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It is generally conceived by Scientologists if there had been in fact evolution. Referred then is to the book publication ‘Scientology: A History of Man’. Subtitled: ‘A list and Description of the Principal Incidents to be Found in a Human Being’. Chapter 4 of the book runs of evolution-like incidents. One should keep in mind however that this was a handbook of some sort to be used by auditors*. Its original release title was ‘What to Audit’*. The reissue title is a kind of misleading in that respect. That which is contained in the little book is that which may be originated by the person receiving processing. The book is just a collection of such things that reside in the mind. Anyway the quotations below may shed some some light on the matter and hopefully will clarify some things.

It is advised while going through this to have some basic understanding about evolutionary theory. This information is provided here for those Scientologists interested in this matter, but also for evolutionists and creationists.

 
Index of selections:

• 1.  About the ‘Theta-MEST Theory’  (May 51)
• 2.  About the consequence of MEST without Theta  (Jun 51)
• 3.  About the ‘Theory of Natural Selection’  (Sept 51)
  
• 4.  About the ‘Darwinian Theory’  (Jul 63)
• 5.  About ‘Phenomena of perception’
  

 
About the ‘Theta-MEST Theory’

“What I'm going to describe to you tonight is a basic theory that underlies this. The basic theory is called the Theta-MEST Theory. I know there's going to be a lot of you going to have a lot of trouble trying to figure out what a Theta-MEST theory is, but if you have any trouble, it is simply because you're trying to make it too complicated. It is too simple. That's the trouble with the Theta- MEST theory. Theta stands for thought. Once upon a time. Man talked about his ‘soul’. Philosophers have talked about ‘life energy’. Some fellow, once upon a time, talked about ‘cosmic consciousness’. All of these things could be called theta. In other words, theta is just the Greek word which comes the closest to saying ‘thought’. So let's take thought as a separate energy, as something we don't know a great deal about, but we'll just compartment it out of the physical universe. Now, we know the physical universe. The physical universe is this desk and that chair and that light and the electricity running through that light. Very simple. We've all had our tiffs and bumps from the physical universe. We know about the physical universe. We call that MEST. It is called MEST because of Matter, Energy, Space and Time. And we take the first letter of each one of those words and put them all together and we have MEST. In other words, matter–energy formed into solids. Energy itself–it could be heat, it could be electricity, it could be any type of energy or any manifestation of energy of which we know in the physical universe. And then there's space. We all know what space is, well, it's this empty stuff. And then there's time, what very few of us have enough of. This is the physical universe and MEST is just another way of saying ‘the physical universe’. We could also call it–and get very, very erudite about the whole thing and call it phi–p-h-i and that would be another Greek syllable, and that would stand for physical universe. But this starts to sound too much like ‘having to have a label because we don't understand what we're talking about’, so let's just call it MEST and let it go at that. And by MEST we mean the physical universe. Now, evidently, the theory of ‘mud to man’ has not worked out too well. The biologist has said, ‘Spontaneously arising from the ammonia seas of the world was a form of life which became more and more complicated and it evoluted and evoluted and all of a sudden you had a man. And that is all there's to it’. And you look at him fixedly and say, ‘Yes, but this basic unit of life ...’ ‘Oh’, he says, ‘well, that was probably a virus or a monocell or something.’ and so on. ‘But how did it come into being?’ ‘Well, it just fortuitously came into being. It just happened at that moment there were enough factors present so that they combined and this happened.’ It's just exactly like that mountain of iron that fell over sideways upon the oil well and somehow or other fortuitously happened to produce a new Cadillac. The odds against the mud-to-man theory, to anyone who wants to figure this out actuarially, are so great that when you add to them the odds of this organism going on and getting more and more complex, you get into an imponderable. Men in the past have solved this imponderable by saying, ‘Well, God made Man and that's all there is to it and shut up!’ All right. This, we find, is a far more acceptable theory, if we want to call it a theory. Because we would call ‘cosmic consciousness’, or something a determination to do something to the physical universe and we find out our first axiom is simply in the line of ‘theta has as its mission or one of its missions the changing of MEST’. Now, that's not very complicated. Theta changes MEST.”          LRH (from Science of Survival lecture #1 “Theta-Mest Theory, Part 1”, given on 21 May 51)

Sound snippet (4:31)

 
About the consequence of MEST without Theta

“As one examines these upper levels of mind, when one examines the evidence of the theta body, and when one himself experiences, incidental to processing, the evidence of his own continuation into yesterdays and an evident guarantee of his tomorrows past his death in the current generation, one's orientation with regard to goals and purposes may undergo a considerable alteration. The biologist, revolting against churches which may or may not have considerably suppressed scientific research in the past, has sought to dream for man an origin out of mud and ammonia seas and a source for him independent of God, but springing only from material things. This reactive overreaching gave us no method of alleviating the unhappiness of man, even in the restricted fields of chronic somatics and mental aberration, and gave to us instead tremendous weapons of destruction without providing as well any sanity with which to use them.

