born said, "Any answers obtained through experiment depend to a large extent on the questions that are asked. Ask an electron whether it is a wave or a particle and it will answer "yes" to both questions."

The properties are dependent on the observer. If you observe them one way, you'll get one result; if you observe them another, you'll get a different conclusion. Your future conclusion depends on your prior choice. B leads to C. But B depends upon A. If you don't choose A in the first place, B won't exist and neither will C. This has huge ramifications. You can't say anything exists until you observe it. After all, it may not exist _. "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."_ (John Archibald Wheeler).

This is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; it suggests that at the quantum level a particle does not have properties in the real world until you observe it. Its future depends on your choice – it may be 'up' or 'down'. It can have two futures – do they both exist in parallel worlds? If so, at every decision point the universe has to decide to split into one of two probabilities.

Any action that has more than one possible result produces more than one probable universe. There could therefore even be an infinite number of parallel universes. Since you have chosen an outcome but could have chosen any other, this implies infinite copies of you. These copies are physically identical, but may have very different personalities resulting from separate outcomes. If the number of alternative realities is infinite, what you do next will be replicated an infinite number of times. The imagination boggles. Each universe must have an observer, of course.

The world exists because you observe/know about it. If a tree falls in a forest, it makes no sound unless there is an observer. But, if there is no observer, it doesn't even fall! A tree which falls in a forest only makes a sound if there is someone there to hear it. Does this necessitate something being already there to be observed? Is there a basic substrate on which observers operate?

_"There was a young man who said, "God,  
Must think it exceedingly odd  
If he finds that this tree  
Continues to be  
When there's no one about in the Quad"_

REPLY:  
_"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd:  
I am always about in the Quad  
And that's why the tree  
Continues to be,  
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God._

Some people go through life half asleep, and know little of the world. For them not much exists. Ah, but surely matter must exist even if you don't observe it. And the reply is that nothing (no statements about any property of matter) can be made until they are measured/observed. Your future reality does not exist until you make a choice. When you make a choice to determine your future, you make the choice depending on your past. Your past fortunes/habits determine your future ones; those determine your past ones

But does that mean that the alternatives that you could have chosen do not exist? Or do they continue to play out as alternative realities/universes? This is the view of the physicist Hugh Everett III, His 'Other Worlds' theory holds that if there are several possible outcomes, all of those outcomes go on to exist in alternative universes. The corollary is that all events in all such alternative universes must be observed; otherwise they can't happen. Who observes them? It's the version of you that exists as an observer in each universe. So are there n realities which may interact with yours?

In effect, all of the possible outcomes at point zero and its decedents (point 2, point 3 etc.) exist as theoretical probabilities. But in fact, of the choices at point zero only one and its subsequent universe is decided by the observer. It becomes reality for that observer, and all the fine tunings/Universal Constants now conform. There are still roses, gin, and murder because these are baggage the observer brings with him. Is this observed reality the only/true reality? It is for him.

If we now look at the observer who has progressed from point zero to point 9000, looking back, we can see that we did not in fact have a choice at point zero. Here we are at point 9000, which absolutely necessitates the choice we made at point zero, or we would not have got here. We would have arrived at somewhere else. Either the choices we make are predetermined, or there are myriad independent universes, which occasionally interact with ours. But for our realities to exist, we observers are absolutely essential. Things happen to us because they must; they are part of our programme. It also explains why our future is predictable – because we made various choices in the past which constrain the future probabilities. We are what we were born to be, and life is at least to some extent determined.

Does this imply that there must be some kind of coordination of observations, and that this must include all the observations made at any time everywhere in the universe? If nothing exists until it's observed, this suggests that nothing in the universe could exist without intelligent observers. Are the observations of all observers co-ordinated? What happens to all our knowledge when we die? It jibes with reason to suppose that it just vanishes. What's the point of living? Come to that what's the point of having progeny and then progeny and progeny ad infinitum?

Experiences only make sense in a context. Man A may recall a crime scene as transitory; man B as harrowing. Can both observations be regarded as true? /that question presupposes that there can only be one truth – truth is unitary. Does the crime scene analogy suggest differently? We would usually resolve such testimonies into one that is most probable ie. truth would consist of n half-truths ie. a probability. Can truth be either unitary for multiple? Man A and man B occupy different realities which intersect with each other – see 'Alternative Realities'.

Reality is a programme which creates a living hologram. The hologram consists of n miniatures of itself, each of which creates a hologram. The mind that controls each hologram is programmed to believe it is 'real'. The components/patterns of each hologram exist because they are an integral part of the pattern of that particular hologram – they must exist. Matter itself is not conscious and cannot create such holograms, although it can spontaneously produce coherent structures out of chaos - crystals of snow for example- again based on patterning.

This is an example of Synchronicity - something made it happen! I was using the sewing machine and had just finished the task. Going to snip off the loose ends, I noticed one was missing - the lower thread It must have broken, though fortunately it hadn't left the run incomplete. But it hadn't broken; it had run out at the very last stitch. That's synchronicity. Such fine timing shows intention!

We all live in our own hologram - a three-dimensional illusion, patterns within a greater illusion. But the way we each perceiver things determines our world/reality/hologram. But the holograms are illusory; the controlling mind creates the hologram, believing its experiences and memories to be real. A pattern that does not relate to/connect with anything else does not exist for the controlling mind. We go through life unable to comprehend concepts/ experiences/memories without sufficient prior experience of/exposure to them. Things which don't fit in with our view/experience of life are edited out/forgotten. And our hologram is just a copy of the universe/reality. We are the creator of our universe, at least according to this theory.

" _The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it"._ (Marcus Aurelius). So the things we perceive are actually just ideas in the mind. What we hear/see/taste etc., we interpret in terms of our view/idea/experience of the world. We can never say that we have a true grasp of a reality – merely whether it makes sense. Reality is like a book – it depends on your interpretation. _"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."_ (Oscar Wilde)

The patterns of our universe/reality are based on mathematical constants. A plant may seem to have a random leaf pattern, but it follows specific mathematical formulae. Each level – universe, the Earth, human life, civilisation, Camembert, bacteria etc. is made up of those patterns germane to it. Free will is just such an illusion. At any moment when you have a choice (Schrödinger's cat, for example), the universe theoretically splits - you create two or more realities, and you exist in each hologram. It is said that the only limitations we have are the choices we make. But each choice produces a new pattern/hologram. On the personal level, it's the way our brains are patterned/constructed that determines our perceptions – and hence our reality. We are predisposed to impose order; Prometheus created man out of clay – order from chaos. Any answer/meaning is better than no answer; therefore, we invent connections.

Physical reality consists of matter, or does it? We perceive it as information from our senses. We believe the world to consist of what five senses tell us. Our eyes ears, nose etc. send electrical signals to a receiving centre in the brain, which then proceeds to an interpretation. But we don't in fact perceive the sound of the tree falling in the forest; we perceive impulses which we put together to represent the sound. Did the tree in fact make a sound? Was there in fact a tree? We infer so. We don't perceive the actual glory of the sun on a wet road – just electrical impulses from our sensory apparatus. Light itself never reaches the brain.

A perception exists only inside our brain, and we believe it to be the external world. Why wouldn't we? But it's only a representation. You hear a humming noise – is it the TV, the phone, the computer? You think one, your companion another – your perception is just an interpretation. _"No one can ever know whether his sensation of red or of Middle C is the same as another man's."_ (Barnett L: The Universe and Dr Einstein 1948). How could we possibly know what 'red' is just from an electrical impulse? Because we've been taught to make that interpretation given that stimulus. We can only assume that our interpretations are copies of real physical phenomena. Things we experience from the external world or in our dreams are constructs – just constructs.

