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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Phylogeny

Science rejects programming in nature, especially in evolution.

From Earth's first biological cell to Homo sapiens, nature has been manufacturing, and occasionally retiring, species in its project to populate the Earth's biosphere. The process is called phylogeny, the evolutionary descent of lineages. It is a process that science dogmatically insists does not proceed according to a program—does not have purpose, is not directed.

In the scientific account, evolution is shaped extemporaneously by natural selection, which acts on the variation that occurs among individuals in the local population of a species. Environments "select" for survival those individuals endowed by nature with a "selective advantage," that is, a natural capacity to survive and reproduce, with successful reproduction yielding fertile, viable offspring.

Individuals selected by the environment to survive and bear progeny skew the genetic profile of generations down the line. As a result, successive generations of a species might bear little resemblance to their ancestors, because they represent only that slice of the original gene pool that possessed the characteristics necessary for survival and reproduction. For generations sufficiently far down the line, the genome of any descendant species is up for grabs. Its makeup will depend on the particular demands made by the environment. And environments themselves change.

No amphibian hatchling can mature into a wolf, but amphibians as a class can sprout a family tree that eventually includes wolves and many other highly unamphibious descendants. The divergences can become so pronounced, over eons, that humankind for millennia failed to develop any widely held concept of species descent. However, as the theory of evolution gained currency, hypotheses arose that sought to relate phylogeny and ontogeny in meaningful ways. As different as they are in scale, both appear to be processes of development.

One influential unification of the two concepts was the "biogenetic law" of German biologist Ernst Haekel in the nineteenth century. Haekel's alliterative law, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," was widely adopted as a scientific principle, its influence reaching well into the twentieth century. Haeckel proposed that during the course of ontogeny an organism passes through the stages of its ancestral phylogeny, through the various steps from simple unicellular creature through stages that repeat its evolutionary history.

During the twentieth century, the biogenetic law was replaced by other ideas; specifically the view that ontogeny is essentially a programmed progression from a less to a more differentiated form, not necessarily bearing any relation to the path of the species' phylogenetic ancestry. The process of individual development is no longer conceived of as a recapitulation of ancestral descent. This newer understanding of ontogeny and its relationship to phylogeny is situated in a historical and sociological context by Stephen Jay Gould in his encyclopedic "Ontogeny and Phylogeny".

The ontogeny of an individual organism is an unambiguous example of ends being imminent in a natural process—that is, of a natural teleology. But in the scientific view ontogeny is embedded in the larger context of unprogrammed phylogeny. The star larvae hypothesis challenges this view. The hypothesis fundamentally reconceptualizes the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. It locates phylogeny—biological life’s evolutionary history—within an overarching ontogeny—the stellar life cycle—making the former subordinate to the latter. It inverts the received relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny; it assigns to evolution an ontogenetic plan.

This hypothesis predicts that the genomes of primitive species should contain genetic programs for newer, more complex species—a prediction NOT supported by normal evolution theory. Such a discovery would seriously challenge the logic of normal evolution theory, because it would suggest that evolution, like ontogeny, unfolds from a pre-programmed genetic potential.

And in fact this is what ongoing genetic analysis is finding:

A news release (11/24/2005) issued by the journal Trends in Genetics announces that

"Corals and sea anemones (the flowers of the sea), long regarded as merely simple sea-dwelling animals, turn out to be more genetically complex than first realised. They have just as many genes as most mammals, including humans, and many of the genes that were thought to have been "invented" in vertebrates are actually very old and are present in these "simple" animals."

The full text of the release is available at http://www.sars.no/research/technauPress.php

Newer (2007) sequencing and analysis results corroborate the anemone anomalies.

Another example comes from research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which found human genes in a marine worm. The news release (11/24/2005) announcing the finding is at http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/aboutus/news/press/press05/press25nov05/index.html

Additional research discovered that genes essential for human nerve cells to communicate with one another are present already in bacteria. This research is described in a NIH news release (6/1/2004) at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/genes.cfm

These and other anomalous (in the Darwinian context) results of genome analysis are collected at http://www.panspermia.org/oldgenes.htm. This page of Brig Klyce’s "Cosmic Ancestry" web site includes commentary on the relevance of these findings to panspermia. The discovery of advanced genes in primitive organisms suggests that the evolution of life on Earth constitutes an ontogeny—the ontogeny of Gaia.

