"In this remarkable scenario, the entire cosmos simply comes out of nowhere, completely in accord with the laws of quantum physics, and creates along the way all matter and energy needed to build the universe we now see...All of this will follow from a magnificent mathematical theory that will encompass all of physics...in one superlaw. But we come back to the question: why that superlaw?"

"Things at least seem to organize themselves better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind-chance evolution and natural selection...There seems to be something about the way that the laws of physics work, which allows natural selection to be a much more effective process than it would be with just arbitrary laws."

I began this book by pointing out that there is a deep split between science and spirit, and arguing that only a holarchical worldview can incorporate both these ways of knowing the world. Almost all scientists now recognize that there are levels of existence, each transcending and including the one below it, and each with its own emergent properties. In Part 1, we examined each of these levels, beginning with atoms and physical matter, and progressing through cells, organisms and societies.

I have also argued that the most generally-agreed features of higher states of consciousness are quite compatible with holarchy. In Chapter 6 we examined some of these features, which are suggestive of a new level of existence incorporating the entire planet. Both the emergent properties of this new level, and its relationship to the levels below it, exhibit principles that we have seen on each of the lower, scientifically-accessible levels.

The holarchical view of existence, then, consists of a series of levels or microcosmoses, one within the next. Some of these levels are accessible to science, some to spirit. More specifically, the methods of science are most appropriate for investigating phenomena below our own level of existence, while the methods of spirit are most appropriate for investigating the levels above us. Phenomena on our level of existence, especially higher stages of social organization, are an intermediary realm, most accessible to the intersubjective methods of philosophy and the social sciences.

The holarchical worldview therefore provides a conceptual unification of science and spirit, a way of organizing the data of each and relating them to each other. Moreover, the operation of analogies between different levels of existence--one of the central principles of holarchy--suggests new ways of understanding certain known phenomena, as well as the possibility of predicting the existence of currently unknown ones. With respect to the first of these possibilities, we have seen that Darwinism may be broadened by postulating that analogous evolutionary process occur on other levels of existence. With respect to the second, the future evolution of the planet may follow organizational stages that can be understood in outline at lower levels.

Nevertheless, to take the holarchical view no further than this hardly constitutes a revolution in either science or spirit. We have mostly added the data of one to those of the other, and shown that there are no serious incompatibilities. In the frequently used metaphor of a house with several stories, we have shown that one story or series of stories will fit on top of another group of stories, without causing the structure to collapse. But the inhabitants of each story continue their lives much as before. They remain within their own part of the house, perhaps a little more aware of the other stories, but still having little or no interaction with their members.

The greatest potential value of the holarchical worldview, obviously, would lie in areas where the two ways of knowing do interact, where one way of knowing can complement and enrich the other. Indeed, I emphasized at the very outset of this book that neither science nor spirit can stand alone, that the practice of either one without the other leads, at best, to an incomplete understanding of even its own realm. Spirit without science may believe in God, but can't realize God. Science without spirit may explain what we observe, but can't explain how we observe.

I have briefly discussed ways in which the two ways of knowing might fruitfully interact. An area of clear scientific deficiency, discussed in Chapter 5, is presented by the so-called hard problem of consciousness--how it is that we experience both an outer world of objects and an inner world of mental phenomena. The obvious inadequacies of all current theories of consciousness have led some philosophers to argue that this problem is beyond our capacity to understand. What I tried to show is that, first, our dualistic vision of the world results from our position between levels in the holarchy; and second, like any form of existence, we have an awareness in certain dimensions of time and space which precludes us from observing phenomena that occur in higher dimensions.

Another area of intersection of science and spirit was suggested in Chapter 6. There we saw that we can use the traditional scientific test of independent verification to identify features of higher consciousness that are most likely to be universal and real. Moreover, the concept of energy may provide a way to understand the mystic path that is consistent with principles of evolution on lower levels of existence.

In this chapter, I want to discuss another area where science and spirit need to cooperate. This is the question of our origins. The current split between the two ways of knowing is nowhere better illustrated than in the answers they give to this question. Science says we came from below, beginning with physical matter; spirit says we were created from above, as the product of an intelligent designer.

