The Eden Revelation An Evolutionary Novel David Rosenberg Dr. Rhonda Rosenberg “The greatest enterprise of the mind is the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities.” E.O. Wilson

Smartphones in place of bananas

 

Although evolution is our consensus science, its dramatic place in our lives still has no common narrative.  The well-worn tale of a tiny branch on the tree of life—the higher primates—has been relegated to a cartoon in which apes on all fours begin to walk upright and arrive in our day holding smartphones in place of bananas. The universal code for evolution is still “survival of the fittest”, even after more than a hundred million mostly fit humans were slaughtered in its name in the previous century.

 

So The Eden Revelation finds new expression for both evolution and the novel by setting its main characters on edge, made anxious about a buried question deep within the human psyche that’s brought to the surface by an archaeologist’s shocking Middle Eastern dig.  That question now becomes a conscious one about evolution and our species’ extinction—when that is about to happen, there is no alternative to evolving naturally.  The recent pandemic has proven that even a virus can’t avoid the necessity to evolve.

 

Only in a novel that confronts the feelings brought up by evolution will we be able to recognize the new-normal.  The clash of ideas and characters in The Eden Revelation asks: How did we feel about “the first new normal”—historically, the scene of our evolving as humans, whether in an Eden or an ecosystem?  Why did we bury our hopes and fears in the depths of our species’ unconscious life?

 

Yet there is a profound precedent to asking these questions.  Our spiritual origins in the sources of Biblical literature were much closer to the time of our actual human evolving.  The characters in our novel are all confronted with the eruption of ancient events and feelings.  Meanwhile, today’s “business ecosystem” models would pave over Eden and its natural ecosystem, the Garden.