Paper 65 Overview: The Overcontrol of Evolution

This paper explores how evolution on Urantia (earth) is carefully managed by celestial beings rather than occurring by random chance. It describes the coordinated work of Life Carriers, physical controllers, and mind spirits in developing life from primitive forms to intelligent beings. Through this process, evolution on inhabited worlds always follows purposeful patterns while allowing for creative adaptations within established parameters.

The revelation explains special features of Urantia's evolutionary history, including the early appearance of the Andonic race, the simultaneous emergence of the six colored races, and various challenges faced during the planet's development. Despite setbacks like the Caligastia betrayal and the Adamic default, the Life Carriers express confidence in humanity's ultimate evolutionary triumph and the vindication of their original life patterns and designs.

Basic evolutionary material life begins with the Physical Controllers and Seven Master Spirits working with Life Carriers. This coordinated effort creates physical mechanisms that can develop mind capacity, which is necessary for intelligent reaction to environmental stimuli. The process of life development operates on three distinct levels: the physical-energy domain that produces mind capacity, the adjutant spirit ministry that affects spirit capacity, and the spirit endowment of mortal mind culminating in Thought Adjuster bestowal.

The Physical Controllers manage the mechanical levels of environmental response, while the adjutant spirits regulate the adaptive types of mind that can learn from experience. Life Carriers exercise considerable control over environmental aspects of evolutionary processes until human will appears—defined as the ability to know God and choose to worship him. These three agencies—Physical Controllers, adjutant spirits, and Life Carriers—function in an integrated manner to ensure that evolution on inhabited worlds is always purposeful and never accidental.

Life Carriers possess remarkable abilities to transform their existence, functioning in three different phases of being. They ordinarily operate as mid-phase Sons but can transform to work at the physical level of electrochemistry when implanting life, or advance to a semispiritual level after their primary work is complete. These transformations allow them to perform different functions throughout the evolutionary process of a planet.

When preparing for life implantation, Life Carriers summon an archangel commission that enables them to function at physical levels where they can organize living matter. After establishing life patterns, they return to their normal mid-phase existence where they can manipulate living units but cannot create new patterns. When free will of human type appears in the highest organisms, Life Carriers must either leave the planet or take vows to refrain from further influence on evolution. Those who choose to remain as advisors are transmuted to a semispiritual level of existence, which is how the author of this paper has functioned on Urantia since the times of Andon and Fonta.

The journey of life from primitive sea organisms to human beings represents an extraordinary saga of biological struggle and mind survival. Life on Urantia began in the warm, shallow coastal waters where Life Carriers established three independent life implantations. From these beginnings evolved the gradual transition from vegetable to animal life through borderline organisms like early sponges, eventually leading to more complex creatures.

The evolutionary path progressed through single-celled animals, then to community organisms like jellyfish, followed by more complex invertebrates. The appearance of backboned animals, particularly fish, marked an important milestone. From certain fish evolved amphibians, notably the frog, which began the series of differentiations that eventually led to reptiles, birds, and mammals. The human race evolved from certain western and central mammalian life strains that migrated to southwestern Asia. The appearance of primitive humans during the ice age was not accidental but designed to foster a hardy type with tremendous survival capabilities.

Many seemingly strange occurrences in early evolutionary history served purposeful functions that might be difficult for modern humans to comprehend. While Life Carriers can utilize all natural resources and circumstances to enhance evolutionary progress, they are not permitted to intervene mechanically or arbitrarily manipulate the course of plant or animal evolution once patterns are established.

The Life Carriers maintained numerous backup plans to ensure human development would proceed even if primary evolutionary lines failed. For example, when a certain ancestral frog that carried human potential nearly became extinct, they were simultaneously observing and fostering a thousand different mutating strains that could have developed into pre-human forms. Similarly, even if Andon and Fonta had perished before having offspring, human evolution would have continued through one of seven thousand favorable strains that could have achieved human-type development. This illustrates how thoroughly planned and safeguarded the evolutionary process was on Urantia.