Though the scientific view of existence has triumphantly changed much of our lives, religion still exerts an immense influence on most people, and nowhere is this influence more obvious than here. While many religions today accept the idea of evolution, they nevertheless preserve the notion of a God that preceded everything else in the universe. Nor does this position, even after a century and a half of evolutionary theory, appear entirely frivolous or old-fashioned. We have seen in the preceding chapters how difficult it is to account for some evolutionary transitions in terms of known physical and biological processes. This has led even some scientists, like Michael Behe (1996) and Dean Overman (1997), to argue that evolution can't provide a comprehensive explanation of existence. Moreover, even if we accept the premise that future work in Darwinian theory, in self-organizing processes, and even in some radical notion like morphic fields might satisfactorily fill in all the gaps, we are still left with the question of how everything began. If the universe began with physical matter, what created the matter?

Because of doubts like these--not to mention the need to understand questions of values, moral and meaning in life--there is still ample room in the logic of even the most intelligent and well-informed people for some concept of God. Polls have consistently shown that about 90% of Americans believe that God played some kind of role in creating us. While perhaps half of these people adopt a fundamentalist view in which evolution played little or no role, the other half see no conflict between God and evolution (Johnson 1997). Indeed, there are a significant number of theologians and religious scholars who are actively trying to incorporate the latest scientific findings bearing on evolution, including quantum phenomena and self-organizing processes, into their religious worldview (Richardson et al. 1996; Polkinghorne 1997; Peacocke 1997).

Still, if the argument for spirit were no more than this--where did we come from?--we could not blame most scientists for being atheists. If the scientific worldview can't yet provide a complete answer to this question, it has undeniably made enormous progress in that direction. The evolution of the physical universe, beginning with the Big Bang, and evolution on earth, beginning with physical matter, are understood at least in general terms; what remains to be explained is far less than it was even a century ago. Even the ultimate question of how everything began, long thought to be totally outside the bounds of science, is being seriously addressed; it has been suggested that something might emerge literally from nothing, as a quantum fluctuation (Davies 1992)? The point is not that whether this idea, or any other speculation about our origins, is correct. The point is that if we extrapolate scientific progress into the future based on what it has accomplished in the past, doesn't it seem quite likely that it will eventually obviate the need for God as any kind of explanatory device?

The evidence for spirit, however, is not simply negative; it does not depend solely on the inability of science to fill in certain gaps in its worldview. The real evidence for spirit is direct: we can experience a higher level or levels of consciousness above the one we ordinarily exist in. In Chapter 6 I not only discussed the nature of this experience, but also addressed the critical question of whether these levels could be emergent from our own. That is, could higher states of consciousness be simply the latest product of evolution, following that of matter, life and mind? Though I don't believe the evidence is totally conclusive one way or another, the fact that more than one state of consciousness above our own has been described by many mystics constitutes very strong evidence, in my view, against the notion that these higher states could be emergent from our own. If they were emergent, we would expect, on the basis of everything we know about the evolution of lower levels of existence, that there could be no more than one level of existence above us.

The experience of higher consciousness thus provides a very compelling argument for the existence of higher intelligence preceding the creation of the physical universe. I say this as a scientist with tremendous respect for the explanatory power of the idea of evolution. I agree with the hardliners on both sides of the science vs. spirit debate that it is very difficult to reconcile evolution with God--that if one really understands the implications of both concepts, they seem incompatible. Yet I follow first and foremost evidence, and the evidence for both seems to me unassailable. As a scientist, I accept the evidence for evolution; as one who has experienced higher states of consciousness, I accept their reality as well.

So how does one go about making them compatible? We should surely begin by listening to those who have accepted both, which is to say, most mystics. The mystic view of God has long been an evolutionary one, for it identifies its goal as not simply recognition, but realization of a higher state of consciousness. This became clear two thousand years ago with the development of the Mahayana or "large vehicle" form of Buddhism. In teaching that enlightenment was open to all, it made the further evolution of humanity a world-wide program (Ch'en 1963; Corlett 1991).

