[Selected Opinion Articles] The Limitations of Modern Science: From Evolution to Prehistoric Civilization and Beyond

(Minghui.org) I was filled with questions as a child. I remember once when I was three or four years old I was outside after dinner. I gazed up at the stars in the sky and wondered, “Are you gazing at me the way I look at you?” That was the very first time I began to think about where human beings came from.

As I grew older, I was still curious about where mankind came from and where we were heading.

The Evolutionary Tree and Gene Mutation

According to current textbooks, all lives can be traced to a common origin along a phylogenetic tree, also known as an evolutionary tree. Lower organisms are like the roots and they evolved into higher organisms like branches. But is this true?

In brief, the evolutionary tree hypothesis argues that all lives stem from a common ancestor through mutation and natural selection. But there are several problems with this hypothesis. First of all, there is no evidence that supports the assumption of a common ancestry. In fact, “the problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories,” wrote evolutionary biologist Eric Bapteste from Pierre and Marie Curie University in a 2009 New Scientist article titled “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life.”

Secondly, biologists believe new species came from random mutations, but many scientists have discovered this is not actually the case. “We always thought of mutation as basically random across the genome,” remarked assistant professor Grey Monroe at the University of California, Davis. “It turns out that mutation is very nonrandom and it’s nonrandom in a way that benefits the plant. It’s a totally new way of thinking about mutation.”

Monroe published his findings in a paper co-authored with Detlef Weigel, scientific director at the Max Planck Institute, in a 2022 Nature paper titled “Mutation bias reflects natural selection in Arabidopsis thaliana.” They wrote, “We conclude that epigenome-associated mutation bias reduces the occurrence of deleterious mutations in Arabidopsis, challenging the prevailing paradigm that mutation is a directionless force in evolution.”

Prehistoric Civilization

There is other evidence inconsistent with evolutionary theory, such as prehistoric discoveries around the world.

One example is the Harappan civilization, which once flourished in today’s India and nearby Mohenjo-daro (a city in Pakistan) in about 3,300 BC. Archaeologists were amazed by the advanced architecture, basic utilities, and sophisticated artifacts. The sudden diminishing of the civilization matched the horrific war described in the Sankrit epic The Mahabharatai. With blasts “more brilliant than a thousand suns,” it illustrated how, after a devastating war, the people lost their hair and fingernails subsisting on contaminated food supplies, according to a March 2019 The Times of India article titled “Researchers find proof of ancient ‘atomic war’ a great many years prior.” These descriptions match the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Many other similar discoveries have been made. Nuclear reactors from two billion years ago were found in Gabon, Africa, as reported in Scientific American and other journals. The print of a human shoe was found in trilobite fossils about 500 million years old. Semi-ovoid metallic tubes were found in French Cretaceous chalk 65 million years old. The Mayan stele from Quirigua documented the location of the sun 400 million years ago. Flints and fireplaces from 3.5 million years ago were found in the Gulf of Argentina. The Dorchester Pot, a metal vase-like object from 6 million years ago, was found in Massachusetts.

These findings challenge the theory of evolution and suggest that ancient civilizations could have existed a long time ago. After all, the primitive cavemen or their ancestors could not have mastered such advanced technologies. That means we need to have an open mind instead of accepting Darwinism as is.

Matter and Spirit

Modern science focuses on the material world and seldom evaluates the existence of the spiritual. Below are several studies that suggest deeper understandings in this area.

Cleve Backster, a former CIA interrogation specialist trained in the use of lie detectors, conducted an experiment in 1966. He connected the electrodes of a lie detector to the leaves of a plant and recorded the plant’s reaction when it was watered. The lie detector recorded measurements that, humans, indicate happiness. When he thought about burning a leaf, the lie detector registered fear. His team tested 25 different plants and got similar results.

In his experiments with the molecular structure of water, Masaru Emoto in Japan showed that words, pictures, and music could alter the structure of water. Herbert Gasser and Joseph Erlanger, joint Nobel Prize winners in 1944, believed that human thoughts exist as a type of energy, such as electromagnetic waves in this dimension. Soviet physicist I. M. Kogan believed that thoughts have a long wavelength with about 10 joules of energy.

Existence of Life

In addition to our visible world, scientists have also discovered the existence of other dimensions. The Superstring Theory speculates that the universe exists in 10 different dimensions.

Avi Loeb, the longest serving chair of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University (2011-2020), put forth the possibility that our universe could have been created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. “Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling,” he wrote in a 2021 Scientific American article titled “Was our universe created in a laboratory?”

“This possible origin story unifies the religious notion of a creator with the secular notion of quantum gravity. We do not possess a predictive theory that combines the two pillars of modern physics: quantum mechanics and gravity,” he wrote in the article. “But a more advanced civilization might have accomplished this feat and mastered the technology of creating baby universes.”

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Note: I am a Falun Dafa practitioner in my late 20s. Falun Dafa is a mind-body practice based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. The practice has not only improved my health, but also made me a better and wiser person who now has a new perspective on the world.

Looking back in history, great discoveries were made possible because people did not blindly insist on holding onto current notions. Rather, they had open minds when they explored the world. I believe that, with such a mindset, we may find the world is actually more interesting than we think.