MYTH-PERCEPTION TWO: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

“When your only intention is looking out for number one, everyone and everything else gets treated like number two.”

“It’s a dog eat dog world.” “It’s a jungle out there.” “Every man for himself.” We’ve heard these catchphrases so many times that we’ve embedded them into what we call reality.

But what if the Darwinian philosophy about the competitive nature of life is all wrong? What if cooperation and sharing are the entire reason for our evolution? What if survival is really dependent on how well we communicate with each other and how quickly we share and process information? And what if there is a world condition much better than mere survival? What if there’s also a state of thrival?

WHICH CAME FIRST, DARWIN OR DARWINISM?

Charles Darwin, who was also a child of his times, played one of the most important roles in establishing the paradigm of scientific materialism, especially as it applies to human health and the evolution of humanity. Evolutionary thought had been ripening for nearly a century and even his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin had studied and written about the subject.

In fact, the first scientific paper on evolution, Philosophie Zoologique, was published by French biologist John Baptiste de Lamarck in 1809, the year Darwin was born.¹ And phrases that we have attributed to Darwinism—the law of the jungle and survival of the fittest—were also well-established before Charles Darwin’s birth.

The opening act for Charles Darwin’s opus was performed by Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus was an economic philosopher whose beliefs and writings provided the theoretical foundation for Darwinian theory. He was also the son of a leading light of the Age of Enlightenment who counted as his friends Jean-Jacques Rousseau and philosopher and economist David Hume. Yet young Malthus took a deeper, darker view of the world than his mentors. Perhaps in rebellion against his father, Malthus championed a pessimistic position in regard to world affairs. He set out not only to prove the glass was half empty but also that it would soon be three-quarters empty, then seven-eighths empty, and on and on subtractum infinitum.

Using logical constructs and linear projections popular at the time, Malthus concluded and subsequently wrote that vegetation reproduced at an arithmetic progression rate:

1 => 2 => 3 => 4 => 5 => etc.

In contrast, he suggested that animal life reproduced at a geometric progression rate:

2 => 4 => 8 => 16 => 32 => etc.

Malthus’s logic went thusly: a farmer managing his land could, with effort and luck, possibly raise an extra bushel of feed in each succeeding year. However, his animal population would double as offspring continued to spring off with each generation and would rapidly diminish the farmer’s ability to produce feed for them. Thus, animal life, which, of course, includes humans, would reproduce to the point that we exceed our food supply. In such a reality, life would truly become an ongoing struggle for existence in which only the strongest and most ruthless survive.

Malthus described the consequences of his vision of reality in his 1798 work titled An Essay on the Principle of Population: “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.”²

Well, at least, the upside of pessimism is that you can never be disappointed. But the essence of Malthus’s concern didn’t have to do with things getting worse, but with them actually getting better. What if nations curtailed warfare? What if poverty was eliminated and disease cured? Then, according to Malthus, we would really have a mess on our hands! The more successful we became at saving lives, the sooner we would run out of food. Malthusiasts of the 19th century engaged all kinds of social programs to forestall this inevitability, including discouraging the poor from breeding and the creation of slums in swamps where disease would cull the poor from the herd.

However, there is a minor problem with Malthus’s gloomy projections—they happen to be false! Seeing the world from a strictly materialist, linear point of view, Malthus was blind to the dynamic complexities inherent within the web of life and to Nature’s tendency toward balance and harmony. Furthermore, animal populations simply do not double every year, and their rate of increase is, again, a total variable based upon prevailing environmental conditions. Malthus’s linear mathematical conclusions, currently defined as “static projection,” would only be reasonable in a linear, mechanistic Newtonian Universe.

Fortunately, the Universe we live in is a probability-based quantum reality that is greatly affected by chaos, which is, in the world of mathematics and physics, defined as a system that outwardly appears random but is, in reality, quite ordered and deterministic. In a chaotic Universe, static projections are useless because they fail to factor in the dynamic and unpredictable processes of living systems. The whole Malthusian notion that evolution is driven by a bloody and brutal battle for survival actually has no scientific merit.

