Patterns of Spirituality

Evolution and Darwin

Evolution is always a controversial topic. The major obstacle that hinders debate on this subject is that there is a dearth of thinkers who are familiar with psychology. The ways that the mind works do not seem to feature in debate.

We can look at evolution either from a short-term view or a long-term view. For the long-term view (a time scale of hundreds of millions of years and more), I follow the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, the anthroposophist. However, his ideas are not the subject of this article.

For the relatively short-term view, over a few million years, I fundamentally disagree with Darwin. Interestingly, when I needed a theory of evolution to put my ideas in, I thought that I could adapt Darwin’s view. So I looked for a theory of evolution in his book  The Origin of Species, but was very disappointed. There is no complete theory within it. All that the book contains are aspects of evolution, that is, issues that any complete theory would have to deal with, such as the ways in which creatures adapt to changes in their environment. At best, all that Darwin produced was a fragmented, incomplete set of ideas that only very loosely can be called a theory. The historical reason that it became famous was that it was used by agnostics such as Thomas Huxley in the 19th century to reject the claims of many clerics that the world came into creation a mere 4004 years ago or thereabouts. What is true is that human evolution exists, but not as Darwin believed.

The big deficiency in Darwinism is that there is no room for, no understanding of, an individual human being (that is, why, within the same group or society, one person is different psychologically from another person). So at present what we have in academia is Darwinism for social or group evolution, and genetics for individual evolution. As an aside, I believe that genetics applies only to structural and physiological features and not to psychological characteristics.

Modern proponents of Darwinism have the view that the emergence of primitive man was a relatively short time ago, around 5 million years or less; this was followed by the emergence of modern man in Africa about 200,000 years ago. This time scale is based on the study of ape-like fossils that are supposed to be our ancestors. One of the earliest fossils, called Lucy, is about 3 million years old.

My beliefs on evolution are based on ideas of reincarnation. The ideas of Darwin may seem sufficient and adequate to explain evolution without having to bring in ideas of reincarnation. However, the various exponents of Darwinian evolution that I have read have never been psychologists. The primary reason why I reject Darwinian views is based on my exploration of psycho-analysis. I dispute the time scale necessary to change from ape to man.

Why is time so important?  It relates to the fundamental difficulty of changing one’s character and core attitudes and beliefs, whilst trying to attain an harmonious and mature disposition, especially with regard to issues such as suffering, violence and hopelessness.

For most people, beliefs (which the person is aware of ) can be changed fairly easily, but character remains mostly the same throughout life. Everyone has flaws to his character, and so the main difficulty in life is to change psychologically in ways that improve character. From my point of view, human evolution is really about the evolution of a person’s character. What I have discovered from the analysis of my subconscious mind is that a person can change his character only very slowly. We can always rapidly change our beliefs if we are under sufficient stress, but never-the-less it takes ages for changes in belief to deeply change our basic strengths and weaknesses in character. For example, in the western world the ways in which we relate to other people have not improved much from the time of the ancient Greeks, a trifling 2,500 years ago.

Although it may appear feasible for man to have evolved from the ape when we consider only anatomical and genetic similarities, we have to reject this assumption when we bring in psycho-analytical considerations. From a psycho-analytical viewpoint, the basic issue to consider is how long would it take for the subconscious mind of an ape to evolve into the subconscious mind of a human? Psycho-analysis proves that humans evolve very slowly, in terms of improving their subconscious beliefs, attitudes and character traits. The Darwinian view that four or five million years is an adequate time period for the evolution from ape to man is much too short. Human evolution theory really requires a time scale of tens of millions of years at least, and this time scale makes humans much older than any ape-human fossils that have been found.

Primitive man would have been focused on survival needs. We can be sure that the kind of creative mental stimuli that would encourage civilising tendencies within primitive consciousness would be extremely weak for millions of years. The self- control of early man would not be strong enough to override the powerful influences of his subconscious mind. Even today, many people are still very affected by the negative aspects of their subconscious mind. Hence civilising influences acting on primitive man would take many millions of years to become noticeable within normal consciousness (and so spur such a man to think beyond survival needs). In my view, the time span required to change ape-man to the rational man of ancient Greece would have to be 30 to 50 million years at least.

Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.