Category Archives: Science and Religion

March 24, 2022 –  Mapping the Headwind of Pessimism

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   Two more facets of pessimism in human society today.

Today’s Post

In answering the question, “Why isn’t Teilhard’s optimism better reflected today?”, we have noted how the seemingly existential need for pessimism in human society inhibits the holistic view of life from which Teilhard derives his great optimism.

Last week we looked into three aspects of such pessimism that Steven Pinker sees in human culture today:  the Ubiquity of News, Miscalibration and the Negativity Bias.  In all three could be seen trends today which tend to color our outlook on life in dystopian ways.

This week we will look an additional two facets that he saw at work in this ‘existential’ outlook.

Progressophobia, Part Two

The ‘Wisdom of Pessimism’ – Pinker notes that throughout history, “pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness”.  This can be seen, for example, in the Hebrew prophets who “blended their social criticism with warnings of disaster”.  The best way to be perceived as a prophet, it seems, is to predict the worse, because there’s always something happening somewhere that can be seen to confirm the prediction.

Pinker also notes that

“Intellectuals know they can attain instant gravitas by pointing to an unsolved problem and theorizing that it is a symptom of a sick society.”

   As we saw two weeks ago, the affluence of the children of Billy Graham, popular Protestant speaker of the last century (and many Evangelicals today) is testimony to how financially successful this strategy can be.

Not that all pessimism is bad.   The fact that there are more of us concerned about evils that would have been overlooked in more callous times, itself contributes to the increase in human welfare which Norberg documents in such detail.  The danger that Pinker sees is that

“…as we care more about humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen”.

   The ‘high’ of Indignation – This last facet of existential pessimism comes not from Pinker but from recent studies in which brain activity was recorded under different stimuli.  In these studies, the researchers were able to identify which part of the brain ‘lit up’ with different activities.  They noted that when a person was shown information that made them indignant, the same part of the brain responded as when they ate chocolate.  It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins, a substance which increases a pleasure not unlike that from eating chocolate.  In a nutshell, indignation feels good.  As my old supervisor at the ‘Bomber Plant’ used to say, “Indignation is the balm that soothes the pain of inadequacy.”

Pinker summarizes Norberg when he cites that

“The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being”

   But he goes on to cite an underlying cause of pessimism due to the fact that

“Almost no one knows about it.”

   The fact that there clearly exists such ‘fruits of evolution’ as seen in Norberg’s facets of global  welfare at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so rare presents us with yet another ‘duality’.  When Teilhard addresses what he considers to be the risks to the continuation of evolution in the human, he rates such duality high on the list.  Like Pinker, he remarks on what there is to be seen once we have the proper perspective.

“.. I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Pinker presents us with six distinct examples of such ‘scales’ and how they prevent us from seeing the astounding rate at which our personal and cultural evolution is rising.

The examples that we have seen illustrate the difficulty of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain as a mediator to the instinctual fears that we have inherited from our evolutional ancestors.  It’s not that the fears are necessarily inappropriate, but that an intellectual context, a ‘hermeneutic’, is needed to provide a compass for navigating them.  Failure to successfully navigate them will eventually constitute a failure to continue human evolution on its path of ‘rising complexity’ which leads to the ‘greater consciousness’ which is necessary to the ‘more completeness’ required by the future.

Next Week

This week we took a second look at why the positive view of human evolution so clearly encouraged in the New Testament, recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ and quantified by the statistics of Norberg, should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Next week we will address a more universal aspect of Teilhard.  As noted many times in this blog, Teilhard proposed using the ‘lens of evolution’ to view reality from a single integrated and comprehensive perspective.  From his perspective, the oft confusing aspects of reality, expressed in the many ‘dualities’ of Science, Philosophy and Religion, can be used as a tool for knitting their many seemingly contradictory cosmic stories into a single fabric.

March 17, 2022 –  The ‘Progressophobic’ Headwind of Pessimism

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   Three facets of pessimism in human society which resist Teilhard’s optimistic vision of the future

Today’s Post

Last week we noted that despite the generally positive aspects of human evolution as postulated by Teilhard and quantified by Johan Norberg, there is a steady undercurrent of belief that things are going from better to worse, leading from more perfect past to a dystopian future.

