The most extraordinary fact about public awareness of evolution is not that 50 percent don’t believe it but that nearly 100 percent haven’t connected it to anything of importance in their lives. The reason we believe so firmly in the physical sciences is not because they are better documented than evolution but because they are so essential to our everyday lives. We can’t build bridges, drive cars, or fly airplanes without them. In my opinion, evolutionary theory will prove just as essential to our welfare and we will wonder in retrospect how we lived in ignorance for so long.
—David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone
Evolution is a fact. Given the seemingly never-ending controversy surrounding biological science and all of its many discoveries regarding the origins of life, it’s important to be clear right from the start. In this book, there is no controversy. I would say that I believe in evolution, only I don’t think belief has anything to do with it. We don’t say we believe the world is round—we know it is. Evolution is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of evidence, painstaking work, and breakthrough science. Any other conclusion stretches the bounds of credibility and retards the advance of knowledge. Evolution is simply true.
Now that I have stated my position clearly and unequivocally, let me confuse the matter. I also think that the discovery of evolution is the greatest cultural, philosophical, and spiritual event in the last few hundred years. I think its overall influence is destined, in the long run, to be seen alongside some of our culture’s most significant inflection points—the birth of monotheism, the European Enlightenment, the industrial revolution.
Are you surprised that I used the word “spiritual”? Many, no doubt, will be. Hasn’t the theory of evolution long been the number-one enemy of spirit in most religious circles? Isn’t evolution the atheist’s answer to religious faith, the “blind watchmaker” who has slowly fashioned life out of inanimate matter without any divine help? Didn’t Darwin’s paradigm-shattering revolution of natural selection and random mutation explain away God with one momentous insight into the workings of Mother Nature?
Yes, that is certainly the story as it is often told—the story that causes consternation in the classrooms of Kansas, inflames the passions of Christians from the rust belt to the Bible Belt, and riles up Muslims from Baghdad to Birmingham. But consider this: evolution was never merely a scientific idea. For that matter, it wasn’t even Darwin’s idea. Indeed, long before Darwin ever became fascinated by Galápagos finches, the notion of evolution was already at work in the culture of the nineteenth century, quietly subverting established categories of thought and changing religion, philosophy, and science, in unexpected and remarkable ways.
Please don’t misunderstand me: I have the greatest respect for Darwin’s seminal contribution. He was the critical match that turned the sparks of a subversive idea into a world-engulfing conflagration. When the historian Will Durant was asked toward the end of his life if Marx could be considered to be the person who had the most influence on the twentieth century, he begged to differ. Darwin, he replied, was even more influential than Marx. The theory of evolution was one of the primary drivers in the undermining of religious faith, and so Darwin’s legacy loomed larger in the century’s embrace of a more secular culture.
I concur with Durant’s estimation of Darwin’s transformative role. But I do think he overlooked a significant point. In the broadest sense, Darwin and Marx were both driven by the same fundamental idea—evolution! For better or worse, evolution was the context of each of their life’s work. Marx was a student of one of the first great evolutionary philosophers, Hegel. And while Darwin, a meticulous collector of data, was focused on biology and Marx on political theory and economic history, both drank liberally from the same philosophical insight—that the given categories of life as it exists today are not static or fixed or unchanging, the “way things are,” but rather are a momentary snapshot in an ongoing developmental process. They both saw through the illusion of permanence created by the seeming solidity of the objects of their respective work—for Darwin, the living world; for Marx, economic structures and historical processes—and understood that these are part of a deeper underlying process of evolution over time. I don’t mean to endorse the ill-conceived nature of Marx’s historical materialism and its tragic human consequences. My point is simply that the evolution revolution may ultimately prove bigger than even many of our most capable thinkers have yet grasped.
