Monthly Archives: January 2022

January 27, 2022 – Dawkins, Teilhard and God

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   While Dawkins quantifies Teilhard’s insights on evolution, where is he on the concept of God?

Today’s Post

For the past three weeks, we have been looking at how such a brilliant scientist, who prides himself on his secular grasp of the unquestionable processes in both human and material evolution, ends up providing insights which validate Teilhard’s insights into evolution.

What it doesn’t show is how Dawkins is unable or unwilling to follow his own insights into resonance with Teilhard’s understanding of God.

This week we will look into the other side of Dawkins’ thoughts on God as the name for the ultimate principle of this evolution.

Dawkins, Teilhard and God

We have seen how Dawkins reflects several aspects of Teilhard’s thinking when he says

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God.  Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

   We can parse this statement in three ways.  First, he agrees with both Physics and Teilhard with the concept of a ‘first cause”.  Secondly, he implicitly agrees with the efforts of Teilhard (and Blondel before him) that the language of traditional religion needs to be ‘divested of its baggage’ and therefore ‘reinterpreted’ if it is to have relevance in this age of scientific discovery.  Third, he further resonates with Teilhard’s concept of an energy which evolves the universe in the direction of increasing complexity.   From this perspective, Dawkins reveals himself less as an ‘a-theist’ and more of an ‘a-religionist’.

However, he makes little effort to address how these three simple insights can be carried forward to perform the ‘divestment of baggage’ that he says is necessary to correctly ‘conceptualize’ God.   His quote from Carl Sagan offers an example:

“If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God.  This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

   The flaw in this argument lies in his assumption that all the ‘laws’ of the universe can be found in those currently understood in Physics.  In the first quote above, he obviously acknowledges that these ‘laws’, by his definition, must include those which underly the rise of complexity if our ‘present complex existence’ is to be scientifically understood.  And further that these laws, so far, lie outside those addressed by Physics.  He seems unaware of his contradiction that when we follow his suggestion that these other laws be considered, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ can be explored to reveal a God whose ‘emotional satisfaction’ increases the intensity  of traditional religion.

Dawkins makes the vague pronouncement that

“Natural science …explains how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance.”

   He, astute student of natural science, provides no examples of such explanation, nor does he offer any explanation himself.  He focusses on debating the common religious assertion that evolution is ‘deliberately guided’, even though he seems comfortable with ‘a crane’ that ‘raises’ complexity over time.

Looking a little more closely at this ‘crane’ we can see further contradictions.

“The evolutionary drive towards complexity comes, in those lineages where it comes at all, not from any inherent propensity for increased complexity, and not from biased mutation, it comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.” (Italics mine)

This would seem to contradict his statement that the action of the ‘complexification’ that he acknowledges is different between the causality seen in natural selection and that seen in the rise complexity of the universe.

“The crane doesn’t have to be natural selection.  Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one.  But there could be others yet to be discovered.  Maybe the ‘inflation’ that physicists postulate as occupying some fraction of the first yoctosecond of the universe’s existence will turn out, when it is better understood, to be a cosmological crane to stand alongside Darwins biological one”.

   After first claiming that natural selection is the “only process ..capable of generating complexity”. He now asserts that “it doesn’t have to be natural selection”.

Contradictions become even more pronounced in assertions such as these.   The ‘drive to increased complexity’ in evolution is seen as merely an aspect of natural selection, even though he admits elsewhere that NS cannot cause it during the ‘pre life’ phase of the universe or in the non-biological phase of cultural evolution.  Nor does he even attempt to explain how the ‘replication’ of living things can result in ‘complexification’.

He nonetheless goes on to implicitly agree with Teilhard’s concept of a universe in the process of increasing its complexity, as at least as it occurs on Earth.

“On one planet ..molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter. “

   Dawkins eschews the idea that the religious idea of God can be reconciled with his valid insights on evolution because he conflates his reasonable concept of God (as the underlying ‘cause’ of complexification) with the Christian fundamentalist and anthropological understanding of God as a supernatural person who creates, judges, rewards and punishes.  He seems incapable of understanding how his suggestion to “divest the idea of God of its baggage” can lead, as Teilhard asserts, to “a clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

Next Week

This week we looked at the thinking of the brilliant geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins whose detailed understanding of the progression of evolution in the ‘pre-life’ and the ‘conscious-life’ eras of the unfolding of the universe give substance to Teilhard’s insights.  We also saw how Dawkins’ anti-religion bias colors and therefore inhibits his ability to recognize how such insights, as recognized by Teilhard, have given new life to what has often been a dogmatic and increasingly irrelevant Christianity.