This week we will look at three facets of this phenomenon in which those who have benefited most from Teilhard and Norberg’s articulation of progress seem to be those that most fail to see it.

Progressophobia In Western Society

Stephen Pinker, in his book “Enlightenment Now”, notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen.  On an individual basis, people seem optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large.  Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:

“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”

  This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals are unable to project their personal optimism onto their society.   Why should this be so?  Pinker offers a few suggestions.

   Ubiquity of News – We are immersed in news in a way which is truly unprecedented.  Thanks to technology, we receive it not only in ‘real time’ but in unprecedented volume.   As Pinker observes:

“Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.”

     And not only does immediate news sell, negative news sells better than positive news, resulting in negative slant.  As an example, Pinker cites a survey showing a ‘negative count’ in the New York Times from 1945 to 2015, in which the use of negative terms in news articles shows a distinctive increase.

Miscalibration – Further, while the result of such a plethora of information might be seen as simply leaving us ‘better informed’, it can also be seen as leaving us ‘miscalibrated’.  For example, we worry more about crime even as (as Johan Norberg documents) crime rates are falling.  As Pinker points out, such information can “part company with reality altogether”.   He cites a 2016 American poll in which

“77% agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria …pose a serious threat to the existence and survival of the United States.”

  Pinker notes that such an opinion is not only an example of ‘miscalibration’, it is “nothing short of delusional”.

The Negativity Bias – As in the above examples, such pessimism isn’t just due to skepticism about the data but suggests an ‘unpreparedness’ for the possibility that the human condition is improving.  This is, to some extent, a ‘human original sin’, in which it is easier for humans to imagine a future in which life is degraded by violence, illness, poverty, loss of loved ones or a nearly endless list of woes, than it is to imagine it as uplifted, quality of life improved, relationships deepened, or their future brighter than their past.  Effectively, lack of clarity about the past can be seen to lead to an unpreparedness for the future.

But there’s also a biological factor at work.  One reason for such negative bias is the simple fact that our ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic brains) continue to stimulate us with the basic urges common to our ancestors, such as fight or flight, hunger, anger or other ‘base instincts’ so necessary for their survival.  Just because evolution has endowed us with a neocortex brain capable of rationally dealing with such instincts (“am I really threatened?”) doesn’t mean that the stimuli from these ‘lower’ brains will cease.

It also illustrates the incomplete maturity of our 200,000-year-old neocortical skills.  Teilhard sees humanity as still in the early stages of its evolution.  He notes that just as the cell emerges in evolution as “dripping in molecularity”, so our human brains emerge as “dripping in animality”.  To put it into perspective, if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom three words of the last page.  Hence Teilhard sees humanity as still in an early evolutionary state very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that after a mere 200,000 years, we have yet to become fully aware of the current that has carried us so faithfully thus far.  Teilhard suggests that as our understanding of the cosmos continues to widen, we will learn to navigate this current more successfully.

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

Next Week

This week we took a second look at why the positive view of human evolution so clearly encouraged in the New Testament, recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ and quantified by the statistics of Norberg, should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Next week we will explore Steven Pinker’s parsing of this ‘headwind’ a little further.

March 10, 2022 –  The Difficulty in Seeing Evolution in Human Life

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   Why is the optimism of Teilhard and Norberg so difficult to see?   

Today’s Post

   In looking into Johan Norberg’s data on human evolution, Teilhard’s optimistic vision of the human’s place in the universe is clearly substantiated.  Norberg documents several objective and fact-substantiated measures of Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, as it rises through the human species, both in the individual person and the cultural edifices that result.

As both Norberg and Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) point out, however, this data, while factually supporting Teilhard’s optimism, seems to be poorly echoed in the opinions of those who benefit from it the most.

Teilhard mentions the inevitability of a positive outlook on life when he asserts that

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   But given the amount of pessimism in the world today, it seems evident that either there is little recognition of the ‘universal will’ or that this recognition is not understood as the positive nature of our lives.