The idea of evolution, the basic notion of process, change, and development over time, is affecting much more than biology. It is affecting everything, from our perceptions of politics, economics, psychology, and ecology to our understanding of the most basic constituents of reality. It is helping to give birth to new philosophies and, I will argue, is the source of a new kind of spiritual revelation. The individuals featured in this book have all been inspired by Darwin and the enduring insights of the past century’s breakthroughs in biology, genetics, and paleontology (some have even contributed to them). But they are also reaching beyond those laudable accomplishments to uncover new vistas. They are forging a rich, novel way of understanding the development of everything from the complex corridors of the human psyche to the outer reaches of the universe. They are drawn to discover the hidden structures deep within the interiors of the genome and also the hidden structures deep within the interiors of culture. Evolution, in these pages, is certainly about the birds and the bees, but it’s also about culture, consciousness, and the cosmos. On this evolutionary journey, the insights of evolutionary science will always apply, but they will have to share the spotlight with pioneering thinkers and theories from a surprising diversity of fields.
I believe that our emerging understanding of evolution in all its many shapes and sizes and dimensions is so fundamental that it would be hard to overstate its significance. Taken as a whole, it will constitute the organizing principle of a new worldview, uniquely suited for the twenty-first century and beyond. The outlines of this worldview are still being formed—spurred on by new insights and breakthroughs in the development of science, psychology, sociology, technology, philosophy, and theology. This book is about that new worldview and the people who are consciously engaged in its creation. Working across vastly different contexts and disciplines, these individuals are united not by creed or belief system but by a broadly shared evolutionary vision and a care for our collective future. They are scientists and futurists, sociologists and psychologists, priests and politicians, philosophers and theologians. They share no common title. I call them Evolutionaries.
CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING
The great geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky once declared, “Nothing makes sense in biology except in light of evolution.” In fact, before the discovery of evolution, biology was largely just a way of classifying species. Evolution was the unifying idea that placed it on the academic map as a coherent and legitimate science, and it became the context for so much of our understanding of the forms and features of life. Dobzhansky’s insight, I am convinced, is applicable to a much broader sphere than biology. Arguably, it is true that nothing in human culture makes sense except in light of evolution. This book will make the case that our emerging understanding of evolution is so transformative that eventually every important area of human life will fall under its revelatory spell. It will change the way we think about life, culture, consciousness, even thinking itself—for the better. In fact, it already is.
Among the first to recognize the scale and significance of evolutionary thinking was the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis?” he wrote in the early twentieth century. “It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”
If this quote seems to succumb to a kind of triumphalism, let me also try to balance the record by noting that we are still in the beginning phase of building a coherent worldview that incorporates the transformative insights of an evolutionary perspective. The people and ideas represented in this book do not capture anything in its final form. Like scholars in a young field of study, Evolutionaries have plenty of material to build on from those thinkers that have forged the way forward in the last two centuries. Yet things have not progressed far enough that ideas have become fixed, ways of thinking established, or agreements settled. We are somewhere between the initial visions of what’s possible and established, accepted cultural truths. We are still in the Wild West phase of development, between the earliest pioneers exploring virgin land and homesteaders looking to settle down and build a new life on secured territory. As the many truths, insights, cultural perspectives, and attitudes that make up this new worldview eventually work themselves into the mainstream, they will have greater and greater effects on all aspects of human culture.
“A philosophy of this kind will not be made in a day,” wrote the pioneering evolutionary philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri Bergson in his classic 1907 book Creative Evolution. “Unlike the philosophical systems properly so called, each of which was the individual work of a man of genius and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or left, it will only be built by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, competing, correcting, and improving one another.”
EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT EVOLUTION MAY BE WRONG (OR INCOMPLETE)
When Darwin spoke about evolution, he meant descent with modification, the idea that all organisms are descended from a common ancestor. His theory of natural selection was a theory about the mechanisms of that modification. Over time, with the discovery of genetics as the agent of heredity, Darwin’s theory became neo-Darwinism, or what is sometimes called the “modern synthesis”—the idea that evolution is driven by a combination of natural selection and random mutation. The basic proposition is that random mutation at the level of the gene produces novel forms and features in an organism. Those few features that are adaptive increase the “fitness” of an organism, allowing it to better survive and pass on its genes, thereby transferring those same features to the next generation. Those mutations that are nonadaptive or nonadvantageous, on the other hand, will naturally disappear because those organisms will be more likely to die out, making them less likely to pass on their genes to the next generation. The combination, therefore, of random mutation and differential selection became a powerful and inseparable scientific duo, playing a central role in the fledgling field of evolutionary biology. This new scientific consensus began to influence public perception, and eventually the term “evolution” and the scientific idea of natural selection and random mutation became almost synonymous.