Next week, we will move on to yet another contemporary secular thinker, Johan Norberg, so see how his flood of data also can be seen t substantiate Teilhard’s insights.

January 20, 2022 –  Dawkins and Teilhard on the Continuation of Evolution in the Human Species

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   How can Richard Dawkins’ insights on human evolution quantify those of Teilhard?

Today’s Post

In the first Dawkins insight that we have addressed, he opens the door to Teilhard’s insight that the key metric of universal evolution is that of the increased complexity of its products over time.  In the second, the door is opened a little wider into articulating how the scientific concept of evolution in the ‘life era’ can be extrapolated backward to flow from the increase of complexity can be seen to occur in the ‘pre-life’ era.

In the third we will see how Dawkins opens the door much wider to how evolution’s process of Natural Selection can be extrapolated forward into the era of life become conscious of itself.  In doing so, we can see. In addition to quantification, implicit agreement with Teilhard’s vision of how human evolution fits into the evolution of the cosmos.

With his expanded perspective of the gene, Dawkins sets off on a new perspective on evolution, rooted in his insights of complexity proceeding from the molecular to the cellular level.

 “For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own.”

   In making this statement, he is referring to the fact for billions of years, evolution occurred through the connection of particles to form new particles of higher complexity (as in atoms to molecules).  In this action, the ‘parent’ particles are unchanged in the making of a ‘child’ particle.  An oxygen atom is unchanged in its union with a hydrogen atom to form the molecule of water.

The action of the replicative function of the genes is different in two significant ways.  First, the gene molecule itself forms new genes, and secondly the new genes can be different from their parents.  Unification is replaced by a replication which results in differentiation.

Dawkins’ quantification of this process is another confirmation of Teilhard’s assertion that evolution constantly manifests itself in new ways as it increases the complexity of its products.

It also introduces Dawkins’ idea of “a new kind of evolution”.

Echoing Teilhard, Dawkins sees that

“Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: ‘culture’.

   And he identifies ‘culture’ as the latest evolutionary milieu of evolution:

“Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that…it can give rise to a form of evolution”.

   Dawkins goes on to quantify the underlying principle of this “new form”.

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet.  It is still in its infancy, drifting around in its primordial soup, but is already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.  The new soup is the soup of human culture”

   And the new replicator

“… conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission.  We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.”

   The name he proposes for this new unit of imitation is ‘meme’, and he proposes that the meme, via the process of cultural transmission, provides the same agency to human evolution that the gene provided to cellular evolution.

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense can be called imitation.  If a scientist hears or reads about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures.  If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain”.

   And, again in implicit agreement with Teilhard, he remarks on the exponential increase of this new form of evolution over the genetic process.  He uses the concept of language to illustrate:

“Language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means. and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.”

   He continues this perspective when he asserts that human culture

“.. historically evolves in a way that looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution. but has nothing to do with genetic evolution.”

   He also seems to implicitly agree with Teilhard on the need to expand Darwin’s concept of the idea of evolution from the narrow confines of the theory Natural Selection:

“For an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the basis of our ideas on evolution.  I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined by the narrow context of the gene.”

   He even takes a stab how such a new view of evolution can open the door to a new concept of consciousness:

“Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.”

   It is very interesting that such a brilliant scientist, who prides himself on his secular grasp of unquestionable processes in both human and material evolution, ends up providing such a validation of Teilhard’s insights.  This strongly suggests the bridges that Teilhard builds from his mystically-charged insights into universal evolution to the emerging empirical quantifications of  such empirical probes are not only valid, but able to carry the weight of our personal search for ‘fullness’.

Next Week

This week we looked at a third aspect of the insights of Richard Dawkins, famous atheist and brilliant genetic biologist, as he trained his sights on how evolution can be seen to continue in the human species beyond the actions of genes.  We also saw how the further he extends his vision, both backward in the direction of ‘pre-life’ molecules and forward in the direction of ‘post-genetics’, the more the visionary insights of Teilhard are validated.

Next week, we will move on to yet another contemporary secular thinker, Johan Norberg, so see how his flood of data also quantifies Teilhard’s projections.