This week we will look into what causes such ‘popular dystopia.”

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

In looking at the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides, and Teilhard’s insight into the energy of evolution that rises within us, ‘conventional wisdom’, as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it.  Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, noting this rising sap of pessimism, sees in it a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norberg, or rejects it outright.

Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books. The parallel depictions of a ‘vengeful’ and a ‘loving’ God, alongside those of a ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’ humanity in the Bible are obvious.

Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature.  Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”.  Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”.  Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person:  the “dangerous Id”.  Even today, authors such as Yuval Harari, “Sapiens”, can see consciousness, as found in the human person, as ‘an evolutionary mistake’ which will doom us to ‘early extinction’.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized the two major fruits of human evolution, reason and individualism, over tradition.  This emphasis was in distinct contrast to that of the Reformation, which Pinker sees in the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Heidegger and Sartre.

In the Protestant Reformation, the essential positive message of Jesus seen in the New Testament became secondary to the need to understand the human species as ‘broken’, ‘fallen’ from some previous pristine state, and in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be rescued from their ‘fallen’ nature by the same God which created it.

Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, evolving aimlessly into the future without the need for divine intervention.

There seems to have been much profit in such dystopian predictions.   For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, clearly showing that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls such as those cited by Norberg.  Even his actual, tangible, and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves the majority of Americans seeing their country “heading in the wrong direction”.  Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.

Further, as David Sanger notes in a recent New York Times article, political supporters, known more for their passion than their policy rigor, are ripe for exploitation.   “Make them pessimistic enough”, he is suggesting, “and you’ve got control”.

Next Week

This week we took a first look at why the positive view of the ‘ground of being’ so clearly expressed in the New Testament and recognized by Teilhard as a ‘current to the open sea’ should have to struggle against the dystopian headwind of an endemic ontological pessimism.
Newt week we will explore this ‘headwind’ a little further.

March 3, 2022 –  Teilhard and Norberg on The Direction of Evolution

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   Teilhard is often criticized for his optimistic view of evolution.  How does Norberg substantiate it?    

Today’s Post

In the past several weeks we have seen examples how human evolution can be placed into the context of the unfolding of universal reality as well as how details can be seen in both science and history.  Teilhard was one of the first to attempt this as he encapsulates in his book, “The Phenomenon of Man”. His insights, however, were criticized as ‘too material’ for the Church and ‘too spiritual’ for science.  A criticism found in both milieus found his insights of ‘holy matter’ and ‘a God of Nature’ to be idealistic and naive, and thus unfit for either making sense of reality much less of our place in it.  A particular critique common to both was that, considering the unending evils which surround us, his pervasive optimism was distinctly unwarranted.
Having seen how evolution proceeds through the unfolding of the universe, and how universal causality increases its complexification in the human, how can Teilhard’s optimism, echoed by Norberg, be not only justified, but emerge in human life as a ‘current to the open sea’?

What can we see?

   Teilhard is often accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply recognized that

 “…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how this is less a statement that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than a testament to what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it.  In human evolution, ideas must start somewhere; they don’t emerge simultaneously everywhere.  The nature of the ‘noosphere’, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg quantifies it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed.  The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered sooner in the West than in the East is evidence that the human potential for betterment is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be stressed: “when allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where individual freedom is “not allowed”, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases.  For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Korea where it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame.  To a lesser extent, this phenomenon can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature in East Germany following its partition after WW II.

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book with, the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

He cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years.  Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled.  Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

   But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?  More to the point, what is the risk that such prevalent pessimism will undermine the continuation of human evolution?

Next Week

This week we began to explore the curious denial of progress that seems strongest among those who have benefited from it the most.  If Teilhard’s optimism, backed by Norberg’s data, is correct, this should be a time for rejoicing in our progress instead of lamenting that ‘we’re still not there yet’.

Next week we will look more closely into why this seems to be the case.