A bunch of wavelengths of light are transformed into electrical stimuli which the brain interprets as red. Are there actually any colours in the external world? Presumably so, or those particular wavelengths would not have been generated. The sky is seen as blue because that is the interpretation given to that combination of wavelengths. Using hypnosis, you can get a man to perceive all apples as blue. When we dream, we have experiences that seem totally real, but they're just perceptions based on memories. So, there's no real difference between material perceptions and dreams. Both are experienced in the brain and interpreted by the mind/self. Is this all there is to reality?

This mind/'I'/self is not the brain itself. The brain is part of the body, the whole of which is merely a perception. The brain merely acts as a recording device, processing information for the mind to view on the screen of the mind. The brain is not conscious of its own existence; it's only an arrangement of cells. There's nothing within the brain to perceive/interpret/experience anything. The organising principle is non-material.

Is there actually an external world at all? It seems that, if there weren't, there would be nothing to perceive. But this proves nothing; we can perceive the sky in dreams too. What is the stimulus for that? We see blue not because the sky has a material existence, but because it's a quality we ascribe to a concept/interpretation in our minds.

When faced with something outside our experience, it is difficult to perceive/comprehend/interpret it – e.g. modern art or politics for the man in the street. For example – a child is taken out one night to see the constellations. He is told how far away they are – even farther than Wigan! The child years later becomes blind. When taken out at night now, he perceives no stars. He can infer their existence from memory, perhaps recall one of the constellations, but he has no proof that they exist. Using our senses, we can never reach the matter itself - if indeed it exists.

The universe is expanding, isn't it? If it didn't exist, it couldn't be expanding, could it? But a hundred years ago we observed it not to be expanding. It is expanding now because we set out to find if it is expanding. The answer you get with quantum experiments depends on what you think you're looking for. But can this be true of the expanding universe? Not if you subscribe to materialist philosophy – matter exists with its observed properties because it constitutes reality.

If there really is a material universe for us to perceive, it can't simply consist of atoms which joined up by chance; it has to have been constructed/created. That means it doesn't exist because it must exist: it exists because it is somehow maintained. A film is experienced only because the projectionist maintains it. If the universe is subject to change, this change must therefore be designed by the maintainer. For us, the world we know is designed/interpreted in our minds. And each man's world is real only to himself. My world is not Mike's world, and we could come to blows over our interpretations. Must there be a material substrate to be interpreted, or just a mental construct?

Return to Chapter VII

Alternative realities

You catch the train or you don't - the universe splits into two. Any action that has more than one possible result produces a split in the universe. When an event can have different outcomes, all of them exist in real time in alternative universes. Ipso facto, there may be an infinite number of universes and infinite copies of each person. But they're all probabilities – like our own universe. These probable universes can only 'exist' if the events in them are observed.

The world exists because you observe/know about it. If a tree falls in a forest, it makes no sound unless there is an observer. But, if there is no observer, it doesn't even fall! Some people go through life half asleep, and know little of the world. For them not much exists. Ah, but surely matter must exist even if you don't see it. And the reply is that nothing (no statements about any property of matter) can be made until they are measured/observed. Your future/view of reality does not exist until you make a choice. When you make a choice to determine your future, you make the choice depending on your past. Your past fortunes/habits determine your future ones. Equally, what you do in the future necessitates your having done something in the past that leads to it. The two events are perspectives of the same picture.

But does that mean that the alternatives that you could have chosen do not exist? Or do they continue to play out as alternative realities/universes? The problem is that you can't just apply statistical analyses to predict any of this. Mathematics applies to non-living operations – a "death-centered view of nature." (not my quote). When life enters the equation, Newton's view of the universe as a clockwork mechanism does not apply.

So, are there n realities which may interact with yours? This might explain why we sometimes come across someone who reminds us strongly of a person in our past - ie that we have already encountered – an experience we have already created. It also explains why our future is semi-predictable – because we made various choices in the past which constrain the future probabilities. We are what we were born to be, and life is at least to some extent determined.

For any observer, all of the possible outcomes at point zero and their decedents (point 2, point 3) exist as theoretical probabilities. But of the choices at point zero in fact only one and its subsequent universe is decided by the observer. It becomes reality for that observer, and all the fine tunings/Universal Constants now conform. There are still roses, gin, and murder because these are baggage the observer brings with him. Is this observed reality the only/true reality? A tree which falls in a forest only makes a sound if there is someone there to hear it. Doesn't this necessitate a forest being already there to be observed? Is there a basic substrate on which observers operate?

We should not be surprised at the unimaginable odds against our completely ordered universe, for if it were not completely ordered, we wouldn't be here to be surprised about it! Note:- if there is an infinite number of universes, it's not surprising ours is fine-tuned for us; it's in fact inevitable that it exists. The Many Worlds theory holds that everything happening here and now is also happening elsewhere. The Multi-worlds theory suggests that many universes exist, each with different laws of physics; like bubbles produced at the beginning.

If we now look at our observer who has progressed from point zero to point 9000, looking back, we can see that he did not in fact have a choice at point zero. Here we are at point 9000, which absolutely necessitates the choice we made at point zero, or we would not have got here. We would have arrived at somewhere else. Either the choices we make are predetermined, or there are myriad independent universes, which occasionally interact with ours. But for our reality to exist, we observers are absolutely essential. Things happen to us because they must; they are part of our programme.

Well, this same model also leads to the suspicion that there must be some kind of coordination of observations, and that this must include all the observations made at any time everywhere in the Universe. If no probability exists until it's observed, this suggests that nothing in the Universe could exist without intelligent observers. Are the observations of all observers coordinated? What happens to all our knowledge when we die? It jibes with reason to suppose that it just vanishes. What's the point of living? Come to that what's the point of having progeny and then progeny and progeny ad infinitum?

One answer might be that there is a being which doesn't understand itself (read Krishnamurti). Human lives are therefore necessary feelers/programmes to explore 'reality'/'It'. If humans are necessary, what about pigeons or bacteria? Experiences only make sense in a context. One man may recall a crime scene as transitory; another as harrowing. Can both observations be regarded as true? That question presupposes that 'Truth' exists – perhaps in Plato's 'Forms'. Does the crime scene analogy suggest differently? We would usually resolve such testimonies into one that is most probable i.e. truth would consist of n half-truths.

We can't see other realities beyond our current existence because we can only perceive what our brain allows us to perceive. Our mind set allows us to fill in the gaps so that we perceive sequential time, where an effect follows a previous cause. In other words, things in the Universe appear different from one another because we are here to differentiate between them. But some of us have poor eyesight, and none of us can't really see beyond the next meal, payday, or domestic row. What stops the Universe collapsing into a chaotic mess of perceptual disagreements? Quantum Physics, appears to be saying that, although at the quantum level all is chaotic, there is some entity/principle out there that sees everything, knows everything and does everything, and at some level decides what reality should look like.  
Sound familiar?

One hypothesis holds there is a transcendent observer, who has immediate and simultaneous awareness of every point of perception and maintains all probabilities in a single coherent reality. It would have to do it for all possible universes of course. This super-observer would uphold laws and constants of physics, which could have been so different at the Big Bang. Or would it? Matter/reality is a kind of reflection or mirror of the mind from which it sprang. Such a super-observer would itself be non-material. It would not reflect Newtonian physics; but laws and constants are themselves non- material. It sounds illogical that matter could be created from non-matter.

Return to Chapter VII

Climate change

There have been five mass extinctions of species. These extinctions were the result of uncontrollable events such as catastrophic volcanism, celestial impacts, floods etc. The current one, the fastest, differs in that is controllable. We are in fact controlling it by lending a helping hand!