THE EVOLUTION OF DARWIN

Darwin, whose life spanned three quarters of the 19th century, came into a world when many views shared an uneasy coexistence. The bright shaft of light called the Age of Enlightenment, which was the philosophy that bred the American and French revolutions a generation earlier, was still shining, although dimmed by the darkness of creeping Malthusianism. The return of the monarchy in France had recently revitalized the Church, breathing life into its quest to retain its powerful paradigmatic crown. And, in the background, the progress of materialist science was steadily moving forward through the work of English chemist John Dalton and his atomic theory, published in 1805, which brought Newtonian physics down to earth by employing its principles to define the mechanics of the newly minted science of chemistry.

Although Charles Darwin was born into an upper-class family of Unitarians and freethinkers, his father, in deference to convention, had young Charles baptized in the Anglican Church. As a child, Darwin attended Unitarian Church with his mother. He later enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he eagerly studied science and attended lectures on Jean Baptiste de Lamarck’s radical theories of evolution.

Apparently, pre-med wasn’t Charles’s calling—his poor academic performance caused him to leave the university without completing his degree. His father, concerned that Charles would become a ne’er-do-well (or, at best, a sometime-do-well), encouraged him to enroll at the University of Cambridge to become an Anglican cleric. For a dropout. upper-middle class Englishman, the ministry was his last resort.

Darwin completed his theological studies and, immediately upon graduation and in spite of his father’s protests, signed on to a two-year voyage on the HMS Beagle as a gentlemen’s mate to Captain Robert Fitz-Roy. In the British navy during that time, aristocrats such as Captain Fitz-Roy were not allowed to socialize with the commoners who comprised the crew. To make his voyage tolerable, FitzRoy offered Darwin a position as traveling companion on a voyage to survey the wonders of Nature.

While at sea, the Beagle’s doctor, who was also the ship’s official naturalist and in charge of wildlife survey, had a confrontation with young Charles. The doctor resolved the conflict by jumping ship in South America. Conveniently, Charles assumed the official post of naturalist as the Beagle sailed toward the Galapagos Islands for what would become an historic voyage of paradigmatic proportions. The two-year journey lasted five years, during which time Darwin immersed himself in his study of Nature.

Before the voyage, Darwin received a copy of Principles of Geology, which was published in 1830 and was, perhaps, the most important scientific publication since Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Its author, Charles Lyell, was the most distinguished and influential scientist in the world at that time and for good reason. His Principles of Geology, published in three volumes in 1830 to 1833, established the science of geology and, in doing so, undermined the Church’s Biblical interpretation of Creation.

Until that time, people held the sacrosanct belief that the Heavens, Earth, and life were the result of God’s amazing six-day tour de force described in Genesis. The Church was so secure in its stand on this issue that it even offered, as a religious fact, the exact date that God gave birth to Earth. In case you were thinking of buying Gaia a birthday card, that was Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. James Ussher, an Anglican bishop, determined this date by calculating the lineage of Biblical begats back to the appearance of Adam.³

While most people of the day blindly accepted this date for Creation, geologists, led by Lyell, estimated that planet Earth had evolved through eons of gradual, yet dynamic, upheavals, which, in geological terms, resulted in a warping and repositioning of Earth’s crust. Lyell concluded that the physical disposition of continents, oceans, and mountains was the result of slow, steady alterations by natural forces such as winds, rains, floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

Lyell’s book contained four chapters dedicated to Lamarck’s theories, which also suggested that life arose through a long, slow evolutionary progression over millions of years during which some organisms became extinct, a situation that explained fossils. To Lyell, evolution of the biosphere was a perfect complement to evolution of the physical planet. Lyell’s writings did much to open the public’s eyes to a whole new view regarding the origin, or Creation, of the world.

