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So many people see the times we live in as The Age of Man that they are blind to the simple truth. Bacteria rule this planet, they always have done, they always will.
As you sit and read this page you may be totally unaware of your own guts. Give them a thought now. Inside your guts are bacteria. Not a few hundred thousand. Your guts contain more Escherichia coli bacteria than people alive today, more than the entire human population across all time. You sit there content in your superiority and yet you are surrounded and outnumbered even when on your own.
Bacteria are everywhere, inside your guts, your blood, your cells, all around in the air, in the water, the soil and even deep down into the rocks below the soil. This planet entered the age of the bacteria over 3 billion years ago and it has never ended.
Dinosaurs never ruled the Earth. Insects never ruled, and never will. The predominant lifeforms on this planet are the smallest, the best adapted, the most highly evolved; the bacteria.
We have a very warped idea of reality because we look at it through our own filters. We see ourselves as being the obvious rulers of the planet because of our anthropocentric viewpoint. We have taught ourselves that man is the pinnacle of evolution, the highest form. This is both untrue and meaningless. Evolution has no pinnacle, no direction, no trend, no destination. There is no up to go. There is no ladder. Progress is a myth.
A much better idea of picturing evolution is as an unfolding out of possibilities. Evolution is a branching out along whatever paths are open.
At the beginning of life there is a very simple choice, towards a stable complexity or to dissolve into death. There is only one direction that evolution can take, towards more complexity. The other direction towards more simplicity ends in death.
When more complexity has evolved the options are wider open, to evolve towards further complexity, to stay on a similar level or to go towards more simplicity again. As time passes these options remain. There is no compelling trend towards complexity.
Game of Life
Imagine a simplified universe of lifeforms. Use numbers. Assume that the simplest possible lifeform has a value of complexity of five arbitrary units of complexity. Assume that evolution is offered fuel in the form of mutations in units of one at a time, and the mutations happen once in every six replications. (These numbers are simply for your ease of mental calculation, they do not represent any description of reality). Then assume every "living number" lasts the same time as three throws of the dice before its death. When you roll a six you get to roll again to determine the type of mutation, a one or two yields a simplifying mutation; a 3, 4 or 5 involves a "sideways" mutation of a similar level of complexity, and a 6 means a complicating mutation. You can also factor in the simplest possible form of environmental limit in the form of a population cap, place an arbitrary ceiling number of individuals and when it is crossed cull the appropriate proportion of breeders randomly.
You start out with one organism at the lowest possible level of complexity that is able to live, represented by the number 5. This replicates steadily. Many early mutations will be fatal. Many are neutral, scoring five but moving along an unspecified distance along a different axis. A few mutations lead to higher complexity. I think it should be easy for you to imagine how this simulation would pan out. Over time the number of "breeding entities" would expand to meet the limit, but the vast majority will stay at the value of 5. As you play more and more the number of breeders at the 5 level will stay high, there will also be many at the levels of 6 to 10. Higher scores will be achieved but by fewer and fewer individual breeders. If you lose your focus on the individual and start looking at the statistics you will notice a trend. The longer you play the game the higher the scores that are achieved, you see a “force for progress”. But if you are deep in the nitty-gritty of the game you know that there are far more non-progressive mutations than progressive ones.
This is how life has panned out. It started at the boundary of the possible, just over zero quantity and minimal complexity. Replication fed growth. Random mutations happened, many were fatal, many led to a divergence without a change in complexity. Some led to more complexity. The minimal level of complexity is the bacterial level, very simple single celled lifeforms. With time these were joined by a minority of more complicated single cells. Then these were joined by a small number of multicelled lifeforms. More time has led to more diversity along all the available axes and possible directions of mutation. The trend toward complexity that we can see in the fossil record is exactly what you would expect to see if there was no intrinsic reason for complexity to be preferable to simplicity. Life has simply explored the available mutation space, filling every accessible niche. There has been no drive towards complexity, no goal in mind, no mind at work.
We are the result of numbers crunching. The power of replication. Imagine one of those bacteria in your gut again; Escherichia coli divide every twenty minutes, doubling in number. Take a single bacteria and feed it unlimited amounts of food that bacteria would have the capacity to proliferate to outnumber all the subatomic particles in the observable universe within 76 hours. Bacteria breed. It is what they do. Imagine replicating every twenty minutes for three and a half billion years. Every single one of those replications was nonfatal. Every single bacteria in that chain of life survived.
Yes, life is very, very improbable. But looked at another way the power of the numbers involved on either side of the great equation of life is so impressive that no firm conclusions can be drawn. You are the result of extraordinarily improbable events of such extraordinary power that they defy our senses and our ability to comprehend meaning.
Does the equation balance? You are here aren't you? Outnumbered even in your own body.
We must remember that we exist in the way that we do because of what has happened in the past. There is nothing pulling us from the future, we are being pushed by the past. Just as every living organism that has ever lived. We exist because we come from an unbroken line of winners, but so does every loser that has ever lived.
I have heard some wildlife documentary makers speculate about how gazelles suffer when they are killed by cheetahs, perhaps they have evolved not to feel the pain? Nonsense. That gazelle's parents were not eaten by cheetahs, at least, not until after they bred. The genes in that gazelle seem to know how to run from cheetahs, they do not know how to avoid the agony of being eaten. No animal is prepared by evolution for death. We are on our own.
Nothing is pulling us towards any destiny. The future does not suck. We have been propelled by evolutionary forces to where we are now, but for no good reason. We just failed to fail. Do not worry, nature gives every organism a chance to fail, and that chance cannot be avoided, no matter how blind we are to it.
So many people see our history as a pointer to our inevitable success. That is nonsense. If we had failed before we would not be here on the brink of potential failure now. Think about that gazelle, the shock of being eaten. For three and a half billion years the genes in that gazelle wove their way through the genetic river from the primordial ooze, forming winning packages every time and now, this perfectly formed gazelle fawn is being eaten. How can it happen? Surely the entire history of the universe is leading up to this point, if any one of trillions of ancestors had died before reproduction that gazelle would not be there. How can he fail? He is destined to succeed, surely?
You and me are no more destined to succeed than the grains of wheat that formed your last pizza crust. They too came from an unbroken chain of success. For 9,000 years man had cultivated wheat, at every one of those 9,000 harvests grains that carried the genes that formed that wheat were selected for propagation rather than food, out of tens or hundreds of thousands, millions or more. Those genes were surely destined for immortality... or maybe they were just as likely to form a discarded pizza crust.
There is no destiny. Your future is neither written in the stars, set in your genes nor under your control. If you sit back and trust to destiny you may be the next gazelle fawn or pizza crust. If you pray to an empty sky you are doing nothing more than deceiving yourself. You cannot win. The best you can do is to try to achieve something before your inevitable demise. Life is a contagious genetic disease. The prognosis is always fatal. Everything we as a species hold dear may be wiped out in a flash, or a long agony.
I make two serious predictions for the long term:-
As long as there is life on Earth the bacteria will rule.
If you keep cheerful and hope for the best you will die anyway.