It has been claimed that a more comprehensive theory of evolution was created in the east by the seventh century A.D. (Northe 1993). In any case, early in this century, the Hindu philosopher Sri Aurobindo (1985) developed a theory extending the evolutionary view of human beings to other forms of existence. Consistent with early creationary theories like the Great Chain of Being, as well that expressed in classical Hinduist texts, Aurobindo visualized a universal consciousness creating, by a process called involution, successively lower levels of life. To this well-known story he then added the contemporary idea of evolution, which was now interpreted as a process by which life on all the lower levels returned to its origin. So evolution was embraced as not only real, but one half of the creative process of God. Teilhard de Chardin (1959) took a similar view of the evolutionary process as a purposeful return to what he called the omega point. More recently still, Wilber (1980, 1981) has interpreted both human development and human evolution in terms of involutionary as well as evolutionary processes.

The conventional mystical worldview does not solve the question of our origins, as some who promote this view seem to believe. In fact, it has some serious problems, which I will try to highlight in the following discussion, as well as in the next chapter. But since no other worldview I'm aware of even makes a serious attempt to reconcile evolution with higher life, it's one we should consider.

The notion that the world was created by a higher intelligence is of course an ancient idea, dating back, perhaps, to several thousand years B.C. Referring to it as "the shared myth of the one that became two", Joseph Campbell notes that:

In the idea of "restoration", surely, is an embryonic form of evolution. In the West, this creation myth became expressed in the story of Adam and Eve, two individuals coming out of one original God. In the East, it was recounted in one of the most famous passages in Hinduist literature, from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

As I emphasized earlier, science has great difficulty understanding how an intelligent form of life could apparently exist outside of time and space, without having been itself created. Even if we pass on that, though, the idea of involution, or "one becoming two", raises another problem, one that mystics and theologians themselves are much more willing to concede, or at least wrestle with: why would a perfect form of existence create something lower than itself? The passage quoted above, taken literally (though Campbell argued we shouldn't do this), provides a clearly illogical answer: that something perfect should lack delight and experience desire.

The great mystical philosopher Plotinus, who apparently had some direct experience of higher consciousness, was nevertheless no better able to understand why there would be egress from this state of grace:

After acknowledging the discussions of his predecessors on this matter, Plotinus concludes with an explanation no less lame than that of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

The problem Plotinus was grappling with was to plague Western thought throughout the Middle Ages. As Arthur Lovejoy discusses at length in The Great Chain of Being, the involutionary act forced philosophers to conclude that God either a) chose to create lesser forms of life--with all the evil and suffering they brought with them--or b) had no choice in the matter, and was therefore not omnipotent (Lovejoy 1936). Nor does the problem seem any less tractable to the modern mind. In this age of evolution, we have become accustomed to thinking of life as something that progresses from the simple to the complex, from inanimate to animate, from less intelligent to more intelligent, from unconscious to conscious--in a word, from lower to higher. Involution, it follows, must be a process that produces increasingly less complex, less animate, less intelligent forms of existence. Stated in this way, it seems regressive, as though life were reversing the gains of billions of years.

There is, though, a simple way to understand involution that makes it clear that it's not regressive. Involution is a reproductive process; the higher recreates itself, through the lower. We examined this process in Chapter 4. In virtually all multicellular organisms, reproduction begins with the creation of a single cell that contains the potential to develop into another organism. This cell subsequently fulfills this potential, by a process of cell division and differentiation. The production of the reproductive cell is an involutionary process. The development of this cell into an organism is evolutionary process.

By this reading of the mystical view, then, we ourselves play out, from generation to generation, the very foundational theme of existence, the creation of universes. A microcosm of the Absolute, we create a microcosm of our microcosm, which then evolves to form another one of us. This repeating process of involution/evolution is part of a much larger but analogous process, in which a higher form of life than ourselves created a much lower form of life than ourselves, which is gradually evolving through many levels of existence to return to its Creator.

This view of involution does not solve either of the twin problems confronting any view of existence that begins with intelligent life: how the higher form of life came to be, and how it came to create lower forms. But let's pass on these questions, and see where, if anywhere, the idea can take us. To the extent that involution is analogous to the reproduction of lower forms of life, it may provide some insight into the evolutionary process that followed it. So, as throughout this book, the question we want to ask is: how good is the analogy? To what extent is reproduction of a holon like ourselves a believable model of how the universe was created, and has subsequently evolved?