During his five-year voyage, Darwin immersed himself in Lyell’s book and, in a sense, became a Lyell groupie, regularly corresponding with this prestigious scientific authority. The novel insights offered by Lyell and Lamarck helped shape Darwin’s ultimate conclusion that the succession of life in Earth-history should be ascribed, like geological phenomena, to natural causes.⁴

Darwin acknowledged the significance of Lyell’s contribution to the formulation of his theory of evolution when he published the second edition of his Journal of Researches in 1845. Darwin dedicated this book to Lyell, with the following explanation: “The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and other works of the author may possess, have been derived from studying the well-known and admirable Principles of Geology.”⁵

On October 2, 1836, Darwin arrived home in London. He met with and immediately became a lifelong friend of Lyell who encouraged him to pursue his studies on the theory of evolution. As an upshot of their discussions, Darwin began to compile his first notebook on the Transmutation of Species, the title of which was also the original term for evolution coined by Lamarck in his Philosophie Zoologique in 1809.⁶

So, while Lamarck provided a scientific foundation for biological evolution and Lyell drew a correlation between that and evolution of the physical planet, Darwin focused on providing insight into the forces or mechanisms that drove or motivated the evolutionary process. He was specifically concerned with the reasons why new species should appear at all. Without an answer to that question, Darwin’s theory languished for years until, ironically, he found the inspiration to advance his concept in the work of Malthus.⁷

Darwin wrote in his autobiography: “In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well-prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.”⁸

In other words, Darwin was saying that, while Malthus focused on the selection process as a means through which the weak elements of a society are eliminated, he, Darwin, put his own spin on the selection process by emphasizing the survival of the stronger individuals. This was a politically savvy move because Darwin was a gentleman in Victorian England, a culture that had an upper class and a lower class. Rather than attributing the selection process to the influence of a menial lower class, Darwin emphasized that it was good breeding and heredity of the upper class—those having the “favourable variations” and presumably being the fittest—that drove evolution. Therefore, in his writing, Darwin rephrased what Malthus called “Nature’s process of selection” in the elimination of society’s unfavorable elements into what Darwin termed natural selection.

DARWIN’S INDELICATE ARRANGEMENT

By the early 1840s, Darwin began to develop his theory, but he did not share his conclusions with anyone, not even Charles Lyell. In 1844, Darwin wrote to the luminary botanist SirJoseph Dalton Hooker, “at last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite to the contrary of the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing to a murder) immutable.”⁹ The murder Darwin referred to was the murder of God. If the theory were valid that species individually descended through a process of evolutionary transformation, that would kill the legitimacy of the first book of the Bible, the part of the Scripture that defines the relationship between God and the human race. It is also interesting to note that Darwin wrote, “I am almost convinced” that species could mutate. Clearly, even he did not yet believe in evolution.

Later that year, Scottish journalist Robert Chambers anonymously published, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a widely read book that championed evolution over creationism. Even though it was controversial and attacked by Victorian society, this book popularized the notion of evolution and broke the ice for Darwin to publish without professionally perishing.

Yet, Darwin kept stalling for more than a decade until prodded into action by a colleague’s work. In June 1858, Charles Darwin received a package that would stir him to action. It was sent by Alfred Russel Wallace, an English naturalist working in Borneo. Wallace was a naturalist as good as or better than Darwin himself but was also, unfortunately, a self-educated, working class commoner. To earn a living, Wallace caught specimens and sold them to museums, zoological parks, and wealthy collectors, and, in the process, became a great naturalist.

Wallace sent Darwin a copy of a manuscript titled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type along with a letter requesting that Darwin review the material and, if he found it of merit, pass it on to Charles Lyell.¹⁰ This manuscript was Wallace’s theory of evolution. It was brief, elegant, academic, extremely well-written and would have qualified Wallace as the rightful “founder of the evolution theory,” a title now attributed to Darwin alone.