Under the guidance of the material-blinkered scientist, whose greatest goal was a work-animal adjustment of man to a physical environment, whose end for the individual was six feet of ground and a coffin sometimes proof against worms, and whose goal for the group was an ant society wherein the smallest unit of life worthy of notice was ten thousand individuals, we have been led down dark and evil byways of destruction not only of the dreams, hopes, and ethics of men but of the MEST planet as well. Materialistic science, operating on the premise that man came from mud only, that the mind is a queerly erroneous stimulus-response mechanism, that the human soul is a delusion, that God was a myth of some aberrated Mesopotamian, has presented us at last with the immediate and real threat of man's extinction as a species. In view of the fact that this materialistic science led only, then, in the direction of death, even the unthinking should see the fact that something must be desperately wrong with the teachings of the Lysenkos, the Darwins, and my learned schoolmates, the atomic scientists who have given man at last for his gravespade the atomic bomb.

However, it was natural for man, as an organism heavily enturbulated with MEST, to bring to perfection something like the understanding of the laws of MEST before he looked about to see whether anything else might exist. The materialist scientist has enormously advanced man's control of MEST, even if he has by his doctrines considerably inhibited man's understanding of what in Dianetics we call theta. Francis Bacon, Newton, and the rest developed ways of thinking about thinking and ways of reasoning about reason which have been of considerable value to Dianetics and without which, indeed, Dianetics could not have been formulated. But Bacon and Newton did not espouse the materialist cause. Their disciples developed the doctrine that man came from mud and that man's destiny was mud.

If Dianetics does not come too late upon the scene, its investigation of higher mind levels, even at this low and undeveloped point, may be of assistance to a resurgence in man of something of his belief in a Divine Being and in himself as an entity partially divine. The basic principles of Dianetics demand that a fact, to be proven, must be sensed, measured, or experienced. When science thrust this onto the scene of thinking, man's willingness to accept a fact merely upon faith was in itself reduced. Caught unprepared before this new doctrine without which, so its espousers claim, nothing could be valid, the religions still attempted to hold at high value what was actually a vitally necessary part of man's social existence. But generation after generation of young men and women came off the assembly lines marked ‘educational courses,’ filled full of the doctrine that they must believe only what they could experience, and ground very fine in the mills of the materialist. These generations, actually, regardless of their ability to quote Hamlet or play Bach on the piano, to look into microscopes, to serve as executives in steamship offices, to shift and command and generally alter MEST, were nevertheless socially lost generations which had no concept of the value of themselves as individuals, which had no workable social order worth mentioning if the value of a social order is to be measured in terms of happiness. These generations were wrecked by divorce, inhibitions, purposelessness, sophistication, insecurity and general hopelessness. Representative of their feeling in the field of humanity were schools of thought which taught them that a man's highest goal was to become ‘adjusted to his environment’ without once realizing that man's only advance depended on man's ability to adjust the environment to him as a species; which taught that genetic heredity alone was responsible for neurosis and insanity, and that filth and muck alone covered the entire problem of the human mind from top to bottom. This is a sad and piteous thing. No empire one has studied in any former day had ever become so depraved and Godless in its senility as the overall average of the societies of man in the world today. It is no wonder that an ideology which holds that man, generation after generation, can be moulded into mindless machine parts, that there is no destiny for the individual beyond his place as an emotionless, rigidly-held cog in a dully, hopelessly grinding social wheel, commands of its minions the destruction and eradication from any society of the producer, the individuals, the thinker, or any noble man.”        LRH
(from book ‘Science of Survival’, Jun 51; Book Two, Chapter Eighteen: “Level of Mind Alert”)

 
About the ‘Theory of Natural Selection’

“One must see this continual necessity of the organism to be in advance of the environment before one can appreciate the value of reason. The organism cannot discover how the environment is going to evolve test species to see if they survive. This is Darwin's natural selection. But it is only a small part of the process of evolution. There are too many data about the development of various species that just do not fit into natural selection. In order to put forth the theory of natural selection, all the data which points to direction and planning in evolution has to be hidden and disregarded. It has long been known to paleontologists that the horn of the rhinoceros cannot be accounted for by natural selection. There are many things in evolution which evolved slowly and smoothly for no apparent reason unless it is admitted that planning and experimentation was going on as a part of the life process. All of life is a process of thought. There is every reason to think that theta*, at least, is capable of planning. Man is on the highest level of reason known, but every life organism is using reason. The idea that ‘man thinks but all the rest of the universe just happened’ is absurd.”