The Earth is a living organism - like an ants' nest. If one part of its anatomy fails, the whole is unsustainable. If the Earth could have a medical check-up, the diagnosis would probably be terminal – at least from the human point of view. The future dominant species could well see it differently.

The present and future climate changes will exacerbate existing problems - desertification, food production, water scarcity, destructive weather etc., which will impact health, travel, and world economy – see recent weather events in the American South, Australia, California. It has been predicted that tropical regions will get cooler and drier, with temperate regions seeing the opposite. Destructive as that may be, it pales beside the certainty that large areas will be flooded. We have seen that sea levels have fluctuated alarmingly in the past. The disappearance of Arctic ice is bad enough; if the Greenland ice mass goes, followed by Antarctica, sea levels may well rise well over 300'. A larger sea area means greater evaporation, followed by heavy precipitation.

Salt water will penetrate into rivers and aquifers as sea level rises, producing international conflicts. Frequent high temperatures and droughts will mean less cereals. Remember the American Dust Bowl of 1930s and the Spanish droughts in 1993 and 2018 decimating the grape harvest. The price of such basic necessities as sugar, wheat, wool, rice, corn, cotton, booze etc. will rocket as deliveries to shops slow down. Flooding of coastal plains will affect the production and delivery of energy from nuclear power plants and other industries heavily dependent on an unlimited water supply. But bacteria will benefit, and probably some insects. For a while, pharmaceutical companies will do well with pesticides and antibiotics, not that they don't already.

Remember the Younger Dryas? Siberia and Alaska were warmer before 9,600 BC. But then there was a crustal displacement from an oblique impact. As rest of the world warmed later, the mass of melt water caused a sudden halt in the Gulf Stream. That produced another ice age lasting 1,300 years and the 'Great Flood'. When the Gulf Stream changes, the corresponding Jet Stream also changes - massive weather disruptions. People will, of course continue to live in their homes, trusting that all will be well. They won't have any water but not because of drought. Most of western Europe has water pipes and drainpipes from years ago buried shallowly. Once the terrain freezes, it will stay frozen – pipes and all. London has the same latitude as Churchill, Manitoba and Moscow, but they have the infrastructure and can cope with brutal winters. British roads are too narrow to snowplough continually.

Society throughout Europe will be disrupted as millions from Africa and the Middle East are forced from their homes. Unwanted by the EU, what are they likely to do? Less fresh water means more competition - and what will animals do? None of this will be a temporary problem \- there will be a time-lag effect. The British government will appoint a royal commission and do too little too late. Millions of people will have to leave Britain – for Syria perhaps!

" _Humanity that was wont to conquer others hath made a shameful conquest of itself"_ ('Richard II'). But it's true. Homo Sapiens may have appeared around 200,000 years ago and, despite the decimation by Mt. Tambora, had increased to a few million by some 80,000 years ago. Having survived the harsh Pleistocene climate, he began to flourish in the milder Holocene. "Insatiate cormorant, consuming means, soon preys upon itself".

Since then, humankind has managed to drive to extinction half the large animal species as well as deforesting Europe, Central America, South America etc. for agriculture. After the Black Death in 1348, his numbers blossomed to a billion in time for the Industrial Revolution. The Great War barely made a scratch in numbers, so the 2nd World War could draw on two billion. Much baby booming gave us three billion, rising to a current seven. With an unprecedented rise in levels of greenhouse gases from the Industrial Revolution, we now have global warming and sea level rises. _"It won't be long-yeah-long-yeah."_

We are fed poppycock about the necessity to avoid a tipping point. As far as I can determine, we have passed that already. Either governments don't want to accept new data, or they just want to keep the electorate quiet. After all, the main objective of governments is to survive! We believe the information we're fed - the UN will fix it at one of their banquets perhaps. But the current temperature increase is nearly 2%. "Oh dear, well we must adapt, and after all there are advantages."

Poppycock. The progression will not be a straight line: it will be geometrical – a sharp upward curve. The fundamental problem is rising demand. No one will face, or even admit, the basic cause of the coming disaster – too many people, and many more to come. That will kill our civilisation. Malthus was right, although he approved of Darwin and proposed a theory of evolution by the process of natural selection. This would include war, but war in fact weeds out the fittest!

Return to Chapter VII

Confirmation bias

The scientific community is subject to peer pressure. 'Publish or perish' is a prerequisite for career success. But you can only publish work which editors and your colleagues approve of. Scientists aren't holy; they've fought many battles to get where they are, and aren't about to have the boat rocked. Alternative theories to evolution are particularly anathema. But consensus does not determine what is true; merely what is currently acceptable.

Science proceeds by finding a comfortable theory, ignoring any contradictory evidence, and relentlessly squashing any contrary opinion. The majority of scientists and educated people can be wrong. Apart from pressure from colleagues, they dislike having to rethink their position in the light of new evidence. This is called Confirmation Bias.

_"Confirmation bias occurs for several reasons. For one thing, rethinking a problem that appears to be solved already takes extra cognitive effort, and so we are apt to stick with our first solution. For another, we give greater weight to subsequent information that supports our initial position than to information that is not supportive of it."_ (Gilovich, Griffin, 8: Kahneman, 2002). And we do this to ourselves too. We experience this and that; we gloss over or don't investigate things which don't gibe with our view of the world, but a pleased to encounter those which confirm our view. We all live in our own dream-world, which is "the best of all possible worlds." Good old Leibniz!

" _In fact, surprisingly, there seems to be a great deal of "magical thinking" in the mental processes that some scientists and mathematicians exhibit. In other words, there appears to be a tendency among some scientists and mathematicians to suppose that because they think that something is the case, therefore, this means that this is the way reality is, and, consequently, it is the way they want the rest of humanity to understand the nature of reality... and they will go to considerable lengths to control political decisions, media presentations, academic programs, and the distribution of resources in order to serve their approach to things."_ (Whitehouse L: Final Jeopardy: Cosmology and the Reality Problem 2015).

" _There is a great deal of peer pressure within the scientific community, and to some extent this is institutionalised in the process of peer review which all scientific papers must go through before they are published. Scientists' careers depend on publishing their work and they can only publish work which their colleagues approve of. It is very difficult to publish papers which contain alternative theories to evolution. Peer pressure at times has even been replaced by persecution and attempts to ruin careers."_ (I can't find where I read this.)

But worse, truth is deliberately distorted to bolster the current position. Materialism and its offspring, the theory of evolution, accepted blindly, shut off people's powers of reason. The truth is all around them but they are trammelled by self-serving colleagues and their lackeys to prevent their thinking logically. The present climate change is about to be as disastrous as previous ones. But we are assured that things can be changed and disaster avoided. Anyone who has studied the problem deeply knows that we have already passed the point of no return. The basic problem is too many people. I can't imagine what could be done about that......

Scientific truth is not determined by consensus. In science the majority can be, and often have been, wrong. There is a great deal of peer pressure in the science community, which can stifle objections to a popular theory. New advances in science often begin with just a few scientists who are prepared to risk questioning the reigning paradigm." (Kuhn T: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1970).

When a scientist _"becomes committed to a particular set of concepts, educational continuity makes it exceedingly hard to change the pattern."_ (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe).

Return to Chapter VII

Consciousness

Love, self, consciousness, soul seem to be born from experience interpreted in the brain. They are manifestations of electrical/chemical activity. When that ceases, these manifestations cease; there is nothing left to interpret. Materialism means that this is the end. Is this true? What about that which observed the interpretations? Does the self cease to exist? If not, then it must exist ex sua natura. And the brain interpretations it makes are the result of the self's being – not its cause. They would not exist without something to observe them. The soul, on the other hand, grows from the moment of birth – it's the sum of all the experiences that an individual encounters. Consciousnesses also depends on the breadth of life's experiences. They cease to exist when the body dies. Is this also true of the self – the 'I'?

