Review.

Book by Haim Perlyuk and Oscar Kupita.
“When trees were humans.”
By Chaim Perlyuk and Oscar Kupita
Pergamon Press, New York, 2015.

The reviewer has great difficulty evaluating this book.
It is based on two ideas. One is quite common and, one might even say, banal.
The other one is original and so unusual that the reviewer doubted the mental adequacy of the authors for a short time.
The first, banal idea, according to the reviewer, is a kind of assumption that hundreds of millions of years ago on planet Earth there already existed an advanced civilization at a scientific and technological level that surpasses our current one. That is, there were some different “Evolutions” on Earth. One, the “first”, began quite early after the cooling of the crust and lasted several hundred million to one billion years.  Then some kind of NON-REVOLUTIONARY change took place and the “second” evolution began (or continued), which we know and have studied, unlike the first, which is almost unknown to us.
What happened, according to the two authors of this book?

(By the way, a few words about the authors. As can be seen from the names and surnames, they are descendants of refugees from tsarist Russia, one may even be from Ukraine, the other is also from there or from Belarus. Perlyuk is a phisician, general practitioner, Kupita is an amateur archaeologist and a professional boxer!!! Such a strange combination!)

So, during the “first” evolution, life, algae, protozoa, plants, animals, and finally humans, intelligent beings, arose. There were people like people and they developed as gradually as we do. But their difference from us was huge! They could think and reason!  Logical, honest, strict. And here another hypothesis, an original one, enters the narrative arena.
But in this most interesting place, the authors suddenly interrupt their sequential presentation and make a leap through hundreds of millions of years into OUR era, the era of the “second” evolution and OUR civilization that has already emerged. They offer us the following material for reflection:

The Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne. View a picture of this sculptural group, by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, located in the Villa Borghese Museum in Rome.
Eros, the mischievous son of Aphrodite, shot his arrows at both Apollo and Daphne. But one arrow was “Love-inducing” and hit Apollo, and the other, “Love-killing”, pierced into Daphne’s heart. Apollo became inflamed with love for the girl, and she ran away from him! Apollo still ran faster and caught up with Daphne. Then she prayed to the gods for help, and they, sympathizing with the girl, turned her into a laurel tree! This is the thrilling moment of the girl’s transformation into a laurel tree captured by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Another Greek myth about King Erisichthon of Thessaly. He cut down a hundred-year-old oak tree in the grove where the beloved DRYADS of the goddess of fertility Demeter lived. One servant, who was trying to stop this atrocity, was killed by Erichton, with a mocking cry: Here, to you for your obedience to the gods! Erichton tore the axe from the servant’s hands and plunged it deep into the trunk of an oak tree where one of Demeter’s Dryads lived. A deep groan followed, and blood gushed from the bark of the tree. But the cruel king did not stop, but cut down the oak. The oak tree fell to the ground with a groan-like sound, and the Dryad that lived in it died with it. Demeter learned about the crime from the friends of the murdered Dryad and decided to punish the evil tyrant. She sent other Dryads in her chariot drawn by winged snakes to Scythia, to the mountains of the Caucasus. There they found and brought the goddess of hunger to Demeter. She flew into Erichton’s house and breathed into him an insatiable hunger. And the more he ate, the more he was consumed by unbearable hunger. The king sold everything to get enough, even his own daughter, but he COULDN’T get enough! Finally, he began tearing his body with his teeth and died in terrible agony.

The reviewer retells this part of the book in such detail, as the authors also describe these myths very thoroughly and with the smallest details. Like the readers, the reviewer wondered why these myths were needed at all and what they had to do with their hypothesis of the “first” civilization.
It turned out to be STRAIGHT!
In the third part of their book, they continue to develop their hypothesis about that prehistoric intelligent life. Back then, as mentioned earlier, people were thinking! And there was a thinker and a talented writer among them, whose name, by a strange coincidence, was Stanislav Lem! (The reviewer did not understand from the book how the authors learned such a detail after millennia.) The then Stanislav Lem wrote a book with the same title as the current one: “The Sum of Technology”. And the intelligent people of that time understood from it that the path that THEIR EVOLUTION took, or rather, the evolution of all life on the planet at that time, was fundamentally FLAWED, because it was based on TOTAL parasitism! And Lem of that time pointed out in his book WHERE Nature or Evolution made a fatal mistake: Refusal – avoidance  from chlorophyll synthesis! After all, what do algae, plants, grass, bushes, and trees do? They use purely mineral substances, and a few with only microadditives of other minerals, to build the most complex organic molecules from water, carbon dioxide and sunlight! These are not just ingenious chemical factories, they are the magicians of nature! No one else knows how to do this. ONLY PLANTS perform this miracle through photosynthesis!
And such a life is NOT parasitic, because purely mineral sources of raw materials are used. But Evolution “made a mistake” somewhere later and parasitic life arose, that is, consuming already produced organic molecules, instead of developing and improving the process of photosynthesis. But parasitism is a suicide mission! Doomed to perish! People realized this then and decided to use advanced genetics to transform their parasitic lifestyle into a symbiotic, photosynthetic one!
They’ve managed to turn themselves into plants!!! And that, in their opinion, saved them from the imminent death of the parasite!!!
That’s where these myths came from, from the oldest memory in the genes!
People have become TREES! Grass! The bushes! Algae!
As you can see, they were intelligent, but they did not take into account the “maliciousness” of Evolution! Having created a parasitic life, she stubbornly continued this vicious practice of developing parasitism. And the result is obvious – a modern man! Parasitic on everything and destroying everything!

The reviewer, after reading the last lines of this extremely interesting book, thought that Albert Einstein was still mistaken when he said about God-Nature.:
Raffiniert ist Herr Gott, aber boschaft ist er nicht.
The Lord God is sophisticated, but he is not malicious!
Public practice, which is the criterion of truth, refutes Einstein’s opinion day and hour.

Valery Bryusov “Son of Earth”:
I am a brother to the beast, and to the lizards, and to the fish.,
THE GROWTH OF SPRING-RISING GRASSES IS CLEAR TO ME.,
I pray to the Earth, its sacred boulders
With loving lips I kiss it on and on.

31 I  2016