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| posted on Sunday, January 08, 2006 |
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EXCERPTS FROM "EVOLUTION'S ARROW"
By John Stewart
Full summary:
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/jes999/EvVision.htm
Book:
http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999
............
A major evolutionary transition is beginning to unfold on Earth. Individuals are emerging who are choosing to dedicate their lives to consciously advancing the evolutionary process. They see that their lives are an important part of the great evolutionary process that has produced the universe and the life within it. They realise that they have a significant role to play in evolution.
Redefining themselves within a wider evolutionary perspective is providing meaning and direction to their lives -- they no longer see themselves as isolated, self-concerned individuals who live for a short time, then die irrelevantly in a meaningless universe. They know that if evolution is to continue to fulfill its potential, it now must be driven consciously, and it is their responsibility and destiny to contribute to this.
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"The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution. This is true because human beings now play an active and critical role not only in the process of their own evolution but in the survival and evolution of all living beings. Awareness of this places upon human beings a responsibility for their participation in and contribution to the process of evolution. If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of metabiological evolution consciously, as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age would be born." -- Jonas Salk
...
At the heart of this evolutionary awakening is the understanding that evolution is directional. Evolution is not an aimless and random process, it is headed somewhere. This is very important knowledge -- once we understand the direction of evolution, we can identify where we are located along the evolutionary trajectory, discover what the next steps are, and see what they mean for us, as individuals and collectively.
Where is evolution headed? Contrary to earlier understandings of evolution, an unmistakeable trend is towards greater interdependence and cooperation amongst living processes. If humans are to advance the evolutionary process on this planet, a major task will be to find more cooperative ways of organising ourselves.
The trend towards increasing cooperation and interdependence is well illustrated by a short history of the evolution of life on Earth. For billions of years after the big bang, the universe expanded rapidly in scale and diversified into a multitude of galaxies, stars, planets and other forms of lifeless matter. The first life that eventually arose on Earth was infinitesimal -- it was comprised of a few molecular processes. But it did not remain on this tiny scale for long. In the first major development, cooperative groups of molecular processes formed the first simple cells. Then, in a further significant advance, emerging in response to Earth's first major pollution crisis, communities of these simple cells formed more complex cells of much greater scale: eukaryotes, or cells with a nucleus.
A further major evolutionary transition unfolded after many more millions of years. Evolution discovered how to organise cooperative groups of these complex cells into multi-celled organisms such as insects, fish, and eventually mammals. Again the scale of living processes had increased enormously. This trend continued with the emergence of cooperative societies of multi-celled organisms, including ant colonies, bee hives, wolf packs and baboon troops. The pattern was repeated with humans -- families joined up to form bands, bands teamed up to form tribes, tribes joined to form agricultural communities, and so on. The largest-scale cooperative organisations of living processes on the planet are now human societies.
This unmistakable trend is the result of many repetitions of a process in which living entities team up to form larger scale cooperatives. Strikingly, the cooperative groups that arise at each step in this sequence become the entities that then team up to form the cooperative groups at the next step in the sequence.
It is easy to see what has driven this long sequence of directional evolution -- at every level of organization, cooperative teams united by common goals will always have the potential to be more successful than isolated individuals. Self-interest and competition drive organisms and systems towards unification and cooperation over greater and greater scales.
As life increases in scale, a second major trend emerges -- it gets better at evolving. Organisms that are more evolvable are better at discovering the adaptive behaviours that enable them to succeed in evolution. They are smarter at finding solutions to adaptive challenges and at finding better ways to achieve their goals.
Initially living processes discover better adaptations by trial and error. They find out which behaviours are most effective by trying them out in practice. Initially this trial and error search occurs across the generations through mutation at the genetic level. An important advance occurs when this gene-based evolution discovers how to produce organisms with the capacity to learn by trial and error during their lives.
In a further major transition, organisms evolve the capacity to form mental representations of their environment and of the impact of alternative behaviours. This enables them to foresee how their environment will respond to their actions. Rather than try out alternative behaviours in practice, they can now test them mentally. They begin to understand how their world works, and how it can be manipulated consciously to achieve their adaptive goals.
