IN LIGHT of the insights emerging in the quantum sciences, the universe is not a collection of separate entities in space and time. It is an integral quantum system: a domain of coherence. This domain is “in-formed” by the Kosmos, the implicate order. Systems in space and time evolve in accordance with this “in-formation.” Without it the manifest universe would be a chaotic domain of randomly swirling inert plasma. Owing to this in-formation, however, the universe—more exactly, the systems that emerge and evolve in the universe—evolve toward higher and higher forms of complexity and coherence.
In-Formed Evolution. Now we ask how the in-formation of the universe creates the evolution that unfolds in space and time. What is the drive or impetus behind the evolution we observe in the universe?
As already noted, the consensus among physicists is that the universe was born in the cosmic singularity known as the big bang. That was 13.8 billion years ago, and in the time that has elapsed since then, the processes of evolution created the phenomena that now meet our eye.
The particles created following the big bang began to assume form and structure when the universe cooled sufficiently for quasi-stable entities to form. These entities, the quarks and quantum particles, are clusters of vibration. They are leptons (electrons, muons, tau particles, and neutrinos), mesons (pions), and hadrons (baryons including electrons and neutrons).
Quarks form the particles (the protons and neutrons and other short-lived particles) that compose the nucleus of stable atoms; they are bound together by gluons fields within the nuclear field. Protons are composed of two “up” quarks and one “down” quark. At suitable temperatures protons bind with electrons, capturing them in the “electron cloud” of atoms. The number of protons in the nucleus of atoms is the defining property of the atoms. In the course of time hadrons such as protons had built from combinations of quarks to form the nucleus of diverse atoms. The resulting atomic structure, defined by the number of protons in the nucleus, fills the periodic table of the elements. It encompasses atoms from hydrogen to uranium, and beyond.
The atoms that emerge in the universe continue to build into more and more complex entities. They build into molecules and multimolecular assemblies: superclusters of vibration. On the astronomical level stars and stellar systems, and entire galaxies form: clusters and superclusters, and super-superclusters of in-formed vibration.
The processes of physical evolution do not take place in a passive and neutral medium, in space of the classical Euclidean kind. They occur in a highly structured field that defines the possibilities of building complex structures (clusters of vibration) out of combinations of simpler structures. Evolution on the physical level takes place in a complex medium, pre-designed as it were to allow stable or semi-stable structures to emerge as integrations of comparatively simpler structures.
The above process is evolution—continuous if nonlinear, partially irreversible change—on the basic physical level. Although physical evolution is the template for all other forms of evolution, the continuous and partially irreversible process of evolution was first recognized in the life sciences. Carl Linnaeus and other naturalists came across continuity between the structure of the simplest and the most advanced forms of life, and proposed that the advanced forms are built on the simpler forms. The processes of evolution fill the panoply of life-forms in the biosphere through the superposition or combination of the simpler forms.
The realization that evolution occurs also in the physical domain dawned only in the first decades of the twentieth century. Einstein’s hopes for an eternally unchanging matrix-universe proved unrealizable: time had to be inserted as a factor in the cosmological equations. The time-dependent quasi-stable universe of general relativity proved to be an evolving system. Its evolution embraced the physical as well as the biological systems that arise in the universe. Process philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander, and A. N. Whitehead recognized that evolution is a universal process and incorporated it as a basic element in their concept of the world.
The Driver of In-Formed Evolution. That evolution would be a universal process has been recognized, but the impetus that drives it remained mysterious. Bergson speculated that it is an élan vital that counters the trend toward the degradation of energy in natural systems; biologist Hans Driesch suggested that it is a counterentropic drive he termed entelechy. Philosophers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Erich Jantsch postulated a dynamic tendency they called syntony, while others called the universal evolutionary driver syntropy. Eastern thinkers called the energy that drives the evolutionary process prana, a Sanskrit term, while in the West Wilhelm Reich suggested that the driving force is the energy he called orgone. Rudolf Steiner regarded the driver of evolution an etheric force, and Newton himself recognized the presence of this force or factor and sought to incorporate it in his theory. The mechanistic laws, he said, are not a full description of reality; they need to be completed with the recognition of an “enlivening and ensouling” spirit in all things—a “spirit of vegetation.”1
The nature and origin of the universal “spirit of vegetation” was not, and still is not, clearly known. Even today, scientists sometimes resort to quasi-theological explanations. An example is Planck’s affirmation that there is a higher intelligence behind the force that holds particles together in atoms. Einstein himself said that anyone who has seriously studied the laws of nature must come to the conclusion that underlying the laws there is a “mind infinitely higher than our own.”
