I have written some posts arguing that darwinism and neo-darwinism is not a valid scientific theory and suggested that transmission of DNA by viruses might help darwinism to solve one problem. That does not mean that I think DNA carried by viruses would solve all problems of darwinism, or that it solves any problem in that theory. DNA carries by viruses may have a small role in evolution, but I do not suspect it is the solution. I simply gave it as a possible theoretical straw that evolutionists could use in defending their theory.
The problem in neo-darwinism is that the mechanisms of evolution are limited to (natural, sexual or other) selection and random mutations. Evolution, that is development of life from previous life through some changes in the genome, can be shown e.g. by fossils and comparison of genomes of different species. Evolution is a fact. Natural selection does occur and it can be shown that it has created some changes in genome, like in Darwin’s finches. It is not quite clear if natural selection or separation, genetic drift and bottlenecks were the main reason for the creation of new species, but natural selection can cause genetic changes. Random mutation cause genetic changes. What is missing is the step that shows that evolution, which can be shown to exist, is mainly caused by natural selection and random mutations, though these mechanisms do exist and can cause new species to appear. That is, the alternative mechanisms have not been ruled out. I presented the virus theory as one alternative that has not been ruled out yet.
But I do not propose the virus theory as a solution to evolution. The solution is different. I just invented a name for it: creative time. That sounds like creationism, but it is not. I intentionally wanted it to sound a bit like creationism, just because Darwinists are offending all others with their religious fanaticism.
I will explain my small idea:
Think about a 3-dimensional virtual space, a street where you can walk as a virtual being and see what there is through the virtual eyes of this virtual being. We can add the time dimension so that you can move between the times 1930 and 2010. Let us assume we made this virtual model from photographs and maps and it is a good replica of some real street, so the looks of the street in 1930ies is quite different from the looks in 2000. This is a 4-dimensional space-time, albeit quite small: you cannot walk the street very far. Our new data does not extend past 2010 and there were no old photos before 1930, but we have added a predictor that allows going a few years after 2010: so moving cars continue their movement without breaking any laws of physics and street lamps break randomly in accordance with their average lifetime. The prediction of the future gives one possible future, though it does not fully agree to what happened after 2010. Likewise, we can use the predictor to go a few years before 1930. The future after 2010 and past before 1930 is not hard coded to the data of the model: it is calculated in real time from the situation in the starting point of the predictor.
This model corresponds to a real time-space rather well. Also in the real space-time the future is not determined. It is one of the possible futures that the laws of physics allow. I say that the future is created when the present time moves forward. This is why I call this the creative time theory: the time creates the future, or future is created when the time advances. In the virtual model this creation requires calculation, so it is really created. In the real world there is no calculation, it is continuation of movement.
This virtual space-time has space coordinates so that we can measure distances between points, and it has a time coordinate, so that we can measure time intervals. Though it does not matter in a so small model, we can calculate distances in time and space with relativistic corrections. If we do so, our space-time is a Minskowski measure, just like the real space-time is according to the relativity theory. Time in this space-time is a coordinate. Nothing moves in this space-time: moving space objects are described by 4-dimensional time-space objects.
The present time is something totally different from this time coordinate in the virtual space-time. The present time is defined by you: you select in what time you are walking the street. You can move forward in time, or backward, or jump form one time to another. You move, but nothing in the virtual model moves. The time you use for moving is the real time, an external time to the model. So, the real time is external, the movement of the present time in this model is created by the real time. The model has a time coordinate that allows calculating time differences in the model. These time differences are usually not the same as time differences in the real time. We can impose a rule in the virtual model that you can only move forward in time and that you cannot jump. Still, the only reason why you can move anywhere in time is the real time. Indeed, in this virtual model all time moments between 1930 and 2010 are equally real, yet you feel being in the present time of what ever year you selected. The present time corresponds to your observation. It looks like you would define the present time. You can move to 2010 and as you walk the street some time will pass and the future is created by the predictor. You can actually influence the future e.g. by breaking some street lamp or writing graffiti, things you would probably do in the real world.