February 24, 2022 –  Norberg, Teilhard and the Noosphere’s Role in Human Evolution

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    How Teilhard’s Insights on the noosphere are substantiated by Norberg’s wealth of data 

Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at Teilhard’s concept of the ‘noosphere’ as the most recent layer of universal evolution on this planet.  As John Haught summarizes it in his recent book, “The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin”:

“He (Teilhard) took it for granted that, on our planet at least, natural processes have successively brought about the realm of matter (the geosphere, then life (the lithosphere), then most recently the noosphere, the ‘thinking layer’ of earth history, a network made up of human persons, societies, religions and other cultural, intellectual, artistic and technological developments.”

   We have how Johan Norberg, substantiates this insight of Teilhard with examples in human history of this recurring building and rebuilding of human culture as evidence of human evolution.

This week we will look a little deeper into this aspect of human evolution.

The Noosphere as the Milieu of Human Evolution 

We saw last week how Teilhard understood human evolution as enabling personal ‘fuller being’ to not only emerge from ‘closer unions’ but to rebound into moving our species toward increased ‘fullness’.  As Norberg saw it, this process is much more than one limited to the plane of human relationships as it spills over into cultural evolution.  Teilhard, Norberg and Dawkins all recognize the presence of something in the milieu of “human culture” that influences human behavior in a way that moves it forward.  Dawkins touches on this phenomenon when he says

“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.”

   This ‘propagation’ requires the existence of a means of sharing this data in such a way that it acquires a life of its own.  Teilhard uses the word, ‘noosphere’ to connote this milieu.

Norberg, reflecting on Steven Pinker’s insights, addresses how Teilhard’s ‘union-being’ dynamic can be understood in terms of human characteristics.

“A couple of hundred thousand years ago, we simultaneously developed three unique traits: intelligence, language and cooperation.  These are mutually reinforcing: incremental improvements in one of them make the other two more valuable, and thus change the social and physical environment- and with it evolutionary pressures for additional adaptions”.

– Intelligence makes it possible to learn and store information and skills

– A grammatically advanced language allows us to communicate this to others so they can build on our experiences and don’t have to make the same mistakes or to reinvent the wheel.

– This gives us both the means and incentives to cooperate with others.”

     Norberg explores this concept of ‘the means’ in his book, ”Open”, where he recounts the rise and fall of nations and empires in our turbulent history.  In each case he notes the three well-known phases of ‘rising’, ‘thriving’ and ‘falling’ that can be seen in their history.  He relates these three phases to ‘opening’, ‘maintaining’ and ‘closing’.  These three phases can in turn be traced to the evolution of the two critical dynamics mentioned above, personal freedom and productive relationships.  In essence, these are simply Teilhard’s ‘fuller being’ that causes the ‘closer union’ that leads to ‘fuller being’.

In his look back at human history, Norberg notes that

“In retrospect, it is easy to see that these advances… made our modern world.  And that openness in politics, economics and culture is the best way of assuring the continued, open-ended search for improvement.”

      As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise their creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control.  A key effect of globalization appears in the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions.  In general, he notes, as his data clearly documents, this nearly always has occurred in a West-to-East direction.

Teilhard takes this same look at the noosphere, as he cites the role of the noosphere in history:

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

     As Norberg sees it, it is less that the West invented these terms, and more that the increasing robustness of the noosphere is enhanced by the evolving Western norms of democracy.  As he sees it, for the first time in human history the ancient insights built up over time by previous waves of civilization are consciously and systematically collected, enhanced, developed, and globalized.  Norberg shows a distinct example of how this can be seen as the insights from Greek and Roman empires were folded into Islamic culture and then rose anew in the European Renaissance.  And both he and Teilhard show in their statements above how this process continues today.

Next Week

This week we have taken a third look at how Norberg’ insights into the spread of human evolution through culture, and how it substantiates Teilhard’s axial role of the ‘noosphere’ in the continuation of human evolution. In the past several weeks we have seen how Teilhard’s remarkable grasp of how cosmic evolution can be seen to continue its rise through the human species.  We have also seen again how Teilhard bases his wonderful sense of optimism on such insights.  If Teilhard is correct, and his insights are substantiated by contemporary secular sources, universal evolution is on track to continue its remarkable journey to a future filled with the promise of ‘fuller being’ for both the individual human person and the species as a whole.

