Last Week
Last week we introduced a new edition of the blog, “The Lens of Evolution of Teilhard de Chardin’.
This Week
This week we will see how Teilhard understood that the most essential aspect of universal evolution can be found in the tendency of matter to become more complex over time. Understanding how this tendency can be found in all aspects of the universe’s coming to be, including how it manifests itself in human is essential to the ‘sense making’ that Teilhard’s lens can provide.
Teilhard’s Unique Understanding of Evolution
Before we can begin to understand how his ‘lens’ can be used to make sense of everything we see and to address and heal the many ‘dualisms’ that have risen in humankind’s attempt to understand reality, we must first address his comprehensive understanding of ‘evolution’. In his masterwork, “The Phenomenon of Man”, he emphasizes in very strong terms how he considered evolution as such to be an underlying context for understanding reality.
“Evolution: a theory, a system, a hypothesis? Not at all, but much more than that, a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems, must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. A light illuminating all facts, a curve all lines must follow: such is evolution.”
His repetition of the term ‘all’ indicates his belief that putting everything that can be seen into the context of evolution will result in a significant clarification of the reality which surrounds us. Such a context, however, is not one that can be easily found in ‘conventional wisdom’.
To begin with, the term ‘evolution’ itself is not one which on which significant agreement exists. The most common use seems to be that of biology’s theory of ‘Natural Selection’, first proposed by Charles Darwin and limited to a process of successive reproduction and differentiation on a small planet during the small universal time scale of a few billion years. Teilhard, recognizing the incompleteness of such an approach, insists that any perspective which purports to address all of reality must address, as Julian Huxley says in his introduction to the “Phenomenon”
“…the material and physical world,… the world of mind and spirit.. the past with the future; and of variety with unity, the many and the one.”
Thus, if Teilhard’s use of the term ‘evolution’ is to meet his lofty intent it must offer an approach to understanding all phenomena over all stretches of time and all expanses of space.
Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ embraces everything by placing it into a natural context which can be approached in empirical terms, from physical events in the past, to the oft confusing cacophony of current human affairs. It goes forward to address the bridges to a future that will take us to the ‘fuller being’ that the fourteen billion years of uplift in the universe suggests is possible.
To identify evolution as the underlying principle which explains the appearance of things as quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, neutrons, humans, poems, songs and cultures, it is necessary to first identify a metric which is common to all, and therefore by which all things can be seen in a unified context. Again, from Teilhard
“Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness. And that doubtless is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of every more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.
And in that ‘elaboration’, Teilhard suggests, can be found the missing metric.
“There is not one term in this long series (from quarks to persons) but must be regarded, from sound experimental proofs, as being composed of nuclei and electrons. This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of a single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of ‘complexification”.
Hence, recognizing that the universe unfolds in the direction of increased complexity is a necessary first step for understanding how everything fits together. This “increase in complexity” is therefore one of the first things to be seen as we look through the ‘lens of evolution’. Seen through his ‘lens’, the phenomenon of evolution is expanded from the narrower context of biological replication on a small planet over a relatively short period of time into a truly universal process by which everything that can be seen comes into being.
Science is in general agreement that biological evolution proceeds by way of ‘Natural Selection’, but Teilhard shows how not only is Natural Selection dependent on a ‘pre-biological’ stage of evolution (producing such things as atoms, molecules and DNA), but leads on to a ‘post biological’ stage in which things such as human relationships, conscious decisions and cultural norms are required for future development.
Such a triad of modes of evolution can also be seen, although rarely, by others. The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins addresses these three waves of evolution in his book. “The Selfish Gene”:
“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”.
Dawkins acknowledges that genetic evolution is still active in the human, but, as he puts it, is “panting far behind” that of human cultural transmission as humans continue to evolve. In Teilhard’s insight of ‘complexity’ as the essential ingredient of universal evolution, we can use his ‘lens’ to trace its rise through human history, how it manifests itself today, and to begin to see how it can continue its unfolding into the future.
More importantly, we can begin to trace the tracks of increasing cosmic complexity upon our individual lives if we know how to look. He provides an example of the focusing of his lens when he says
“I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized (becomes human) in him.”
Next Week
This week we took a first step into seeing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by understanding that the fundamental metric at work in the evolution of the universe is the ‘phenomenon of increased complexity’.
Next week we will look a little more closely at how this ‘phenomenon’ can be seen as the essential activity active in the universe as it unfolds into the state that can be seen today.