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.