ENDLESSLY ROCKING

To begin a new and successful "religion" we must believe three things:

1.  Everything is a dynamic process,

2.  Everything is multiple

3.  Everything is connected

Then we can begin to understand how to survive under these circumstances.  The result will be educated politics and logically, some kind of progress, though it might not please everyone.  At present a large percentage of the human population, both the educated modern and the basic hard-pressed, simply cannot think this way.  They do not have the technical means that provide this way of seeing the world and have no idea what to do with the ideas.  

Since it is all invisible to them, but seems to be a source of superiority and power, they are afraid and coveting at once.  Ironically, autochthonous UNtechnical peoples understand it best.  The real obstacle and dangerous ideas are those of the Enlightenment that set us all free from a dark time once, but are now too dedicated to mechanism and force.  They close their eyes to avoid the vision.

This planet changes constantly, which anyone can see on video:  the dark and light, the movement of clouds, the flashes of electricity, the tides, and even the ebb and flow of giant beds of ice.  Much harder to see are the great currents of air and water that swirl around the globe.  Even harder to see is the dance of the continents resting on place tectonics.  https://study.com/academy/lesson/major-plates-of-the-lithosphere-earths-tectonic-plates.html

That's the BIG picture, but life on this shifty planet starts with many little bits smaller than pin points.  Yet, when aggregated together, consider that they are extremely powerful.  When they were only "plants", they generated so much oxygen that the atmosphere was close to poisonous, but then the oxygen made "animals" possible and they restored a balance that was good for both forms.  Consider that two main geological features, both bedrocks, were created by tiny animals: they are coal, the remains of swamp plants, and limestone which is the skeletons and shells of tiny sea creatures.

Both plants and animals, living in a synergy in which they "eat" each other, are dependent on certain climate conditions, the great swirls of currents that move temperatures and water through the continents and around the planet.  If change is too abrupt and sudden, that particular adaptation of life is lost.  But because the changes move in patchwork around and around through rather mysterious patterns of interaction, all of life is rarely extinguished.

We are always particularly interested in which changes will help or destroy us, but like old swamp plants compressed into coal or dots of shell calcium accumulated into limestone, we also change our environment even as we adapt.  From the first hominins, the bedrock of humans as we know them walking around today, all adapted.  In this place they learned to cope with excessive rain; there they learned to live on the desert.  And so on.  It strongly appears that there was no Adam or Eve, but many many rough drafts that ended up in an accumulated composite of successes.  There was no one missing link, but rather aeons of knitted evolution.

" . . .the data do not seem to be consistent with the long-held view that human ancestry is derived predominantly from a single African region hosting a panmictic population.  [the word means mating anyone who comes along]   Instead, H. sapiens likely descended from a shifting structured population (i.e., a set of interlinked groups whose connectivity changed through time), each exhibiting different characteristics of anatomical ‘modernity’." 

https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(18)30117-4

That may be the case with our bodies, but our minds and emotions lag.  In addition, the hardest part of the environment to live with is always each other.  Our cumulative brains can flash back to reptilian world-views.  The limbic forces of our mammal past cannot always be managed by our conscious minds, our proud identities.

Current fossil and genomic information causes scientists to change their minds about assumptions because that is what science does, observes the evidence and tries to understand it.  It's whole process is "rough drafts."

Refugia have been highlighted as key catalysts of evolutionary change and certainly would have generated population structure. Nevertheless, some regions acting as ‘backwaters’ and isolated habitat islands may also have been central in the persistence of relict populations. Research has emphasized broad asynchronous environmental changes in different African regions. The northern and southern tips of the continent are most strongly affected by winter westerly precipitation, variation in which is largely driven by changes in Atlantic Ocean circulation. However, most of Africa experiences monsoonal rainfall associated with the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), the strength and location of which varies according to changes in insolation that are driven primarily by precessional aspects of Milankovitch forcing.  [This term means the earth gets closer and farther from the sun and also tilts, which changes the weather, the climate, the seasons.]  Consequently, parts of tropical Africa that are currently humid likely experienced numerous episodes of extreme aridity in the past. At the same time that the monsoon migrated northwards, the Sahara contracted, and networks of lakes and rivers expanded across much of north Africa, with matching conditions in parts of southwest Asia. Finer-scale shifts in the monsoon are also evident. For example, in West Africa the extent of savannah and forested areas is strongly affected by small changes in patterns of rainfall.

Humans are altering seasonal climate cycles worldwide,  Nearly four decades of global temperature data collected by satellites reveal the atmospheric fingerprint of climate change.  (quoting Jeff Tollefson)

"An analysis of decades of satellite data has revealed how humans are changing seasonal cycles in the lower atmosphere. The accumulation of greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels has increased air temperatures in summer and caused larger annual temperature swings in the northern hemisphere.

We can forecast that the planet is warming more quickly and with more consequences than we ever expected.  Most of the world's earliest and poorest population is in tropical places.  Temperatures in those same places are killing many and will kill more.  Those who can will move north.  Rising waters will press people to move inland.  Strive among them will produce more death and possibly become so devastating that it could destroy the power and instrumentation that have created what ought to warn us.