The Constant of Evolution and Bob Dylan

By Ian Beardsley

Copyright © 2010 by Ian Beardsley

Cover Art by Ian Beardsley

This project is one that has come back to life since more than 20
years ago, because I heard a Bob Dylan lyric that rejuvenated my
excitement in the project.

The lyric can be found in the wonderful piece “High Water” on his
CD “Love And Theft” released in 2001.

I will recite the lyric from memory:

George Lewis told the Englishman, Italian, and the Jew

You can’t open up your mind boys to every conceivable point of
view
They’ve got Charles Darwin trapped out there on highway five
The judge says to the high Sheriff, ‘I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don’t care’

Now some twenty odd years ago, I was a student in physics at the
University of Oregon. At some point, I was commuting about 40
miles on highway five from my Dad’s farm in the valley of
Elkhead, about ten miles from the town of Yoncalla, where I went
to High School. I drove a red Datsun long-bed pick-up, maybe
about 1975. In the commute, north up highway 5, which is
surrounded by pastures of rye and fescue, the sides of the highway
which have small to moderate in size pine trees growing on them, I
would stop and measure the lengths of branches and the angles
they made with the trunks of the trees. I was searching for
something in their structure that might be common to something in
the structure of fish and even humans. My theory was that all life
has over the millions of years evolved under certain constant
factors, like the force of gravity, the density of water, the density
of air, and so forth. And, owing to that, there may exist a constant
of evolution, a number that was a combination of certain units, like
pounds, inches, and so forth, that was common to all life. I was
calling this number, if it existed, “The Constant of Evolution”.
One day when I was out measuring trees, my truck broke down,
and there I was, Charles Darwin, trapped out there on highway
five, and God knows what the high sheriff was thinking. I managed
to hitch a ride home, or call my Dad, and get my truck running
again.

Thinking about that lyric got me wondering if the project was not
entirely futile. I thought it was futile at the time because I realized
there were just too many unquantifiable factors involved, the
amount of sun that hits a tree changes with the seasons, its angle of
incidence with the time of day and year, and the list went on. But
now I am thinking maybe I can look at those factors that are
quantifiable, and perhaps they won’t explain the connections
between all aspects of the different life forms, but perhaps will
explain a connection between certain aspects of the different life
forms.

The Constant of Evolution

The buoyancy of water is a force that involves two things about the
earth that is constant for all marine life, the density of water and
the constant of gravitational acceleration of the Earth.

The buoyancy of air is a force that is constant for all flying animals
and insects and depends on the natural constants, density of air,
and the force of gravity.

Gravity is a constant force particular to all animal life to counter in

standing erect.

These values for the earth have been behind making us what we
are through millions of years of evolution.
 Can we find a constant of evolution in dynamic interplay between
these physical quantities that have existed on earth, in the case of
gravity and water since its beginning some 5 billion years ago, and
in the case of air since plant life generated the atmosphere we
know today.

We begin by finding the equivalence of the density of water to the

buoyancy of air through a constant, instead of equating the
buoyancy of water to that of air, so the constant will be a number
with units.

The density of water defines volume in the metric system. We say

there is one gram of water per cubic centimeter.

Calculating the density of air is easy. A mole of air atoms, and here
we treat the mixture of the nitrogen and oxygen that make up air as
diatomic molecules, when in reality nitrogen is a molecule and
oxygen is a molecule – occupies a certain volume of space as
dependant on their temperature and the pressure present. This
volume is constant for all gases at specified temperatures and
pressures. We will calculate the volume of air at standard
temperature and pressure (STP), which is zero degrees centigrade,
and one atmosphere of pressure, which is the pressure of air at sea
level, and zero degrees centigrade is the freezing temperature of
water. That value is 22.4 liters per mole. A mole is a number of
atoms, which is 6.02E23. The E23 means there are 23 figures after
the six, all zeroes, except the two which remains the third digit. A
very large number of atoms. I have calculated the molar mass of
air in other works of mine (grams per mole of air). It is:

Earth Air = 2[(16.00)(0.21) + (14.01)(0.78)] = 28.5756

Since Earth air is about 21% oxygen and 78% nitrogen. The 16.00
and 14.01 are the molar masses of oxygen and nitrogen as given by
the periodic table of the elements and the factor of two is
introduced because nitrogen gas and oxygen gas are the binding of
two atoms of nitrogen and oxygen each. What are called diatomic
molecules. We always write N2 for nitrogen gas and O2 for
oxygen gas, not N and O, because as gases, they occur this way
naturally. We now write:

{(28.5756 grams air)/(mole)}{(mole)/(22.4 liters)}

= 1.28 grams of air per liter

We will now convert this value to grams per cubic centimeter,

because I prefer to work in the cgs system (centimeters-grams-
seconds).

1 liter is 1000 cubic centimeters, so

{(1.28 grams air/(liter)}{(liter)/(1000 cubic centimeters)}

= 0.00128 grams of air per cubic centimeter

Earth surface gravity is 980 centimeters per second squared,

Which we will write:

980 cm/s^2

Our equation will be:

C(Density Of Water) = (earth gravity)/(density of air)

Where C is the constant of evolution. We plug in the numbers, and

solve for C.
C(1 g water)/(cm^3) = (980 cm/s^2)/(0.00128 g air)/(cm^3)

C{(g)(s^2)(0.00128 g)} = 980 (cm^7)

C = 765,625 [(cm^7)]/[(sec^2)(g)^2]

This reads, the constant of evolution is seven hundred and sixty

five thousand six hundred and twenty five centimeters to the
seventh per seconds squared grams squared.

I need to find where this value occurs in the physiology of both

birds and fish, if not in land animals and plant and tree life.

The density of sea water is about the same as that of fresh water,
not exceeding 1.035 g/cm^3. 

Note:

Yes, all these factors vary a little under different physical conditions.
That is why I calculated, as I said later in the essay, the density of air
at standard temperature and pressure, which is the temperature of air
at zero degrees centigrade, and one atmosphere of pressure (sea
level). I have since checked charts for density of air at extremes of
9,000 feet (density of a gas varies with altitude due to the change in
pressure) and the change was too small to have a big effect on my
constant, because the constant is such a big number. I checked for
variance of buoyancy with change in water temperature, which was
again too small to affect the outcome much at a range of earth
temperatures. At this point, the paper does point out that the density
of salt water is not much different than that of fresh water. Ideally, I
would like to hone the constant for a value using an average over the
extreme ranges, like the highest altitude at which a bird will fly. I
found the density for air at room temperature and 1 atmosphere, and
it was only
2 hundredths of a difference in kilograms per liter from my value at
freezing temperature. I have been planning on writing a segment
about all this for the paper, but I was sure already that the differences
were so small in comparison to the large constant, because I worked
at high altitudes and water didn't boil that much faster at high altitude
than in the valley, and I have swam in the ocean and streams noticing
the feeling of the water to be about the same, not to mention
replacing some fresh water with salt is going to make little difference
in that salt does not weigh much more than water to have that great
of an effect in the ocean. My hunches all turned out right, but
technically It would be appropriate to go into this in the paper, I just
felt either some people would know this, and others would research it,
or feel it from experience. However, these are good questions, and
they afford me to get to the task of elaborating on this subject.

My constant of evolution is a number that is not just a constant of

evolution but is a number that is no doubt unique to the planet earth
out of all the perhaps billions of world that exist in the universe, and
the uses of it may apply to many fields and open up an uncountable
amount of doors to new ideas.

Ian Beardsley
February 28, 2010