Tag Archives: evolution in human life

April 28, 2022 – How Does Teilhard Articulate Complexity?

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   How does complexity manifest itself in the evolution of the universe?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw Teilhard’s first step toward understanding evolution as recognizing that its common denominator in every phase of the unfolding of the universe is ‘increase in complexity’.  We saw how he sees the appearance of the cell as a specific instance of a ‘step of complexification’.  As he put it, the cell is just one example of

“… the stuff of the universe reappearing once again with all its characteristics- only this time it has reached a higher rung of complexity”.

      Given that the cell illustrates one step of the billions needed to grow the universe to its current complex state over fourteen billion years, how can the characteristics of complexity be seen as active in each of the steps?

This week we will review two of seven of Teilhard’s insights into how complexity can be objectively observed as a general phenomenon present in every stage of evolution.

The Cell as a Specific Example of Universal Complexification

In the ‘Phenomenon’, Teilhard lists seven characteristics of the cell that can be seen as ‘new’ when compared to its molecular ancestor.

– Thrust forward in spontaneity

– Luxuriant unleashing of fanciful creations

– Unbridled expansion

– Leap into the improbable

– Essentially new type of corpuscular grouping

– More supple and better centered organization of an unlimited number of substances

– Internal onset of a new type of conscious activity and determination

   Having recognized these characteristics, we can go on to see how each can be seen as active in each and every step of universal evolution from the quark to the human person.

Thrust forward in spontaneity

The cell clearly shows an increase in spontaneity when compared to the molecular ‘replication’ process from which it emerged.  With its greater potential for connectivity, the cell is now able to carry the simple molecular activity of ‘replication’ into the biological activity of ‘ramification’.

It requires the repackaging of DNA into a configuration with more potential for branching into ever more complex forms.  As Richard Dawkins explains, DNA itself cannot evolve.  It can only provide instructions to RNA to manufacture proteins.  However, these ‘instructions’ are susceptible to occasional failures, such as seen in tissue growths induced by x-rays.  The cell provides a vehicle for the modified DNA to prove its worth as it is exposed to the environment by the increased mobility of the cell.

Each new step of evolution, from the formation of atoms from electrons, proteins, and neutrons to the formation of brains from neurons, is accompanied by such an increase of functionality as well as potential for more complexity.  A simple metric which illustrates this phenomenon can be seen in the increasing number of ‘new’ products that result from groupings of their fewer number of precedents.  Examples include the hundred eighty types of atoms that result from groupings of their four constituent components, or the thousands of types of molecules that result from these hundred eighty atoms.  The hundred million neurons in the human brain also provides quantification of this phenomenon.

Luxuriant unleashing of fanciful creations

In capitalizing on the ‘replication’ potential of DNA, the cell offers another example of complexification.  Teilhard uses the word ‘fanciful’ to denote the ‘branching’ (or ‘ramification’) of biological products into ever more complex arrangements. With the increased complexity of the cell, the environment becomes radically more open to its activity.  Many attempts have been made to show the staggering proliferation of biological configurations (the ‘tree of life’) that science believes to have emerged from the one or two original cellular prototypes that emerged some three or so billion years ago on this planet.  Again, this can be seen to a lesser extent in ‘pre biological’ evolution (as in fabricating proteins from amino acids) and becomes even more so with the ramification seen at the other end of the biological scale: in human culture.

Next Week

This week we began a look into how Teilhard understood the action of ‘complexification’ which is active in all stages of evolution as it unfolds in the universe.

Next week we will expand this list of ‘complexification’ actions on the way to seeing them as active in the current phase of evolution, ‘thought’.

April 21, 2022 – Complexity as the Fundamental Axis of Universal Evolution

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   What does Teilhard see as the single underlying phenomenon in cosmic evolution?

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Last week we began to see how Teilhard’s insight into evolution departs significantly from that of traditional science and religion.  From science, it broadens the scope of evolution from the biological era to the whole era of existence of the known universe.  For religion, it adverts to a process by which the underlying agency of this evolution can be seen as active in each human person, and if acknowledged, can lead us on to, as Karen Armstrong suggests, “a greater possession of ourselves’.

