Continuation of the Species
Dr. Grahame Blackwell

In his treatise ‘Origin of the Species’ Charles Darwin makes it clear that we are, quite literally, products of our environment. This is a characteristic that we share with every other creature, plant and fungus on our planet, together with all those other life-forms that don’t fit any of these classifications.

Ever since those earliest complex molecules in the primordial soup caught on to the trick of self-regulation and self-replication – now referred to as ‘life’ – those same molecules have been continually polishing up their act to make best use of whatever’s available. That has led to evolution into ever-higher, ever more complex forms: a myriad of plants, including trees; birds, reptiles, mammals etc. etc. – and not least us, who like to think of ourselves as the highest form of life on this planet. (I wonder if the other forms would agree – I suspect it depends very much on your terms of reference.)

This ceaseless process of becoming ever more perfectly suited to prevailing conditions is totally responsible for every aspect of every living thing on planet Earth, down to the minutest detail of colour, shape or behaviour. Of particular significance in this multi-million-year ‘design project’ is what might be termed our ‘immersive environment’. That is, those environmental factors that have constantly surrounded us, the various species, as we have worked our ways up from the primaeval swamps to our various roles in the scheme of things today. These include: our atmosphere – its chemical composition and density (salinity, impurities/nutrients and dissolved gas content, for aquatic species); the ambient temperature at each stage of evolution; the Earth’s magnetic field; the gravitational field of the Earth and, to a lesser extent, the tidal pull of the moon – less still the sun and other planets; and, of course, visible light and all other components of the electromagnetic spectrum (infrared, ultraviolet) that bathe us invisibly.

To take an example: the respiratory systems of non-aquatic animals and plants have responded over the millennia to the oxygen-nitrogen-carbon dioxide mix around them to produce, in each case, a metabolism perfectly suited to that mix as it is now. It would be a very foolish society indeed that decided, for whatever reason, to increase or decrease the oxygen content, say, of our atmosphere by even one-tenth. The effect on every living organism is probably not predictable, but one can say with absolute certainty that it would dramatically affect the optimal balance that has been painstakingly perfected over millions of years. Since this balance has, as Darwin tells us, been achieved by ‘survival of the fittest’, then it follows logically that fitness for survival would take a nose-dive. Worse still by far would be to introduce, in any quantity, some totally new element into the atmosphere we breathe.

Now consider visible light: all organisms, animal and vegetable, exposed regularly to light have responded to this stimulus. Notice that ‘response to a stimulus’, as outlined by Darwin, is not a considered deliberate action. It is a biochemical reaction, leading to the natural selection of organisms best fitted to survive and thrive by optimum usage or handling of this environmental factor.

Visible light has two attributes of potential benefit to living organisms: energy and information content. Many millions of years ago plants ‘twigged’ (excuse the pun!) the technique for harnessing the energy of sunlight in the photosynthesis process – and chlorophyll-green has been the trendy colour for vegetation ever since. The eye took considerably longer to arrive on the scene – but once it caught on, no moving organism without a light sensor of some sort stood much chance in the evolutionary stakes. And those that could squeeze the most information out of this abundant resource definitely gained a major tactical advantage.

It’s important to notice in all this that things didn’t just magically appear ‘because they’d be useful’. An eye – any sort of eye – is the result of a painstaking process of trial-and-error refinement. But refinement of what? Neurons – brain cells – were externalized to form the first primitive eyes precisely because they showed some sensitivity to visible light – that sensitivity was the cause, not the result, of the formation of the eye. What started, perhaps, as the mental equivalent of an itch or a tickle was seized upon by the evolutionary process, refined by that same process to give that wealth of information input that the visible light around us is capable of providing.

This illustrates a general principle: if there is a stimulus, then a living organism cannot help but respond to that stimulus – every organism is designed that way. This is part of the evolutionary process; to disregard a stimulus is to ignore possible warning of danger or a source of support or sustenance. The electrobio-chemical make-up of organisms ensures that any ‘competitive advantage’ to be gained from any environmental factor will be exploited – by the evolutionary process.

