But I venture to guess that most do agree with at least one of the peak series (peak oil, peak sanity, peak of oil wars, etc.).
I suppose it would depend on one's definition of "evolution".
Add an itsy bitsy "r" to "evolution" at the right place and you have "revolution", which social evolutionists see as positive evolution a la The French Revolution or The American Revolution.
Ye olde Bastille |
Of course our capitalistic view of "positive" would be applied to any direction any revolution takes by asking only one thing, which would be to ask about the effect any such revolution would have on that capitalistic analyst's bank account.
The yardstick used is nothing more than a sequential series of numbers going from zero to infinity, but not back again.
Evolutionary cosmologists use, as their yardstick to measure "positive", the mature development of the capacity to travel in space.
It is their measurement of evolution because all species on this earth are given life by the Sun, our star, for a span of time.
But in astounding contrast all life forms still here at the end of that span of time, the Sun's "life cycle", are eradicated (See Life According To Science or Tenet One Basics).
Academicians know that empires or kingdoms historically rise to the peak of preeminence, then fall to the depths of decay and/or destruction to eventually become the subject matter of archeology or history classes in college.
Keith Olbermann indicates that even the journalism of blogdom does this as well.
But when we get down to biological or cosmological evolution, hard core science, the scene changes from a scenario of peaks, however, to a peak-less, Kansas-like terrain where the flow of evolution is in only one direction.
We cited Dollo's Law of Irreversibility in the next to last sentence in the post Jabber The Whut, while mentioning the newly discovered female lizard that can reproduce itself without a male counterpart.
The clear, concise, black and white, peak nirvana sought by evolutionary and cosmological scientists, as well as dogmatic authoritarians, is difficult to touch, see, taste, feel, or even prove, when we consider Dollo's Law:
"An organism is unable to return, even partially, to a previous stage already realized in the ranks of its ancestors.". According to this hypothesis a structure or organ that has been lost or discarded through the process of evolution will not reappear in exactly the same form in that line of organisms.(Dollo's Law). That, combined with the female lizard discovery, would seem to indicate either that women are no longer orgasmic, or to indicate that once peak oil, peak nuclear, peak sanity, and yes peak social evolution have been reached then passed, there is no going back to "better days".
The Earth is whispering to many of us, but shouting to the rest of us, that our social evolution in ecological terms indicates that our time is up in terms of the need of a revolution concerning the use of energy.
According to astronomers and cosmologists, the Sun will one day "say" out loud what it has been whispering for eons, yes, it will say to any species still inhabiting the inner planets of this solar system, "your time is up, there is no going back."
The sum of evolution it would seem will depend on where we are then, determined it would seem by where we are now.