Not wanting the prestige of formulating the theory of evolution to fall upon a commoner, Darwin beseeched Lyell for help to preserve his precious self-claimed priority in this profoundly important discovery. In a letter dated June 26, 1858, Darwin wrote: “It seems hard on me that I should be thus compelled to lose my priority of many years standing . . .”¹¹ Lyell came to the aid of Darwin, his distraught junior colleague, by engaging their mutual friend Sir Joseph Hooker in what was to become known as the “delicate arrangement” regarding “one of the greatest conspiracies in the annals of science.”¹²

Lyell and Hooker crafted a letter in which they claimed that Darwin and Wallace were acquaintances. The letter stated that both “gentlemen having, independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory . . . may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry.”¹³ The simple truth is that Wallace had, in hand, a fully evolved written theory and Darwin had merely a long-incubated, but unhatched, idea! However, Lyell used his status to orchestrate fabrications, alter documents, and plagiarize so that Darwin, the aristocrat, would get first billing while Wallace, the commoner, would receive the dubious honor of being listed as second, or junior, contributor. The theory of evolution—officially described as the Darwin-Wallace theory—was formally introduced at the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858, one month after Darwin received the package.

On the surface, this bit of skullduggery might seem to be trivial in regard to the history of humanity, but we can assure you this incident has had profound reverberations that continue to impact us today. The difference between whether Wallace or Darwin received credit for the theory is the evolutionary epitome of the glass being half full or half empty.

From the perspective of a commoner, Wallace recognized that evolution was driven by the elimination of the weakest, while Darwin interpreted the same data to mean that evolution resulted from the will to survive inherent in the fittest. The difference? In a Wallacean world, we would improve in order not to be the weakest, but in a Darwinian world, we struggle to acquire the status of being the best. In other words, had Wallace prevailed, there would be less focus on competition and more on cooperation.

A year after the delicate arrangement, Alfred Russel Wallace dissolved into the background as Darwin gained worldwide prominence with the publication of his masterpiece, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The content of this best-selling book popularized the concepts of evolution and natural selection and implanted into the world the chilling notion that only the fittest survive.

What brought this book to the attention of the world more than anything else was its subtitle, which offered a more penetrating view of the Darwinism we would come to know. The full title is The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It should be emphasized here, that Darwin was a product of his times. While he was radical enough to build on the geological implications of Lyell’s work, he also accepted without question Malthus’s conclusions, which we now know to be faulty. While biological success obviously comes from adapting to an environment, from the Malthusian standpoint, that adaptation primarily takes place in the fight over scarce resources.

The concept of social Darwinism, the term coined by philosopher Herbert Spencer—who, coincidentally, is also credited with inventing the term survival of the fittest—emphasizes the harsh implication of Darwinian theory. That theory encourages improving humanity by purifying the race, which, of course, means winnowing out unfavorable genetic inferiors. Taken to its fullest application, Darwinian theory became the state-sanctioned science and mission of Nazi Germany.

In his later years, Darwin moved away from academic Darwinism. Rather than emphasizing survival and struggle, Darwin readdressed his attention to focus on the evolution of love, altruism, and the genetic roots of human kindness. In addition, Darwin began to credit the Lamarckian concept of the environment as the driving force in evolution. Unfortunately, Darwin’s disciples thought his new ideas were tantamount to sedition, undermining all that Darwinism had come to stand for. Darwinists simply held on to their version of the theory and dismissed Darwin’s later ideas as the consequence of his creeping senility.

Within ten years of its publication, the majority of the world’s scientists essentially accepted Darwin’s theory as truth. But it had a much more powerful impact on the evolution of human civilization than most people realize, and that’s because Darwin provided a missing piece that would change civilization’s basal paradigm. Before The Origin of Species, monotheism shaped the cultural beliefs of Western civilization because it was the only source of truth that could provide satisfactory answers to each of the three perennial questions:

1. How did we get here?

2. Why are we here?

3. Now that we’re here, how do we make best of it?

While science was making miraculous advances and steadily eroding the Church’s powerbase, it could not unseat monotheism as civilization’s “official” truth provider until it offered “We evolved.” as the answer to “How did we get here?”

