Is the Universe Evolving?
Evolution is the club that science wielded to beat religion into the dust, and whenever religious ideas threaten to take on new life, science rushes in to smash them down again. These ideas include, first and foremost, the perfection of God. According to religion, the deity didn’t need to get smarter, because God is omniscient. He (or she) didn’t need to expand into new places, because God is omnipresent, or to increase in power, because God is omnipotent. Having declared the creator perfect, religion couldn’t call God’s creation imperfect; therefore, the universe didn’t need to evolve, either. But the rise of intelligent life from primitive life-forms is undeniable. Physics has proven that the universe expands, and that energy gathers into vast clumps known as stars and galaxies that are more organized than interstellar dust. The defeat of perfectionism seems totally justified. We live in an evolving universe.
Spirituality therefore cannot get back into the game on religious terms. It has to add something new to the concept of an evolving universe. I think it can. If consciousness underlies everything in Nature, it is the force that directs evolution. If not, then evolution becomes, along with everything else, the result of blind random activity. Physics has chosen the second assumption, which has led it to some glaringly false conclusions.
First, science focuses on physical expansion as the basic foundation of evolution. At the instant of the Big Bang the known universe was billions of times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Now it spans billions of light-years. But that expansion isn’t evolution, any more than blowing up a house with dynamite is. The house certainly expands when you blow it up, scattering its fragments in all directions, much like the Big Bang did for the universe, when an unimaginable blast of energy scattered elementary particles in all directions. Yet behind the mask of matter, something more mysterious was happening.
To get at the mystery, let’s follow the path a hydrogen atom might take over the thirteen billion years or so following its creation. First it drifts out into space in a completely disorganized, random fashion, bouncing around like an infinitesimal feather on the cosmic wind. Some atoms keep on doing this until they form clouds of interstellar dust. But this atom falls into a stronger gravitational field and becomes a building block for a star, which takes primitive atoms like hydrogen and helium and transforms them into heavier, more complex elements. Through a series of nuclear reactions our particular hydrogen atom becomes part of the element known as iron, the heaviest metal formed inside stars.
The life span of this star comes to an end in the dramatic death throe known as a supernova, an enormous explosion that scatters iron atoms throughout the nearby regions of the cosmos. Our original hydrogen atom no longer exists as such, but its component parts are being drawn toward another star, hundreds of times smaller: the sun.
By this point in the history of the universe, the sun has already thrown off enough matter during its birth pangs that rings of dust have settled into orbit around it. This dust is clumping into planets, and our iron atom, pulled in by gravity, joins the planet Earth. At its core, the Earth is thought to be up to 70 percent molten iron, but our atom arrives late enough to settle onto the surface of the planet, which is around 10 percent iron.
Ten billion years have now passed. Many iron atoms have undergone random interactions with various chemicals, but ours is still intact. More time passes. It finds itself drawn into a spinach leaf, which gets eaten by a human being. Then our iron atom becomes part of a molecule thousands of times more complex than itself, a molecule that has the ability to pick up oxygen and throw it off at will: hemoglobin. Hemoglobin’s ability to perform this trick turns out to be crucial, because another molecule, this one millions of times more complex, has managed to create life. It is known as DNA, and around itself DNA is gathering the building blocks of life, known as organic chemicals, of which hemoglobin is one of the most necessary, since without it, animals cannot convert oxygen into cells.
In our story, one primal hydrogen atom has undergone incredible transformations to get to the point where it can contribute to life on Earth, and every step of the way involves evolution. Since all the iron on Earth was once part of a supernova (plus some iron deposited when meteorites collided with the early planet), the journey from the Big Bang can be observed and measured. Yet our iron atom has still another transformation to undergo. It has entered the bloodstream of a human being—you or me, perhaps—to become part of a sentient, thinking creature, one that is capable of looking back on its own evolution. In fact, this sentient creature created the notion of evolution in order to explain itself to itself. A primal atom has somehow become thoughtful.