“The effort to explain life in terms of organisms adjusting to their environment leads to hopeless confusion. But when it is assumed that the organism is adjusting the environment to it, everything falls into place with great ease. In order to survive an organism must be theta, not MEST*. It must be a causative agent. The individual who can change his environment can reason. If he cannot reason, he cannot change his environment. The wide-open case low on the Tone Scale will only be able to change the environment by destroying it, but he is still trying to change the environment. One way or another the organism will go on changing the environment until death.”          LRH*
(printed in ‘Dianetic Auditor's Bulletin, Vol 2, No 3’, Sept 51 “Basic Reason - Basic Principles”, taken from a lecture)

 
About the ‘Darwinian Theory’

“Now the Darwinian theory—now, I'll give you some idea of the influence of false track upon this society. The Darwinian theory, which probably influenced Pavlov to the greatest degree, is just an implant*. That is an implant from man to mud.”

Sound snippet 1 (0:14)

“Now this incident—this incident, now with a wheel dating device which gives you a series of numbers that gives you—gives you the time of these events, shows you being implanted, shows you finished implanting ... , shows you being dumped in the sea, and shows you start from the sea and become seaweed and become this—and to work up stage by stage—giving the millions of years which elapse on each step, see? And you go on and on up the line, each step—each step—each step on an evolutionary channel and you run all the way through on these evolutionary channels. ... and shows you eventually arriving at the state of being a man. ... some of the incidents of 'What to Audit' are actually out of that. Some of the incidents of 'What to Audit' are actual, some are out of that Darwinian implant, see?”

	Sound snippet 2 (1:52)
	[The sound snippet is longer and fills in the not quoted parts (...) in the above printed text.]

“A lot of characters around here got this [implant], most of them become scientists. That actually is the sole foundation of the Darwinian theory. That's the lot. Evolution: there's no such thing. Bodies don't evolve. They deteriorate, but they don't evolve. You can trace all kinds of reasons how they evolve, and why they evolve, and you can figure it all out, but the truth of the matter is when you get horses on a planet, somebody came along and mocked up some horses! Now, they also mocked up these horses with the capability of growing hair or not growing hair. You've got adjustment factors, but not evolution factors. So you confuse the adjustment factors and prove the whole theory of evolution. And now you know man came from mud, and you can write a book like Pavlov and get the whole world poisoned. You see how this one goes? All of this is based on what? It's based on errors in time. Errors in time. Because an individual has this incident: It's a wrong time, wrong place, going wrong the whole way, and it took up two hours and actually looks like it takes up seven million, see? There are such incidents.”          LRH

Sound snippet 3 (1:26)

(from Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lecture #287, renumbered 1991: #316 “Errors in Time”, given on 18 July 1963)

 
About ‘Phenomena of perception’

“The basic assumption of modern biology is that there was a bunch and one day a piece of it ‘unmudded’ and we had man. This is a most unreasonable assumption, since older and more searching thought had, many years before Darwin, consistently speculated that space, energy and matter were phenomena of perception. There is energy because we perceive energy. There is matter because we agree that something is solid and sitting there in that space ... .”          LRH
(quoted in ‘Advance! 59’, Jul-Aug 79 in article: “Man: The Animal or God?”, source unknown)

Vocabulary:

     audit, auditing, auditor:
The application of Scientology processes and procedures to someone by a trained auditor (listener). The goal of the auditor is to make the receiver of the auditing look at incidents and reduce the mental charge which may lay upon them. The auditor may not evaluate and has to adhere to the Auditor's code.
     HCOB:
‘Hubbard Communications Office Bulletin’: issue-type since Jan 74 reserved for L. Ron Hubbard only, these address technical issues, having to do with auditing procedures and courses. 
     implant:
A painful and forceful means of overwhelming a being with artificial of false concepts in a malicious attempt to control and suppress him. An unwilling and unknowing receipt of a thought. An intentional installation of fixed ideas.
     LRH:
An usual abbreviation for ‘L. Ron Hubbard’.
     MEST:
A coined word, meaning matter, energy, space and time, the physical universe. All physical phenomena may be considered as energy operating in space and time. The movement of matter or energy in time is the measure of space. All things are mest except theta.
     SHSBC:
‘Saint Hill Special Briefing Course’: This is a course delivered by L. Ron Hubbard at Saint Hill, England during 1961-66 and comprising of 447 lectures, its result is an adept auditor and thorough know-how of Scientology itself.
     theta:
Thought, life force, the spirit or the soul.
     ‘What to Audit’:
Title of a book first published in 1952 in limited quantity. Meant to be a guide for auditors. When it was reissued in England the title was changed to ‘Scientology: History of Man’.