Even the most casual look at the data in which we are daily inundated, however, can suggest a quite opposite view.

Next week we take another look at Teilhard’s optimistic view of the future of humanity.  Why is it so difficult to see?

February 17, 2022 –  Norberg, Teilhard and the Noosphere

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   Norberg’s wealth of data can be seen to substantiate Teilhard’s Insights on the noosphere 

Today’s Post

Last week we saw a synopsis of how Johan Norberg, whose interpretation of the documented history of human development provides objective evidence of human evolution.  In the four (of the nine) categories of improvements in human welfare over the past 150 years that he cites, the ability of the human species to not only survive, but to thrive during its (so far) evolutionary run on this planet is very clear.  That this data substantiates the optimistic insights of Teilhard is also not only clear, but descriptive of how they are being played out today.

This week we will see how Norberg views human evolution from a different vantage point, which also gives tangibility to yet another of Teilhard’s great insights, that of the ‘noosphere’.

Extrapolating Norberg’s Data

In his book, “Progress”, Norberg provides a wide spectrum of information, provided by many independent sources, and based on objective measures to provide a view of human evolution that is very resonant with the insights of Teilhard and the other thinkers we have encountered in our attempts to understand the fabric of human existence.  Like Teilhard, he is very optimistic in his perception of the potential of humans to continue their evolution in the form of increased their welfare.

And, like Teilhard, he is keen to uncover the threads of causality by which this progress occurs.  Looking at this potentiality, he sees the trend that

“ .. we are using ever-smaller quantities of resources per unit of output.  Demand is not for the resource itself, but for what we do or make with it, and new technology and ingenuity will enable us to find other, hitherto unforeseen resources to achieve our needs.  If the market is relatively free, a shortage will mean higher prices, in which case we will economize more with that raw material, and should a resource run out, we will find or invent substitutes.”

   And, as Teilhard would agree, he goes on to assert that

“The most important resource is the human brain, a resource which is pleasantly reproducible.”

   Thus, as both Norberg and Teilhard see it, the human brain can be understood as a reliable resource for our continued march to the future, requiring only two things:

– Personal freedom to innovate and invent

– Stable and productive relationships

   Teilhard succinctly describes the dynamic that unites the development of the human person with the improvement of relationships in his “Phenomenon of Man”:

 “Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.”

   He sees this action at work in the human phenomena of the psychism, that which is found in human groups which effects the

 “.. increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power”

required to find and employ

 “.. new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   The finding of these new ways is obviously necessary for human evolution to continue.  But as Norberg provides countless examples of, it is in the depository’ of these new ways that they are retained and reused.  Thus, Teilhard’s concept of a ‘recursive’ mode of evolution is revealed.  As humans contribute to this trove of insights, it in turn contributes to ever more to Teilhard’s ‘new ways’ of moving forward.

Next Week

This week we began to look at the huge trove of data which Johan Norberg culls to quantify how evolution can be seen to increase human welfare.

Next week we will look a little deeper into this facet to see how Norberg’s insights into the noosphere clearly substantiates Teilhard’s insights on human evolution.

February 10, 2022 –  Johan Norberg Shows Us How We’re Evolving

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   How Norberg’s wealth of data can be seen to substantiate Teilhard’s Insights on Human Evolution 

Today’s Post

After exploring the genetic and cultural insights of Richard Dawkins and their resonance with Teilhard’s mapping of the human journey to the future, we turned to those of Johan Norbert, interpretive historian, whose detailed data illustrates Dawkins’ perspective on the continuation of human evolution as well as substantiates Teilhard’s universal perspective.

How Does the Data Show We’re Evolving?

While Norberg addresses nine distinct and measurable metrics of human evolution, four of them will be addressed here: food, life expectancy, poverty and violence.   While summarized here, more data can be seen with citations in the blog series addressed earlier.

Food

Norberg presents some thirty detailed statistics which show how improvements in food, its availability, production, and distribution have increased global human quality of life over the span of recorded history.  Some examples.