But such a vision requires some sort of ‘metric’, a tangible activity which is active in all stages of the uplifting of the universe.  This week we will begin to address Teilhard’s insights into such a metric.

‘Complexification’ as the Essence of Evolution

Teilhard understood the process of evolution in all stages, at all times of the universe to be captured in the increase of complexity of the elements of matter.

The term can be a little slippery.  We live in a ‘complicated world’, one in which the complexity of our environment continually invades our calm even while it is adding to our comfort.  Who among us does not long for ‘simpler times’?  Using the term ‘complexity’ to suggest some sort of improvement in our lot over time can seem somewhat contradictory.

Teilhard uses the term rigorously, as he does with all those he uses to address his insights into the organization and processes of the universe.  He simply notes that in the process of evolution

“In each particular element energy is divided into two distinct components: a tangential energy which links the element with all others of the same order (that is to say, of the same complexity and the same centricity) as itself; and a radial energy which draws it towards ever greater complexity and centricity- in other words: forwards.”

   He takes note of the scientific concept of evolution that new things come from the connectivity of precedent things, but adds the missing agency: the new things can be more complex than their individual precedents.  This should be obvious: if the new things remained at the same level of their precedents, the universe would not evolve.  For example, if atoms remained at the elemental organization of their precedent neutrons, protons and electrons, there would be no stars, planets, molecules, cells, or brains in the universe.

He goes on to say

“In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law .. to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of ‘complexification”.

Explaining Complexity

If we are to differentiate between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’, a little more description will help.  Teilhard’s definition goes well beyond the simple addition of structure, and addresses how complexification can be seen in the universe.

“In every domain, when anything exceeds a certain measurement, it suddenly changes its aspect, condition or nature.  The curve doubles back, the surface contracts to a point, the solid disintegrates, the liquid boils, the germ cell divides, intuition suddenly bursts on the piled-up facts…Critical points have been reached, rungs on the ladder, involving a change of state-jumps of all sorts in the course of development.  This is the only way in which science can speak of a ‘first instant’.”

   In ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ he uses the cell to describe a specific example of ‘complexification’ in the evolution process.  With the cell,

“We find a triumph of multiplicity originally organically contained within a minimum of space.”

   As Richard Dawkins explains it in his book, “The Selfish Gene”, matter has reached a ‘rung of complexity’ seen in the complex arrangements of amino acids into such products as proteins, DNA and RNA.  This arrangement of matter has itself evolved to the point that not only can its components unite in ways which increase their complexity, they can also replicate it.

Dawkins notes that the next step, that seen in the further encasing of this complex molecular machine into a ‘sheath’ of skin which encloses it and increases its sphere of activity. is not such a great step as science has thought.  He would seem in agreement with Teilhard, who saw it this way:

“In this cell…what we have is really the stuff of the universe reappearing once again with all its characteristics- only this time it has reached a higher rung of complexity and thus, by the same stroke…advanced still further in interiority, ie in consciousness.”

Next Week

This week we began a look at Teilhard’s groundbreaking concept of ‘complexity’ as the underlying metric that allows the universe’s unfolding into what we are discovering today.  He uses the cell as a specific example of how the increase in complexity can be unequivocally seen in the appearance of the cell.

Next week we will expand this example into a more general look at Teilhard’s ‘complexification’ process to see how occurs not only in biological evolution but in our personal and cultural evolution as well.

April 14, 2022 – What’s Different About Teilhard’s View of E volution

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   How does Teilhard see ‘evolution’ differently from traditional science and religion?

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Last week we saw that Teilhard considered his ‘lens of evolution’ to offer a way to clarify the reality in which we are enmeshed.  The concept of ‘evolution’, however, especially as Teilhard understood it, itself needs to be clarified.

This week we will look at how his insight is quite different from traditional perspectives, and move to the integrated and wholistic perspective that Teilhard developed.

