The Overcontrol of Evolution

65:3.1It will hardly be pos­si­ble to ex­plain to the pres­ent-day hu­man mind many of the queer and ap­par­ently grotesque oc­cur­rences of early evo­lu­tion­ary prog­ress. A pur­pose­ful plan was func­tion­ing through­out all of these seem­ingly strange evo­lu­tions of liv­ing things, but we are not al­lowed ar­bi­trar­ily to in­ter­fere with the de­vel­op­ment of the life pat­terns af­ter they have once been set in op­er­a­tion.

65:3.2Life Car­ri­ers may em­ploy ev­ery pos­si­ble nat­u­ral re­source and may uti­lize any and all for­tu­itous cir­cum­stances which will en­hance the de­vel­op­men­tal prog­ress of the life ex­per­i­ment, but we are not per­mit­ted me­chan­i­cally to in­ter­vene in, or ar­bi­trar­ily to ma­nip­u­late the con­duct and course of, ei­ther plant or an­i­mal evo­lu­tion.

65:3.3You have been in­formed that Uran­tia mor­tals evolved by way of prim­i­tive frog de­vel­op­ment, and that this as­cend­ing strain, car­ried in po­ten­tial in a sin­gle frog, nar­rowly es­caped ex­tinc­tion on a cer­tain oc­ca­sion. But it should not be in­ferred that the evo­lu­tion of man­kind would have been ter­mi­nated by an ac­ci­dent at this junc­ture. At that very mo­ment we were ob­serv­ing and fos­ter­ing no less than one thou­sand dif­fer­ent and re­motely sit­u­ated mu­tat­ing strains of life which could have been di­rected into var­i­ous dif­fer­ent pat­terns of pre­hu­man de­vel­op­ment. This par­tic­u­lar an­ces­tral frog rep­re­sented our third se­lec­tion, the two prior life strains hav­ing per­ished in spite of all our ef­forts to­ward their con­ser­va­tion.

65:3.4Even the loss of An­don and Fonta be­fore they had off­spring, though de­lay­ing hu­man evo­lu­tion, would not have pre­vented it. Sub­se­quent to the ap­pear­ance of An­don and Fonta and be­fore the mu­tat­ing hu­man po­ten­tials of an­i­mal life were ex­hausted, there evolved no less than seven thou­sand fa­vor­able strains which could have achieved some sort of hu­man type of de­vel­op­ment. And many of these bet­ter stocks were sub­se­quently as­sim­i­lated by the var­i­ous branches of the ex­pand­ing hu­man species.

65:3.5Long be­fore the Ma­te­rial Son and Daugh­ter, the bi­o­logic up­lifters, ar­rive on a planet, the hu­man po­ten­tials of the evolv­ing an­i­mal species have been ex­hausted. This bi­o­logic sta­tus of an­i­mal life is dis­closed to the Life Car­ri­ers by the phe­nom­e­non of the third phase of ad­ju­tant spirit mo­bi­liza­tion, which au­to­mat­i­cally oc­curs con­comi­tantly with the ex­haus­tion of the ca­pac­ity of all an­i­mal life to give ori­gin to the mu­tant po­ten­tials of pre­hu­man in­di­vid­u­als.

65:3.6Man­kind on Uran­tia must solve its prob­lems of mor­tal de­vel­op­ment with the hu­man stocks it has—no more races will evolve from pre­hu­man sources through­out all fu­ture time. But this fact does not pre­clude the pos­si­bil­ity of the at­tain­ment of vastly higher lev­els of hu­man de­vel­op­ment through the in­tel­li­gent fos­ter­ing of the evo­lu­tion­ary po­ten­tials still res­i­dent in the mor­tal races. That which we, the Life Car­ri­ers, do to­ward fos­ter­ing and con­serv­ing the life strains be­fore the ap­pear­ance of hu­man will, man must do for him­self af­ter such an event and sub­se­quent to our re­tire­ment from ac­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion in evo­lu­tion. In a gen­eral way, man’s evo­lu­tion­ary des­tiny is in his own hands, and sci­en­tific in­tel­li­gence must sooner or later su­per­sede the ran­dom func­tion­ing of un­con­trolled nat­u­ral se­lec­tion and chance sur­vival.

65:3.7And in dis­cussing the fos­ter­ing of evo­lu­tion, it would not be amiss to point out that, in the long fu­ture ahead, when you may some­time be at­tached to a corps of Life Car­ri­ers, you will have abun­dant and am­ple op­por­tu­nity to of­fer sug­ges­tions and make any pos­si­ble im­prove­ments in the plans and tech­nique of life man­age­ment and trans­plan­ta­tion. Be pa­tient! If you have good ideas, if your minds are fer­tile with bet­ter meth­ods of ad­min­is­tra­tion for any part of the uni­ver­sal do­mains, you are cer­tainly go­ing to have an op­por­tu­nity to pre­sent them to your as­so­ciates and fel­low ad­min­is­tra­tors in the ages to come.