My theory of devolution

Anyone who questions Darwin is these days regarded as one notch above a flat-earther, if that. We take it for granted that everything evolves from small to big, from simple to complex, from primitive to advanced.

However, my contention is that, if we stop taking evolution on faith for the sake of argument, we’ll find that exactly the opposite of it is both more evident and more plausible. I do hope that one day schoolchildren will be taught the theory of devolution, with at least equal time allocated to it as to Darwin’s slapdash musings.

Those tots will then find that things more naturally develop from big to small, from complex to simple, from intricate to primitive. Of course, anyone who believes in the Creator doesn’t need me to put forth this argument. Yet even a rank materialist can’t deny obvious facts.

That rank materialist will know that he owes his birth to two fully mature beings, his mother and father, who each produced a tiny particle of themselves, carrying information accumulated over many centuries. The two particles then came together (I’ll spare you the gratuitous graphic details) and conceived the rank materialist.

Development was in this case vectored downwards. It started with two fully grown human beings who activated some intricate physiological and psychological processes occurring in the unfathomably complex systems known as human brains. Will, reason and emotion came together to release two cells that then combined to produce the rank materialist nine months later.

Just before starting to write this, I ate a Cox apple. Unless I miss my guess, this smallish fruit came from a rather large tree. Not only is the tree bigger than the fruit, but the apple is also bigger than its seeds that can then produce another tree. Again we are witnessing what can appropriately be called devolution, not evolution.

The couple of small eggs I had for breakfast had come from a big hen, for my lunch I’ll eat a small portion of a bird related to the one that laid the eggs. And at dinner I’ll have a piece of meat cut out of the carcass of a cow, itself produced by a method not dissimilar to the one responsible for the existence of that rank materialist.

Duccio and Rembrandt were more accomplished artists than the chaps who painted animals in the caves at Santander. But their artistic minds are dwarfed by the mind of the man who first realised that the natural world could lend itself to pictorial representation. There too the development proceeded from the more complex downwards.

In the same vein, the man who invented the wheel was an intellectual giant compared to Robert Street who in 1794 patented the first internal-combustion engine. Street’s intellectual effort was in its turn superior to that of Carl Benz who invented the car.

Now what about the intellect involved in higher pursuits than producing mechanical devices? Exactly the same tendency is observable there. The 20^th century thinker Alfred North Whitehead once commented that: “The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”.

Footnotes are set in small type at the bottom of the page to provide a reference for something set in big type above. Whitehead’s implication is clear: Western philosophy also developed from high to low, from superior to inferior, from original thought to mere commentary.

If you wish to take exception to the theory of devolution, you’ll have to argue that today’s composers are better than Bach and Beethoven, today’s poets are superior to Dante and Shakespeare, today’s novelists put Dickens and Tolstoy to shame, today’s playwrights go further than Ibsen and Chekhov, today’s economists outsmart Adam Smith and David Ricardo, today’s political scientists go Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre one better.

After you’ve exhausted yourself trying to prove the unprovable, I’ll ask you to compare Vermeer to Tracy Emin and flash a smug QED smile. Note that so far we haven’t had to take God’s name in vain, nor even to appeal to modern biology (assisted by archaeology, physics and chemistry) that has relegated Darwin’s theory from science to unadulterated ideology.

A grown man, Dr Robert Darwin, had to add his spermatozoon to the ovum produced by a grown woman, Susannah Darwin, née Wedgwood, to produce a tiny embryo that then became baby Charles. Chickens lay eggs, oak trees produce acorns, small fruit grows on big trees. This is how the theory of devolution works in practice.

I’m not claiming irrefutable rigour for this theory. I can see quite a few arguments not only pro but also con. However, on balance it strikes me as more plausible than anything Darwin and his acolytes have come up with.

If we look at man’s mind, something that natural science hasn’t yet come to grips with and probably never will, then the theory of devolution is easier to argue than its opposite. And if you examine the political institutions the human mind has created, you’ll notice a steady decline in the level of the people who man them.

Just compare our past few prime ministers with the likes of Wellington, Disraeli and Churchill – or for that matter any recent US presidents with Washington, Adams or Madison. The larger the test sample you use, and you’re welcome to draw in comparable figures from other countries, the more noticeable the steady decline. Or devolution, if you’d rather.

Looking at the portraits of old British PMs, one sees some supremely intelligent faces and some perhaps less so. But not a single one shows the same lack of any discernible mental acuity you’ll find exhibited on Keir Starmer’s face, or on that of his inimitable deputy Angie Rayner.

The theory of devolution works in ways as mysterious as they are inexorable. But it does work.