January 13, 2022 –  Dawkins and Teilhard on Complexity in Evolution

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   How can Richard Dawkins’ insights of genomic evolution illustrate Teilhard’s insights into universal evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look into how Richard Dawkins understood the role of the gene in biological evolution, offering the distinction between the replication function of the gene and the selection function of the cell as addressed by the theory of Natural Selection.

This week we will look a little deeper at this distinction to see how it opens the door to Teilhard’s insight that both are simply stages in the fourteen billion years of universal evolution.

Replication and Complexification

Dawkins avoids addressing the key to the activity of replication and selection.  While he insightfully describes how the DNA is the premiere agent of replication, he does not address how complexification gets into the replication function itself.  What factor in the DNA engine of reproducing complex amino acids causes the reproduced products to be more complex than those from which they were produced?   Dawkins maps the DNA factory’s reproduction process, which of course leads to the ability of Natural Selection (NS) to guide the cellular products into satisfactory accommodation of their environments, but nowhere in this story is the question of ‘why complexity?’ addressed.

While such ‘complexification’ can clearly be seen to continue in cellular structures, the lack of fossil evidence prevents a clear picture of how it progresses in the ‘pre life’ era.  While simple amino acid molecules are thought to emerge very quickly (180 or so M years after the big bang) that leaves some 8 B years for it to increase to the level of DNA.

But the genes themselves obviously evolve.  This can be seen in a comparison of the size of the genomes and the complexity of the resultant biological entity.  Generally (and unsurprisingly) more complex entities are endowed with larger genomes, from the first eucaryotic cells (a thousand genes) through the early bacterial entities (two thousand genes) through to the human (twenty thousand genes).  Science generally believes that these simpler constructions preceded their more complex offspring over time, suggesting that the molecular increase of complexity seen in genomic evolution continues to increase in the succeeding cellular biota.

So, while Dawkins insightfully describes the intricate process of developing the mainspring of biological evolution, the cell, from a complex interaction among pre-cellular, but not ‘alive’, molecules, he casts his net only to the edge of the stage of universal evolution at which the DNA molecule is alive and well.  What came before it to raise the structure of the molecule from its vastly simpler construct of two atoms, helium hydride, to the incredibly complex structure of the DNA molecule?

Dawkins, Teilhard and ‘Pre-organic Evolution’

In his recognition of the preorganic role of molecules, Dawkins effectively moves the process of evolution back one step from the cell to the DNA molecule, showing that the organic cell depends on the inorganic (or better, the preorganic) molecule for biological evolution.  But that just moves the mystery of complexification back as well.  Conventional thinking sees Darwinist evolution as ‘selecting for’ the complexity seen in science’s history of biological evolution.  But if the ‘replication’ activity of the molecule is required for Darwinist ‘selection’, what causes its own increase in complexity?  Clearly, the more complex a cellular product, the greater the complexity of its component genes.  If there is no ‘feedback’ from the ‘selected’ biological product to the DNA of the ‘replicator’, how does the DNA itself ‘evolve’?  Dawkins does not address this contradiction.

While Dawkins clearly recognizes the significant novelty introduced into the process of universal evolution by the gene, he does not remark on another aspect noted by Teilhard.  In every step up the evolutionary stairway of matter from the big bang to the precursor of the gene, the element of evolution does not itself change in its participation in the elevation to the next level of complexity.  For example, the atom retains its basic structure as it fulfills its potential for unity with other atoms to form molecules.  In the gene, as with all evolutionary products, complexification occurs in the act of unification.  The gene not only presents us with a new mode of evolution, it is also the first time in evolutionary history that the element of evolution itself changes in the act of unification.  As we will see, this phenomenon takes on even more significance in the human phase of evolution as we ourselves evolve to fuller being in the course of pursuing fuller union.

That said, however, in this second of three examples of Dawkins’ thinking we can see the door to Teilhard’s more comprehensive insight into evolution opening a little wider.  Dawkins insightfully articulates the process of the differentiation leading to the diversity addressed by NS, and that of the replication which leads to elements capable of differentiation.  He thus sees them as the result of two different processes, the second of which is rooted in the molecular processes asserted by Teilhard, and the first of which is identified in the theory of Natural Selection.

Therefore, in our first two examples of how the insights of Richard Dawkins define the densely complex process of evolution’s rise from the inorganic to the organic, we can see echoes of Teilhard’s sweeping vision of a universe in the process of becoming more complex.  Dawkins rarely expands his insights to the workings of the universe, but he does admit that where evolution occurs in the universe, it will likely do so with the steps of replication followed by differentiation seen in the genetic process at work on our planet.