I’ve taken the time to follow a single atom for 13.7 billion years because the steps it took to arrive in my body or yours, allowing me to write this sentence and you to read it, encompass the invisible qualities that spirituality is all about: creativity, quantum leaps of transformation, the emergence of unexpected properties, and overall, an enormous display of intelligence. As evolved creatures, we attribute all these qualities to ourselves. So where did they come from? Physics claims that they came from random physical processes, but that answer makes no sense. At every single step of its journey, our hydrogen atom resisted randomness. It became more complex; it contributed to increased energy; finally, it made the leap to human intelligence. The iron that allows you and me to be alive and sentient is no different from the iron in a rusty sewer pipe, or in interstellar dust. Yet evolution had a different fate in mind for our atom, and spirituality claims that its fate was directed by consciousness.
Consciousness-directed evolution isn’t the same as invoking a creator God. Instead, it introduces a property inherent in the cosmos: self-awareness. The beauty of this property is that it can include randomness; there is no need for an either/or choice. If you take a highly ordered molecule like hemoglobin, which contains thousands of perfectly arranged atoms, like thousands of dewdrops on a spider web, you can examine it at finer and finer levels. As you get to the quantum level, atoms are considered clouds of probability. The dewdrops have evaporated into a mist. Because science is reductionist, it claims that random electrons emerging from probability waves provide the ultimate explanation for the visible universe, based on chance but guided by basic forces like electromagnetism.
In spiritual terms, this is a topsy-turvy explanation. It’s very hard to get to life on Earth starting from total chaos, much more difficult than shaking a beaker of stem cells, walking away, and then coming back to find Leonardo da Vinci. Why not explain creation by what it achieves, instead of by what it can be broken down into? The Great Pyramid of Cheops can be examined as a heap of different kinds of dust, but that doesn’t explain it, any more than breaking the human body down into subatomic particles explains who we are. As the noted English physicist David Bohm put it, “In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.” The music of Bach can be broken down into sound waves, but once you arrive at this raw data, you lose Bach. His genius has been reduced to the same level of information as a clap of thunder or a rumbling earthquake.
The great flaw of reductionism is that when it pushes out the invisible aspects of creation, it thinks it has improved our understanding. Turning around and saying that data is actually better than the messy, ever-changing thing we call experience is totally wrongheaded. As the great quantum pioneer Niels Bohr put it, “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” To someone who insists that solid objects are the only real things in the universe, this is a fatal blow.
Evolution stops short of being God. Rather, it’s the tendency for the universe to unfold along steps of increasing intelligence. A huge amount of wiggle room is left for experimentation, side trips, detours, and sudden leaps. This fizzy, uncertain, yeasty reality has been with us since time began.
Spirituality will win the struggle for the future by restoring consciousness to evolution. The next step depends on us. Human beings must break away from materialism if we want to keep evolving. As a species we alone can transcend biology. In fact, the process is already well under way. We have crossed the crucial divide. Science is proof that we have taken conscious control of our own evolution, and so is spirituality. The guiding hand has let go, allowing us more and more freedom. When we accept it, our participation in the universe will take a quantum leap: we will fully become cocreators of reality. Evolution isn’t the whole of the mind of God. It is only one aspect, the one we are about to claim as our own.
A quick way to turn science into science fiction is to play with the meaning of its terms. When an astronomer says the sky is alive with stars, she doesn’t mean you can trade recipes with it. So if we say, quite catchily, that “evolution is the club that science wielded to beat religion into the dust,” and then ask if the universe is evolving, we’d better get straight what we mean by “evolution.” In common parlance evolution is “any process of formation or progressive change.” In biology (the field that ostensibly used evolution to club religion to death), it means “a process that produces change in the gene pool of a group—via mechanisms such as mutation and natural selection—that is heritable from one generation to the next.” There are two differences in these definitions. First, the scientific meaning of evolution refers to a specific change, an alteration in the genes of a group of organisms. Second, it specifies the mechanism of change. Natural selection is a process in which organisms better able to cope with their environment tend to have more offspring, which creates a new generation that on average has more traits favorable to survival and reproduction than the last.