At first view, the analogy seems a forced one at best. In the case of reproduction, the outcome is virtually guaranteed. The fertilized single cell contains the potential, within its genes, to develop into another organism. Barring some pathology, the new organism will appear, and in every sense be, very much like the original. In the case of involution as reproduction of the universe, we really can't compare what has been produced so far with the original, because we really don't have any conception of the original. Yet based on what we know about evolution, the outcome hardly seems guaranteed. In the view of most scientists, the evolution of all life on earth, and especially our own species, was an extremely improbable event. In this important respect, it could hardly be more different from biological reproduction.

But was evolution really that improbable? The discovery of self-organizing processes, which I discussed in Chapter 10, presents a serious challenge to the traditional Darwinian view. Though the details of these processes can be understood, like Darwinism, as an interplay of chance and selection, the outcome seems somewhat determined. Thus Stuart Kauffman argues that many of the major transitions in evolution were not simply probable, but perhaps inevitable, following from certain mathematical laws. Might not the existence of such laws be construed as evidence of an orderly reproductive process of some higher level of existence?

Still, even the most ardent believer in self-organization would not view evolution as a completely determined process. For one thing, regardless of the role of self-organizing processes in evolution, Darwinian processes, as we have seen in Chapter 9, did play a major role. There can be little doubt that many of the twists and turns of our natural history occurred largely through chance, rather than as the outcome of an inevitable process. Furthermore, even where self-organizing processes did occur, we must be careful to distinguish general features that might have been inevitable from details that were more likely contingent. It may have been inevitable for certain kinds of molecules to evolve into cells. It's unlikely, however, that the specific molecular composition of the cells we see today was inevitable. Likewise, even if the emergence of multicellular organisms were inevitable, the forms these organisms took most likely were to some degree contingent.

So the very best-case scenario we can make for an original involutionary process is that some potential for higher forms of life was present in physical matter. On the other hand, before we conclude that the analogy with reproduction in organisms is of limited value, we need to keep in mind that biological development, too, is shaped by contingency. As I discussed in Chapter 3, development of the organism, though guided by genetic information, is not strictly determined by it. Genes are best understood as providing certain rules by which cells interact to form tissues and organs. While the outcome in a general sense is very certain, the details are not. There is a certain degree of randomness in the process. Studies with genetically identical organisms have demonstrated, for example, that they differ in the detailed connections in their nervous systems (Levinthal et al. 1976).

Indeed, there is definitely a Darwinian element that comes into play during development of connections between neurons in the brain, as well as between neurons and muscles. While not any neuron can connect with any other--physical proximity as well as the presence of certain interacting chemical substances plays a role--many connections are initially formed which are later eliminated by a process of cell death (Stellar 1995; Lichtman et al. 1999; Oppenheim 1999). What seems to determine whether connections are permanently established is a kind of natural selection--that is, whether the connection is used repeatedly by the organism. Neural pathways formed during early development that are repeatedly used are strengthened, while those that are not tend to degenerate (Wiesel and Hubel 1963). Thus the deep structure of the brain is formed to some degree by a Darwinian process. Gerald Edelman has proposed that a somewhat similar process of "neural Darwinism" affects the surface structure as well, that is, the connections that are formed during learning in the adult organism (Edelman 1989).

In summary, while development appears to be far more of a determinate process than evolution, the view that evolution may be to some degree analogous to development is not entirely fanciful. Development, like evolution, is shaped by Darwinian processes, and perhaps also by self-organizing ones, which seem to play a role in molecular and physiological processes in organisms (see Chapter 10). Moreover, just as I noted earlier (Chapter 4) that we must be cautious about drawing analogies between holons or levels that are complete and those that are apparently still in the process of evolving, so one might argue that if evolution of life on earth is indeed part of the reproductive process of a higher form of life, this process itself may be evolving. We might view it as an early stage of a property that at some later point will be capable of a much more determinate form of reproduction.

So let's presume that evolution can be understood as some kind of cosmic development process. What other features with biological development does it share? As I just pointed out, the development of higher organisms is guided by more than the genetic information in their cells. It also requires a particular environment in which to develop. For mammals, this environment is provided by the womb of the mother, and after birth, by the society of others of the same species. In other words, in addition to the informational potential that is provided within the developing new species, there is also potential provided from without. The higher level of existence is not only compressed within the developing organism's genes, but also envelopes it as it unfolds.