Next Week

This week we looked a little deeper into Dawkins’ distinction between replication and selection to see how it opens the door to Teilhard’s insight that both are simply stages in the fourteen billion years of universal evolution.

Next week we address Richard Dawkins’ take on the ‘other end’ of biological evolution: how it continues to proceed through the human species.  As we shall see, this third facet of his evolutionary insights is the one that is most resonant with Teilhard’s much more holistic picture of the process of evolution as it rises through the history of the universe.

January 6, 2022 –  Teilhard, Dawkins and the Genetic Root of Evolution

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   How can Richard Dawkins’ insights on genetic activity reflect Teilhard’s insights into evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we began out look at how three of the insights of Richard Dawkins into human evolution can be seen to have nuggets of thought that resonate with Teilhard, starting with the idea that evolution is the underlying phenomenon by which the universe comes to be.

This week, we will look at the second of his insights into evolution, that of the essential contribution of the amazing molecule, the gene, to the continuation of evolution on our planet.

Dawkins and ‘Pre-Biological’ Evolution

While Dawkins does not explicitly open the idea of evolution as a satisfactory term to describe the development of the universe from the big bang to the human, he opens this door by addressing evolution before the advent of biological life.  In his book, “The Selfish Gene”, He describes in great detail how biological evolution is made possible by the ‘gene’.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, experiments pointed to DNA as the portion of chromosomes that held genes. A focus on new model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics, a subject in which Dawkins is considered most proficient.

Genes are pieces of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) inside each cell that tell the cell what to do and when to grow and divide. Each gene is made up of a specific DNA sequence that contains the code (the instructions) to make a certain protein, each of which has a specific job or function in the body.

Dawkins, however, takes a closer look at the relation between genes and Natural Selection (NS).  He points out that genes do not themselves evolve by NS.  NS requires genes to be active in the cellular structure before ‘selection’ can take place.

“Darwinian selection does not work on genes directly.  DNA is cocooned in protein, swaddled in membranes, shielded from the world, and invisible to natural selection.  If selection tried to choose DNA molecules directly, it would hardly find any criterion by which to do so.  All genes look alike, just as all recording tapes look alike.  The important differences between genes emerge only in their effects (cells)”.

He makes the distinction that while biological species evolve, genetic components replicate.  The transition to the increase of the diversity addressed by NS requires the cell.

The gene itself, in comparison to its component parts, is incredibly complex.  Its complexity is not limited to its size, but also to its function.  Dawkins sees the gene as the first element in evolution to be able to replicate itself.  This replication process itself is itself quite complex, as the gene’s ability to guide the work of RNA to build proteins not only ‘encodes’ the proteins that result, but as well the creation of the enzymes that build the cells, instruct their growth and guide their divisions and interactions with other cells.

In this model, the DNA molecule can be seen as the master software ‘app’ which feeds instructions to lesser ‘apps’ which perform the construction and management of those of the cell itself.

This raises the question: how did the evolutionary product of the molecule get from the earliest known structure of helium hydride, thought to emerge very early in the evolution of the universe, to the incredibly complex molecule of DNA?  Even more importantly, how did the evolutionary process of connecting elements to make newer and more complex ones become a process in which elements become able to replicate themselves?  Dawkins does not address this per se but makes the assumption that the basic function of replication is fully in place before the process of biological evolution can begin.  He opens the door to understanding an evolutionary process that eventually produces the level of complexity required by the gene.  His theory requires a complex precursor to the gene.

Of course, the replication function itself is somewhat iffy.  Were it not so, the same genome would be simply be endlessly identically replicated, and none of the diversity that is clearly in evidence today would be possible.  Such diversity that results from random changes to the genetic content obviously leads to the diversity of cellular structures, and further leads to the ramification of biological species addressed by Natural Selection.  As Dawkins sees it, what is referred to as ‘genetic evolution’ is simply the effective ‘selection’ of certain genes which ‘survive’ in their cellular ‘vehicles’.

Next Week

This week we took an initial look into the insights of Richard Dawkins on the role of the gene in biological evolution, and how, by differentiating the two distinct steps of replication and selection, he opens the door to a backwards look at the process of molecular evolution proceeding that of Science’s Natural Selection.

Next week we will look a little deeper into the relationship between these two processes, and how in doing so Teilhard’s vision of how the energy of evolution flows into the development of living things can be seen.