If You Want to Understand My Theory, This is the Only Article You’ll Need
I lost so much sleep only to develop a theory of evolution, life and matter in general
For over 7 years I have worked on this theory.
Here, I bring it to you in less than 7 minutes.
Building it was a gamble. And I went all in.
Most of my seniors stressed the idea of publish or perish. But curiosity got the best of me.
If it’s a question of perish, then perish I did. I died with this idea.
But One Republic said it best:
Everything that kills me makes me feel alive.
I have never felt more alive than when chasing this idea.
There were moments when it seemed hopeless. Most of the ideas I had, at the inception, were quickly debunked with more reading. Others had been discovered already.
But the more I dug, the more I came across fertile fields and the more my idea soared. In my mind, at least.
It was a gamble. It was the tossed coin hanging in the air, waiting for my fate.
Seek it out and ye shall find — the gamble
Flip a coin
Forget that it can land on the edge. It’s either heads or tails.
A coin toss is all you need to understand what I will explain in this article.
In the end, this post will be all you need to understand my theory of evolution.
It starts with a simple coin toss.
Heads or tails are similar to heads or not heads.
If you flip a coin, there’s a 50% chance it will land on heads and a 50% chance it will land on tails.
This much we understand from probability. However, it is not that simple.
If I flip a coin ten times, it might land on heads 6 out of 10 times. Which means it landed on tails 4 times. With such a small number of tosses, it does not mean the coin is biased.
If the coin is neutral, it can still have the same outcomes as above. If we flip it 1000 times, it might get to 601 times as head, and 399 times as tail. It gets closer to 0.5 for either option the more the flips.
As we get to infinity, it should have this outcome we all know — 50% heads and 50% tails. But we can hardly live long enough to see what infinity looks like.
So we use mathematical tools to guide us. We use the idea of the sampling space.
A sampling space is the space of outcomes and the probabilities. In the case of the cube, there are six outcomes. If the cube is unbiased, it means each face has a one in six chance of being on top.
For the coin, the sample space is two — heads or tails.
If a coin’s sampling space is two, we can only get one of the two per flip. Heads or tails. This is enough to arrive at the result of 50% tails and 50% heads.
Now, let’s flip it.
You can either have 50% heads or 50% not heads.
In this sample space, 50% tails is the same as 50% not heads.
So when you flip a coin, you can either get ½ heads or ½ not heads.
I want us to now consider an organism.
From 0 to 1 — your life exists in this spectrum in this way
Imagine a spectrum of existence.
Its extremes are 0 on the left and 1 on the right. If you are at 0, then you are non-existent. If you are at 1, then you are also non-existent.
At 0, you are non-existent because you have not even existed in the first place. You are not even a thought process in any existing entity.
1 is the flip side, where you are non-existent because you no longer exist. You moved from non-existence, which is 0, and existed throughout the spectrum of existence until you died.
Next thing, imagine an arrow moving from 0 to 1. Existence is seen when you are at the most immediate step from 0, from non-existence to existence. The arrow moves at whichever pace it can from zero, but ultimately it will get to 1.
Why? Because death is inevitable.
I use an arrow to explain it because I want you to consider the arrow of time. It has one final outcome — death.
But as long as you are not dead, you are not at 0 and not at 1. You lie in between.
Your existence can be expressed as a fraction
Because you are found between these two extremes, your existence is a fraction.
Let’s say you are halfway between 0 and 1. This would mean you are at ½ in this spectrum.
But every organism as we know it would not want to just die. Death is at 1 — the extreme right of the spectrum. Before then, you are not dead.
If you are at ½, the probability of you existing is ½. If we flip this, as we did the coin, then the probability of you not dying is also ½.
Here’s another example for better understanding.
If you are at 1/3, your probability of existence is 1/3. Your probability of not existing is 2/3. Simple, yes?
Now, let’s flip it once more.
Every organism we can think of would not want to get to 1 as fast as it can. It will do anything in its power to delay progression to the right end of this spectrum, to prevent death.
As a consequence, an organism is any entity with a tendency to avoid death.
And it can delay death in a simple way. Through mergers.
From fractions to the delay of death — how organisms survive
Mergers are anything that links us together. It could be a business, a child, or a sports team.
Say I meet you today and decide to form a merger.
Your probability of existence is ½. Mine is ½. If we create a merger, 1/2×1/2 = ¼.
I use multiplication because the probability of you AND me existing implies multiplication. The function ‘AND’, in probability, dictates multiplication.
What this has done is extend your stay in the existence spectrum. Why? Because now the probability of not existing is 1–1/4 which is ¾.
Before the merger, each of us had a probability of not existing being ½. Now, it is ¾.
The lesson? Mergers delay death.
It is important to lay out some assumptions in our theory.
All theories need to do so.
The first is, this probability is not as static as you might think. It’s dynamic. But for you to understand the logic, I use static examples. Remember, the arrow is always on the move.
Secondly, we can never know what our probability of existing is. As a result, we can never know what the probability of not existing is. But this is hardly a challenge to the theory because we can use static probabilities to illustrate our point.
Once you understand the logic, this assumption turns into a reality principle.
And the reality principle is we can never know our probability of non-existence.
The third and most important is every merger result in the formation of a new emergent organism.
Remember your probability was ½ and mine was ½. After the merger, there was an emergent organism with a probability of ¼. It is this organism that delays both of us from progressing to death.
In short, this emergent organism delays death.
An organism is any entity with a tendency to avoid death. At a primal level, this tendency can be seen by the capacity for organisms to form mergers, because it delays their progression towards death.
Once we accept these assumptions, the theory is straightforward.
Before I forget. Here’s the name of the theory:
Organismal Selection
Or OS in short.
It uses two powerful laws:
- The calculus of probability as I have shown in the examples
- The second law of thermodynamics — which points towards eventual death
I thus describe the theory like this:
Using probability, existence is sufficient to explain evolution.
This is how Organismal Selection differs from Natural Selection — 10 reasons, but there are more
OS is different from natural selection in the following ways
1. You do not need reproduction (as Lewontin insisted)
2. You do not need competition
3. You do not need cooperation, even though cooperation delays death as seen in mergers
4. It stresses the importance of cooperation (mergers) rather than competition.
5. It can explain the first organism, the very first organism, unlike no other theory of evolution.
6. It does not need death rates, birth rates, and reproduction rates to gain merit.
7. It only needs existence for it to be understood. It means all the barren entities such as mules gain relevance in evolution
8. It shows the active role of the organism, while natural selection is largely passive.
9. It gives an organism its due credit — creativity and resilience. Creativity has always been attributed to natural selection. But nature only annihilates. Organisms create.
10. It needs no context — such as a species in its niche or two species competing. It only needs existence.
These are only ten ways the theory is different from natural selection. There’s more but I’ll leave it at that.
Final thought
Yes, I have developed an alternative view of evolution. But it does not stop there.
There are so many areas I still have to cover. A lifetime is not enough. Darwin started his ideas in the 19th Century. Lamarck did the same.
They are discussed to date.
I can only be foolish to think I can stop here.
There is more in this pool of evolution. Every day we keep steering in this unknown pond.
And should the boat capsize, One Republic responds the only way I can think of:
Everything that drowns me, makes me wanna fly
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