Evolvability gets another significant boost when organisms develop the capacity to share the knowledge that they use to build their mental representations. Imitation, language, writing and printing are important examples of processes that transmit adaptive knowledge. These processes enable the rapid accumulation of knowledge across generations and the building of more complex mental models.
Eventually organisms with these capacities will develop a theory of evolution -- they will acquire the knowledge to build mental models of the evolutionary processes that produced the living processes on their planet, including themselves.
...
"None of the scientists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries knew the larger implications of what they were doing or the discoveries they were making. Yet each of the major figures was contributing something essential to a pattern of interpretation that would only become clear in the mid-twentieth century. Only now can we see with clarity that we live not so much in a cosmos as in a cosmogenesis, a cosmogenesis best presented in narrative; scientific in its data, mythic in its form." -- Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry
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As life on earth reaches this stage, some individuals will begin to undergo a critical shift in consciousness. Increasingly they will cease to experience themselves primarily as isolated and self-concerned individuals. Instead, they will begin to see and experience themselves as participants and actors in the great evolutionary process on their planet. The object of their self-reflection will change. When they think of themselves, they will tend to see themselves-as-part-of-the-evolutionary-process. Their conscious participation in evolution will increasingly become the source of value and meaning in their lives. Key realisations that will contribute to this shift in consciousness are:
** A life dedicated to the pursuit of narrow desires and pleasures cannot be worthwhile. They will see that their desires are evolution's way of programming them to be adaptive and successful in past environments. In many cases their desires and pleasures no longer serve evolution's interests -- they often produce behaviour that is now maladaptive, and motivate actions that will undermine rather than advance the evolutionary process;
** They have the opportunity to be conscious participants in the evolutionary processes that will shape the future of life on their planet. They can play an important role in the actualisation of the next great steps in evolution;
** The successful future evolution of life on their planet depends on their conscious participation. Unlike past great evolutionary transformations, the steps to a unified and sustainable planetary society and beyond are too complex to be discovered by trial and error. They will be achieved only through the conscious efforts of organisms, and not otherwise. Conscious organisms will need to envision the planetary society and design strategies to get there. If it is left to chance, it will not happen -- in the past, chance took millions of years and many false starts to produce cooperative organizations such as complex cells;
** Their actions can have meaning and purpose insofar as they are relevant to the wider evolutionary process. To the extent that their actions can contribute positively to evolution, they are meaningful to a larger process outside themselves that has been unfolding long before they were born, and that will continue long after they die;
** The evolutionary perspective therefore provides them with an answer to the great existential question that confronts all conscious individuals: What should I do with my life?
** Their awakening to the evolutionary perspective and the awakening of others like them is itself a critically important evolutionary event on their planet.
The emergence of individuals that undergo this shift in consciousness is the evolutionary process on the planet becoming aware of itself. Through these individuals, the evolutionary process develops capacities for self-reflection, self-knowledge, and foresight. It will use these abilities to continually redesign itself to accelerate its own advancement.
...
"As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to under-stand something of its past history and its possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe -- in a few of us human beings. Perhaps it has been realized elsewhere too, through the evolution of conscious living creatures on the planets of other stars. But on this our planet, it has never happened before." -- Julian Huxley
...
Individuals that develop the psychological capacity to transcend their pre-existing motivations and needs will actualise a further major transition in evolvability. They will be self-evolving beings
-- organisms that have the ability to adapt in whatever directions are necessary to advance the evolutionary process, unrestricted by their biological and social past. Comparable transcendence of old patterns will occur in groups, organizations, communities and societies.
Individuals and groups that embrace the evolutionary perspective will also work to encourage all other groups within society to reframe their goals and mission statements to align them with evolutionary objectives. Social, political, governmental and economic organisations will begin to re-evaluate their activities and goals to ensure they are consistent with the advancement of the evolutionary process.
As more and more individuals and groups make this transition to an evolutionary perspective, a wave of evolutionary activism will emerge, directed at the unification of living processes on the planet to form a cooperative planetary society.
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