If we allow another user to the model, he will also be able to choose the time where he wants to be. He creates another present time. We know that this is not possible in the real world: we are all in the same present time and the time goes on, we cannot stop it. Furthermore, the present time is just before the future. In the virtual model it corresponds to us walking the street at the time 2010. A possible future is selected at each moment when the time goes on. Based on the virtual model analogy we should expect that the present time is caused by some real time that is external to the physical world and that it is this real time or an observation that selects one of the possible futures to happen.
And this seems to me to be the case. It is observation, our observation. There are quantum physical experiments, like the EPR-paradox and the Schrödinger cat, where an observer selects which future is selected. But as all humans, as well as all mammals and other animals which have consciousness, are experiencing the same present time, the observation is not a personal choice. Every observer in the Schrödinger cat experiment would do the same observation. All observers are the same and the real time is the same. In quantum physics it is assumed that an observer can be the measurement equipment, but this is my creative time theory: a living object makes observations through living beings. It is certainly so in the virtual world: the visitors there are the only ones making any observations (not quantum mechanical ones), the rest is simply a deterministic program.
I cannot say if all living beings, like viruses and bacteria, can make this observation, but I doubt it. I think lower life forms are like automatons and they cannot make observations. We can make observations, and all mammals can, but only because the one making the observation is not the physical us but the real us in the real world where there is the real time. It is the same as in the virtual world model: you walk the street, but you are not the virtual object walking the street. The virtual object is an automaton and it cannot make any observations. You are external to the model and can make observations as you are real. In our virtual world observations do not affect the future: the future is calculated by the predictor.
In the real world it seems that our observations may affect the future, but this is not so clear. In the Schrödinger cat experiment the cat is either alive or dead corresponding to what the observer observed, but it is not clear if the observer causes the cat to be dead or alive. Fortunately there is the other experiment, the EPR-paradox. In that experiment the observer changes the past. (I wrote a short story on it, so read it before discarding this claim.) Let us remember that calculating the past before 1930 in our model was done by a predictor. Predicting the past is similar to predicting the future: there are many possible pasts and the task is to select one. In the EPR-paradox an observation in the present time in one point in the space causes something in the same time in another point in the space without there being sent any interaction particles. The only way I can understand this experiment is that the observation changes the past: the observation selects one of the possible pasts. This is also how it is explained by the formulae of quantum physics. It is possible to select one of the possible pasts if the past is not real but potential, like in our virtual model. In the real time past cannot be changed because what was cannot any more be changed. Thus, the physical world cannot be real and there is the real world from which we know by two phenomena: there is the present time, we are conscious and can make observations.
In the EPR-paradox, which has been verified by experiments, the past changes but the past is not lived again. What happens is that one past is selected from the set of possible pasts. That is, a wave function collapses when a measurement is made and it collapses also in the past up to the time when the entangled particles were still together, so past did change.
Next consider the fine tuning problem in theoretical physics and cosmology: the present fundamental theory of elementary particles, called the standard model, seems to be correct. Assuming that the standard model is correct, the relative strengths of interactions must have been extremely precisely fine tuned in order to the universe to have developed as it did. There is no apparent reason for this fine tuning and for that reason researchers looked for a long time for a better theory than the standard model to explain the fine tuning, but in vain. There is one explanation for the fine tuning: there had to be fine tuning because we are here wondering why there is fine tuning, but this explanation is almost universally discarded as circular reasoning: the problem is moved to the impossibility to explaining why we are here. However, a modified form of this reasoning is better: conscious life was born on the earth and that fact required for the past to be selected as a very improbable case from the set of possible alternative pasts. The selected past had to have fine tuning. Now the problem is moved to the problem of how conscious life was born on the earth. Let us ignore this act of creation for a while and consider what it implies to another difficult problem: how life started on the earth.
