Deckard said:
if we can beleive that our bodies will totatlly change as soon as we have finctional 12 strands of DNA why would it be so hard to beleive that our complete physiology and biochemistry will change.
The first problem is, of course, finding out what might enable an individual to reach the point of such a transition to "higher states of being." Where did the "12 strands" idea come from might be a first question...
But we'll skip over that for the moment and just consider some things for a minute here:
It is assumed that man is the product of slow and orderly evolution and his present hope for three-score and ten years is a great advancement, since recorded history indicates to us that during other periods of history, when more hostile conditions prevailed, man had a much reduced life-span. I would like to conjecture, however, that a fundamental reordering of things during several episodes in the earth's past might have appreciably altered conditions so that an original "Edenic condition" was lost. Must we assume that the ancients did not understand time as we know it when they claimed to live hundreds of years? Or must we assume that Time is always and forever the same thing?
Obviously many creatures have lived upon the earth that no longer live here. When they disappear or are all killed off, we say that they are "extinct." It occurred to me at some point that, perhaps, "extinction" is a symptom of the fact that the cosmos in which that species was able to flourish has lost its vigor. It doesn't matter how the species becomes extinct, because, in the end, it is only a symbol. What is more, the fact that a certain species does not reassert itself after such losses suggests that certain conditions have changed, and those changes are lethal.
In terms of human beings, the Bible tells us that after the Flood of Noah, man was no longer able to live the same lifespan that had originally been allotted to him. Symbolically, this suggests that something significant about the cosmos or the state of matter itself, had changed. Modern science, of course, completely dismisses such ideas with seeming good reason. But, we should like to ask: What if the shortening of man's lifespan actually happened? What if it happened more than once? What if such an event represents a loss of vigor or exhaustion of cosmic resources? Or, what if it represents the fact that mankind originally evolved in a different environment and the present one is no longer conducive to such long lives? In this regard, some observations about dinosaurs are pertinent.
There have been found dinosaur remains in "bone-yards" which had shoulder blades eleven feet long! The towering Brachiosaurus, an herbivore, stood up to fifty feet tall and weighed perhaps a hundred tons! How could it have sustained itself? One hundred tons is about fifteen times the weight of an adult African bull elephant - an animal that consumes 300 to 600 pounds of fodder every 24 hours and spends up to eighteen hours a day foraging for food! It seems totally out of the question to imagine this "Supersaurus" feeding itself.
If Brachiosaurus was warm-blooded like an elephant, it might have been unable to eat enough to keep itself alive! But, even as a cold-blooded animal, there is doubt that this gargantuan creature could have eaten enough with its small mouth and teeth. There is just no real solution to this problem if we assume that the earth has always been the same since life evolved on its surface.
We are taught by orthodox science that the dinosaurs were failures - colossal failures. There is a litany of "couldn'ts" recited about them. They couldn't walk on land because they were too heavy. They couldn't eat anything but mush because their heads were too small. They couldn't run fast because their joints were imperfect. They couldn't be warm-blooded because their brains were too small. They couldn't compete with smaller, warm-blooded animals.
Yet, when dinosaurs began to emerge as the dominant group, there were many other species which had equal opportunity to dominate, to win the race for king of the mountain. For five million years, the dinosaurs were on equal footing with the other inhabitants of the ecosystem. But then, the dinosaurs showed that they were the fittest and survived into absolute domination of the globe. During their rule, it is claimed that there was no non-dinosaur larger than a turkey! They don't call it the "age of reptiles" for no reason! The dinosaurs monopolized the planet for 130 million years. As they spread into every area of dominance, they drove out or destroyed other advanced clans which had also been evolving and adapting for tens of millions of years. During their long reign, there were other clans that could have threatened their survival, and each time the dinosaurs showed they were "firstest with the mostest" in terms of adaptive vigor.
It is posited that the class Mammalia emerged fully defined just as the dinosaurs began their expansion. But, obviously, for some reason, being a mammal wasn't such an advantage during that time. Dinosaurs evolved quickly, changed repeatedly, and maintained their dominance until some terrible event brought their rule to an abrupt end. Robert T. Bakker, author of The Dinosaur Heresies, writes:
The sudden extinction of dinosaurs is one of the most popularized topics in paleontology. Why, after all, did the last dynasties finally end in total extinction? In reality, however, the dinosaurs' history contains the drama of much more than a single death. They suffered three or four major catastrophes during their long predominance, each one thinning the ranks of the entire clan. And after each such fall, they recouped their evolutionary fortunes, rising again to fill the terrestrial system with yet another wave of new species and families of species. The final complete extermination did not come until sixty-five million years ago, at what geologists label the 'Time of Great Dying,' the greatest evolutionary disaster of all time... Our view of evolution must take into account the profoundly disorienting blows struck by the environment during these world-wide extinctions.
There are many theories put forth to explain these problems but, as is the usual case with Darwinian thought, they are highly unsatisfactory and leave too many questions that require fantastic cerebral gymnastics to answer.
Using Occam's razor, might it not be more reasonable to assume that the earth was a different place at the time the dinosaurs walked? Just to speculate here, it might be that they obtained a portion of their nourishment from the act of breathing itself. Additionally, a different level of gravity would have greatly reduced the energy needs, and a more salubrious climate would have further eliminated the energy expenditure for heat regulation.
At the same time, a soupier atmosphere would have shielded the inhabitants of the earth from the harmful radiation of the sun and would have been more conducive to extensive life spans, which may have been the means by which the dinosaurs grew to such fantastic sizes. Bakker also makes an excellent case for the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs:
No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a whole were more like reptilian crocodiles than warm-blooded birds. No one has done this because it can't be done... So hundred-year-old dinosaur theories live on without being questioned, and too often they are assumed to be totally correct. Even when such a theory is caught in an error, it's likely to be excused. [...]
Any attempt to analyze the events of the extinction of the dinosaurs runs into the fundamental difficulties that hinder the investigation of any of these mass murders of species. Most fossil bones owe their preservation to quick burial by sediment right after the death of their owner. But generally most spots in the terrestrial biosphere suffer erosion, not deposition.
Then, of course, there is the little matter of the "invention" of agriculture. Richard Rudgley, author of "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" noted in passing:
The study of the sample of skeletal remains from South Asia showed that there was a decline in body stature, body size and life expectancy with the adoption of farming. ...Of the 13 studies, 10 showed that the average life expectancy declined with the adoption of farming.
Apart from the change in diet of course, farming generally means spending a lot of time in the Sun.
Just a few things to think about.