Pursuing our analogy of development and evolution, we might ask whether a level of existence beyond our own could provide a similar environment. The conditions on earth, by definition, have been favorable to evolution, at least not incompatible with it. The earth is the correct distance from the sun, has an aqueous environment, the presence of certain gasses, and so forth. In the traditional scientific worldview, this is purely a matter of chance. There are numerous galaxies in the universe, and the laws of probability are perhaps such that a few contain solar systems where the starting conditions prevail for the evolution of life as we know it. But this is not necessarily an argument against what I'm calling a developmental model of evolution. We know that many plants and organisms reproduce by creating a very large number of involutionary holons--i.e., seeds or eggs--a vanishingly tiny portion of which go on to develop and mature into a new organism.

This mode of reproduction is particularly common among plants and invertebrates--lower, less evolved forms of life. HIgher forms of life--in particular, birds and mammals--produce fewer offspring, but generally a much larger percentage of the latter survive and mature. So again, we are confronted with the possibility of a reproductive process that is still evolving. Evolution on earth can be viewed as a the product of a seed--physical matter--that happened to fall on a propitious spot. At this stage in the evolution of the reproductive process, nothing more is done. The seeds are produced in large enough quantities so that a few will go on to develop.

In the preceding section, I have tried to argue that there is a certain degree of analogy between development of individual organisms and the evolution of life on earth. Of course, even if we accept this argument, hardly a compelling one, this doesn't prove that evolution is part of a reproductive process of a higher form of life. It could be simply that development is making use of the same processes that evolution discovered, slowly and laboriously. And even if evolution is part of such a cosmic reproduction process, understanding it in this way clearly doesn't much change our scientific view of the world. We have simply substituted a creationist view of the origins of matter, for that of science, then let nature take its course.

In the mystical view, though, higher consciousness does more than just create the physical world. It guides its evolution in some manner, infuses it with purpose to ensure that the lower will indeed become the higher (Teilhard de Chardin 1959; Aurobindo 1985; Wilber 1981). This view, it seems to me, is not easy to reconcile with the facts of evolution as we now understand them. We can't deny that the process has taken an incredibly long time to get to where it is now, a period many orders of magnitude longer than the development of any new organism. Moreover, while the higher has followed the lower, this has not been a completely linear process. Evolution is more like a bush than a tree, says Stephen Jay Gould (1977b, 1990). While I think he is missing the forest for his bushes, we surely can see that even if evolution of human beings, or some form of relatively intelligent life, was inevitable, it did not come about in the most direct possible manner. If a higher form of life is guiding the process, it is surely operating under some mighty strong constraints.

In Chapter 8 I argued that there is an information gap between different levels of existence; the quantity of information in the informational holon of one level, such as the genome or the brain, is not sufficient to account for the quantity found in the next. We subsequently saw that there is a very close relationship between information and selection. Self-organizing processes, as well as Darwinian ones, can be understood in terms of selection, suggesting that a broader evolutionary theory should be based on this idea. Selection does seem to create information, in Chaitin's sense. Any process that can reproducibly pick out one complex string from many others generates information. So the question is, how does selection occur? Could a higher level of existence have any effect on evolution in this manner?

While Darwinism was widely perceived as incompatible with an active role of a Creator in the emergence of life on earth, the principle of selection has never fit perfectly snugly in the "natural" world. As many evolutionary biologists have pointed out, the term seems to imply some sort of outside agency, not so much denying the existence or activity of God as re-interpreting what that activity is:

It was for this reason, indeed, that Herbert Spencer--not Darwin--suggested the terms "survival of the fittest", which seemed to make it clear that no supernatural process was at work. However, use of this term has its own problems. Karl Popper, one of the most ruthlessly critical philosophers of this century, accused it of being tautological, that is, self-defining or circular (1976): Why does a particular species survive? Because it's fitter. How is fitness determined? By survival. Most Darwinists believe Popper has been refuted (Stamos 1996), yet neither fitness nor survival seems yet to have found a definition entirely independent of the other. Lima-de-Faria (1988) points out, moreover, that selection is one of the very few fundamental scientific terms that can't be expressed in measurable units.

