How can the energy of evolution be seen in its material and conscious facets?

Today’s Post

Last week we began to use Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ to track his ‘convergent spiral of evolution’ as it winds its way upward in the form of evolutionary products now become aware of their awareness.

This week we will take a closer look at this activity in terms of its material manifestation.

The Material Spiral of Evolution

We are surely very early in the process of building an integrated understanding of all the facets of energy acting on us, much less an understanding of how to cooperate with them.  Even so, empirical science offers much insight.

While the light which science can shine on the past may not yet be complete, Physics highlights many of the ‘discontinuities’ which appear in the past evolution of ‘the stuff of the universe’, such as:

• Matter appearing from pure energy
• Atoms emerging from combinations of the first, simple grains of matter
• Molecules emerging from an infinitude of combinations of atoms
• Molecules increase their complexity to the point of ‘making itself make itself’ (DNA to proteins)
• Complex molecules reorganizing themselves into highly organized and centered cells
• Cells continuing this unprecedented explosion into more complex groupings such as found in neurons
• Neurons finding ways to compact themselves into centralized neurosystems, then into brains
• Brains evolving from the so-called ‘Reptilian’ layer to the mammalian ‘Limbic’ layer and finally, in the human to ‘Neocortex’ arrangement.

Each of these transitions can be considered a ‘discontinuity’ because the conditions which preceded each of them, taken out of context, do not suggest the significant change in complexity which was to appear in the next reconfiguration step.  Science offers no explanation of why atoms should be able to organize themselves into the greatly increased complex state of molecules, for example.  We saw last week how John Haught summarize this conundrum.

“So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

   The standard ‘materialistic’ position of science is that in each rung of this ladder from complex molecules to complex neurons is fueled by a combination of generic replication compounded by random variations.  This ‘causality’ is further aided by the unquestioned observation that those products resulting from genetic variation ‘survive’ to continue their evolution when they conform most successfully to their environment.  This process, know as ‘Natural Selection’ is an adaption of the insights of Charles Darwin some hundred years or so ago.

As Teilhard and John Haught (in the above citation) note, Natural Selection does not explain the ‘unexpected emergence’ of increased complexity that recurs for some eight billion years before the cell can emerge as a ‘vehicle’ for Natural Selection.

The universe seems full of such examples of ‘unexpected emergence’, seen in the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature.  While Science can describe the physical processes which are involved in the transitions, it cannot explain the emergence of increased complexity that ensues.  There is no current scientific explanation of how the ‘stuff of the universe’ manages its slow but very sure rise in complexity as it moves from the undifferentiated level of the big bang to the highly differentiated human brain which is uniquely capable of an awareness which is aware of itself.

While all these stages and their transitions can be described and to some extent understood by Science, the increase in complexity that follows each step is another matter.  Further, while Science can quantify this increase up to the human person, how can it be understood to be still active in human evolution?

 Next Week

This week we saw how Teilhard’s three components of universal evolutive energy, which have recurred throughout the evolution of the universe, can be tracked in the evolution of matter as it leads to ever new manifestations of complexity.

Next week we will take a look at how second of the main threads of this energy can seen in the conventional term understood as ‘consciousness’.