ABSTRACT
Every biocoenosis has its own history. Nature, in particular, as the embodiment of all biocoenoses on Earth, has its own history. Interpreting nature historically is not matter of course. In many cultures there exists no concept of nature in an Occidental sense,1 and no concept of history in the sense of a unique, unrepeatable sequence of events. Processes in the world have been interpreted cyclically in many past cultures: everything that was comes again; worlds come and go. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, the world has a unique history with a beginning and an end. In the Jewish Bible, the Christian Old Testament, this history begins with the creation of Heaven and Earth and the cry of God, ‘Let there be light!’ It leads through the creation of the sun and the moon, of plants and animals to the creation of Man. This history will end in a manner determined by God in which creation as a whole will be administered justice. Non-human nature (which is extremely difficult to grasp as an autonomous sphere in biblical Judaism) appears within this act of creation as a manifestation of divine will on the one hand, and as the basis for the emergence of humanity on the other. A history of nature outside of its orientation towards humanity and its commission to be the agent of the revelation of its creator was not conceivable within the framework of such concepts. Speaking of a history of nature, one which evidently transpires independently of any intervention of a divine will, is a concept that emerged in the Occident only in European modernity, and did not catch on before the end of the eighteenth century, at which time a dynamic examination of nature took place. The prevailing concepts in this regard are even today still heavily influenced by the work of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), published in 1859. Darwin gathered a wealth of empirical material about individual species and their changes in order to argue, as the title of his principal work The Origin of Species states, that they (along with all the branches that became new species) descended from a few or even a single basic form. Further developing ideas and categories of the economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) and the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Darwin intended to prove that all species were not created as they are today, but that they developed in a process of evolution that takes place according to certain mechanisms. What is today known as Neo-Darwinism put Darwin’s approach to a certain extent on a new foundation. Taking the results of
genetics into account (as they first appeared in the research of the Augustine monk Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)), in the latter half of the twentieth century Neo-Darwinism based these in biochemistry, thus integrating the discoveries of molecular biology. Although Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism concentrate primarily on the changes in individual species, they have made a significant contribution to the foundations of ecology; Haeckel (1866), the founder of ecology, was already an ardent supporter of the teachings of Darwin. In the following, where we devote ourselves to the Neo-Darwinist theory of evolution, we are striving to fruitfully employ some of their discoveries in the field of the scientific logos, particularly regarding the problem of time in non-human nature. At the same time, however, we wish to show the limitations of this approach. The Neo-Darwinist concept cannot claim to make the ‘essence of evolution’ comprehendible; it does not tell us what the ‘ultimate reasons’ for evolution are. It is a model explaining how to picture the important characteristics of the process of the evolution of life. Models of past things cannot tell us how something truly was, but only how it might have been under consideration of all available data, and how to explain why it might have been that way. Models are not representations of reality, but rather illustrations, in which we attempt to fit together the empirical data available to us at a certain point in time in a non-contradictory manner. The biological model of evolution is, in a manner of speaking, a ‘picture in time’, a representation of the processes throughout the time-span of life on Earth. It attempts, as it were, to explain the ‘technique’ of evolution as we can conceive of it with our current level of knowledge. At the end of our roughly sketched portrayal of this model, we will attempt to display it in the new light of our approach.