Earliest life on earth was not even single celled, in the beginning cell had not developed. There is no accepted theory how life could have started from non-life. We can conclude that earliest life was not conscious since a brain is needed for consciousness. Because of this fact, earliest life could not make observations (in my dubious theory, not in quantum physics). It was still on the same level as automatons, a part of non-conscious world. When, much later, conscious life appeared, the past had to take a form which allowed the conscious life to develop. That is, there was no present time at the time when the first cell formed, at the time when first life appeared, and when interactions got fine tuned. Those times were never lived. They only existed as possibilities. The time axis, the physical, measurable time, can be extended to those events and those events can be given approximate times in billions of years, but there was no present time in those far away days. Time did not move forward from moment to moment.
Now we come to the creationistic explanation to fossils: God created fossils to the ground because the present must have the past, but there were no dinosauri. This explanation is ridiculed for a good reason. God appears to be cheating researchers by hiding fossils to the ground. A modified version of this explanation is much better. There were ancient animals, but they did not live in the sense we live. They existed as possibilities, like mathematical structures exist. Probably dinosauri already has consciousness since mammals and birds seem to have, therefore dinosauri existed like we do, but if we continue further to the history there comes some time when the present time did not exist.
Multi-cellular life appeared at the beginning of the Paleozoic Era 543 million years ago. Before that there could not be conscious life. After this species explosion time were five large extinction events followed by periods when many new species developed in a short time: the Ordovician–Silurian extinction event 443.8 million years ago, late Devonian extinction 376-360 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago, Triassic-Jurassic extinction event 201.3 million years ago and the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction eventand 66 million years ago. There extinction events probably were necessary for conscious life to develop in the same way as fine toning of interactions was necessary. If we assume that fish, amphibians, lizards and snakes do not have consciousness, the beginning of conscious life may be the Triassic Era just after the worst ever extinction event. Dinosauri and mammals appeared at that time.
Finally, there is the beginning of this universe, the Big Bang. Nothing can be created from nothing, thus there had to be something from which the universe was created.
I will summarize the arguments for this theory:
- We are conscious, consciousness is not necessary and not explained by physics or evolution
- The present time and movement of time is not explained by the time-space model.
- Observation in the EPR-paradox selects the past showing the time is not real.
- Fine-tuning of interactions is explained by this theory.
- Birth of life and the birth of the first cell are explained by this theory.
- The future is created when time advances, thus time is creative.
- Random mutations should not create totally new species, mutations cannot be random.
- There had to be something that caused the Big Bang and the universe to emerge.
All of these together make me rather confident that there has to be the real world and this physical world is not the most real one. It is not a simulation world, it is an essential part of the reality, but it is not the place where consciousness and the present time are situated.
My theory is not any more miraculous than the present cosmological theory. In the present cosmological theory the universe emerges from nobody-knows-where but not from this space-time in the Big Bang. For some unknown reason interactions happened to be fine tuned. Then the universe develops along the laws of physics, life is born from non-life on the earth and by the mechanism of darwinism evolves to the present species, which by some unknown mechanism develop consciousness.
In my theory conscious life emerges by some unknown mechanism on the earth, it forces the past to be selected in a way that allows the conscious life to develop. This past can be highly improbable as it is forced to happen by the end result. As conscious life requires that life was born, there is an explanation how life was born and why the first cell was born even though both events are highly improbable. Development of consciousness does not require any explanation in this universe, as it is external. The evolution of species does not present problems as mutations are not random but guided by the end result that they have to fill. The present time is not a mystery as it is in the standard explanation.
The difference seems to be to replace a set of miracles (the birth of the universe, the fine tuning, the birth of life, the birth of a cell, the birth of species, the birth of consciousness) by one miracle, the emergence of conscious life. But the emergence of conscious life on earth is actually not a miracle since I assume that conscious life existed earlier in another world and the existence of this other world is shown by the concept of the present time.
Clearly, there is the usual objection that the real world, the other world, is not seen, but there can be many things in the reality we do not see and must conclude their existence from some theory.
This is where I have got so far. Very little was found of the real world.
Of course, I invented this theory just to ridicule the Darwinists as the always imagine that there are no scientific alternatives to their beloved evolution theory. I do not object to evolution, but those people are fanatics. This post, of course, belongs to the religion category as all darwinism.