If consciousness exists because it must exist, but is non-material, a man must therefore consist of a material part (body) and a non-material part (conscious mind). This leads to the conclusion that the mind/soul/consciousness survives bodily death. But matter is the antithesis of non-matter. They can have no connection - it would allow the creation of the universe from nothing.

Another theory suggests that the mind/soul/consciousness is in fact material. Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, published the results of some experiments in 1907 in the New York Times and the medical journal American Medicine. Bodies lost up to an ounce and a half suddenly at the moment of death. He was able to counter various objections that the loss could be due to bowel voiding, expelled air etc., although his methodology was flawed. Do individuals have different soul/mind weights? A whole realm of conjecture would proceed from that. It gets worse; he repeated the experiments with dogs, but found no loss in weight. Um. All nonsense perhaps but Lyell Watson of NY University also experimented in 1990, as did as did the Lithuania Academy of Sciences in 2006 and Samuel Parnia in 2013, they found a loss of between 2·5 and 7 grams.

If consciousness is in fact material, it would answer the question of why all our learning and memories die with us rather than being usefully recorded somewhere. On the other hand, Plato said in the 'Meno' - _'The soul... being immortal... and having seen all things that exist... has knowledge of them all... and all learning is but recollection'_. In other words, when something is "learned" it is actually just "recalled" or recognised by the soul/mind which pre-existed this material life. There has to be a realm in which the being/notion/reality of things in themselves exist, or we could not recognise them in this life.

Rather abstruse, but worth considering. After all, Socratic thought is the foundation of civilization! Kant also went along with the doctrine of 'the thing-in-itself'." "And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something." (Prolegomena, § 32).

Can we say that at birth an infant/a puppy possesses/shows consciousness/awareness? Both show growing awareness; both show some ability to grasp a moral concept. A dog can understand 'NO!' and may manifest shame. It can also predict the outcome of a set of behaviours. A human, of course, can outperform this and grasp abstract concepts - love, duty, death etc. An animal may show a change in behaviour prior to death, but can a dog conceptualise death? The point is that consciousness appears to develop with experience, and is extinguished at death.

Is there a relationship between consciousness and life? Older people are less lively and less conscious/aware, particularly with dementia. Dementia is not the only thing to suppress consciousness/awareness. Anaesthetics, drugs, a blow on the head will also do it. Sleep and coma are not conscious states, except perhaps for lucid dreams. There's a lot more fruitful research to be done there.

Animals feel - plants and man too! There is a very big difference between man and ape apart from outward appearance. An ape has a similar level of consciousness to animals like a cat or a dog. Yet man is different \- a conscious being that can think, communicate, understand, decide, and judge. All of these features are functions that man possesses, but they are not inborn physically, and an develop with age These abilities mark the huge gap that differentiates man and other creatures. In nature, the only living thing that has these abilities (a soul?) is man. Is the neonate born with a mind that learns to use these functions? Is the conscious mind the same as the self? Whether it is or not, consciousness/self can't be observed. If it could, what would then be doing the observing?

If man evolved from apes, we might expect natural selection to produce minds fitter for dealing with everyday problems. But the problem is that our minds are capable of dealing with far more than that – science, religion, philosophy. These are transcendental concepts with no relevance to finding food and shelter. What use would they be for a creature little more advanced than an ape? Why would evolution produce such a characteristic irrelevant to the environment? Maybe it was a big bound. But the essence of Darwinism is that progress is slow. It smacks of design.

"Anything that exists, does so in some quantity and can, in principle, be measured."

Can life be measured? Some people seem to go through life half-dead Do they have less life than someone else? Or do they have less consciousness? Can there be life without consciousness/mind? Consciousness actually affects the reality we observe. Consciousness is the propensity to interpret our current situation and make predictions about the future. A frog has enough consciousness to keep a watch for food, but does it realise it will one day be food itself?

Observation is a process; consciousness is a state. thinking is a process, being is a state. When I think, my mental state changes with time. But the 'I' to which the mental state belongs does not change; it remains the same – or does it? My 'I' is not the same as another's 'I'. Any attempt to compare the two involves the personality, but personality is not 'self'. Personality has defining qualities and boundaries which can be measured. Your real self, cannot be observed or measured.

Descartes said _"Your conscious mind is a distinct entity capable of existing independently of anything physical."_ Are there individual consciousnesses, or are we part of a group mind – like ants? Do our experiences/memories transcend death and go into a melting pot or library? Who/what would read them? Or are our memories brain traces that cease to exist when we die? We can no longer observe them because we no longer have a brain to do so. Speculating further – we are alive because we have life/energy. But energy can't be created or destroyed. So, what happens to our life energy when we die? Whence did life energy originate to produce the first simple living cells?

If the universe was created, this resulted from a consciousness which antedated matter. If the universe was not created, consciousness must then be a manifestation of matter. Either way would answer the question of the dog/infant/plant. But, since the dog/infant/plant is conscious, our behavioural rationale cannot be purely materialistic. This is all rather simplistic, and I don't know the answer.

Return to Chapter VII

Creation/Design

Chandra Wickramasinghe admitted _: "From my earliest training as a scientist, I was very strongly brainwashed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be painfully shed. At the moment, I can't find any rational argument to knock down the view which argues for conversion to God. We used to have an open mind; now we realize that the only logical answer to life is creation-and not accidental random shuffling. The sudden emergence of a complex structure in a complete form, quite out of the blue, shows that this is the work of an intelligent agent."_

" _Dumping the problem in the lap of a pre-existing designer is no explanation at all, as it merely begs the question of who designed the designer."_ (McCoy: Fringe). But juggling with unobservable universes with their own laws doesn't really get us any further either _. "Chance becomes a sort of providence, which, under the cover of atheism, is not named but which is secretly worshipped."_ (Pierre-Paul Grassé, the former president of the French Academy of Sciences.)

_"This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth of the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality – that the stuff of which physical reality is constructed is mind stuff."_ (Wald G – Life and Mind in the Universe 1992). He added that _, "We chose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance"._

No animal, plant, saprophyte or mineral could have created itself, or even the concept of itself. You can't create a uniquely new machine without some idea of the end product you're working towards. Such machines, and indeed everything living and non-living, has to have been designed. The designer may or may not have been created/designed by something else. But whatever designed the universe is other than the universe, and not subject to its laws. Nothing in the universe could have designed the rest of the universe. That seems logical, but the Universal Hologram theory – that we create/perceive our own version of the universe, which perforce runs according our own laws, contradicts this. A problem – if we create physical reality from our own minds, which are non-material, then there can be no such thing as matter. Like creates like – reality is just a mental construct. Mind pre-exists matter.

The basic principle of materialist philosophy is the existence of matter. No creator/designer is necessary because matter has always existed. But the Big Bang theory asserts that the universe was created from nothingness. If the bang was a point in time, this necessitates points before and after. So, the idea that matter has existed since beginning of time is untrue. That being the case, the universe was not created from nothingness. Yet most scientists stick to materialist philosophy rigidly, rejecting the possibility of any non-material organising process. Because of this, they have no choice but to couch the results of their experiments, however weird, in material terms that conform to their colleagues' bias.

