Just recently (December 2024) there appeared a headline in the journal ‘Scientific American’ (Earth and Environment section.). It was based upon a study of Fern’s, The headline read;

‘FERN’s ‘BACKWARD’ EVOLUTION REVEALS LIFE’s MEANDERING PATHS.’

Its invitation to read the article further, then stated the following;

“Evolution is often depicted as a steady forward march from simple to complex forms. But new research shows that certain fern’s can evolve ‘backward’.”

The author (or editor) of these words clearly hasn’t really understood the theory of evolution or has chosen not to mention who it is that ‘often depicts evolution as a steady march forward from simple to complex and why. Choosing not to mention the Christian naivity of the Victorian originators of the theory of evolution in 1859 and even later, is significant. The latter were influenced by the Bible’s made-up  conclusion that God made everything in a perfect form and so from within that Christian based ideological framework, evolution to be acceptable to its theology, had to be fulfilling gods purpose. However, evolutionary theory, espoused by Darwin and other supposedly ‘enlightened’ Victorian Christian evolutionists, rests on the entirely conceptual assumption that changes to the form and structure of organic beings, was (and is) caused by an incessant competive struggle with other life forms in order to obtain supposedly relatively scarce essential resources. They further assumed this competition to exist among all species, and thus it accomplished what god intended – perfection! In his introduction Darwin writes;

“In the next chapter the Struggle for Existence amongst all organic beings throughout the world, which inevitably follows from their high geometric powers of increase, will be treated of. This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.” (Darwin. Introduction.)

It did not occur to these Victorian era naturalists, that the “high geometric powers of increase” had long become the nutritional supply source for all living organisms and thus was the basis of the cycle of life, during its entire evolutionary development. For example, if plants only produced enough or less seeds, than were needed for its particular species to survive, there would be less nutritional resources for seed eating birds and other seed eating animals, therefore there would be less seed eating birds and animals due to a shortage of nutrition, not due to them fighting each other for the few available seeds. Life needs nutritional sources to process and metabolise into forms their cells can use.

Consequently high geometric species reproduction has been occuring in some species for millions, if not billions of years, without the need for a human-centred idea of ‘life on earth’ (i.e.nature) overcrowding itself and thus involving species in an existential struggle against everything alive in order to survive. Grass, seeds, leaves, nuts and fruits are so prolific that herds and flocks of millions could graze (and still do) without fighting with each other for every square metre of grass or for every fruit or leaf bearing branch.

It did not occur to these Christian intellectuals either that it was a specific human hierarchical mass society form of organisation, that had given rise to the overcrowding of settled living areas and which thus led to wars and life and death resource struggles, with other communities  in order for their hiersrchical system to survive. Such collective death-dealing struggles are unique to human communities. No other life form does that, not even the carnivores.  That actual socio-economic fact of human collective living by eliminating other human communities in turn led to the ideas of eugenic forms of limiting the reproductive rate of humans and onto the practices of culling rivals by war for resources and its extreme cases in the act of calculated genocide.

Those Victorian Naturalists, favouring a non-God explanation of how organisms were changed during their existence,  concluded (with no really sound evidence to support it) that ‘nature’ was causing a ‘selection’ (hence ‘Natural Selection’) to occur within life forms on earth. Actually the word ‘nature’ is nothing more than a verbal abstraction useful only for human general use. Abstractions have no means of exerting any external material force on anything, let alone changing the cellular composition of all organic organisms. They concluded from this imagined ‘selection’ by ‘ nature’, that this imaginary process served to improved the ‘stock’ or (race) and kept it fit enough to survive in any environmental changes around it.

This result, they assumed or presumed (again with only Theological Opinion supporting  it) that, that was what God originally intended. Darwin’s subtitle for his theory of Natural Selection in the Origins of Species is revealing in this regard. His subtitle is the ‘Preservation of Races in the Struggle for Life’. Darwin probably didn’t consider that this sub-title along with his and Malthus’s interpretation of their anthropocentric Christianised version of evolutionary theory would give support to the elitist bourgeois capitalist superior attitudes to working people, women and non-European indigenous people of the world, but it did.