The Evolution of Evolution

Nearly all scientists and many religious thinkers (at least from the liturgical Christian expressions) recognize that the things we see around us emerged as part of a process generally referred to as ‘evolution’.  Simply stated, this term refers to the assertion that all things come to be from things which preceded them.  This simple assertion is the starting point for Teilhard’s insight that evolution offers a lens to understand reality:

“Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.”

That said, there is a decidedly wide spectrum of understanding how this action of ‘coming from’ can be seen to occur.  At one end of the spectrum, strongly held in the conservative religious camp, a supernatural being simply created, ‘from nothing’, everything that exists.  To conform to the scientific fossil record, it all didn’t occur instantaneously but was sequentially created to give the appearance of doing so.  At the other end, strongly held by the more materialist scientists, the process by which things come to be what they are is understood as governed by pure chance, combined with ‘Natural Selection’ in which those random combinations of cells which survive will engender offspring and those that don’t will not.

Another issue which separates these two poles is the question of time span.  In the former, God can create what he wants in any order, beginning with the finest grains of ‘the stuff of the universe’, in as little as six thousand years.  To the scientist, this ‘stuff’ must somehow get to a very high degree of organization before Natural Selection can kick in, and this requires billions of years.  For example, it is necessary for evolution to first effect very complex inorganic molecules, such as amino acids, proteins and DNA before the emergence of the very first, most simple cells can begin.

The concept of evolution is so common today that it is difficult to realize just how recently it has risen in our collective consciousness.  It was only a little over a hundred years ago that Darwin published his thesis on biological evolution, an evolutionary ‘blink of the eye’, and this thesis, albeit with many variations, still stands as the most accepted scientific approach to understanding the origin of living things.

Within fifty years after Darwin, however, Science began to extend its inquiry into the nature of entire cosmos.  With thinkers such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, supplemented by advanced instruments and computational systems unimaginable in Darwin’s time, Science has begun to grasp the true immensity of the universe, not only in space but in time as well.

This new awareness of the seemingly infinite duration of time that it took the universe to organize into the configuration we see today also opened the question of “how did this happen?”  The discipline of Physics has continued the task of expanding our understanding of this organization with its ‘Standard Model’.  The Standard Model of the late twentieth century identifies the basic building blocks of matter, the order of their appearance and their energies of interaction, although with several gaps still to be filled.  Many of its basic assumptions have been independently tested and verified, thus offering our best and most comprehensive understanding of matter in a universal context.  Its underlying assumption is that the universe becomes what it is via the processes identified in the Standard Model; from such minute granules as quarks, through increasingly intricate components such as electrons, atoms and molecules into those which are capable of supporting the functions that we refer to as ‘living’.

Science’s monumental expansion of insight into cosmic reality, however, still possesses a gaping hole.  While the evolution of living things is somewhat explained by Natural Selection, there is no underlying concept for how the elemental granules identified by the Standard Model came to be configured into complex entities, such as DNA, which are necessary for the emergence of the cell.  The passage of time alone cannot alone account for the rungs of complexity mounted by the elemental ‘stuff of the universe’ as it precipitated sequentially from a featureless quantum of energy into such increasingly complex entities as electrons, atoms and molecules.

There’s a third stage of evolution to be considered in addition to the material and biological, that of ‘thought’.  The theory of Natural Selection works well in explaining the evolution of living things, but less so in explaining the rise in biological complexity leading up to the human, seen in such phenomena as ‘consciousness’ and ‘culture’.  Further still, the principles of biological Natural Selection would seem to apply poorly to the explanation for the subsequent evolution of the individual human person in the context of society.  The phenomenon of consciousness and an understanding of how it plays out in human culture therefore continues to be at the edge of the grasp of biology.   It is common for biologists to simply ignore human evolution at the level of consciousness, other than in the biological sense of random genetic mutation of human ‘morphology’.  That humans continue to evolve, however, cannot be denied even if the underlying principles of their evolution remain obscure.