Another model for the inversion of the usually conceived of relationship between phylogeny and ontogeny is the differentiation of cells during embryological and fetal development. During the normal course of development of an organism many generations of cells live and die, "evolving" through the succession of their generations. A complex organism begins life as a single cell of a morphologically generic sort (the fertilized egg cells of seahorses, hummingbirds, and humans, for example, are morphologically indistinguishable, being essentially spherical). In the case of complex organisms, the fertilized egg divides into two cells, which divide into four, and so on, until a sufficient number of cells exists for the cellular collective to initiate a specialization of labor. Among the successive generations of cells, the various types compete and cooperate to acquire the resources that they need to survive, and their collective labors constitute the physiology of the embryo that their their bodies, in aggregate, constitute.

At some point during embryological development, a cell that is not quite a liver cell gives rise to a liver cell; a cell that is not quite a neuron gives rise to a neuron, and so on. This is micro- or cytophylogeny, the process by which cells of a type—those present before any have differentiated into specialized roles—evolve over the course of generations into cells that are differentiated into specialized roles. They give rise to specific types that behave in specific ways in their interlocking niches within the somatic ecology of the organism's physiology.

The phylogenetic character of this process can be elaborated further according to the strictures of Darwinism: Insofar as there is variation among the individuals in the population of any particular cell type, and insofar as not every cell survives to contribute its genetic predispositions to the next generation, there is a natural selection among cells during ontogeny. This thought experiment—fitting ontogenetic cellular differentiation into a model of Darwinian phylogeny—underscores an early and continuing criticism of Darwinian logic, namely that it is tautological. When formulated as "survival of the fittest" the doctrine of natural selection identifies the fittest organisms as those that survive and the survivors as those most fit. In the process of cytophylogeny, the development of an organism—an ontogeny—is also a phylogeny, one in which a common ancestral starting point—a fertilized ovum—differentiates through successive generations to yield a diversity of descendant forms. Someone inclined toward anthropomorphizing might imagine the cells of a complex organism marveling at the blind workings of mutation and natural selection that turned their common ancestor—the original ovum—into such a diversity of cellular species. Fitness selects the survivors, as demonstrated by their survival!—whether they are cells cooperating and competing in an organism or organisms cooperating and competing in an ecosystem.

Cellular differentiation reveals a phylogeny within an ontogeny, whereas modern science locates all ontogenies within their respective phylogenies. The inversion of this relationship in the case of cellular differentiation in complex organisms is at least illustrative and at most provides a natural precedent for the underlying logic of the star larvae hypothesis. It constitutes a proof that a phylogeny can operate within an ontogeny, in which case the phylogeny unfolds according to a program. The new research that finds genes for advanced (newer) organisms already present in primitive (older) organisms, suggests on the macro scale that phylogeny (evolution) is embedded within an overarching ontogeny.

Western thinking from Plato through The Elizabethan Age conceived of Creation as structured hierarchically in the form of a "Great Chain of Being." The chain ascended from the smallest germ up through the plants and creatures to humankind and ultimately through the spheres of the firmament to reach the throne of God. The extraterrestrial links in the chain were, within Catholicism, detailed in the form of the Orders of Angels. Few thinkers today would regard such metaphors as more than poetic anachronisms, a primitive conception of the natural (and supernatural) order. But in the context of the star larvae hypothesis, the Chain of Being presents a more complete picture of evolution than does the standard scientific view. What the Chain lacks, and science provides, is the temporal, dynamic dimension of the process. The Chain of Being is a cross-section of a temporal progression—a developmental sequence that leads from the terrestrial to the extraterrestrial. The Chain was conceived of at a time when Creation was regarded as static (a place for everything, etc.). Once we assign phylogeny (the evolution of species) a subordinate position within an overarching ontogeny (the stellar life cycle) we effectively resurrect the Chain of Being, but in an ecological context. Evolution is the metamorphosis of stages in the life cycle of a genus of organism—the stellar organism. The apparent directionlessness of evolution (Gould, Dawkins) is replaced by a processional sequence that, when viewed in cross section, takes the form of a Great Chain of Being. The historical intuition was essentially right, it just failed to take into account the underlying dynamic process.

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