HOW WE INHERITED SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

At the time The Origin of Species was published, the general public was very much engaged in breeding plants and animals and was quite familiar with hereditary alterations that influenced the structural and behavioral traits of offspring. It was not a far reach for laymen to accept Darwin’s view that life on this planet evolved from a primitive ancestor who was followed by a long lineage of reproductive variations over millions of years. Consequently, the theory of evolution made sense and was readily accepted by both science and the populace. This acceptance put science in a position to provide a public-approved and satisfactory answer to that pesky perennial question regarding origins, an answer much more acceptable to the majority than the former view of Creation offered by monotheism.

Not surprisingly, the Church launched an aggressive campaign to counter the heresy of the godless evolutionists. The anticipated confrontation between religion and science came to a head only seven months after the publication of The Origin of Species. The showdown took place during a meeting held by the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford University in June of 1860. The meeting was distinguished by the fact that two scholarly papers, based on the new theory of evolution, were to be presented for public consideration. A scheduled debate ensued between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, representing the creationists, and Thomas Huxley, a friend of Darwin and a champion of his theory.

In a time before movies, radio, and television, debates commanded public attention for more than just the information they conveyed. Debates were entertainment. It was public theater wherein contestants would duel to the metaphorical death, verbally lashing each other with razor sharp wit punctuated with high drama and biting satire. Bishop Wilberforce, a topnotch debater, was referred to as “Soapy Sam” because of the craftiness he displayed in gaining the advantage. In other words, Sam was slippery.

Wilberforce did not come to conquer evolution; he came to exorcise its evil spirit from the mind of the people. His expressed intent was to humiliate the evolutionists and reestablish in the public’s mind the Church’s belief in Creation. No record was kept of the actual debate, but Wilberforce apparently summed up his argument with a contrived question to make Huxley look like a fool no matter how he chose to answer it. A version of the question, which played upon Victorian reverence to family lineage and motherhood, went: “Let me ask Mr. Huxley one question. Is it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claims descent from a monkey?”

Huxley, who was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” was hesitant to even attend the debate due to apprehension of being entrapped by Soapy Sam’s rhetoric. However, he hit Wilberforce right between the eyes with his now famous reply: “I will answer your question, my Lord Bishop. An ape may seem to you to be a poor sort of creature, of low intelligence and stooping gait that grins and chatters as we pass. But I would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a man who is prepared to prostitute his undoubted gift of elegance and culture to the service of prejudice and falsehood.”¹⁴

Huxley’s magic bullet not only felled Wilberforce, it mortally wounded the Church. In a matter of moments, the debate—as well as the monotheistic paradigm—was over. After nearly two thousand years of overseeing the course of humanity, the Church was forced to relinquish the torch of knowledge and, with it, control of Western civilization’s basal paradigm. The future was now in the hands of scientific materialism.

A DOG-EAT-DOG WORLD . . . NOT!

Prior to the 17th century, science viewed life as a harmonious process, one of the last vestigial beliefs of animism and its descendant, deism. But in the century before Darwin and in the years following his death, the cultural picture of Nature went from nurturing mother to violent jungle.

Largely, this change in image was based on erroneous conclusions derived from biased observations using distorted science. What we observe as violence in Nature is the result of both predator-prey relationships and rivalry over territory, food, and mates. However, the latter form of violence is rarely if ever fatal. Once dominance has been established and acknowledged in a territorial dispute, the defeated animal slinks away, still living. So it’s most definitely not a dog-eat-dog world. Yes, it’s a dog-eat-squirrel world and a dog-growl-at-dog world, but dogs just don’t eat other dogs.

While we humans are, indeed, part of the web of life, we are, fortunately, perched atop the food chain. We no longer have natural predators and so, as more than one cynical philosopher has observed, we prey on one another. There is a distinct difference between the violence of hunting a deer, which is a natural process in the established web of life, and hunting a deer hunter, which is a behavior that falls far outside of Nature’s inherent morality. Our fundamental preoccupation with violence as a way of life is truly a misinterpretation of Nature.

