Dear Georgina,
apologies for my late reply...
"That comes from using Einstein's space-time continuum..." No! It comes from Parmenides! 'Mere happening' cannot be observed in principle. Assuming (just for probabilistic reasons) that you are not familiar with cricket, what you would observe in a cricket game is people moving in certain ways and doing things with bats and balls. Then, for you, every game-oriented 'move' by the players would be entirely unexpected, i.e. you wouldn't be able to observe the GAME. Likewise, what we see on an oscilloscope before synchronization is noise. The synchronization, however, is what WE bring to the measurement, namely, the a priori knowledge what it takes to make a signal of certain periodicity APPEAR to stand still. So, hypotheses, I think, are the most powerful scientific instruments there are, because -if they're good - they make things stand still, and they do this by finding the right way to think (speak) about the world (difficult job indeed). The solution of the equations of motion is always a body in space, e.g. an orbit or trajectory, which is why I said in a previous essay that in Newton's laws the apple does not even feature.
Time, on the other hand, is what we experience when we are 'unsynchronized', because time begins to flow when we are permanently forced to change our expectations.' Time' is the indicator of things-going-wrong, and since disorder is wrong, the direction of time is in the direction of increasing entropy.
I'll be back on evolution and species later.
Heinrich