In our previous article published by this magazine
we promised to show examples of evolution
paths chosen by three animal species, one living on the land, another
one in the sea and a third one moving through the air.
That’s what we will be doing from this point onwards.
***
The order Cetacean contains mammals
that migrated back to water about 60 million years ago, including
several species that are considered by researchers as having developed
high intelligence.
Among the several
species that form the cetacean order,
classified in families and subfamilies, the one most studied is the
bottlenose dolphin (Tursiopis Truncatus), better know as “flipper”, the
name given to those that acted in films produced to show its abilities.
Researchers have discovered several intelligent behaviors
in bottlenose dolphins, in line with an ancient tradition that goes
back as far as ancient Greece. Several of those behaviors use the
animal’s sophisticated communication system, including a signature
whistle pattern each individual uses to identify itself, a kind of
proper name, the use of dialects specific to each group, the capacity
to communicate abstract concepts between individuals, as proven in an
experiment done by Dr. Javis Bastian and the capacity to learn and
reproduce vocalizations.
Equally noticeable is its high emotional intelligence.
They are happy, playful and amiable to one another most of the time,
even when in captivity, having always shown a special friendship for
humans. They have sense of humor, being mischievous to fish and birds
only to have fun.
They show strategic notion by sending scouts to evaluate
for the first time a strange obstacle in their path or forming
alliances between their group and another one to take advantage in
disputing something they want with a third one. They decide what to do
usually by consensus after several minutes of conversation. Interacting
with Dr. John Lilly a dolphin changed the rule of a whistling game and
when it noticed that Dr. Lilly hadn’t heard a high pitch whistle it had
emitted, it started to lower the pitch of its whistle until the sound
would reach Dr. Lilly’s acoustic range, keeping all whistles within the
range from that time on. It was a unique case when an animal performed
an experiment on a man.
***
Nowadays scientists’ support is
mainly divided in two hypotheses for the origin of birds. One says that
birds evolved from dinosaurs and another one that both dinosaurs and
birds evolved from a common species.
Many bird species have been shown as capable of
intelligent behavior. Among them we have chosen for our study the
African gray parrot (psittacus erithacus), one that Dr. Irene Maxine
Pepperberg, from the University of Arizona, has been studying for
decades.
Alex is the name of
the lovely parrot that we can see
beside. It is the older of the African Grey Parrots that have been
studied by Dr. Irene and her collaborators.
Alex has learned how to answer questions about more than
100 different objects. He can distinguish correctly between colors,
forms and numbers, using such concepts in a meaningful and combined
way, while dealing at the same time with abstract concepts like
relative size and the notion of equal or different. He knows how and
when to say “no”, “come here”, “I want <that thing>” and “I want
to go <to that place>”. Alex’s linguistic capacity is equivalent
to a two year old child whereas its reasoning is similar to that of a
four year old one at least. According to Dr. Pepperberg and her
collaborators, evidences so far suggest that Alex may learn to read one
day.
I call the reader’s attention to the fact that Alex is
learning the language and the concepts of a species that is completely
different from the one it belongs to, a species not only belonging to a
different order, as dolphins when compared to man, but to a different
class, a feat that highly values the results obtained so far. After
all, to this date no human is known to have been able to communicate
with a similar species, let alone to one so different.
***
Among the species
that we have chosen
for our article, the one we are going to discuss now is the closest to
the human being. We are talking of the amiable muriqui (Brachyteles
arachnoids), also called wooly spider monkey, the largest primate in
the American continent, which lives in the once magnificent coastal
rainforest of Brazil and is unfortunately being pushed to extinction.
The first researcher to study the behavior of muriquis was Dr. Karen
Strier, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but now there are
several Brazilian researchers doing so.
The muriqui is a unique species due to its very peaceful
social behavior, where a significant degree of competition doesn’t
exist. They are very gentle creatures and it’s common to see them
touching or hugging one another for just a few to a several minutes,
forming sometimes a large bunch of hugging animals suspended by their
tails. Hierarchy among them is based neither on strength nor on age but
on the amount of affectivity each individual gets from the group.
Females and males have similar weight and size, there being no
competition in sexual behavior, shown to be free but respectful. The
communication within the groups was observed to be rich and
sophisticated, as reported by researchers Francisco Mendes and
César Ades, after a field study done under the auspices of
Fapesp (Research Supporting Foundation of São Paulo). Never
having to use either stimulants or psychotropic drugs, the muriquis
were successful at creating a pure alternative society, something
mankind has dreamed of for centuries but has never succeed in making
real.
***
In Item 56, Chapter I, Second Part of
The Mediums’ Book, Allan
Kardec says: “The human form, though
differenced in some details, and with certain organic modifications
necessitated by the nature of the sphere in which the soul is called to
exist, appears to be common to the inhabitants of all the globes of the
universe ; this, at least, is what spirits tell us…”.
When we read the quotation above, our attention is called
by the cautious phrase Kardec wrote at the end. Nevertheless, it’s
clear for us when we read the whole quotation, Kardec’s understanding
as to the environment where the being has to live being a determinant
factor to its physical constitution. Being a man with vast knowledge,
accurate reason and sharp intuition, Kardec must have presumed the
existence of worlds with the most different physical constitutions.
Being so, the affirmation that the human form remained common to the
intelligent beings of all worlds of the universe must have seemed at
least strange to him. Would that be the reason for his cautious last
sentence in the above quotation?
Studying the Spiritist Codification we have noticed that
the matter hasn’t either been the subject of a formal question to the
Spirits or the subject of a message signed by one of the great names of
the Spiritist Codification. We have only found the matter approached
again in an article called The
Plurality of Worlds included in the March 1858 issue of the Spiritist Magazine. Here is what it
says: “By a simple reasoning similar
to what others have done before we conclude for the plurality of worlds
and that reasoning is confirmed by what the Spirits reveal. They teach
us that all those worlds are inhabited by physical beings appropriate
to the constitution of each world”. If we pay attention to the
last sentence we will see that it puts as a rule the same affirmation
that may be mistakenly taken as an exception to the rule as it’s put in
the quoted saying of The Mediums’
Book.
We have presented in this article concrete examples of
species that are shown able to go on evolving without much alterations
in their physical and subtle constitutions. Being moved to increasingly
subtler worlds as they proceed learning all the lessons available for
the animal realm, a day will inevitably come when they will be ready to
enter the hominal realm. When that day finally comes we may be sure
that at least one of the many mansions of the Father’s house will be of
such constitution that their subtle bodies will reveal the most easily
adapted to remodel themselves as those necessary to host human beings
in that world.
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_____, _____. The Gospel According
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