Whether by accident or design, the use of violence far predates Darwin as a lowest-common-dominator operating system, wherein might makes right. However, Darwinian theory offered humanity a scientific justification for inhumane actions, including individual violence and the collective use of force, especially if the latter helps eliminate the burgeoning, applecart-upsetting lower class masses.

Darwinism also dealt the Church another low blow when it undermined the religious notion of morality in regard to justification of means and ends. In a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, Darwinian fitness is the ability of a population to maintain or increase its numbers in succeeding generations. Therefore, fitness through health or fit progeny represents an end. How we humans attain that end, be it through compassion or an Uzi, is entirely irrelevant.

In the end, Darwinian theory encouraged the “favoured races” to treat themselves to even more favorable treatment. Even worse, Darwinism gave tacit permission for each nation to advance its own “favoured race” at the expense of the whole. And so Darwinian theory delivered Western civilization from monotheism’s laws of the scriptures to scientific materialism’s law of the jungle. No rules or moral guidelines . . . just Darwinners and Darlosers.

While few people have actually read and understood Darwin’s complete works, the phrase survival of the fittest is well known, but mostly misunderstood. The phrase isn’t a scientific concept but a tautology, which is just a fancy way of defining what something is by stating what it is. For example, the dictionary defines the word fit, in biological terms, as being able to survive. When Darwinists invoke the mantra survival of the fittest, they are actually saying, “survival of those most able to survive.” Well, yeah. But when fed into the human psyche, replete with images of lions chasing down gazelles, survival of the fittest takes on a more life-threatening, adrenaline-pumping significance.

However, if we take a look at the jungle, we find that the law of the jungle doesn’t even apply there! When a lion takes off after a gazelle, the lion doesn’t care about the fittest or capturing the one with the biggest antlers to later be a suitable trophy in his den. In fact, she goes after the least fit because she’s hungry and wants to be sure she gets something to eat. More precisely, the law of the jungle is actually the non-survival of the non-fittest. By definition, to survive, you don’t need to be the fittest, all you need to be is—well, fit. In another way of looking at it, consider the percentage of gazelles that don’t get eaten by a lion every day.

An evolutionary lesson in not being the weakest is humorously portrayed in the story of two campers in the woods who wake up to find a bear in their camp. One starts putting on his shoes, and the other says, “Why are you putting on your shoes? You can’t outrun a bear.” The first one says, “Who needs to outrun the bear? I only have to outrun you.”

THRIVAL OF THE FITTINGEST

As the path of humanity’s evolution continues its swing toward a more balanced, holistic perception of life, we see that the new rules of quantum science apply to the theory of evolution as well.

Studies now emphasize that evolution occurs in the context of an environment—not separate from it. The progress of evolution can be seen as an environment constantly seeking to rebalance itself. For example, let’s say organism #1 eats X in the environment and poops Y. As #1’s population increases, its food source X necessarily diminishes, while its waste product Y simultaneously increases. While the loss of X and the buildup of Y throw the environment a little out of balance, the situation also provides an opportunity for the evolution of a new organism, #2, that thrives on eating Y and excreting Z. As #2’s population increases, it causes the level Y to return to balance but at the cost of increasing the amount of Z in the environment, which, in turn, supports the future evolution of Z-eating organism #3. And so on, and so on. This is an oversimplified example and yet, as sophisticated systems theorists are showing us, it is, indeed, the case.

In his 1998 article in the prestigious journal Nature, British scientist Timothy Lenton provided important support for the Gaia hypothesis formulated by scientist, environmentalist, and futurist James Lovelock. Lovelock suggested that Earth, itself, is a living entity that uses evolution to regulate its own exceedingly complex metabolism. Lenton described how the sun has warmed by 25 percent since life on Earth began some 3.8 billion years ago, and, yet, the planet has somehow been able to regulate its climate and buffer that huge temperature differential. Lenton suggests that evolutionary traits that benefit the system as a whole tend to be reinforced, while those that alter or destabilize the environment in an unfavorable way are restrained.