Cogito, ergo sum, but where is the 'I' that measures an external object? It's not 'out there' measuring, because the 'I' does not exist externally. It's within myself - so the thing I actually measure is just an internal reflection/representation. We can never reach the original outside. We interact with external reality through our bodily senses, but we are not 'out there' in our bodies. Our bodies that we experience are images formed within our brains. I am not inside my body: my body, as far as I can experience it, is within my brain. I can't experience my brain, my sixth vertebrum, or my pyloric sphincter. Pity really.

Similarly, the book I'm reading and the chair I'm on are inside my brain. But my brain is not 'me'. So, the self/mind that uses the brain must be non-material. It has no physical reality; it is not 'alive' so cannot 'die', though it can experience death. The 'self' in our brains who observes this world cannot be the brain itself, which is like an integrated computer system: It processes the data reaching it, translates it into images, and projects them onto the screen of the mind. Yet a computer cannot watch itself; nor is it aware of its own existence. An artificial intelligence could not become self-aware, because intelligence is merely a function of material complexity. A transponder is more complex than a computer - both machines are material. Awareness is a non-material state; it's not inherent in matter; it must antedate matter. A rock is not aware; a baby is not immediately aware; awareness/consciousness/soul grows with experience/interaction. Perhaps Plato was right.

When the brain is dissected to search for this awareness, nothing is found in it but lipid and protein molecules, which exist in other organs of the body as well. This means that within the tissue we call "our brain," there is nothing to observe and interpret the images, constitute consciousness, or to create the being we call 'I'.

Where is the I—the entity that uses the brain? Who does the actual knowing? The self does not exist suae generis. The neonate does not have a self/mind. That develops/is created during upbringing as a reflection of other selves/people. It's what distinguishes 'me' from 'not me', but has no physical reality _. "What we are looking for is what is looking",_ as St. Francis put it. Would this mean that the mind that created/designed the universe itself developed from....?

Claiming that matter has no reality of itself sounds terribly spiritual/religious, but there is an alternative explanation. It may well be that a man is something observing a universe that is created by something else. But it can equally well be that the opposite is true. The universe exists because it must – because I am here. It has to have just the qualities necessary for my existence. I am the creator. If things seem to change, it's because I seem to change. But I perceive the changes to be 'out there', rather than 'in here'. It is I who am maintaining my concepts – maintaining reality. And I don't like change – like the supporters of Darwinism. The universe has been held to be a hologram - a reflection of myself. The whole is simply the part made large. 'Reality' changes as I proceed along my way. The universe is a shadow – a projection of myself on a universal screen. Of course, I wouldn't know the whole had changed: all I can ever know is now.

Materialist philosophy assumes that everything that exists consists of matter which has always existed. There is no need for any sort of creator. This view forces us to adopt principles and procedures that perforce produce material explanations, however hard they are to swallow. But Occam's Razor instead compels us to accept a simpler solution for the problems of evolution. They disappear when the idea of design/creation is entertained.

Of course, you are now left with the big question – who/what is the creator/designer? Is it really myself? I wish I knew! Actually, I don't – the whole concept is beyond me, and probably everyone else too. It's like an ant being squashed by a cow – no good the ant asking why such things happen. A cow is beyond the ant's conceptual ability and vice versa. Ipso facto, not only is comprehending a universal designer/creator beyond us; it follows that this designer can have no inkling of the disappointment of failing an exam. Religious rituals can be comforting and beautiful; they're designed for that. And most of us question why we're here; positing an unreachable god helps to solve that problem. Belief in a god that loves us is just that – a comforting belief. Better to plod on and just accept that the American political system produces the most unfortunate presidents....

If the universe is the work of a designer, was it the same designer that designed life? In that case, there should be strong similarities between the construction and workings of both. For example, life forms seem to have built-in obsolescence –perhaps the universe too and even the designer! Hermes Trismegistus may have been right ("As above, so below"). And if indeed all things have an end, an end is always followed by a beginning. "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1). What price the Big Bounce theory?

Species come and go, and are then replaced with something else; this is just what a researcher does – tries one thing, then another improved version - like sugary drinks. So is the original designer doing just this with us? It is said that our sole purpose is to find ourselves. Is the original researcher also trying to do just that? We do it by measuring ourselves against our fellows. If the designer is doing the same in its growth to self-awareness, against whom/what is it measuring itself?

Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.

1) No gods worth having exist

2) no life after death exists

3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists

4) no ultimate meaning in life exists

5) human free will is non-existent. (Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life" 1998 Darwin Day Keynote address)

"In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and indeed all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism". (Academe: January 1987 pp.51-52)

Return to Chapter VII

Goldilocks

Planet earth finds itself in just the right place for life to exist. If it were further away from the sun, its oceans would freeze over; any nearer and they would boil. The fact that our planet is in the just right situation – or Goldilocks Zone – is fundamental for our existence.

" _The distance between the earth and the sun is exactly 108 times the sun's diameter. More incredible fact is the fact that the distance between the earth and the moon is 108 times the moon's diameter. Finally, the diameter of the sun is 108 times the earth's diameter. At this particular moment in Earth's history – although the sun's diameter is about 400 times larger than that of the moon – the sun is also about 400 times farther away. So, the sun and moon appear nearly the same size as seen from Earth. And that's why we on Earth can sometimes witness that most amazing of spectacles, a total eclipse of the sun. All created for us!"_ I can't recall where I got this; it sounds remarkable, but it's not true. The moon is getting farther away. The Earth's orbit varies; it's slightly elliptical.

The operation of our universe is based upon constants – mathematical values. The speed of light is one: the strength of gravity another. These precise values characterise the very existence of our universe. They mean that we and the universe as we know it can exist. Any infinitesimal variation between the four basic forces of nature, would mean that this universe would not exist. If they are fundamental to the existence of the universe, where did they come from? Is there a purpose to this? Do they exist so that we can exist, or did they and we come into being by chance?

John Wheeler of Princeton said: _"It is not only that man is adapted to the universe, the universe is adapted to man. Imagine a universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percent one way or another. Man could never come into being in such a universe."_ Does this mean there are n alternative universes? How large is n?

Brandon Carter of the French National Centre for Scientific Research supported this with a paper at a symposium at Krakow in 1973 - 'The Anthropic Principle in Cosmology.' It agreed that _"life as we know it only exists because the universal constants have the precise values they have"._ Which is more probable:-

a. the constants came to exist together by chance, and then life started, or

b. An intelligence (necessarily non-physical), produced the universe and its constants by its very existence?

The problem then emerges – if observations determine the values of the constants and their accompanying laws, what was there for the intelligence to observe in the first place?"

As an extension of this, Wheeler later put forth his take on the Participatory Anthropic Principle. Schrödinger's cat lives/does not live – it's not possible to determine its actual state because it doesn't have an actual state until the box is opened by the observer. It is the observer who determines the actual state of the cat and, by extension, of the universe of which the cat is an integral part – existing or not-existing.

Wheeler's theory says that "any pre-life Earth would have existed in an indeterminate state, like Schrödinger's cat. Once an observer exists, the aspects of the universe under observation become forced to resolve into one state - a state that includes a seemingly pre-life earth. This means that a pre-life universe can only exist retroactively after the fact of consciousness...human observations actually influence the design of the universe now – and even back to the beginning." Think about this – it's logical but boggly.

We in fact create/make manifest mere probabilities. If there are, say, two experimenters, who each make an observation of his own cat, it's not clear whether, this results in two separate universes. Or is it the same universe re-modified?

" _Studies have shown that life cannot emerge unless there is a fine tuning between the four basic forces of nature (gravitational, electrical, and strong and weak nuclear forces). In fact, to have some of the elements necessary for life (e.g. carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous) they have to be made in the interior of stars with proper conditions of temperature, density and so on. The creation of these necessary conditions in turn, depends sensitively on the initial state of the cosmos and the relative strength of the basic forces. The cosmos appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings."_ (McCoy: Fringe). The whole thing smacks of a fix!