  • Famine Thomas Malthus, reflecting conventional wisdom, predicted early in the 18th century that in a very few years population growth would undermine humanity’s ability to sustain itself, dooming humanity to extinction.  (This is not uncommon today.)

The data, however, shows an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20th century until now, from the 27 million then to today’s persistence in just one major area: North Korea.

  • Product Yield So, it’s obvious that something is going on to result in such a startling statistic.  One factor is improvements in crops and extraction methods.   In the past two hundred years, for example, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to today’s 130 hours.
  • Malnutrition Not surprisingly, these improvements in food production have led to decreased malnutrition.  The average Western caloric intake per person increased by 50% in the last hundred years; in the world by 27% in the past fifty years.  This trend has spread across the globe, resulting in a reduction in world malnutrition from 50% to 13% in the last 60 years.

Life Expectancy

Norberg notes that individual life expectancy was not much different across the globe by the early 1800s than it had been since antiquity, which was approximately thirty-three years.

   At this point, the trend of globalization, in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases and threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen: the average global life expectancy of thirty years, extent for all recorded history (some eight thousand generations) more than doubled to seventy years in the short span of only the past three generations.

Poverty

In 1820, the average percent of Europeans in poverty, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%, relatively unchanged throughout history.  At this rate, it would have taken the average person two thousand years to double their income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years.  By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income.

Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that he addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East.  As The United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

“Starting in East Asia, countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore integrated into the global economy and proved to the world that progress was possible for ‘developing countries’”.

   Norberg cites the World Bank:

 “Global Poverty initially can be seen to decrease by 10% over the forty years from 1820 to 1920, by another 10% by 1950, another 20% by 1981, then another 40% by 2015.“

   Putting this data together into a global trend shows a decrease in extreme global poverty from ninety four percent in 1820 to eight percent today.

Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years.

Violence

Norberg addresses violence in three categories: War, Homicide and Terrorism.

  • War Norberg notes the deep disturbance that has manifested itself throughout our history   as humans have attempted to resist the expansion of one group into the space claimed by another.   State boundaries had been contested for ages, reaching a fevered pitch only a few generations ago that saw the entire globe engulfed by conflagration.  Teilhard sees in this abysmal state the slow human learning curve to balance the ‘outer push’ of compression with the development of an ‘inner pull’ which balances it peacefully.  Norberg agrees, and articulates four facets of the ‘inner pull’ which has resulted in an abrupt and unprecedented decline in interstate large scale warfare in just fifty years.
    • A general ridicule of war that begins to emerge with the Enlightenment
    • The calming of religious fundamentalism in the West
    • The emergence of a globalization which requires stable relations in which it becomes cheaper to buy resources than to take them by force
    • The possibility of war after several generations of warfare becomes less acceptable as personal wealth and education increased and poverty decreased.
  • Homicides Norberg reports the significant reductions in homicide rates that can be seen in European history from 1400 to the present as they have fallen from forty percent to approximately one percent.
  • Terrorism He notes that the decrease of warfare and homicide has not been accompanied by a decline in terrorism, although the degree of violence is smaller.  However, putting terrorism into perspective, he notes that it

 “.. is not on the scale of other acts of violence, like war or criminality, and it is not even close to traffic deaths.  Since 2000, around 400 people have died from Terrorism in the OECD countries every year, mostly in Turkey and Israel.  More Europeans drown in their bathtubs and ten times more die falling down the stairs.”

    We have seen how four of Norberg’s nine measures of ‘Progress’ all provide examples of how Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution is being played out.  In each of Norberg’s examples, Teilhard’s insight that while the ‘compression’ phase of humanity’s evolution leads to many levels of conflict and tension, at the same time this compression also increases humanity’s understanding of itself.   This understanding in turn leads to the increases in human freedom which then result in tactics better disposed to deal with humanity’s ills.

Norberg’s detailed look at human progress offers in-depth statistics that quantify not only how evolution can be seen to continue through the human species and how this evolution is contributing to human welfare, but how quickly the rate of ‘complexification’ is increasing.  Even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveals the same trends as ones we have examined.

