The BIG LIE in Our Evolutionary Mythology

I’m not making a big claim in observing that the reigning orientation of our contemporary culture sees prosperity, growth, and power as essential aspects of progress. It is in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism on one side of the Atlantic and Russian expansion on the other. It’s embedded in the bitcoin promise, the colonization of space, and most exaggeratedly in the AI industry. It’s what many mean by “greatness.

The underlying myth is that materialistic growth is positive, even good in an evolutionary way. The problem with this myth is that it is a lie, meaning it doesn’t conform to what we usually define as truth, which is fact-based observation, and isn’t a good representation of the arc of evolution in nature. Scientific research does not support the idea that bigger is better. In fact, maximization of a species or ecosystem invariably results in collapse or degeneration. Why is this contradiction sustained?

One of my early influences was the thinking of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish scholar shocked by the Great War, who explored how the structure of our language shapes perception and conflict in society. He noted that the English language has a subject-object construction which consistently invites “reifying” or objectifying things in order complete our sentences. “We are this.” “You are that.” And when the objectifying involves qualities and characteristics that are not objects but fluid phenomena like attitudes and feelings, we create boxes of meaning that are inflammatory. “You are racist” instead of “Your last statement discredited someone on the basis of their color.” This objectification, applied to describing political leanings, hardens into identities and positions that become inflexible, i.e. blue and red.

I’ve found that the shaping of our awareness by language extends to visual language and the mental frameworks we hold to explain things. The objectification of reality is supported, for instance, by our habit of displaying data on Cartesian coordinates, which portray the “0” point as nothing, and progress is up and to the right. If there is an icon for contemporary business it is the ubiquitous stock market graphic plotted on these coordinates.

But what does this have to do with our evolutionary mythology?

When objectivity and materiality is overvalued then more of something is generally considered to be better. The idea of something being better because it has more functionalities becomes replaced by the idea of being better by having more material goods. Clearly one is better off with more money, more house, more power, more freedom —who can argue?

Nature argues. Scientists have discovered over the decades of the 20^th Century, that what we consider objective and material, i.e. the molecular world, is based elements that are progressively uncertain and unpredictable. Molecules are made up of less predictable atoms which can absorb and give off electrons unpredictable. These are composed of even more unpredictable fundamental forces (electrons and protons), and ultimately on almost completely unpredictable photons of light at the quantum level, which appear as particles sometimes and waves at other depending on how the experiment is set up. In nature the evolutionary process means less predictable elements come together and create material structures that then become the means for evolving more expressions of capability. It is a journey from freedom to constraint and back to freedom.

In evolutionary process light becomes forces, become atoms, become molecules, with some molecular structures then developing remarkable abilities. DNA allows the plant world to grow, branch, bloom, and seed, absorbing elements from its environment and converting them with photosynthesis and other processes. This abundance can even renew itself following cycles of the sun and moon.

But plants never reach the scale of mountains and oceans. The tallest tree is a Coastal Redwood in California at 379 feet tall. Aspen groves can span 100 acres, but that is still nowhere near the size of the mountain ranges upon which they live. If plants can growth, why not expand and expand? Nature demonstrates that when plants overgrow, they become vulnerable to weather and bugs and cannot continue growing. We call uncontrolled organic growth cancers.

The arc of evolution doesn’t stop with plants. Some molecular structures, primarily protein molecules, have extensions like arms and legs that can form large aggregations allowing animals to run and fly. These extensions are also evident in more advanced communication capability, that allow pods of whales to communicate over 100 and even thousands of miles, and butterflies to migrate thousands of miles to specific ne casting sites. But it is not their material being that expands to this size, but the songs and vibrations. The largest blue whale is only 108 feet long physically, smaller by a good degree than the redwoods. The tallest giraffe is only 18 feet and the tallest elephant 13 feet tall.

And finally come humans with the miraculous development of highly evolved nervous systems capable of symbolic representation, imaging the future, documenting the past. But physically, objectively, the body size of humans is almost the same worldwide. The shortest is a Nepalese man who was 21 inches tall (and lived to age 72). The largest man in recent history was 8’11” tall. But most people are in a range between 5.5 and 6 feet tall.

Arthur M. Young, the evolutionary theorist who integrated scientific findings in his arc of evolution (explained in his book the Reflexive Universe) believed that this consistency in human form compared to less evolved beings was the result of the structural requirement of having both growth and mobility and a bi-lateral symmetry in the nervous system that supported reflexive thinking. However, explaining why humans are basically similar in size is not required to appreciate that human functionality is supported by a physical structure that requires a lot less material matter than animals, plants, and the ground itself.

To illustrate the longer arc of evolution Young turned the Cartesian system upside down and suggested that the “0” point represented no freedom, not no material. The bottom line, in fact, represents all material manifestation with the upper lines representing levels of increasingly less objectivity and more freedom. His summary graphic looks like this.

If you agree that evolutionary progress can be defined as having more functionality than less evolved phenomenon, the lesson of nature is that the more evolved phenomenon exhibit and may even require a substantial reduction in material physicality. This gives new meaning to the saying that “less is more.” (Paradoxically the high-tech industry, champions of maximization, agree when they take pride in chips getting smaller and doing more with less.)

True evolutionary development is supported by optimization of resources, not maximization. Maximization in fact will probably get in the way of higher functionality.

In a time of big lies and falsehoods providing currency in the attention economy, our biggest lie—that materialism leads to evolutionary progress—may be our real undoing. Its truth of its opposite could be a source of hope.