Life is an inherent principle of the dynamics of the universe. If you accept the intelligent design theory, everything that we see has been designed, but nothing we see/observe/experience can itself be the 'designer'. Scientists who are stuck in the philosophy of materialism are strongly prejudiced against this conclusion. They refuse to accept that there are other possibilities. For them, matter exists sua natura; it exists as the necessary ground of everything. But the fact that we can never perceive/observe it (perception consists merely of electrical signals in our brain) is a major stumbling block.

" _Dumping the problem in the lap of a pre-existing designer is no explanation at all, as it merely begs the question of who designed the designer. That said, appealing to a host of unseen and indemonstrable multiple universes, with totally different setups is scarcely a better explanation."_ (McCoy: Fringe).

Life in the universe only exists because constants and laws permit it. Humans exist where we are only because all the local physical variables are favourable. The Goldilocks Zone is an extension/reflection of the Anthropic Principle. This gives rise to 'Fermi's Paradox'. This vast universe seems to be there to encourage manifestations of life. Why, therefore, despite all the resources that are being employed to find it, have we not done so? There is no evidence for extraterrestrial life at all. Perhaps:-

1. There are other life forms, but they have not developed technologically to a level that is detectable. In this huge universe, we are the only form to have developed to this level.... Really?

2. Life forms on Earth all seem to exhibit the same behavioural trend - 'dog eat dog'. They kill, outgrow or outbreed their competition. Are we likely to do the same to any extraterrestrial life we find (use it as slaves perhaps), or are we waiting to be eradicated in our turn?

Return to Chapter VII

Life

Chandra Wickramasinghe of University College, Cardiff gave this edited statement (supported by Sir Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University):- _"The definite existence of microfossils of bacteria and microfungi in the Murchison meteorite....the striking similarity between strings of fossilized cells in the Murchison meteorite and those in two groups of terrestrial sediments....A whole body of astronomical data pointed to micro-organisms being present in our galaxy....the way in which starlight of various colours was dimmed by interstellar dust was indicative of the presence of living cells in space, some of which had become selectively degraded into graphite....Bacteria seemed therefore to be present on a galaxy-wide scale._

Terrestrial life had its origins in the gas and dust clouds of space, which later became incorporated in and amplified within comets....Life was derived from and continues to be driven by sources outside the Earth....life on Earth is derived from what appears to be an all pervasive galaxy-wide living system....Terrestrial life had its origins in the gas and dust clouds of space, which later became incorporated in and amplified within comets....Life was derived from and continues to be driven by sources outside the Earth a space origin of life would seem to be securely established....life is a cosmic phenomenon.

Recent evidence points to life first appearing on the Earth about 3.8 billion years ago....This life was in the form of micro-organisms - bacteria and microfungi now evident in the Earth's oldest sediments....It would seem significant that life appears in an instant, geologically speaking, almost at the very first moment the Earth possessed a quiescent crust, an atmosphere and oceans, at the very first moment in fact that life was able to survive.

Frequent and massive gaps in the fossil record and the absence of transitional forms at the most crucial stages in the development of life show clearly that Darwinism is woefully inadequate to explain the facts....What the fossil record does show beyond doubt is that new properties of life at the level of expressed genes have been introduced by successive experiments....Only when these experiments were successful did the changes endure....Lines with unsuccessful or inoperable gene additions simply died away.

Gene additions could take place by the interaction between space-borne viruses and viroids and the spectrum of life as it exists on the Earth at any given time....Viruses, although often bad for the individual, are in the view of Sir Fred Hoyle and myself of paramount importance to the evolution for species on our planet....They carry with them the store of cosmic genetic information needed for the generation of new species, classes and orders, and for the progressive forward march of life.

In our view, every crucial new inheritable property that appears in the course of the evolution of species must have an external cosmic origin....Although apes and man admittedly have much in common, biochemically, anatomically and physiologically, they are at the same time a world apart....We cannot accept that the genes for producing great works of art or literature or music, or developing skills in higher mathematics emerged from chance mutations of monkey genes long ahead of their having any conceivable relevance for survival in a Darwinian sense....Just as for the case of the most primitive life on our planet, all these properties had to be implanted from outside....If the Earth were sealed off from all sources of external genes: bugs could replicate till doomsday, but they would still only be bugs: and monkey colonies would also reproduce but only to produce more monkeys....The Earth would be a dull place indeed.

Life could not be an accident, not just on the Earth alone, but anywhere, anywhere at all in the Universe....The facts as we now see them point to one of two distinct conclusions: an act of deliberate creation, or an indelible permanence of the patterns of life in a Universe that is eternal and boundless."

Return to Chapter VII

Perception

We never believe that the external world can be other than what our senses present to us, since we've depended on those senses since the day we were born. Yet modern research in many different fields of science points to a very different understanding, creating serious doubt about the "outside" world that we perceive with our senses. For this new understanding, the starting point is that everything we perceive as external is only a response formed by electrical signals in our brain. The red of an apple, the hardness of wood—moreover, one's mother, father, family, and everything that one owns, one's house, job, and even the pages of this book—all are comprised of electrical signals only.

On this subject, the late German biochemist Frederic Vester explained the viewpoint that science has reached: _"Statements of some scientists, positing that man is an image, that everything experienced is temporary and deceptive, and that this universe is only a shadow, all seem to be proven by current science. The act of seeing actually takes place at the posterior of the brain, in this tiny spot which is pitch dark, completely insulated from light. The brain is insulated from sound just as it is from light. Therefore, no matter how noisy it may be outside, it is completely silent inside the brain. But we do not perceive the clock ticking. Perception depends on concentration, expectation, interest....You can never be sure that how a food tastes to you is the same as how it tastes to anyone else; or that your perception of a voice is the same as what another's when he hears that same voice."_ Along the same lines, science writer Lincoln Barnett wrote that _"no one can ever know whether his sensation of red or of Middle C is the same as another man's."_

For instance, whether a lemon truly exists or not and how it came to exist cannot be questioned and investigated. A lemon consists merely of a taste sensed by the tongue, an odor sensed by the nose, a color. That knowledge is limited to our five senses, and there is no proof that the world we perceive by means of those senses is identical to the "real" world.

It may, therefore, be very different from what we perceive. and shape sensed by the eye; and only these features of it can be subject to examination and assessment. Science can never know the physical world.

It is impossible for us to reach the physical world outside our brain. All objects we're in contact with are actually collection of perceptions such as sight, hearing, and touch. Throughout our lives, by processing the data in the sensory centres, our brain confronts not the "originals" of the matter existing outside us, but rather copies formed inside our brain. At this point, we are misled to assume that these copies are instances of real matter outside us.

Everything we see, touch, hear, and perceive as "matter," "the world" or "the universe" is in fact electrical signals interpreted in our brain. We can never reach the original of the matter outside our brain. We merely taste, hear and see an image of the external world formed in our brain....

While you read these lines, actually you are not inside the room you assume you're in; on the contrary, the room is inside you. Perceiving your body makes you think that you're inside it. However, your body, too, is a set of images formed inside your brain.

Knowledge is limited to our five senses, and there is no proof that the world we perceive by means of those senses is identical to the "real" world. It may, therefore, be very different from what we perceive. Right, left, front or behind exist. That is, sound does not come to you from the right, from the left, or from above; there is no direction from which sound "really" comes....

We live without recognizing our mistaken assumption that these are the actual, original versions of matter existing in the "external world." We are misled, because by means of our senses, we can never reach the matter itself....