Next Week

This week we began to look at the huge trove of data which Johan Norberg culls to quantify how evolution can be seen to increase human welfare.

Next week we will see another facet of how his data clearly substantiates Teilhard’s insights on human evolution.

February 3, 2022 –  Teilhard, Norberg and Human Evolution 

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 While Dawkins substantiates Teilhard’s insights on evolution, Norberg documents them

Today’s Post

For the past four weeks we have seen how Richard Dawkins, brilliant geneticist and vociferous critic of religion, manages to nonetheless substantiate Teilhard’s optimistic insights into the nature of cosmic evolution, even to the point of quantifying how evolution proceeds through the human species.

This week we will begin to see how the huge treasure trove of contemporary data can substantiate Teilhard’s vision of our continued evolution.

Teilhard, Norberg and Human Evolution

There are other secular sources of empirical information that substantiate Teilhard’s vision of evolution’s path to the future.  One of the strongest is Johan Norberg, analytical historian, who offers a wealth of global current and historical statistics which very clearly support Teilhard’s insights into the continuation of evolution in the human species.  His two books, “Progress” and “Open” provide accumulations of data from the World Economic Forum, UNICEF, World Bank, UNESCO, WHO, OECD and many others to chart a distinct and exponential rise in global human welfare over the past hundred fifty years.  This data articulates the history of human welfare in his book, ‘Progress’.  In them, Teilhard’s vision of an advancing humanity is strongly substantiated.  When the human development of venues and strategies for such advancement is presented in his book, “Open”, Teilhard’s concept of the noosphere as both a human product and a tool for its continuation is also articulated.

Thus, in Norberg’s two insights into the quantification of human evolution and his analysis of its tools for doing so, Teilhard’s insights and forecasts for the future can be seen to take on an increasing tangibility.

Quantifying Human Evolution

How can human evolution be quantified? Biologists see a very clear continuation of morphological evolution in the human species due to small, incessant, slow, and random changes in the DNA molecule which controls life’s florescence.  This type of evolution continues in the form of ‘Natural Selection’ through random changes in the molecular structure of the human cell.  These changes in turn result in the slow emergence of new characteristics of human physiology over time.

While these processes are certainly in play today, their extremely slow pace does not explain the much more rapid explosion of changes in human culture and society that can be seen in human history.  These changes, unlike that of biological influences, have had a drastic impact on both the dimensions of human life and the human footprint on our planet.

As Norberg sees it, this development can be seen in two ways that reflect Teilhard’s insights of human ‘psychsms’ (groups of humans working collaboratively) and the ‘axis of evolution’.

“..the amazing accomplishments that resulted from the slow, steady, spontaneous development of millions of people who were given the freedom to improve their own lives, and in doing so improved the world.”

   In doing so he alludes to the existence of an innate ‘energy of evolution’:

“It is a kind of progress that no leader or institution or government can impose from the top down.”

   Norberg doesn’t reference Teilhard or cite religious beliefs.  Instead, he refers to findings from public surveys, Government data, international media, and global institutions.

His approach is to propose nine categories in which human evolution can be objectively and empirically understood.

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                 Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

For each of these categories he provides, as the noted international news magazine The Economist characterizes, “a tornado of evidence” for the “slow, steady, spontaneous development” of the human species.  He compares these statistics across the planet, from Western societies, to near- and mid- Eastern Asia, to China and India, and to super-and sub-Saharan Africa.  And, to the extent possible, he extends trends from antiquity to the current day.

This look at objective and verifiable historical data will serve to put Teilhard’s highly optimistic vision of the future to the test.  Does the data show that we humans are continuing to evolve?  If so, in what ways, how quickly, and is the trend positive or negative?

While our approach to Norberg’s findings is merely summarized here, it can be seen in much more detail in earlier posts.

Next Week

This week we began to look at the huge trove of data which Johan Norberg culls to quantify how evolution can be seen to increase human welfare.

Next week we will see how his data clearly substantiates Teilhard’s insights on human evolution.

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.