Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard envisioned the process of universal evolution as proceeding in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’ in which entities, products of evolution, join in such a way as to produce ‘offspring’ of higher complexity.  We also looked at how, in the human, the evolutionary spiral is slowly taking on a ‘volitional’ characteristic, built on top of the ‘instinctual’ characteristic which has powered it for the past four billion or so years of life.  While the agency of ‘natural selection’ is undoubtedly at play in biological evolution, at the level of the noosphere it is becoming superseded by the human need to consciously choose the future.  Evolution is slowly becoming less ‘something that happens to us’ and more ‘something that we must consciously choose’.

This week we will take a more detailed look at how this ‘spiral of evolution’ is at work in universal evolution as a step toward better understanding of how we can respond to it in order to insure our continued evolution.

A Closer Look At The ‘Convergent Spiral’

We ended last week with Teilhard’s succinct description of cosmic evolution, in which he summarizes the action of a ‘convergent spiral’:

“Everything that rises will converge.”

   This simple statement has many facets of meaning which we will begin to unpack this week.  Each of these facets illustrates some characteristic of Teilhard’s ‘convergent spiral’.

First, the joining of products of evolution can effect an increase in complexity in their offspring.  As Teilhard sees it, this characteristic is the basic thread of universal evolution.  Nowhere in the universe does matter move toward greater complexity without this basic step.  Evolution is complexification, and complexification is the action that moves an evolving entity along the spiral.

Second, this universal phenomena (without which we wouldn’t have a universe or be here to address it) happens under the influence of some sort of implicit energy, which Teilhard understands as radiated by the ‘axis of evolution’ (the center line of his spiral).  While it is common in the scientific community to see this statement as ‘teleogical’, and hence a back door intrusion of religion into the field of science, Paul Davies, secular physicist and astrobiologist, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint”, states:

“I have been at great pains to argue that the steady unfolding of organized complexity in the universe is a fundamental property of nature”.  (underline mine.)

   As we saw last week, even the atheistic scientist Richard Dawkins acknowledges the existence of a ‘mainspring of complexity’.

Third, the action of such joining of entities, which results in an increase in the complexity of their offspring, can result in a new entity which, because of its increase in complexity, is more responsive to the energy emanated by the ‘axis of evolution’ and better able to produce yet another level of complexity.

Fourth, the increase in complexity can be seen to occur exponentially over time, which means that as time goes on, products of evolution manifest higher measures of complexity more quickly.  A simple sampling of internet sources will quickly show that the observed interval of time between the appearance of the first atom and that of the first molecule is much longer than the interval between the molecule and the cell.  The intervals leading up to each of evolution’s major milestones (atoms, molecules, cells, single cell animals, neurons, brains and consciousness) are each shorter than the last.  The exponential decrease of the distance from the evolving entity to the ‘axis of evolution’ is a metric of the spiral’s ‘convergence’.

Fifth, each of these transitions appears as a ‘jump’, a ‘discontinuity’, or as Teilhard puts it, “a change of state’.  The resultant new entity of such transitions is radically different from its ‘parents’, and the diversity and volume of new capabilities of the ‘child’ are radically different from those of the ‘parent’.

As an example, hundreds of atoms are capable of uniting in such a way as to join to produce millions of different types of molecules, and the types of cells which eventually emerge from the initial cells is as yet uncounted.

As Davies cites biologist Bernhard Rensch:

“For example, when carbon, hydrogen and oxygen become combined, innumerable combinations can originate with new characteristics like alcohols, sugars, fatty acids, and so on.  Most of their characteristics cannot be deduced directly from the characteristics of the three basic atoms.”

   The presence of Teilhard’s spiral of evolution is therefore clear when we look back at what we understand of the past.  As Dawkins understands it, there is clearly a process at work “which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. “

This process, while decidedly hard to quantify, nonetheless powers complexification via the intrinsic nature of matter which, as it becomes more complex, also becomes more ‘spiritual’.  I am using the term ‘spiritual’ here not in the vernacular of religion, but in that of science (as recognized above by Davies and Dawkins).  As Teilhard puts it:

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.   The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.  It is a cosmic ‘change of state’.”

   What is less clear is how this spiral can be seen to continue in the human.  Since the continuation of human evolution becomes less and less ‘instinctual’, and more and more ‘volitional’, it seems clear that our understanding of this spiral is increasingly necessary if we are to insure its continuation.  If we don’t understand this, it will be difficult to organize ourselves to align with it and make the choices necessary for its continuation.  In Teilhard’s words:

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the Earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   Implied in these poetic but insightful words is that if we do not understand the ways that evolution continues its universal unfolding in the human, we will not be able to cooperate with them, and thus will ultimately fail.   Understanding Teilhard’s ‘spiral of evolution’ may well help us to understand more about how evolution works on a universal scale, but other models are needed to see how such a process can be extrapolated into human life, and to better understand how we can move from ‘instinctual’ to ‘volitional’ response to ‘the winds of the Earth.”

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at Teilhard’s model of a convergent spiral as a way to better understand how evolution proceeds as a process central to the history of the universe.   We then began to address how this spiral can be seen in human life.

Next week we will look a look at another set of models that can be helpful in moving from this week’s ‘universal’ model to one closer to human life as we get closer to understanding how we can begin to consciously respond to the ‘winds of the Earth’