Over time, means through which creatures have communicated with each other have evolved. From this, we now have words that supposedly carry meaning with them through which we are able to express our ideas and feelings to other. It is my opinion though, that we still do not have a means of communication through which we are able to accurately depict our feelings and ideas to each other because we are do not have the words to accomplish this with. We also have words whose meanings vary substantially from use to use based on the context of the word. Essentially, we are experiencing the symbol grounding problem that Descartes theorized with the way we associate ideas of objects and their representation.
Theories about time and evolution have been floating around almost as long as time itself. Where we came from, who we evolved from, and the involvement of god has always plagued mankind.
From http://hypernews.ngdc.noaa.gov
English: Title page of the first English-language ...
First figure of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Ph...Science attempted to answer this by tracing our ancestry through our mammalian brothers all the way back to the pre-biotic soup we emerged from. Religion explained it using the Garden of Eden and the creation of man in God's image.
Whitehead had his own ideas about these issues just like all of us. As far as evolution, he essentially came up an alternative to scientific materialism, what he called a new doctrine of organism. Basically, everything in this world started out as 'stuff'. From 'stuff' came the pre-biotic soup and after a few more jumps in the chain, there were rats and other such creatures followed by a few more jumps to where we are now. He also felt that through creation, there is no more material now on the earth than there was in the beginning meaning that there is as much 'us' now as there...