Natural selection is what makes evolution more than just a random process. If you ignore it, you can indeed make the theory of evolution appear absurd and far-fetched. For example, Deepak writes that “creation without consciousness is like the fabled roomful of monkeys randomly striking keys on a typewriter until they wind up, millions of years later, writing the complete works of Shakespeare.” He tells about a researcher who arranged to have “a random-number generator (an updated monkey) spew out letters to see if sensible words would emerge.” Since it took countless tries to form even a simple phrase, and since human DNA is thousands of times more complex in its structure than the letters constituting Shakespeare’s works, Deepak concludes that the theory of evolution could not possibly account for the structure of our DNA. That random-typing experiment is typical of the kind of misleading arguments that arise when you ignore natural selection. Richard Dawkins addressed it in his book The Blind Watchmaker. He described a computer program he wrote, which included a mechanism analogous to natural selection. Setting it in motion, he waited to see how long it would take for the program to arrive at Shakespeare’s phrase “Methinks it is like a weasel” through random typing in a manner that mimics evolution. In the purely random model Deepak described, the chance of typing the entire phrase correctly is one in ten thousand billion billion billion billion, so a computer could generate random string after random string in this manner until the sun burns out and still never hit upon the target phrase. But by incorporating natural selection into his random-typing program, Dawkins showed that the phrase could be produced in just forty-three generations—a mere moment or two on a decent computer. That is the magnitude of the error that can arise if one is not careful about the precise definition of concepts in science!
One cannot apply the Darwinian concept of evolution to the universe as a whole, because concepts like heredity and natural selection—by which individuals less able to survive their environment die out and the gene pools of those that are more fit prevail—make no sense in that context. A cloud that changes shape from an elephant to the face of Jesus cannot be thought of as evolving according to the biological meaning of the word. Nor can a spinning cloud of interstellar dust and gas that flattens and condenses into a star and planets. Such a system can be said to be evolving in the sense of everyday language, and physicists might on occasion use the word in that sense, but its progression has nothing to do with the theory of evolution that “beat religion into the dust.” So is the universe evolving? The universe is undergoing progressive change, but that is not evolution in the sense that Darwin made his name on.
Having locked Darwin in the basement for now, we can deal with the real issue. Is the universe evolving, in the colloquial sense, toward greater complexity and intelligence? And, if so, is there evidence that the trend is the result of a guiding force such as consciousness? Is the march of the cosmos an evolution toward something higher? Have scientists overlooked the existence of meaningful progressive change in this universe that is our home?
The answer is, again, no. In later chapters we’ll see that even biological evolution does not have any “innate” drive toward intelligence and complexity, but as regards the physical universe, the opposite is in fact true: the universe, I am sorry to say, is heading toward a simple and lifeless end.
Why is that the future of the universe? As I explained earlier, the universe is expanding. That expansion will continue at an ever-increasing rate. As that happens, the matter and energy within the universe will grow ever colder and more dilute. Distant galaxies will eventually move so far away that we will no longer be able to detect them. Eventually all that will remain in our observable universe will be our local group of galaxies, bound to us, if weakly, by gravity. Astronomers living then could conclude that our galaxy, and perhaps a few neighbors, are all that there is in the universe, or ever was. They might have no way of knowing the rich history that preceded.
Sadly, those isolated worlds, too, will eventually end, for stars burn out. They can end their life cycle in different ways: they can collapse into black holes or neutron stars; they can fade like glowing embers, becoming a type of star called a white dwarf; or they can explode as supernovas. In the last case, new stars and solar systems can form from interstellar gas and debris, leading to new life, but with time supernova explosions will become rarer, and eventually cease, and the reservoir of interstellar gas will become dilute and “dry up.” When that happens the universe will consist of just the corpses of dead stars: white dwarfs, black holes (which will eventually “evaporate”), and neutron stars. None of these can sustain life, so the universe will then be utterly dead. And if physicists who believe the proton is unstable are correct, even these corpses will break up and dissipate, leaving a universe that is nothing more than a thin gas of particles within a vast void. This may seem to be a depressing picture, but as my mother told me when I was three and learned that people die—don’t worry, the death of the universe is a long time off. Perhaps as many as 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
If Deepak is right that the universe is purposefully becoming ever more complex, then the picture I just painted is wrong, and some of the most fundamental and well-tested principles of physics are also wrong. But if this picture is correct, if the development of the universe is not purposeful, and not evolving toward ever greater complexity, then how do we interpret Deepak’s story of the lone hydrogen nucleus, born in the early universe, improving its lot by becoming part of that princely metal, iron, and eventually making its way into a conscious human being? How could such an unlikely event happen? Could it really occur through random processes?
