The Overcontrol of Evolution

65:4.1Do not over­look the fact that Uran­tia was as­signed to us as a life-ex­per­i­ment world. On this planet we made our six­ti­eth at­tempt to mod­ify and, if pos­si­ble, im­prove the Sa­ta­nia adap­ta­tion of the Neb­a­don life de­signs, and it is of rec­ord that we achieved nu­mer­ous ben­e­fi­cial mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the stan­dard life pat­terns. To be spe­cific, on Uran­tia we worked out and have sat­is­fac­to­rily demon­strated not less than twenty-eight fea­tures of life mod­i­fi­ca­tion which will be of ser­vice to all Neb­a­don through­out all fu­ture time.

65:4.2But the es­tab­lish­ment of life on no world is ever ex­per­i­men­tal in the sense that some­thing un­tried and un­known is at­tempted. The evo­lu­tion of life is a tech­nique ever pro­gres­sive, dif­fer­en­tial, and vari­able, but never hap­haz­ard, un­con­trolled, nor wholly ex­per­i­men­tal, in the ac­ci­den­tal sense.

65:4.3Many fea­tures of hu­man life af­ford abun­dant ev­i­dence that the phe­nom­e­non of mor­tal ex­is­tence was in­tel­li­gently planned, that or­ganic evo­lu­tion is not a mere cos­mic ac­ci­dent. When a liv­ing cell is in­jured, it pos­sesses the abil­ity to elab­o­rate cer­tain chem­i­cal sub­stances which are em­pow­ered so to stim­u­late and ac­ti­vate the neigh­bor­ing nor­mal cells that they im­me­di­ately be­gin the se­cre­tion of cer­tain sub­stances which fa­cil­i­tate heal­ing pro­cesses in the wound; and at the same time these nor­mal and un­in­jured cells be­gin to pro­lif­er­ate—they ac­tu­ally start to work cre­at­ing new cells to re­place any fel­low cells which may have been de­stroyed by the ac­ci­dent.

65:4.4This chem­i­cal ac­tion and re­ac­tion con­cerned in wound heal­ing and cell re­pro­duc­tion rep­re­sents the choice of the Life Car­ri­ers of a for­mula em­brac­ing over one hun­dred thou­sand phases and fea­tures of pos­si­ble chem­i­cal re­ac­tions and bi­o­logic reper­cus­sions. More than half a mil­lion spe­cific ex­per­i­ments were made by the Life Car­ri­ers in their lab­o­ra­to­ries be­fore they fi­nally set­tled upon this for­mula for the Uran­tia life ex­per­i­ment.

65:4.5When Uran­tia sci­en­tists know more of these heal­ing chem­i­cals, they will be­come more ef­fi­cient in the treat­ment of in­juries, and in­di­rectly they will know more about con­trol­ling cer­tain se­ri­ous dis­eases.

65:4.6Since life was es­tab­lished on Uran­tia, the Life Car­ri­ers have im­proved this heal­ing tech­nique as it has been in­tro­duced on an­other Sa­ta­nia world, in that it af­fords more pain re­lief and ex­er­cises bet­ter con­trol over the pro­lif­er­a­tion ca­pac­ity of the as­so­ci­ated nor­mal cells.

65:4.7There were many unique fea­tures of the Uran­tia life ex­per­i­ment, but the two out­stand­ing episodes were the ap­pear­ance of the An­donic race prior to the evo­lu­tion of the six col­ored peo­ples and the later si­mul­ta­ne­ous ap­pear­ance of the San­gik mu­tants in a sin­gle fam­ily. Uran­tia is the first world in Sa­ta­nia where the six col­ored races sprang from the same hu­man fam­ily. They or­di­nar­ily arise in di­ver­si­fied strains from in­de­pen­dent mu­ta­tions within the pre­hu­man an­i­mal stock and usu­ally ap­pear on earth one at a time and suc­ces­sively over long pe­ri­ods of time, be­gin­ning with the red man and pass­ing on down through the col­ors to in­digo.

65:4.8An­other out­stand­ing vari­a­tion of pro­ce­dure was the late ar­rival of the Plan­e­tary Prince. As a rule, the prince ap­pears on a planet about the time of will de­vel­op­ment; and if such a plan had been fol­lowed, Cali­gas­tia might have come to Uran­tia even dur­ing the life­times of An­don and Fonta in­stead of al­most five hun­dred thou­sand years later, si­mul­ta­ne­ously with the ap­pear­ance of the six San­gik races.

65:4.9On an or­di­nary in­hab­ited world a Plan­e­tary Prince would have been granted on the re­quest of the Life Car­ri­ers at, or some­time af­ter, the ap­pear­ance of An­don and Fonta. But Uran­tia hav­ing been des­ig­nated a life-mod­i­fi­ca­tion planet, it was by prea­gree­ment that the Mel­chiz­e­dek ob­servers, twelve in num­ber, were sent as ad­vis­ers to the Life Car­ri­ers and as over­seers of the planet un­til the sub­se­quent ar­rival of the Plan­e­tary Prince. These Mel­chiz­e­deks came at the time An­don and Fonta made the de­ci­sions which en­abled Thought Ad­justers to in­dwell their mor­tal minds.

65:4.10On Uran­tia the en­deav­ors of the Life Car­ri­ers to im­prove the Sa­ta­nia life pat­terns nec­es­sar­ily re­sulted in the pro­duc­tion of many ap­par­ently use­less forms of tran­si­tion life. But the gains al­ready ac­crued are suf­fi­cient to jus­tify the Uran­tia mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the stan­dard life de­signs.

65:4.11It was our in­ten­tion to pro­duce an early man­i­fes­ta­tion of will in the evo­lu­tion­ary life of Uran­tia, and we suc­ceeded. Or­di­nar­ily, will does not emerge un­til the col­ored races have long been in ex­is­tence, usu­ally first ap­pear­ing among the su­pe­rior types of the red man. Your world is the only planet in Sa­ta­nia where the hu­man type of will has ap­peared in a pre­col­ored race.

65:4.12But in our ef­fort to pro­vide for that com­bi­na­tion and as­so­ci­a­tion of in­her­i­tance fac­tors which fi­nally gave rise to the mam­malian an­ces­tors of the hu­man race, we were con­fronted with the ne­ces­sity of per­mit­ting hun­dreds and thou­sands of other and com­par­a­tively use­less com­bi­na­tions and as­so­ci­a­tions of in­her­i­tance fac­tors to take place. Many of these seem­ingly strange by-prod­ucts of our ef­forts are cer­tain to meet your gaze as you dig back into the plan­e­tary past, and I can well un­der­stand how puz­zling some of these things must be to the lim­ited hu­man view­point.