But within the scientific community itself, such a close conflation is more myth than fact. Science is rarely so settled. Indeed, in recent decades, there have been new and interesting ideas making their way to the forefront of the field that raise important questions about our understanding of the history of life. Esteemed scientist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman, in his book Reinventing the Sacred, recently wrote, “There is considerable doubt . . . about the power and sufficiency of natural selection as the sole motor of evolution.” His novel evolutionary ideas, along with those of the late biologist Lynn Margulis and others, have extended the science of evolution in significant ways, and I will further explore their work in Part I of this book. Moreover, the new science of epigenetics is revealing the human genome to be much more malleable, creative, and adaptive than we ever imagined. For example, the idea of “horizontal gene transfer” among bacteria—a process in which organisms share parts of their genetic material with other organisms around them—has recently gained some ground among scientists. The neo-Darwinian synthesis remains foundational, but the scientific story of our evolving universe is unfolding much faster than the public’s capacity to fully digest the changes.
However, the evolutionary worldview I envision is not built by science alone. And so I intend to pursue a broader inquiry into the influence of evolutionary thinking on all aspects of culture. Again, this book is first and foremost about evolution as a powerful and significant idea rather than evolution as a science. The difference is critical. Evolution as an idea transcends the more limited, gene-centered perspective that has come to dominate public discourse. As the book unfolds, I will explore things like the evolution of technology, the evolution of cooperation, the evolution of consciousness, the evolution of worldviews, the evolution of information, the evolution of values, and the evolution of spirituality and religion. I believe these are legitimate and important ways to speak about evolution, and indeed critical if we are to adequately understand our life and our world. But that doesn’t mean they are first and foremost scientific approaches, or that they will always be consonant with current biology. These ideas are stretching and pushing the very limits of our understanding of this important concept.
Before we continue, I want to acknowledge that there are those who are fearful of evolution being used as a context through which to interpret human life and culture. The most common opposition is the one voiced by religious communities who associate evolutionary thinking purely with atheism and materialism. I have addressed these concerns already and I will continue to do so in the pages that follow. The other common objection is reputational. Like a high school kid who gets a bad reputation for hanging with the wrong crowd, evolution is rejected for its dubious historical associations. Unfortunately, it is true that evolution has been used in the past as a tool to justify the most disreputable social philosophies, such as Social Darwinism in the nineteenth century and the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Some may despair that I have already identified Marx as being inspired by evolution. After all, look at the historical horrors wrought by Marxism! Others manage to draw a direct line from the evolutionary thinking of Hegel and Darwin to Hitler’s fascism. Evolutionary speculations outside of the science labs are dangerous, they would tell us, leading to delusional notions like “some cultures are superior to others” or “there is an inevitable direction to human history.” Put those two conclusions together, so the thinking goes, and you have the perfect petri dish for all kinds of fascistic and totalitarian abuse. Certainly, we can see abundant evidence for that in the twentieth century.
In the wrong hands, all powerful ideas have the potential for abuse—the more powerful, the more dangerous they can be. Evolution is without a doubt a potent idea, but I hope to show that many of the problems and abuses referred to above are no more intrinsic to evolutionary thinking than fanaticism is to religious thinking or nihilism to scientific thinking. The failures above are failures of immaturity—the regrettable and often reprehensible growing pains of a culture coming to terms with an idea as explosive as evolution.
