The theory of evolution will be scientifically debunked in your lifetime. My prediction about evolution is actually part of a larger prediction. I believe that the next 100 years will bring about new ways of looking at existing things as opposed to finding knew things to look at. It will be about perception and not vision.

Most of human history has been an obsession to improve our visual understanding of our Universe. Almost everything we know is based on looking at things. We do experiments and look at the results. We build microscopes to look at small things. We build telescopes to look at distant things. We build vehicles to take us where we can look at new territory. One of the most fundamental beliefs is that the things we see with our eyes are a good approximation of reality

We use our other senses, too, but mostly we look at things and raw conclusions. That has worked well for most of human existence. But there have been some big-time blunders caused by looking at the world using our brains to draw conclusions.

The most well-documented blunder caused by our vision was the historical belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth. It sure looks that way. Until an alternate theory was suggested, no other possibility was obvious. Here were the two biggest and most important objects in our field of vision - the Earth and the Sun - and virtually every person who looked at them got a totally backward perception of their movements. People thought the Earth was flat because that’s the only model that fit the way things looked. People didn’t change their minds until someone took a boat and sailed out for a better look.

You might be tempted to say that these are isolated instances involving primitive times in our history, so it’s not relevant to the future. But these isolated instances involved the biggest objects in our reality. These were not trivial misunderstandings. Our eyesight was inadequate for the task. It took some experimentation and a lot more looking to find the truth. What if there are other optical illusions about our existence that are just as major as the illusion of the Sun revolving around the Earth? If so, how big are the opportunities that would emerge from a clearer perception?

What are the odds that you live in exactly the window of human existence when all of the major optical illusions have been discovered? Wouldn’t that be an amazing coincidence, since every previous generation of humans has believed they were born in that window of time? They were all wrong, but they all thought they were right, just like we do now. This is a hugely important question, because if you view of reality is flawed, then your strategies for succeeding are also probably flawed. If you change your assumptions, you have to change your plan.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to give you some mental exercises and scientific tidbits that might change your view of how much you understand about your reality. In doing so, I’ll give you an alternate view of reality, one in which evolution makes no sense. Don’t worry, I won’t be addressing the religious interpretations. There’s nothing here that contradicts your religious beliefs, no matter what they are. I’ll be talking about the limitations of eyesight as a source of knowledge, nothing more. I don’t think the reality I’m going to describe here is the “right” and “only” one that could be described, but I think it’s as logical as what I’ll call the “normal” view. It has been my experience that when I craft my strategies for success around this alternate reality, I get better results than when I assume reality conforms to the normal view. I realize that my personal experiences are not persuasive from a statistical perspective, but statistics mean nothing in my alternate view of reality. So neither perspective can be used to verify the other.

I’m sure that some - if not all - of what I tell you next is scientifically inaccurate and maybe even illogical. It won’t make any difference for my purpose. I’m just trying to help you imagine how your reality COULD be completely different from what you perceive and still LOOK exactly the way it looks. That alone will give you some freedom to try other approaches to success. Sometimes the first step to finding a better approach is to recognize the limitations of the current approach. That’s as far as I can take you. I’m not intentionally making up any facts, but I’m not bright enough to get all of the scientific stuff exactly right either. Nor am I sufficiently interested in accuracy to spend a lot of time researching it. But if any of the points I make ring true, it will help you imagine a different world. That’s all I’m aiming for.

Assumptions About Reality
Time goes forward.
Objects move.
Gravity exists.
Time goes forward: I read about the double slit experiment in Newsweek. Here’s how it works. You take a light source and hsine it through a barrier that has two slits. Then you examine the light pattern on the surface behind the barrier. You would expect to see two bars of light corresponding to the slit, but you don’t. You see multiple bars. This nonobvious result interested the scientists who devised the experiment, so they hooked up some equipment that would record information about the light pasing through theslits. When they recorded information about the light, they didn’t get the multiple bar pattern anymore. They saw a blotch pattern instead. You’re probably thinking that the way they measured the light must have changed it. The scientists thought of that too. So they did the experiment two ways, each time measuring the light the same way. In one case the measured information was automatically erased after being measured. When the information earased, the light pattern was multiple bars, but when the info wasn’t erased, the pattern was a blotch. Conclusion: Information in the present can change the past. Read the sentence again. I’ll wait. Let me say it another way, because I know it’s hard to grasp. When the scientists had access to the recorded info aboutthe light in the present, the light pattern in the past was multiple bars. But when the scientists did not have acces to the info in the present, the pattern in the past was a blotch. It might seem impossible for you to conceive that time doesn’t always march in one direction, bringing with it a perfectly ordered sequence of causes and effects, but it’s not hard for me to imagine it, because I’m dyslexic. When I hear a phone number spoken quickly, I hear all the number but don’t have any impression in what order they were spoken. It’s as if they came in all at once. I have no problem imagining a reality where everything happens at once and some aspect of our perceptions straightens it all into an artificial sense of order. To me disorder in the direction of time seems normal, at least some of the time. In laboratory tests, it has been shown that sometimes the portion of the brain responsible for making a decision doesn’t even activate untilslightly after the action has been made. if I poke you in the butt with a pin, you jump before your conscious mind realizes what happened. But your immediate memory will be that you felt a poke and then moved. In this example, you would have perceived time backward, because what really happened is that you jumped and only afterward realized why. If brains can perceive time ina ny order, it raises the question of whether time is an independ thing or just a perception. Your perception of color might be a good analogy. Objects seem to have color, but, in fact, it’s just a perception caused by the reflection of light. The color is a perception created by your mind. It is not a quality of the object. Could time be in your mind and not in the environment?