There are no colours in the "external world." Neither is the apple red, nor is the sky blue, nor the trees green. They are as they are only because we perceive them to be so.... But people all over the world will perceive the sky as blue. They won't say it's red. How do they know it's not red? Because the Dahlia behind them is red. But Even the slightest defect in the eye's retina can cause colour blindness. Some people perceive blue as green, others red as blue, and still others see all colours as different tones of grey. At this point, it no longer matters whether the outside object is coloured or not. So, we perceive the sky as blue because we are told it's so.

" _First, ...it was thought that colour, figure, motion, and the rest of the sensible qualities or accidents, did really exist without the mind...but, it having been shewn that none even of these can possibly exist otherwise than in a Spirit or Mind which perceives them it follows that we have no longer any reason to suppose the being of Matter..."_ (Bishop Berkeley).

" _Man's knowledge of the external world is exceedingly limited. That knowledge is limited to our five senses, and there is no proof that the world we perceive by means of those senses is identical to the "real" world. It may, therefore, be very different from what we perceive. There may be a great many dimensions and other beings of which we remain unaware._

Never will it become possible for you to understand that you consist of nothing but your brain. This is because all that's needed to form a world within your brain is the availability of stimulations to the relevant centres. It is perfectly possible for these stimulations (and hence, perceptions) to originate from some artificial source. Often, we experience this illusion in dreams, wherein we experience events and see people, objects and settings that seem completely genuine. But they're all merely perceptions. There's no basic difference between these dreams and the "real world"; both sets of perceptions are experienced in the brain....

If all the physical objects we know of are intrinsically perceptions, what about our brain itself? Since our brain is a part of the material world just like our arms, our legs, or any other object, it too should be a perception. Whether we perceive a dream or reality, the entity that sees and perceives is not the brain, which is after all only a hunk of nerve tissue. We watch a copy of the external world in our brains.

_An important result is that we can never know the external world as it actually is. A second, no less important fact is that the "self" in our brains who observes this world cannot be the brain itself, which is like an integrated computer system."_ (Yahya H: Atlas of Creation 2008).

Light rays coming from an object fall receptor cells on the retina of the eye sound on the cochlea etc. These impacts are converted into electric signals and transmitted the appropriate brain lobe – occipital, temporal etc. There they are interpreted; they have meaning attached to them. Everything we perceive as external is only a response formed by electrical signals in our brain. The world we know consists of what our eyes see, our hands feel, our nose smells, our tongue tastes, and our ears hear.

We depend on those senses for our knowledge of the external world. But our senses are not reliable; they may not tell us the truth, if they are defective for example. A blind person's world is not that of a sighted person. But the other essential process in perception depends on experience, learning, memory. We can only make sense of what we perceive by relating it to something else. We may of course, misinterpret/ make a mistake. Interpretation is not reliable either. Your perception may result from a dream, or perhaps hypnosis. There is then no physical stimulus; memory comes into its own. If you have no memory of something, it can't be used in your interpretation. Senility is a case in point. Memories, like perceptions, depend on the brain for their existence. When you die, your memories die too. If your memories transcended death, they would have to become part of a non-physical filing system to be consulted by.....?

Electrical impulses from physical stimuli result in interpretations. The question then is - interpretations of what? You can't interpret something unless there is fundamentally something to be interpreted. Or we experience dreams - perceptions without any material correlates - as real. Here we also experience events and see people, objects and settings that seem completely genuine. But they're not perceptions of something external.

In the sense that both sets of perceptions are experienced in the brain, there's no basic difference between these dreams and the "real world". What a man sees in his dreams and what he relates to in his world are both merely images in his mind. Moreover, what he sees is not what I see – how can either be 'real' except to oneself? Reality is personal.

If all the physical objects we know of are only perceptions, what about our brain itself? It's as material as everything we perceive, or is it too just a perception? But then who or what is doing the perceiving? And what is the relationship between apparently similar experiences of different perceivers? Everything they experience - be it in a dream or in their daily lives—consists of only perceptions whose 'objective' source they can never reach. And they themselves are merely perceptions in your world copy.

So, our brain confronts not the originals of the matter existing outside us; rather copies formed inside our brain. But we automatically assume that these copies are real matter outside of us. Your house, the furniture in it, your car, your office, jewels, your bank account, wardrobe, spouse, children, your colleagues—in fact, all else that you possess—resides in your mind. Everything around you that you perceive with your five senses is a part of the world copy you create in your brain.

When you die, all of it will vanish, although you'll assume it has real existence and will go on in the future, and so are meaningless. You'll leave the house to your son. But, when you die, he will vanish too! You have no direct contact with any of your possessions. They are merely perceptions.... But perceptions of what? Does this infer that there is a material world to perceive?

Everything we see, touch, hear etc. and perceive as matter, the world or the universe, is in fact electrical signals interpreted in our brain. We can never reach the original of the matter outside our brain, if indeed there is any. We merely taste, hear and see an image of the external world formed in our brain. In fact, someone eating a doughnut experiences not the actual cake but its perceptions in the brain. So, if you cut the optic nerve, that aspect of reality disappears. But the cake a man eats in his dream satiates him, although it is a mere perception, because feeling satisfied is a perception too. The cake he eats in daily life also satisfies. What is the relationship between the cakes? They are both just perceptions.

The only world we know is the one that is designed, recorded, and made vivid there—in short, the one we have created in our brain and existing within our minds. So, is this reality? We can never comprehend the external world as it actually is; we can only make sense of it in terms of the perceptions/patterns we impose upon it. By means of our senses, we can never reach the matter itself, if indeed it exists....

While you read these lines, actually you are not inside the room you assume you're in; on the contrary, the room is inside you. Perceiving your body makes you think that you're inside it. However, your body, too, is a set of images formed inside your brain. Does this mean that the brain is the only thing that exists, and that it must exist, or it couldn't interpret its electrical signals? But who makes sense of the signals? I do. What is the I that does the final perceiving?

We can ever experience any direct contact with matter and thus be justified in claiming that everything consists of it. The universe we contact is the universe that we perceive in our minds. We can never step outside these perceptions and encounter matter as it "really" is, so it is wholly nonsensical to construct any philosophy regarding matter as an absolute entity we lead our whole lives within our minds.

At the end of the day, we can only perceive something that we can relate to. You can relate to and remember the Mona Lisa, for example. Which painting by Kandinsky or Braque can you recall in detail? If it's totally alien, it won't make any sense. We perceive what we expect to perceive: we believe what we want to believe.

Return to Chapter VII

Time

Each event owes its existence to preceding and succeeding events. Event A, therefore event B. But the very existence of B presupposes/necessitates the occurrence of A. In other words, everything that has happened or will happen – all of it exists because it must as part of an overarching pattern. We are programmed to perceive events in a particular order; they move forward, never back. It's called 'The Arrow of Time'. Things constantly change, but cannot change back. Things don't become more complex; they decay. This is Entropy – progress toward disorder, and it's fundamental in this universe.

Eventually, the universe must become totally disordered/disarranged. But the drive toward disorder is not reversible, which suggests that the Big Bounce theory can't be right. The only reason we can exist in this universe is because it has Entropy – the Second Law of Thermodynamics – fundamental to our existence. And as the process continues, there will come a time when we can no longer exist. In fact, the duration of the existence of life as we know it is an utterly fleeting one in the lifetime of the universe.