Despite these concerns, the promise inherent in an evolutionary worldview is truly tantalizing. In some respects, this promise is obvious and unavoidable; in others, it is subtle and hardly recognized. It is obvious in the sense that new insights into the science of evolution will inevitably help to revolutionize technology in ways we barely foresee. As science probes deeper into the mysteries of the last fourteen billion years and begins to more accurately understand the way in which nature crafts her handiwork, the technologies that result will surely be game-changers.
However, this is not really a book about the progress of science and technology; it is a book about the progress of meaning. And so much of human meaning today comes from the way in which we interpret science, the conclusions we draw about the scientifically revealed universe. Therefore, part of what I will be exploring is how our interpretation of evolutionary science is evolving in ways that will have a significant effect on how we make meaning in the coming decades and centuries.
Breakthroughs in our understanding of cultural evolution also promise rewarding insights. While some remain unconvinced that evolutionary ideas can even be applied at a cultural level, new researchers, social scientists, and philosophers are working to deconstruct the very nature of human culture and the relationship between individual and social development. They are seeking the principles and patterns that inform the trajectory of cultural evolution. Such information could provide a more sophisticated understanding of how and why societies progress (or regress) in the long parade of history. Imagine for a moment if we were able to identify some of the key leverage points that help facilitate and encourage positive cultural development. In a world in which multiple civilizations seem to be in a time of great flux, understanding such principles would surely be a great boon to the overall health of our ever-smaller global village.
At the subtler end of the spectrum is the potential of an evolutionary worldview to serve as a new cosmology, one that provides an authentic meeting point between science and spirit. Evolution, in this respect, has a unique capacity to be a source of spiritual fulfillment, of authentic meaning and purpose, renewing our faith in the possibilities of the future and inspiring us to reach for those higher potentials, individually and collectively. This is perhaps the most profound promise of an evolutionary worldview, with implications as far-reaching as human aspiration itself.
EVOLUTION: A BROADER VIEW
Today, our postmodern world is restless, suspicious of big ideas yet hungry for meaning—searching for a new worldview, one that can guide us through the turbulent waters of a new millennium. Evolution is the latest contender to step into that cultural vacuum. And even some mainstream thinkers are beginning to notice. “While we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives,” writes New York Times columnist David Brooks, “in fact, a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around. Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere.” Brooks is certainly right when he points to the tremendous influence that evolutionary ideas are having on our culture more than one hundred and fifty years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Even when I turn on the television to watch the NBA playoffs, I see the latest Gatorade commercial: “If you want a revolution, the only solution: evolve.” I wonder if Darwin would be happy or bemused if he were still alive to hear such words accompanying images of great athletes scoring, sweating, celebrating, and hydrating.
It must be noted that Brooks is referring to an evolutionary perspective that is primarily defined by attempts to apply Darwinian ideas to social sciences and cultural studies. Indeed, it seems like a book comes out every week that features a scholar applying evolutionary thinking to some new field of study. Why do we have religious feelings? Why was Lady Macbeth so hungry for power? Is the impulse to go to war bred into our DNA? Why do we like snazzy technology? Such questions are examined by exploring how the origins of these attitudes and proclivities can be traced to the conditions of life in our evolutionary past.
For example, according to this perspective, we can analyze the ins and outs of sex, love, marriage, and all the cultural extras that go along with them, according to how they each played their role in the evolutionary drama of our ancestors. We get jealous because infidelity threatens our need to pass on our genes to the next generation. Women are attracted to powerful men because once upon a time in the tundra, their survival depended on aligning themselves and their children with a strong provider and protector. Men struggle with monogamy because they are genetically predisposed to sow their seed far and wide. And on it goes. According to this way of thinking, we tend to overindulge in fatty, sugary, and salty foods because those desires best served our survival and reproductive needs thousands of years ago. We band together in close-knit groups because the tight bonds of such relationships would have conferred survival advantages to our Stone Age predecessors. And the latest popular assertion is that humans have an evolutionary predilection for religiosity. Faith may be part of our genetic and cultural programming, goes this argument, because of how shared beliefs and rituals facilitate the creation of highly loyal social groups that helped us survive the slings and arrows of life among the Flintstones.