Objects Move: Most people would agree that reality is full of objects that move around. Planets move, people move, molecules move. Everything is moving all the time. What if all the motion we observe is an optical illusion? Let me paint a picture where you can imagine how nothing that appears to be moving actually moves, yet still looks like it does. In cartoons, Bugs Bunny appears to be moving, but it’s an illusion caused by lots of still frames being shown in sequence. Some physicists theorize that reality is like the frames of an animated movie, with infinite universes existing at once. What if every possible universe existed simultaneously, each one only slightly different than its neighbor, like the frames of an animated movie? None of the universes in this model have movement. All the people and objects frozen in one position. The only thing tht moves in this reality is your perception (some might call it a soul), inhabiting one “you” after another in an endless string of nonmoving universes. Your perception would be that you were in one universe, but everything in it was moving. In fact, the only thing that moves would be your line of perception from one “you” to another in each adjacent universe. And because each frozen universe is slightly different, you perception is that the things in it are moving. Have you ever pulled up to a stoplight next to a city bus? If you see the bus gradually moving out of the corner of your eye, you sometimes think incorrectly that your car is rolling in the opposite direction - because your field of refrence is changing. In this case, your perception of motion is completely opposite from reality. The bus is moving, not you. Reality could be that way, too, and it would look just the way it looks to you now. The view of reality I’m describing can’t be proven, but it can’t be disproven either. The same holds true for your current view of reality. Maybe there are lots of other models that would result in our current perception yet are quite different from what we assume.

Gravity Exists: It’s hard to doubt that gravity exists. Every single thing you see appears to be affected by it. Gravity appears to be a force that reaches across space and somehow connects two objects, making them attracted to each other. That’s what it looks like. But scientists can’t find gravity. They can only measure its effect. So where is it? The best explanation that Einstein could come up with about gravity is that it was like a bowling ball ona bed - a heavy object bending the fabric of space. That explanation is virtually useless for a visual understanding. Physicists talk about gravity in terms of multiple dimensions. It’s safe to say that whatever we perceive about gravity - our simple model of objects being attracted - is an optical illusion. To understand how gravity can look and act the way it does and be an optical illusion, let me describe a hypothetical universe. In this universe, there are only two objects: you and a huge planet-sized ball. There is no gravity in the classic sense of objects being attracted to one another. There is only one rule: Every piece of matter in this universe is constantly expanding, doubling in size every second. You wouldn’t notice the doubling, because both you and the huge ball would remain in the same proportion to each other. There would be no other refrence points. And you wouldn’t feel your own matter doubling any more than you feel the activity of the atoms in your body now. The only effect you would feel is the illusion of gravity. The ball’s growth would cause a constant pushing against you. If you tried to jump away from the growing ball, you would create some space temporarily, but the ball’s growth would catch up with you. To you it would feel as though you were attracted to the huge ball and whenever you jumped up, you would be sucked back down. There would be no gravity, but it would look and feel that way. Imagine a marble and a bowling ball. Now imagine they both instantly double in size. The marble still looks like a marble but the bowling ball appears huge. When a large object doubles in size, it seems to have a disporportionately significant impact compared to a smaller object. So if gravity is an illusion, large objects would appear to create more of the illusion than smaller objects. That’s consistent with what we see. Now let’s move from the hypothetical universe to our current one. You’d have to add a rule in order for the expanding matter theory to replace gravity. You’d have to have a universe where all the major planets are moving away from each other quickly, otherwise they’d grow until they bumped into each other.

I’m not suggesting that any of these theories are correct, only that it’s a good mental exercise for seeing how things could be very different than you imagine them and still look the same.