Spiritual Selection and the Evolution of Humanity

By Richard Lewis

My topic is the evolution of the human race, but it will take a roundabout before we get there. Starting with my afternoon in the park today in New Jersey…

One of the pleasures of being 75—and they are few—is that there is time to read good books in the park in the afternoon. Recently, I was reading a delightful novel set in Ireland in which two of Maeve’s young characters realize how well suited they were in so many ways, but, as they agreed: Isn’t it awful that we couldn’t fancy each other, but we don’t, not even a bit.

This got me thinking about how it is not unusual for, at first meeting, to have a strong feeling about new acquaintances, unlike the mild ambivalence about them that is more usual. It could be a hot sense of how wonderful they were, or a cold knowledge you have met an enemy.

There are probably well over a million movies about ‘love-at-first-sight’ and ‘finding your soulmate.’ While it is logically impossible in a planet of 8,120,000,000 persons that only 1 person is it and you have to find it, it is quite possible that there are many people you could get along with famously, they are, so to speak, your soul class.

It is only parental, church and social guidance that prevents instant expressions of these unexpected passions.

For animals in the wild, these controls do no exist. But they do in agriculture, where farmers are interested in maximizing yield and minimizing effort by a process called Artificial Selection (a cousin to Natural Selection, made famous by Darwin). The farmer quite naturally chooses the best of a generation to mate and breed, while the rest go on to be steak and sausages. Darwin did this with domestic pigeons, thought Mother Nature did the same, and came up with his theory of evolution by random change and natural selection.

Now, while religion has difficulty with the random aspect of Darwinism, no one has any problem with the tautological concept that ‘these best at surviving displace those bad at surviving.’

We can pull all of this together in a process we can call, Spiritual Selection (SS), joining the family of Darwin’s Natural Selection (NS) and the farmer’s Artificial Selection (AS).

Spiritual selection is what turned pre-human hominins in Africa into the first humans.

While current science treats these hominins as distinct species, there much genetic mixing more akin to races than species. My GoogleAI answer: There is no exact number of hominin species that have existed in Africa, as discoveries and classifications are ongoing, but at least a dozen have been identified.

For our purposes, we can equate ‘human’ with the “I Am” characteristic, one that is absent in non-humans, but, according to Moses, is the most important of God’s characteristics.

It is well-understood in medicine that this “I Am” is an emergent property of a very specific and sophisticated patterning of material. If this pattern is disrupted, the I Am is absent.

Biology has shown that on a genetic level, bananas have 60% of our genes, while chimps have 99% of them. This indicates that it is not what genes you have, but how they are organized together that is the key.

All organisms are designed to learn and respond to the environment, on scales from day-to-day, generation to generation, to age to age. Humanity learnt over many generations that the dark skin protection from the Sun leads to vitamin deficiencies in northern climates that is obviated by lighter skin.

Now, while all were bathed in endless sunlight, Africa has a wide variety of ecologies and ecosystems. The hominins in each ecosystem learned a set of skills and abilities.

The ancestral wisdom recorded in the Bible, suggests that a single spirit was involved in the Origin of Man event. This essay suggests that not one but many, many spirits were involved, not just at the culmination of the process but actually driving the evolutionary process from the very start. By causing hominins to fancy or dislike each other.