Lenton concluded, “If an organism acquires a mutation that causes it to behave in an ‘anti-Gaian’ manner, its spread will be restricted in that it will be at an evolutionary disadvantage.”¹⁵ More to the point and applied to our current situation, Lenton is suggesting that if we humans don’t find ways to evolve that are more harmonious with the planet, we may find ourselves homeless.

What we have failed to realize is that the real evolutionary principle is “thrival of the fittingest.” Those organisms that best fit the environment by contributing and supporting global harmony get to thrive while the others—well . . .

THE ANSWERS LIE WITHIN

But, perhaps, the most cogent example of the real nature of life, the example that shows us the way out of the Malthusian dilemma of scarcity and points us in the direction of our next evolution, pertains to the origins and development of multicellular life forms on this planet.

Why is it, and how is it, that trillions of single-celled organisms were able to combine forces to become us?

To answer this question, we must remember that, for the first 3.8 billion years of life on this planet, the only life forms were single-celled organisms such as bacteria, algae, yeast, and protozoans.

Around 700 million years ago, cells started to assemble into primitive multicellular colonial organisms. By sharing information, new communal associations provided greater awareness of the surrounding environment and enhanced the life of their constituent cells. Simply, environmental awareness, which is a measure of evolution, affords an organism a greater opportunity to effectively and efficiently survive in a dynamic world. Two can live as cheaply as one, so joining forces is better than going it alone.

Initially, in the early stages of evolution, all the cells in colonial organisms carried out the same functions. However, there came a time when the number of cells that comprised an organism became so large that it was no longer advantageous for all cells to do the same thing.

Imagine, for example, that we’re still a hunter-gatherer society and each morning eight million New Yorkers commute to Westchester County to forage for food. It is far more effective to split up life-sustaining responsibilities among the members of the tribe. In this case, hunters would go out into the world while others in the community would stay home and perform various chores such as cooking, raising the kids, maintaining tools, watching TV, and so on.

This is exactly what happened in the evolution of multicellular organisms. As their communal numbers increased to thousands, millions, and trillions, individual cells in the community took on specialized jobs to support the survival of the whole organism. Biologists refer to this division of the workload among constituent cells as the process of differentiation.

As the structures of the differentiating cell communities evolved further, they ultimately created a multitude of emergent species—an evolution unimaginable to the single-celled organisms that thrived in the first 3.8 billion years of life. The formation of multicellular communities was, in a sense, a quantum leap in the course of evolution on this planet. Therefore, we might be tempted to think the current sentient human organism represents the fully tweaked evolutionary endpoint. But, in reality, the human is actually at the beginning of the next and higher level of evolution, the emergent multi-human super-organism known as Humanity.

The notion of survival of the fittest has been applied in our individualistic culture to mean survival of the fittest individuals. The sad truth, however, is that Gaia couldn’t care less about the fittest because she is more concerned about the impact the whole population has on its global metabolism, the environment. Regardless of how many Gandhis, Mother Teresas, and Leonardo da Vincis we produce, at the current time, our entire species is being measured, not for its fitness, but for its “fittingness.” Perhaps we, like our single-cell forebears, must now leave our single-cell individuality behind and evolve into a coherent multicellular whole, wherein self-interest and planetary interest are one and the same.

FROM THE SELFISH GENE TO THE SELFLESS GENIUS

The current human society has taken to heart the notion of competition as a means to survival even though that word has been distorted and misinterpreted from its original Greek etymology where “to compete” meant “to strive together.” To the Greeks, the notion of competition meant using the energy of each other’s performance to enhance one’s own; it did not imply that we should crush our opponents or try to win at any cost.