In-Formation as the Driver of the Evolutionary Process. Failing natural explanations, resorting to extra- or supernatural forces is understandable, but it is a last resort. Science is based on explanation in reference to natural process. Such an explanation is provided in the quantum sciences, in particular in David Bohm’s theory of “in-formation.” The observed world, the explicate order, is an in-formed space-time domain. Its in-formation creates the phenomena we observe.
The affirmation that there is an order-creating element behind the evolutionary processes we observe is bound to be sound: as we have seen, random interactions are astronomically unlikely to have created the universe we observe in the available time. It is logical to assume that there is an order-creating factor in the processes of evolution, and that this factor is not extraneous to the natural world. The driver of evolution in the universe is plausibly part of its “in-formation.”
The Direction of Evolution. Evolution in the universe unfolds in a nonrandom direction. This direction can be discovered: it is toward complexity and coherence.
The coherence of systems is due to connection and communication among their parts. In a coherent system each part is finely “tuned” to receive, and respond to, all others parts. Such a system maintains itself through reciprocal relations among its parts, and between its parts and its environment. Coherent systems are systemic integrations of their parts. They are whole systems, rather than agglomerations of separate elements.
Evolution is a coherent-system-generating process. It is driven by the drive encoded in the in-formation of the universe. As we have seen, even the most basic physical processes occur in a structured field that allows the formation of coherent wholes. There appears to be a disposition or “drive” at the core of the universe that favors the emergence of complex coherent systems. The disposition or drive toward coherence coming to light can be seen as a universal “attractor” that governs, or at least conditions, the evolution of systems.2
The hypothesis we consider is that there is an attractor present in the domain of space-time we know as the universe. This attractor biases otherwise random interactions toward complexity and coherence. The observable result is the integration of diverse elements in integral systems of differentiated parts. For this reason we can say that evolution is a “holistic” system-building process.
Adopting a term originally proposed by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof for developmental processes in psychology, we call the attractor behind the system-building process “holotropic.” (Holos means “whole” in classical Greek, and tropic means “tendency or orientation toward”—e.g., toward a particular state or condition.) The hypothesis is that the disposition or drive behind the evolution philosophers have called transcendental intelligence, élan vital, prana, or etheric force, is in fact a holotropic attractor. The action of this attractor accounts for the observation that evolution tends to produce coherent complex systems, rather than chance assemblies of random elements.
The tendency toward coherent complex systems is manifested on all levels of size and complexity. Gravitation brings the particles and ensembles of particles that emerge in space and time into contact, and this contact, as we have seen, occurs in a highly structured field. Thus it does not create undifferentiated heaps of particles, but differentiated systems built of coherent relations among their parts.
The systems-creating disposition or drive appears already in the basic laws that define the behavior of particles and systems of particles in space and time. It is evident in Wolfgang Pauli’s “exclusion principle.” Owing to the operation of this principle, the atomic structure that comes about is not a random heap of uniform elements but a differentiated whole. It is built by the inclusion of electrons in some of the energy shells surrounding the nucleus, and their exclusion from others. Further systems are then built incorporating the resulting atomic structure in higher-level systems: these are molecules and crystals formed by atoms on the basis of their valence.
Differentiated multiatomic structures become templates for the evolution of organic macromolecules. The latter build into still more complex and coherent systems: living cells. Groups of cells in turn build into multicellular organisms, and multicellular organisms build into societies and ecologies of organisms. Even anthills are coherent complex systems on the socio-ecological level, and so are tribes of chimpanzees and pods of dolphins. As it unfolds on Earth, evolution generates differentiated systems on higher and higher levels of complexity and coherence. We humans are differentiated systems on the highest—or perhaps just one of the highest—level of complexity and coherence so far attained on this planet.