Such research is certainly illuminating, and much of it credible. Unfortunately, proponents of exciting new fields sometimes overreach, and evolutionary psychology, as this approach is often called, is no exception. Just as the field of Freudian psychology, in its heyday, tended to explain everything under the sun in terms of the Oedipal complex and childhood experiences, suddenly it’s in vogue to explain all of human behavior by appealing to Darwinian processes. In the more extreme expressions of this trend, evolution has come to represent the de-facto reference point for seemingly all human motives—as if religion, morality, altruism, love, evil, marriage, infidelity, music, poetry, and so on can all be traced solely to the industrious activity of selfish genes. While there are certainly more nuanced versions of this story, it has, regrettably, caused many to adopt a suspicious attitude toward evolutionary thinking on the grounds that it carries with it a dangerous reductionism that circumscribes rather than expands our insight into human life and culture.
The problem here, however, is not evolution; it is a specific and narrow definition of the term. If we’re going to use evolution as a context in which to examine human nature and human culture, I suggest that we are much better off expanding the way we think about this important idea. Evolution, as an idea, transcends biology. It is better thought of as a broad set of principles and patterns that generate novelty, change, and development over time. In some sense, this book is an exploration of those principles and patterns, as well as an examination of how they are illuminating and transforming different fields of human endeavor. Exclusively using Darwinian mechanisms as the interpretive lens for understanding the evolution of consciousness (psychology) and culture (sociology) may be insightful and interesting. But like using a magnifying glass to look at the Mona Lisa, sooner or later we are going to realize that there is a lot more to the big picture.
Nevertheless, the seed is sown, and the momentum for a larger evolutionary embrace of life is growing as new generations of thinkers consider the physical, biological, and cultural story of evolution as a new metanarrative. And it’s easy to understand why. Evolution is at its heart an inquiry into who and what we are as a species. Simply put, it is our origin story. Evolution tells us where we’ve come from; it explains the historical roots and context of our very existence. Origin stories or creation myths have formed the basis of cultural worldviews and religions throughout history. They are one of the most universal expressions of our search for meaning. In African tribal legends, we find sky serpents whose coils formed hills and valleys and brought forth stars and planets, and white giants who vomited out the sun, moon, stars, and all living things. China’s ancient Tao Te Ching describes the “nameless void” that gave rise to existence, split into yin and yang, and became Mother of the Ten Thousand Things. Norse mythology tells us that fire and ice met in a “yawning gap” and gave birth to life. In these and countless other tales, from the bizarre to the profound, humanity’s creation myths attempt to answer what scholar Robert Godwin poetically calls “the perennial questions that have puzzled human beings ever since they became capable of puzzlement: how did we come to exist, what is the point of existing, and is there any escape from what appears to be an absurdly brief slice of existence between two dark slabs of eternity?”
By exploring where we’ve come from, what we’re made of, and the factors that have molded and shaped us, evolutionary thinking has much to say about what makes us human, about what potentials and possibilities inform not only our brains and biology but also our consciousness and creative capacities. Are we mindless mechanisms, created accidentally by a meaningless material process? Are we special children of God, created in his image for a temporary sojourn in his earthly garden? Or are we something else? That “something else” is as yet undefined, but it is what I will be exploring in the pages that follow. There is a significant diversity among the emerging views I will be presenting, but that in itself is one of those principles of how evolution works—in nature, in culture, and even in the development of knowledge. As cosmologist Brian Swimme puts it, “You’ll have an explosion of animal forms at the birth of a species—an explosion of diversity, this incredible chaotic explosion of possibility—and then the universe sort of winnows out the more exotic shapes and enfolds them into forms that are more enduring. Diversity is a great way in which the universe explores its future.” As I explore the diversity of evolutionary perspectives that are vying for prominence in this new worldview, I hope I am contributing to that exploration—of the universe’s future, and our own.