The socio-economic outcome of industrialised mass society aggregations and this intellectually manipulated outcome of racial theories conveniently became an ideological  justification for the whole 17th to 20th century dark episodes of exploitation and oppression by European elites in the colonial period of savage exploitation of the European working classes and of the indigenous people of North and South America,  Africa, Asia and Oceana. The sentiment of ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ as Sven Lindqvist entitled his book and which Conrad depicted in ‘Heart of Darkness’, is implicit as well as explicit in the hierarchical mass society form – as the many historically recurring genocides indicate.  Including the latest one in Gaza.

The ‘preservation of favoured races’ concept also provided the basis of the ideology and genocidal actions which the various 20th century Fascistic versions of authoritarian mass society elite formations adopted. Their elites merely adapted it to make use of industrial methods of mass slaughter. Thus the idea of ‘the preservation of ‘favoured races’ in the struggle for life’ was energetically pursued by Imperialists, Colonisers and Fascists alike and this way of thinking still secretly or openly informs the ruling elites of all modern hierarchical mass societies – some more than others.  It is not hard in the 21st century to recognise that a number of elites are prepared to perpetuate the ideology of race and of being a God-favoured section of humanity. Such nationalistic and narcissistic elites and their naive followers are particularly partial to such self-indulgent thinking when they consider themselves as being;  the Greatest Nation or Religion, or a Favoured Nation, or a Specially Chosen People.

However, the material basis for this Malthusian form of anthropocentric ideology is not in the non-human life forms of planet earth and their actual evolution. Evolution stripped of its perjoritive religious pretentions and any abstract mystical invisible ‘forces’ to account for changes in the body form of living organisms, is best understood as cellular level adaptations in those body forms or behaviours. These can be miniscule and slow or considerable and relatively quick,  but they actually occur at the cell and organelle (and multi-cellular) levels in response to either environmental circumstances or in some cases accidental mutations at the cellular or multicellular level. But these changes are not in any particular time-dependent or ideologically driven direction. Such changes do not go back or forward, as is asserted by the author in the Scientific American quoted above. Ferns are not evolving backward, they are just living and if evolving, then this is as a result of bio-chemical changes to their cellular processes.

That particular ‘backward’ opinion of ‘backward evolution’ is based upon an anthropocentric driven social assumption encapsulated in the bourgeois initiated concept of economic and technical ‘progress’ either backward or forward. Nor does evolution follow the poetically derived “Meandering Paths” as the article’s title implies. Such changes to form or behaviour in organisms merely occur and are successful or not.  This means that some species have changed considerably over their entire existence and some have hardly changed at all. Fossil records, as imperfect as they undoubtedly are,  nevertheless do indicate that some species have come and gone, others have changed considerably and others are almost identical to their original form even after billions of planetary orbits around the sun (which are of course now conceptually represented as earth years).

These may seem only small points to bring up and criticise, but I have a reason. Given that some of us are at last recognising that the current socio-economic path humanity is rushing along is endangering the very natural foundations upon which all multicellular life is based, we above all need accuracy in understanding life on earth. We need as much accuracy as possible because there is so much misinformation and confusion around the issue of climate change, resource pollution and essential species loss, which are the organic and inorganic factors which underpin the foundations of life on earth. These foundations provide the entire nutritional and non-nutritional needs, for all forms of life on earth and so inaccurate information about nature and evolution equates to fake or misinformation which already frequently emanates from ‘popular’ biased media.

However, it is much more concerning when it also comes from supposedly authentic scientific sources. Those who read, digest and then repeat such mistaken opinions after they have sought clarification on the issues of life on earth and its evolution, will in some cases become part of the problem not part of the solution. It is common knowledge that scientific research and findings can be skewed, by data ommissions, manipulation, distortions and deliberate falsifications, when in the service of petro-chemical, pharmaceutical, logging and mining industries. Those corporations with the influence and the money to dish out high salaries and grant huge research funds to those scientists who are prepared to collude with commercial and financial interests of big-business, make it their business to do so. It is up to those of us with the time and inclination to challenge these small as well as large deviations from presenting reality, as it is, in favour of promoting a prefered industry narrative or on a small scale, short sightedly promoting inaccurate and misleading opinions.

Roy Ratcliffe ( December 2024)