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It cannot be seriously disputed that evolution is taking place, to some extent at least. It is the only way of explaining how pests become resistant to chemicals sprayed on land – those which fail to evolve in such a way that they become resistant to the chemicals die out, leaving just those that are resistant. Similarly, antibiotics target certain bacteria and force them to evolve; the over-use of antibiotics is creating some very dangerous and resistant strains, such as MRSA, C-dificile, “mad cow disease” (BSE/CJD) and bird flu. Evolution also took place for the turtles in the Galapagos Islands studied by Charles Darwin, because those that failed to adapt to a changing environment died out too.
The laws of evolution, with the genes of an offspring being the combination of genes from both parents plus mutations, cannot seriously be disputed either – they are visible in people.
However, the idea that humans could have evolved, purely by chance, via a large number of evolutionary leaps from single-celled organisms in seas and oceans, is far more contentious. I used to hold the point of view that there are many “missing links”, and that complex things like the eye could not have evolved naturally, because intermediate steps between creatures with no eyes and those with fully functional ones don't exist. However, I have seen articles in the New Scientist magazine that claim missing links (including creatures with simpler eyes and those part way between classes of creatures (such as reptiles, amphibians and mammals) have indeed existed even if they do not exist today.
What I strongly disagree with is the idea that fundamental evolutionary change takes place purely by chance. This is partly because I am unconvinced that the myriad of species on the Earth today consists purely of those that have an evolutionary advantage over their ancestors. The main reasons for my disagreement are a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that the world is planned plus the failure of evolutionary theory, and atheist theories generally including the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism (see my Rosa Lichtenstein page), to explain free will. My understanding that the world is planned, but influenced by free will, is explained in my song The World Is Planned. I know I have free will and some sort of soul (existence outside matter).
What is often overlooked by those who criticise Intelligent Design, which is now being taught in some schools in the USA, is that it does not necessarily entail the existence of God. I take the point of view that there is some sort of combined consciousness linking all souls on the Earth together. I argue that the Earth is a kind of super-organism which directs the free will of individual minds; that super-organism could be considered to be God, or there could be some sort of overarching god overseeing everything. I think my idea of a super-organism is similar to the Gaia theory of Richard Lovelock (but I have only read his book The Revenge of Gaia and will need to read more of his literature before I can fully establish the differences between our understandings of the world).
I watched an IndyMedia video in the autumn of 2004 which showed anarchists locking their arms together with metal bars and getting in front of Sainsbury’s lorries, with police being physically incapable of separating them – at the end, it was announced that all depots in the country had been similarly blockaded preventing fresh Sainsbury’s milk from arriving anywhere. This was a protest against the fact that that store’s own brand dairy products (along with those of every other supermarket apart from the Co-op and M&S) came from cows fed partially genetically modified (GM) feed; as a result there is Cravendale milk in Sainsbury’s and other supermarkets which is advertised as natural, tastes nicer, lasts seven days once opened, and costs about the same price for four pints. [I presume Cravendale is non-GM but I do not know for certain.] I found out about the scandal of GM products being introduced behind the public’s backs at the 2004 Earth First! Gathering, where I saw some leaflets produced and handed out outside Sainsbury’s stores calling for a boycott of that store’s dairy products, by anarchists along with farmers’ groups (including Farmers for Action who led the fuel blockades that forced the New Labour government to back down over petrol prices). It was pointed out that Sainsbury’s had been targeted because they had come out publicly against GM products in the past, but the fact that Lord Sainsbury was a New Labour Minister is perhaps another factor. Incidentally, it is a travesty of democracy that a lord, who has never been elected to any position, can be in the Cabinet
I came to the position at about that time (in time for the 2005 G8 summit when I made an issue of it) that GM food is a form of mass mind control, because they (specifically Monsanto) are not going to introduce a particular GM product without knowing its effects on people’s minds. There are an infinite number of ways food can be genetically modified so trials supposedly proving that GM food is safe (if that is indeed the conclusion) are massively flawed. However, there are many other ways of subduing the population, such as using additives, and GM food is probably less of an issue than I previously thought.
The J Craig Venter Institute in the USA was the first to decode “the human genome”. This achievement sounds more impressive than it really was – it is one thing to record the values of a sequence of chromosomes (which can take four possible values, denoted by the letters A, C, G and T) and another to understand what particular chromosomes do. Nevertheless, it gives geneticists considerably more information that they can use for good or bad purposes.
The values that would be generated for one particular person would be different from another's, unless they are identical twins. It may appear to be purely for vanity reasons that the founder of the Institute, J Craig Venter himself, to arrange for his DNA to be used for much of the genome. However, the revelations that the Institute has subsequently created an artificial bacterium and that they aspire to create such bacteria that they could release into the atmosphere (supposedly to stop global warming, which is a hoax as I point out in my Global Warming Bluff song) should sound alarm bells. Perhaps I was too influenced by the BBC TV series The Last Enemy, which I watched primarily due to its theme of total surveillance (moving towards a society like George Orwell predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a direction that New Labour is moving in), but I am deeply concerned about the possibility of the release of artificial bacteria to target people with particular genes (perhaps based on race or the colour of eyes).
I am in a unique position to do something about this nightmare scenario due to my development of an artificial intelligence/simulation language called SDML (which stands for “Strictly Declarative Modelling Language”). Because I was the only programmer of this language (and main designer), because I implemented it in Smalltalk (rather than Java or C++, supposedly faster object-oriented languages but subject to bugs when integers get too large), and because the language has a strong basis in logic, it is well-suited to simulating what effect a bacterium would have on a human being. I need to do some further work on SDML, as I explain on my SDML page,