While exceeding one’s personal best is certainly a worthy ambition, consider all the contests and games in which there are far, far more losers than winners. The movie, Mad Hot Ballroom, an excellent and inspiring documentary about teaching troubled inner-city students self-respect through ballroom dancing, unfortunately offered the down side caused by misinterpreting competition. Despite the learning, the enjoyment, and the growth that came from striving together in the dance competition, all but the final winners were reduced to tears because they failed to win. Now, how in Heaven’s name does that make sense?

On the darker side, Enron, once heralded by Forbes magazine and The Wall Street Journal as the “company of the future” and, later, shown to be rotten to the core, made Darwinism their company credo. CEO Jeffrey Skilling touted his favorite book, The Selfish Gene by British science writer Richard Dawkins, as his Bible and, in true Darwinian fashion, took pride in culling the herd periodically at Enron in an effort to enhance corporate fitness. He would go into a division and tell the employees that he would fire the bottom 10 percent of producers during the next quarter. And he did exactly that. The pressure of the selection process created a ruthless, free-for-all atmosphere in which your best friend could become your worst enemy on judgment day.

The misunderstood notion of competition as a judge of evolutionary fitness was ferociously carried over into all of the company’s dealings. If you have the opportunity to view the movie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, you’ll hear and see traders gleefully talk about “screwing grandmothers out of their pensions,” cheer for ravaging life-threatening fires that were increasing the value of their stocks, or celebrate the collapse of an entire state’s economy as they reap windfalls from the victims.¹⁶

But that laughter was to die out abruptly because, in true reptilian fashion, Enron’s corporate officers ate their young by sinking the company and running off with their employees’ payrolls, pensions, and stock annuities. The fall of the house of Enron, and the resulting shock waves it sent into a blithely Darwinian business community, was an important wake-up call concerning the unworkability of short-term individual gain, including a paramount focus on next quarter profits. Yet, the very same faulty thinking behind the selfish gene still persists and keeps us from facing our true genius.

WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

Perhaps the most important message offered by both quantum physics and field experiments is that everything is related. Our Universe is not hierarchical and linear; it’s relational and fractal.

What do we mean by fractal? Fractal geometry, as we will see later, is the branch of mathematics that describes the patterns of Nature. When you look at a leaf, a stem, a branch, a tree, or a forest, or when you observe a seashore from varying distances, you notice a repeating, self-similar pattern at different levels of complexity.

Alarming issues like global climate change and species loss are telling us that no individual—no matter how physically or fiscally fit or how big the security wall behind which we live—can survive if the species doesn’t. Polymath Arthur Koestler coined the word holon to describe the condition of “having parts” as well as “being part” of something else.¹⁷ Humans are holons. We are made up of parts—cells, tissues, and organs. Yet, we are parts in something larger. We belong to communities, nations, and humanity. We even see ourselves as a cell of Mother Earth. The key to survival is thrival of the entire world system: healthy cells, healthy humans, healthy planet. Put another way, without Earth we’re nowhere.

Therefore, what has been called the biological imperative seems to have two equally important concerns: survival of the individual organism and survival of the species. Generally, survival of the species is expressed as the drive to reproduce. However, when the species, itself, is threatened by environmental changes, reproduction not only is not an option, it makes no sense. We have now created an environment that, should we continue doing what we are currently doing, will no longer be able to sustain human life.

This means that the new biological imperative for humankind necessarily involves the understanding that we’re all in this together and survival of the fittest must now give way to “thrival of the fittingest.” That means we must adjust human activity to that which will cause the entire system to thrive. We now seem to have reached the level of complexity on the planet where seven billion human cells, operating unconsciously and using their energy at destructive cross-purposes, is no longer biologically functional.

Like the single-cell organisms that utilized environmental awareness in order to emerge into more complex and efficient organisms, human society must adopt a new paradigm of social and economic relationships. Paradoxically, this new level of cooperative awareness means maximum expression for the individual and maximum benefit for the whole. Only the seemingly impossible reconciliation of these misperceived opposites can create the emergent human that spiritual teachers tell us is our destiny.