All of time/all events exist simultaneously. Sequential time is an illusion: it's the ego that draws it all together. We perceive what we expect to perceive: we believe what we want to believe. The present moment contains all of time - past, present, and future. There is only now, although for each person there are n probable timelines. So, the overarching pattern mentioned above is not a set sequence of events, but an almost infinite set of probable pathways. These do not become real until they are observed/chosen. We are a set of probabilities made conscious in this universe. There cannot be other universes where humans exist. Other universes would have different laws of Physics.

If timelessness is understood, it will be understood that everything takes place at one single moment: Nothing need be awaited, and time does not go by, because everything has already happened and finished....

Time is a perception - time is not an absolute fact as supposed by materialists, but only a relative perception. Einstein showed that, _"space and time are forms of intuition, which can no more be divorced from consciousness than can our concepts of color, shape, or size."_ According to the Theory of General Relativity _: "time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it."_

" _A person formulates his perception of time by comparing the moment in which he lives with what he holds in memory. If he doesn't make this comparison, he can have no perception of time either. What we call "time" is in fact a method by which one moment is compared to another. For example, when a person taps an object, he hears a particular sound. If he taps the same object five minutes later, he hears another sound. Thinking there is an interval between the two sounds, he calls this interval "time."_ (Yahya H: Atlas of Creation 2008)

Consciousness enables an individual to compare his present circumstances with what he recalls from the past. Senility/Alzheimer's remove this ability, so the person loses control of time. "Are we going to the seaside today?" "Did I have breakfast?" It's only by comparing a possible order of events stored in the brain that we can perceive time. Time is not a property of space; we can't experience material time. Without an external reference point, a dream may seem to last a long time, although judging from actual REM eye flutters it only lasts minutes.

Einstein himself changed his view of time as a continuous flow from past to future and accepted that time is just a perception: it has no independent material reality. - _"The subjectivity of time is best explained in Einstein's own words -The experiences of an individual appear to us arranged in a series of events; in this series the single events which we remember appear to be ordered according to the criterion of 'earlier' and 'later'. There exists, therefore, for the individual, an I-time, or subjective time. This in itself is not measurable. I can, indeed, associate numbers with the events, in such a way that a greater number is associated with the later event than with an earlier one...."space and time are forms of intuition, which can no more be divorced from consciousness than can our concepts of color, shape, or size."...."time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it."_ (Barnett L: The Universe and Dr. Einstein 1948).

Return to Chapter VII

Try switching off your electricity for a day, and see how well you function.

Imagine if you had none for a week - as Montreal didn't a few years back.

"Oh, they'll have it fixed by next week".

What if they can't? In the depth of winter weather, how would you cope?

"Oh, we have a woodburning stove."

Really? Imagine if you had no power for a month. How much wood do you have and for how long - the rest of the winter?

After a couple of days, you run out of milk. Bad luck – the local shops aren't available, unless they've already been broken into and looted. Black tea – yuk!

And your GP isn't open or contactable – no medications! Poor Mama! How will you bury her when she goes?

Imagine if you had no power ever again. Best not to think about that! Why didn't you prepare when you were warned a few years ago? And, if you tried and were ready, get used to knocks at the door wanting help.

After a few months, they'll be few. The air will stink of unburied bodies -what's left of them when starving pets have had their last meal – those that hadn't already been eaten themselves.

Best not to think about that!

But what could possibly cause that?

Well.........

About 1,000 years ago, Vikings settled on an island that had green, coastal meadows. They named it Greenland. The Vikings cattle had plenty of green grass to eat and the colony thrived there for 300 years. There were eventually 3,000 people in the Viking settlement.

Then, Greenland suddenly got colder during the Little Ice Age (which was in fact just a 2.5ºC drop). Ice blocked the Vikings ships from sailing. The summers got shorter, producing less vegetation for the dairy cattle during the long, cold winters. Eventually, Vikings left their colony.

Where do you think the populations of Africa will go in a decades-long drought?

Nikola Tesla said this:

"The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenicists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now, it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal."

And this said with the moral certainty only found in politicians and church leaders.

Return to The End of Evolution

###

Thank you for reading my book. If you enjoyed it, won't you please take a moment to leave me a review?

Thanks!

About the author:

Smashwords has provided me with a much-needed crutch. It has taught me a lot about writing and publishing that I wouldn't have got otherwise. (I hope Mark Coker doesn't mind being described as a crutch). I wanted other people to benefit from my research, so I've made this book free. Freedom of speech doesn't really exist.

I prefer paperbacks to ebooks, but then I'm a fuddy-duddy. Traditional books may eventually disappear, along with the society I've known and loved - as you'll soon find.

Connect with me: https://www.smashwords.com/interview/contactenglish

Subscribe to my blog: http://bottrillfamilyhistory.blogspot.com
Other titles on Smashwords by Dr Bottrill:-

The Templar Heresy by John Bottrill

Published: April 29, 2017.

President George Washington's ancestor was a Boterel. That family did well in the Middle ages, helping two homosexual kings, and two heterosexual, with their intimate problems. The French king destroyed the Knights Templar, but the Order of Sion continued to manage Europe. Several Boterels fell in battle in 100 Years' war. The Cornish branch of the family died out and with it the title.

More Kings' Toads by John Bottrill

Published: October 23, 2015.

Under six kings, two of them homosexual, the Boterel family stuck close and knew all their bedmates – male and female. They acquired lands including old Camelot. In the background, the Order of Sion organised the Crusades and the Hundred Years' War. It set up and then destroyed the Templars with their real work done, and founded Switzerland, the Masons and the Rosicrucians.

No Carrots for Dink by John Bottrill

Published: October 23, 2015.

Dink, the hungry Donkey, tries to steal Billy, the goat's, thistles. But he eats Billy's beard by mistake! The other animals hold a Council to decide what to do. Claudia, the Cow, thinks 'Council' has something to do with cow. So, she goes off to Cyril, the Squirrel to have a beauty treatment. Meanwhile Scroggins, the Bear, and Gruntlet, are trying to steal honey from the bees.

Replacement in Heaven by John Bottrill

Published: December 25, 2013.

Gudrun grows up behaving sometimes like a boy, sometimes like a girl. After death, she gets a tour of Heaven and its surprises. She is given a job caring for those like herself who have never really come to grips with who they are. This allows her to understand why she's had a confused life, and her two halves are reunited.

The King's Toads by John Bottrill

Published: November 9, 2013.

The Boterels of Brittany effectively won the Battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror. Over the next century, the Boterel men stayed close to the king and prospered, sometimes through military support: sometimes through much more personal services - and they don't get much more personal! And the family spread in England and France - one line being the ancestors of George Washington!

Embarrassing Palmistry by John Bottrill

Published: November 6, 2013.

It's not a how-to-do-it book. It's a palmist's embarrassing experiences with some taboo topics:- Worry, piles, masturbation, psychic power, suicide, sexual potential.... Congenital health weaknesses, the best careers for your child, indications of Death, recognising a psychopath, importance of dreams - are also discussed with a lot of humour. And there are LOTS of illustrations.

The Edinburgh Grail \- a Scottish romance by John Bottrill

Published: November 6, 2013.

The heroine lives with a gay professor, but manages to acquire two stunning suitors. One cousin falls for her, but she herself has fallen for the other - devastatingly male and dreamy - and elopes to Gretna Green with him. A last-minute phone call to her mother for her blessing brings shattering news, the resolution of a recurring dream, and an unexpected ending.

Keep Your Head If You Move To France by John Bottrill

Published: November 3, 2013.

France is wonderful but frustrating. There are all sorts of advantages to living there, but 'Oh' the disadvantages! Here is a glimpse of life just over the water showing what it's really like. This isn't a practical, how-to-do-it book. It's a glimpse of how we did it, the mistakes we made, and some no-holds-barred comments on life in la belle France. There are things you should know ..........

