Ultimate Questions (Polemic) by Edwin L. Young, PhD

I have just finished viewing a video on the origin of life. Many great scientists of our day were speaking on this question.  Some few think they may be on the right track, as evidenced by their research.  Still, there is yet to be a definitive answer.  Likewise, the 'Big Bang Theory' of the origin of the universe, to me at any rate, is really pure speculation, based, originally, on the Hubble telescope's retrogression back through time to a single, tiny dot of who knows what.  

Many astrophysicists are now questioning that theory also, as do I.  Evolutionary theory seems, to me, incontrovertible and within the range of my imagination when I think in terms of billions of years.  Only then does the eventuality of the (infinitely) complex human brain and our and other mammals remarkable sense organs seem plausible.  

There are so many other very complex unanswered questions.  However, with the combination or our specie's extraordinary technological innovations furthering the equally astounding scientific discoveries, we, in my opinion, are gradually moving into a long period of human evolution that is producing a division into what may eventually become 'us' as a lower species and another higher level of the humanoid branch, or a superior form of humans that may require the classifying of a new phylogenetic, (cladistic is the new term) branch. Do you think I am being cruel to our species????

What I can imagine is that for human's "natural selection", as in the forces of nature set out by Darwin and subsequent Darwinian evolutionists, this has, for humans, been supplanted by "civilization selection." The philosopher Ernest Cassirer wrote, consistent with Darwin's theory of evolution, that “form follows function”, whereas I say that “function follows form” for humans in civilizations. ('Form' in this case meaning the configurations of civilizations).  

Modern humans have been shielded from the pressures of nature's natural selection to which all other creatures are subjected.  Humans were subjected to the same 'natural selection' as animals and other creatures for millions of years.  However, with the rise of human civilizations, there came about a totally different process of evolutionary selection.  We humans, being so enmeshed in it, that is to say in our 'civilization', that we cannot see this radical transformation happening.  

There are vast arrays of ways in which "civilization selection" operates on different principles from "natural selection."  Examples are the profit motive; the GINI coefficient for economic inequality between social-economic classes widening as a result of US (probably worldwide) Labor and Tax laws; the market economy pushing fattening, nutrition bare foods and addictive cigarettes, alcohol, and medicines on the lowest classes causing severe health problems; justice as system of laws and not of men that lays burdens on the poor to the benefit of the rich and the lawyers (Jesus was so right so long ago when he is said to have uttered, "Ouai! Ouai Nomikros!"); the demographic segregation of levels of social status; the world of fashion selecting for types of beauty rather than character or viability; education treating children like widgets on assembly lines and educating them for facts, physical cause and effects, technology, and commerce, rather than for character, ethics, critical thinking, and maturity for the full range of life's demands; the effect of the medical sciences of reproduction totally revising nature-based human reproductive systems and medicine's advances that alter nature's way of conception and birthing of children; the force of military technology upsetting the balance of power between men and nations; the effects of high tech weaponry when used by tribe against depersonalized tribe; the consolidation of systems of wealth management that strongly favors the wealthy and removes financial control from caring, mutually supportive and responsible small communities; and on and on. 

We cannot see that one social reference group's material successes and technological wonders gives them huge advantages in the struggle for good health and survival.  This gives them vital advantages over the many others lower classes not so advantaged.  These others, while their population growth is unsustainable, and their impoverishment growing, are slowly becoming an inferior, lower, sub-human species.

I know such thinking is highly unconventional and raises highly complex and controversial ethical issues.  I seem to be thinking so far out of the box, so to speak, that almost anyone who knows what I am thinking must dismiss me as some kind of kook with ethical questions bordering on bizarrely insane.  Yet, I feel that I cannot avoid saying what I am seeing in the sense of having 'insights'; insights that most would rather say are, perhaps, 'blind or distorted sights'.  To myself, I say, thank goodness I am not writing for an audience like a board of editors for a popular magazine or erudite journal.  I can keep my thoughts, insights, questions, and such unadulterated.  

Consequently, I am alone in having to severely critique my own thoughts and writings.  While solitary, I am, nevertheless, committed to writing whatever and wherever or my thinking leads me, I will sing my own song, as it were, and yet with my eye kept sharply on my 'thinking's' correctness and and with a sense of responsibility to a distant, envisioned future for humankind's and all of nature's ultimate destiny and existence.