Urantia was assigned to the authors as a life-experiment world where they made their sixtieth attempt to modify and improve the Satania adaptation of Nebadon life designs. They successfully developed twenty-eight beneficial modifications that will serve throughout Nebadon in future time. While experimentation occurred, it was never haphazard or uncontrolled—evolution always follows a progressive, differential, and variable technique.

Many features of human life demonstrate that mortal existence was intelligently planned rather than occurring by accident. For example, when living cells are injured, they produce chemicals that stimulate healing in neighboring cells—a process that involved the Life Carriers testing over one hundred thousand possible chemical reactions before finalizing their formula. Two unique features of the Urantia life experiment were the appearance of the Andonic race before the evolution of the six colored races, and the simultaneous emergence of the Sangik mutants in a single family rather than appearing over long periods as on most worlds.

The Life Carriers express regret that their special efforts to modify intelligent life on Urantia were handicapped by tragic events beyond their control: the Caligastia betrayal and the Adamic default. Their greatest disappointment came from the unexpected reversion of certain primitive plant life to parasitic bacteria levels, causing many diseases in mammals, especially humans. They had anticipated that the Adamic life plasm would reinforce immunity to these plant-based diseases, but this plan was thwarted by the Adamic default.

Despite these setbacks, the Life Carriers recognize that the universe is not managed merely for their convenience or to satisfy their curiosity. They acknowledge that the wise and powerful beings responsible for universe management know what they are doing, and it behooves mortal minds to cooperate patiently with the rule of wisdom and the march of progress. Later celestial supervisors of Urantia express complete confidence that the human race will ultimately triumph evolutionally and that the original life plans will be vindicated.

Scientists face a fundamental challenge when studying life: they cannot simultaneously determine both the location and velocity of a moving object, just as they cannot analyze living protoplasm without killing it. Dead protoplasm may weigh the same as living material but is fundamentally different. Living organisms possess an innate drive toward perfection, continuously adapting to their environments and striving for greater realization.

Throughout evolutionary history, living beings have developed remarkable adaptations. Plants evolved chlorophyll-making abilities and seeds. Animals developed complex systems like the iron-based oxygen transport in blood cells. Human dentition shows evolution in progress, having decreased from thirty-six teeth in remote ancestors to thirty-two in early humans, with a continuing trend toward twenty-eight. While many adjustments are chemical or physical in nature, the ascending scale of life reveals increasing influence of mind, which becomes progressively adjustive, creative, coordinative, and dominant as organisms evolve.

The seven adjutant mind-spirits function as versatile mind ministers to lower intelligent beings in the local universe. Operating from the local universe headquarters or connected worlds, they exert influential direction over mental function from system capitals. Their work is crucial on evolutionary worlds, though they are concerned with mind evolution rather than physical development, which is the domain of the Life Carriers.

These spirits operate like circuits rather than entities and experienced unusual difficulty contacting evolutionary organisms on Urantia due to the planet's unique life patterns. They do not interact with purely mechanical responses of organisms but begin functioning when living beings show the ability to learn from experience. The adjutants work progressively through six levels culminating in the spirit of worship, with additional ministry coming through the seventh adjutant, the spirit of wisdom. This spiritual assistance prepares mind for higher spiritual receptivity through gradual and reciprocal changes rather than abrupt transitions.

Time and space are inextricably linked, with certain time delays being inevitable due to specific space conditions. Life Carriers cannot accelerate evolutionary processes beyond what a planet's physical development allows. If physical conditions were more favorable, life evolution could be completed in less than one million years instead of the much longer periods typically required.

Perspective on time varies dramatically depending on the observer's lifespan. To beings with limited lifespans, evolution appears exceedingly slow, while to those not constrained by temporal existence, the process seems less protracted. Mind evolution depends on physical development, and spiritual progress depends on mental expansion. Though spiritual evolution does not require education or culture, it does require mental capacity and the desire to achieve greater perfection. When conditions are right, sudden transformations can occur—physical conditions enabling mental evolutions, mental status allowing spiritual transformations, and proper spiritual recognition revealing cosmic meanings that increasingly free the personality from time and space limitations.