Beautiful and ordered objects arise from the purposeless laws of nature all the time, from rainbows to snowflakes. But human beings are predisposed to search for patterns and, once we’ve found them, to assume they are born of good cause. We don’t need to look to cosmology to be fooled by randomness. In The Drunkard’s Walk I wrote about the case of a mutual fund manager named William Miller. He became famous for running a fund that outperformed the Standard and Poor’s index for fifteen years straight. Thousands of mutual fund managers over several decades were all trying to accomplish that feat, but only one manager did it. Even to many who think that stock picking is of marginal value at best, it seemed that feat could have been accomplished only through a relentlessly brilliant knack for anticipating the futures of individual stocks, and investing accordingly. But the mathematics of probability yields a surprising result: if you replace those thousands of managers with gamblers who simply flip a coin once each year with the goal that it come up heads, you’ll find that the chances are very high that one of those gamblers, too, will have a streak of fifteen or more successful years. William Miller’s much-heralded feat, it turns out, could indeed have resulted from randomness alone.
The story of the “evolving” hydrogen atom is analogous: our awe in the face of the unlikeliness of a rare feat can be neutralized by knowledge of the great number of opportunities for such a feat to be accomplished. Supernovas, for example, are extremely unlikely events. If you pick a typical galaxy of, say, a hundred billion stars, you’d have to stare at it on average for an entire century before you’d see one of those stars explode. Yet if you hold your arm out and block a patch of sky with your thumbnail, there are so many galaxies in that patch that, with a sufficiently powerful telescope, you’d see ten supernovas each night. Rare events happen all the time.
In the case of the proton, there are roughly 1080 bouncing around in the observable universe, only a very tiny fraction of which end up a cog in some life-form. In fact, on Earth there are about 1042 protons in the biomass, so even if we assume that every star in the observable universe has its own life-friendly Earth—and probably few actually do—we find that for every proton that stumbles its way into a living organism, there are at least 10,000,000,000,000,000 protons stumbling around that don’t. Just as once in a blue moon a coin flipper can achieve fifteen heads in a row, on very rare occasions, without the intervention of any conscious force, so too can a proton end up, not in a star, or in interstellar space, but inside a living thing. Science doesn’t say that nature shook a beaker of stem cells, walked away, and came back to find Leonardo da Vinci. It says she sent matter into a billion trillion star systems, let it brew for 13.7 billion years, and then produced a Leonardo da Vinci. The former is indeed far-fetched; the latter is the beautiful consequence of the unguided and purposeless forces of nature.
If scientists describe the universe through laws that act without purpose, it’s not because we oppose an intentional universe; it’s because we don’t appear to live in one. It can be inspiring to believe the universe is evolving toward greater complexity and intelligence under the guidance of a universal consciousness. But for scientists, such musings are not where the investigation ends; they are where it begins. Deepak attacks science’s use of reductionism as an approach to understanding the universe, but scientists are not wed to a single method. When a phenomenon can be easily explained by reducing it to its simpler elements, scientists do that. When it cannot, when it depends on the collective interactions of a great number of components, we recognize that, too. Thus, when chemists study the properties of water, they analyze its molecular components. But when oceanographers study waves, they are not interested in dealing with the finer constituents of the water. Science has theories of water molecules, and theories of water waves, and having one does not exclude having the other. The end of an investigation comes when, regardless of an idea’s attractiveness, we are able to find evidence to prove it either right or wrong.
If the universe evolved through physical law and had no guiding purpose, no consciousness, does that negate the value of humankind, or make our lives meaningless? Is the scientific view a heartless view of life? My mother, now almost ninety, told me once of a cold day when she was about seventeen, and the war was raging in Europe. Her town in Poland was occupied by the Nazis, and on this day one of those Nazis told a few dozen of the town’s Jews, including my mother, to line up in a row and kneel in the snow. He walked the row and, every few steps, leaned down, put his gun to someone’s head, and fired. The spiritual view says that my mother’s survival was not random. It says my mother was passed over for a reason. Does this not imply that there was also a cosmic reason that those not passed over were slaughtered? Since most of the members of my parents’ families were killed during the Holocaust, to me it is this “spiritual” explanation that feels cold and heartless.
Science offers a different view: The human animal evolved to have the capacity for both good and evil, and it does plenty of both, but there is no hidden hand of universal purpose or consciousness behind what we do, only our own consciousness, our own purpose. Each of us chooses love or hate; we give and we take; we leave our own imprint on our family, our friends, and society. We don’t need an eternal and conscious universe to give our lives meaning. Our lives are as meaningful as we make them.