Thus, we can see that while the term, ‘evolution’ is quite commonly used, the actual process to which it refers is much more comprehensive than can be seen at first glance.

Next Week

This week we took a first step into seeing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by recognizing that the term, “evolution” does not have a common meaning

Next week we will use Teilhard’s lens of evolution to see how this ‘phenomenon’ is the essential activity in the universe as it unfolds into its current state.

 

April 7, 2022 –  Teilhard’s Vision of Cosmic Evolution

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  To understand Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ we must first look at how he defines ‘evolution’

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard asserted that to make sense of things in a way that our skills at navigating the winds and currents of life become more successful, we must learn to see these things more clearly.  He offers his ‘lens of evolution’ as a tool for doing so.

As we will see this week, Teilhard’s concept of evolution goes well beyond that commonly found in the scientific as well as the religious communities.

Teilhard’s Understanding of Evolution

Before we can begin to understand how his ‘lens’ can be used to make sense of everything we see and to undo 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 an underlying hermeneutic 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 Darwin and limited to a process of successive reproduction and differentiation on a small planet during the universal small 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 by definition 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.

Through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ everything can be seen in 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.  The “increase in complexity” is therefore one of the first things to be seen as we look through the ‘lens of evolution’.

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.

 

March 30, 2022 –  Teilhard’s ‘Lens of Evolution’

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   How does Teilhard see universal evolution as a hermeneutic for understanding reality?

Today’s Post

We have been looking at how the human person and the society in which we live can be seen by Teilhard in a distinctively optimistic light.  We have also seen that Johan Norberg’s statistics shine this light even brighter but, how there seems to be a headwind of pessimism that inhibits a general positive view of the direction of evolution in the human species.   We also saw how Steven Pinker identifies several examples how this headwind is evident in contemporary society today.

These ‘headwinds of pessimism’ that we addressed in the past two weeks are indeed real and impossible to ignore.  They did not appear recently, but depend on the existence of a dystopia that has been prevalent in human society since its beginnings, and will continue as long as a narrow perspective of human existence persists.

Teilhard proposes a widening of this perspective as an antidote to such headwinds.  If, he suggests, we can see ourselves in a context of reality which is evolving in the direction of ‘fuller being’, we will be able to

“..spread our sails in the right way to the winds of the earth and always find ourselves borne by a current towards the open seas.”

   This “spreading of sails” involves the recognition of a reliable causality in each of us that is always at work in our lives to bring us to an ever-fuller degree of ‘being’.  He asserts that such recognition will awaken us to our potential as human persons, and provide the stimulus for our personal and collective fullness.  As he put it (and please forgive my overuse of this quote):

“.. 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.”

   In saying this, he is stating a belief that when we, individually and collectively, see ourselves as the current manifestation of the same energy that has breathed the universe into existence over the past fourteen billion years, the emerging confidence in this energy within us will enable us to overcome all obstacles to becoming more what it is possible for us to be.  As he puts it in more poetic terms, the insight that the universe is ‘on our side’ allows us to perceive ourselves as being held in God’s hands.

“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   To experience one’s self as being held in the hands of God can truly count as a significantly ‘decisive moment’.  A person who feels that, as Maurice Blondel put it,

“The ground of being is on our side”

    will experience life quite differently than one who feels adrift.

But the act of experiencing is somewhat dependent upon understanding.  Considering the way that understanding contributes to belief, and hence the importance of such understanding, Teilhard develops a way of seeing that can contribute to this skill of sailing.  This mode of seeing is based on his grasp of all reality as it exists in a flux of a universal ‘becoming’.  It is his ‘lens of evolution’.

Next Week

This week we introduced Teilhard’s fundamental approach to ‘making sense’ of reality and our role in it: seeing reality through the ‘lens of evolution. From this perspective, he believed that 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.

Next week we will begin to see how Teilhard’s view of evolution was unique in many ways, but how his expanded view enabled the whole of the universe, including the human person, to be understood holistically and therefore lead to a clearer understanding of our part in it.

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.

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.

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.