The root of this problem, surely, lies in the fact that Darwinists, by focussing on fitness, are aiming at a moving target. The forces of selection, as they define it, are constantly changing. As organisms evolve, so does their environment, which to a large extent is composed of those organisms. Thus an environment that favors a certain kind of adaptive fitness may later change--indeed, usually will change as evolution proceeds--so that it no longer favors that particular adaptation. This makes it essentially impossible to predict a priori what features are adaptive. Adaptive fitness and survival are very much determined by context.

While most evolutionists would agree that efficiency is important, many might argue that it can't be viewed as the fundamental driving force of the process. We can easily point to examples of life that don't seem to fit the rule of greater efficiency--the peacock and its huge tail, for example. In traditional Darwinian terms, the tail is explained in terms of reproductive fitness--it is better at attracting mates than a smaller tail. Period--end of explanation. If we were to interpret evolution strictly in terms of efficiency, the peacock would not seem to make sense.

An even better, if much less appreciated, example of apparent inefficiency is the human brain, which spends most of its time and energy on useless thoughts--daydreams, fantasies, old memories, and so on. Again, this inefficiency can be understood in terms of reproductive fitness--reproduction, however, not of genes but of memes (Blackmore 1999). The junk that repeats itself endlessly in our minds is passed along from one individual to the next, in this view, because it's more reproductively fit than competing types of thoughts which might, from an individual point of view, be more efficient. Thus as Blackmore notes, popular tunes reproduce themselves memetically much faster and extensively than more serious thoughts concerning, say, political, social or scientific ideas.

To the extent that any group, population or society of organisms requires reproduction to maintain itself, the traditional view of reproductive fitness is still a powerful one by which to understand how it has evolved. We might say that viewing evolution as the creation of ever more efficient forms of organization often reduces to a view of simple reproductive fitness. Reproduction is a kind of group metabolism. Any new adaptation that allows a form of life a reproductive advantage over its competitors enhances this metabolism.

Selection defined in terms of efficiency, it should be apparent, strongly implies holarchical organization. We saw in Chapter 3 that associations of holons of a similar kind can be specified with much less information, and therefore less energy, than other types of organization. We have also seen that many types of self-organizing processes, such as autocatalytic networks, are highly efficient, because products of one reaction are used as catalysts of another. To say that selection is survival of the most efficient, then, is virtually to say that selection creates holarchy. Survival of the most efficient, in the long run, is survival of the highest. Selection is no longer viewed as a process that can create anything, contingent on what else exists now and what existed in the past. It has to create levels of existence; anything else is not the most efficient way to go. Not only is a group of holons organized in a certain fashion more efficient than the same holons unorganized, but a new holon consisting of several different stages of social holons is still more efficient. The details of this organization may be unclear a priori; but the general principles are fixed.

Given that this kind of selection strongly implies development of higher forms of life, we may legitimately ask if it also implies pre-existence of the higher. Here, it seems to me, is where we get into the no-man's land of arguments about intelligent design vs. bottom-up evolution. Even some scientists who thoroughly reject the idea that the universe was created by a higher form of intelligence note there is a problem in understanding why the universe has its particular physical laws. If these laws imply a potential, present from the beginning, to develop into much higher forms of life (more energy, more information, more complexity), isn't this some kind of argument from design?

I'm not going to take the argument any further than this, because I don't think it can be taken any further. I only want to re-emphasize two important observations, both of which are rarely appreciated by one and the same theorist: 1) evolution is an inordinately slow process that seems to create higher from lower, but by a very indirect means; and 2) there are higher levels of existence accessible to human beings that can't be explained by evolution, because the latter process should not yet have created them. To say any more than that there was some potential for a higher form of life from the beginning is to ignore the evidence that evolution has proceeded extremely slowly, gradually and often indirectly from one level to the next. But to say anything less would be to ignore the evidence for spirit. Anyone who really understands both forms of evidence--and unfortunately, there aren't many people who do--will realize how difficult it is to make them compatible.

Go to Footnotes

Go to Chapter Summary