Today’s Post

Last week, after looking at how the ‘addiction’ that is possible as we enhance our subjectivity and anger in the acidic pool of internet ‘likes’ that dilute our brain’s ability to reason with dopamine, we saw how this can be seen as another risk (when added to all the other ‘dualisms’ that underlay pessimism) to our continued evolution, and looked a little more closely at this phenomenon of ‘human evolution’.

We saw how the first eight or so billions of years of evolution, ‘pre-life’, and the following four or so billion years of ‘biological’ evolution depended on an innate and instinctive (in the biosphere) agent by which the ‘coefficient of complexity’ slowly rose.  In contrast, in the past two hundred thousand years, as humans have evolved, we noted the slow rise of ‘volition’ as the agency which is becoming the prominent force.  We saw again how the past one hundred fifty years (a nanosecond in evolutionary history) human evolution, as measured by human welfare, has increased exponentially, and how the key agent of this new surge could be recognized as the increase of freedom of the human person.  Such an understanding represents the beginning of our (in Teilhard’s terms) ‘articulation of the noosphere’, and the process of building personal freedom into our political constructs is a beginning to construe our ability to cooperate with it.

We have also seen throughout this blog, examples of ‘risks’ to our evolution, the last of which identified an insidious rising of subjectification and ‘progress pessimism’, which offers yet another ‘risk’.

This week we will begin to move forward to look at the action of universal evolution and see how our understanding of it can help us better overcome these risks and hence develop appropriate responses to it.

A Geometrical Model for a Universal Process

Developing a truly objective and wholistic grasp of universal evolution can be difficult.  After all, we are products of this process.  Whatever and whoever we are, whatever the energy or agency by which we seek this grasp and whichever cause we attribute it to, we are still caught up in its grasp.  Developing a comprehensive but objective view of cosmic becoming and our part in it is not dissimilar to constructing a bridge while we are traversing it.

Teilhard offers a fairly straightforward geometrical model which may help to better grasp this situation.   He sees universal evolution taking place as a ‘convergent spiral’, and this model can be clearly seen in our scientific understanding of the past.  Science understands the eight billion year period preceding the cell as the production of increasingly complex products of evolution, and this elaboration always leads to richer ‘entities’ which are always more conducive to ‘offspring’ of even more complexity.  Biology understands the following four billion years in much the same way: products of evolution appear as richer, better organized and more autonomous entities with each wave of living things.

Science has had a difficult time with this viewpoint, in fear that it is a ‘back door’ for inserting subjective theology into an objective method of inquiry.  However, there are few practitioners of science today that disavow the fact that the universe has become a much more complex thing today than it was at the ‘big bang’, and that humans are products of evolution which exemplify such complexity.

Even those atheists with a scientific background do not deny this.  We have seen how one of the most famous atheists, Richard Dawkins, in his book, “The God Delusion”, states it:

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God, but 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 basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

Other than to note that this does not constitute a vote for religion (he seems less ‘a-theistic’ and more ‘a-religionist’), he doesn’t develop it further or recognize the many contemporary theological concepts that do so.

Teilhard, in one such concept, completely agrees with Dawkins’ premise, but goes on to elaborate in some detail how such a ‘process’ can be articulated in terms of the model of a ‘convergent spiral’.

Such a spiral is simply like a vertical spring, except as the spiral becomes increases in height, the diameter becomes smaller until the spiral converges on a single point at the top.

How Does Teilhard’s Evolutionary Model Apply to Universal Evolution? 

Teilhard applies this model to universal evolution, seeing each stage of such ‘raising of the world’ as located at some point on the spiral.  The vertical axis of the spiral is time, with the past at the bottom and the future at the top.  Along the spiral itself, evolving entities (eg, atoms) join in such a way as to increase the complexity of their products, with the result that the new entity (eg, the molecule) is located further along the spiral.

In addition to the new attributes of the new entity, a measure of such complexity can be also understood as the proximity of the new entity to the ‘axis’ (the centerline) of the spiral.  This distance slightly decreases as each new entity emerges with its slight increase in complexity, and can be seen as the influence of the agency of evolution by which the hew entities become more complex.

The third component of the converging spiral, which distinguishes itself from a simple spiral, is that the increasing complexity of the new component manifests itself as ‘vertical’.  To move along the spiral, the evolving entity must move upwards, increasing its complexity. The entity’s new level of complexity can therefore be seen as a ‘rise’.

In simpler terms, as each new product of evolution appears, it ‘rises’ in complexity in response to some ‘agency of complexification’ which equips it to produce an increase in complexity in its offspring.

In Teilhard’s words:

“Everything that rises will converge.”

The Next Post

This week we have taken a look at Teilhard’s spiral model of evolution and how such a model can be used to conceptualize and even visualize how evolution can proceed.  It still remains to see how such a model can offer a way to see it at work in each of us as we live our lives.

Next week we will unpack Teilhard’s simple statement into terms which articulate how he sees the agency of evolution in universal becoming.