The energy from, say, a TETRA mast, a reasonable distance from that mast, is around a few hundred- thousandths of the energy from naturally-occurring visible light on a good sunny day. However, one photon of TETRA radiation carries barely one millionth of the energy carried by an average photon of visible light. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that there must be more than ten times as many photons of TETRA radiation out at that ‘safe’ distance from the mast as there are of visible light anywhere on an ordinary sunny day. Now think about the pupil in each of your eyes, just a few millimetres across, think about closing one eye, then think how much information you receive every second from photons of visible light – through just those few square millimetres of that one pupil – on that sunny day. At a ‘safe’ distance from a TETRA mast, every few square millimetres of your body is being bombarded with more than ten times as much information, that it is not in any way adapted to. And TETRA radiation, because of its lower frequency, has the ability to penetrate through living tissue – including the skull – in a way that visible light can’t. Similar considerations apply, to varying degrees, to GSM, DECT and 3G communications systems.

One thing that makes the frequencies used by TETRA and mobile phones so useful is the fact that they are in a ‘window’ of background radiation. That’s to say, of all the radiation occurring naturally around us – from the sun, from infra-red given off the earth as heat – there is almost none in the frequency ranges used for mobile communications. That area in the radiation spectrum is a ‘flat spot’ in terms of natural background radiation. Very handy in that it means there’s no naturally-occurring interference for those communications – but it also means that it’s not part of the environment that all living species have evolved in over millions of years. The ICNIRP guidelines permit emissions over one thousand million million times (that’s a one with fifteen noughts) the naturally-occurring level of radiation in that range. [Source: A.Philips, "Are we measuring the right things?", T&F 2002, see www.powerwatch.org.uk ]

In the early days of life on earth, chop & change, mix’n’match, were the order of the day. Protozoa and the like were constantly trying on new genes to find the best fit with their environment. As things settled down a bit, organisms also began to become more complex, less able to change their makeup at the drop of a chromosome. Evolution moved on from the hewing out of rough principles to the finer details – fur or feathers? feet or fins? – the basic ground rules having been established. Now, over a frighteningly short period, those ground rules have been dramatically altered. Highly evolved organisms find themselves immersed in a totally unfamiliar environment – and their electrobiochemical makeup has no option but to respond to that environment, to try and make sense of it. The fact that we are not consciously aware of this radiation by no means lessens this difficulty, it simply underlines the fact that our evolution to date has found no benefit in such awareness – since no such radiation was around before. The inbuilt evolutionary mechanisms of every living organism have been thrown a totally new ball-game – at a very late stage in the proceedings. Talk about trying to teach an old dog new tricks!

There are those that acknowledge that radiation from mobile communications may have unpredictable effects on living organisms, but question whether those effects would necessarily be harmful. One may as well ask whether random notes injected into a symphony would necessarily be detrimental to that work, or whether a few random movements of the surgeon’s hand during an operation could be said to be definitely a bad thing. Cancer clusters have been identified around a substantial number of phone mast installations; isn’t this totally in keeping with frantic attempts at a cellular level to adapt to a new way of being?

It is not in question that our brain cells (and every other part of every living organism) are being bombarded with information totally unfamiliar to them, at a rate up to ten times the visual information our eyes take in. It is not in question that our cellular makeup is ‘programmed’ to try to adapt to any source of information, to fit itself optimally for survival in the light of that information. What is very much in question is whether a race of highly complex organisms, each consisting of a myriad of cells, will survive this trial-and-error process of adaptation at that cellular level.

Current research links the dramatic decline in bird populations at many places around the world to the advent of mobile phone masts. The British Trust for Ornithology has just announced a research study to check this correlation, involving up to 30,000 birdwatchers. One is reminded of the canaries that miners used to take down the mines to warn them of inhospitable atmosphere. Some things don’t change!