1 ECCO was a spinoff of the Center Leo Apostel (see chapter 2), the research institute focused on the evolution and emergence of cultural worldviews. This Brussels university has become something of a center for new thinking in evolutionary dynamics, systems theory, and the new complexity sciences, a tradition that goes all the way back to one of its more famous scholars, Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, who showed how certain systems or what he called “dissipative structures” can exhibit a tendency to spontaneously self-organize to higher levels of organization.

  2 It might seem that the evolution of political arrangements defies this trend. After all, we noted in the previous chapter that they have, in some respects, proceeded toward more unity, not more diversity. But on close examination we see that greater integration and increasing complexity can easily go hand in hand. Autonomous political entities may be fewer, as we noted, but their underlying subcomponents are immensely more complex.

  3 This term is a translation from the German Wesengrund, and was used by both Husserl and Heidegger prior to Tillich. Tillich took the term from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.

  4 Technically, there may be certain types of consciousness that don’t evolve. Most theorists suggest that pure primordial consciousness or the “ground of being” doesn’t itself evolve. But every other object or structure found in the internal cosmos would be subject to the evolutionary process.

  5 Though I refer here primarily to Hegel’s work, I do so holding to scholar Fred Turner’s observation that “ideas live less in the minds of individuals than in the interactions of communities.” Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others formed the community of German idealists out of which these ideas sprang and though Hegel may have been the best synthesizer of the bunch, it is probably wrong to give undue credit to any one person.

  6 For more on Haeckel, see The Tragic Sense of Life by Robert Richards (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  7 Richard Dawkins defined the term as a “unit of cultural transmission” in The Selfish Gene (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192.

  8 Wilber has reclaimed the Greek term Kosmos because, as he explains, “the original meaning of Kosmos was the patterned nature or process of all domains of existence, from matter to math to theos, and not merely the physical universe.” (See Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, in the Collected Works volume 6, page 45.) In other words, he wants the definition of Kosmos to include the internal as well as the external universe.

  9 This could also help explain why laws in physics are inherently more determinative than laws in biology, which is a science that provides for much more predictability than general principles in the social sciences, etc. It is also worth noting that Maslow pointed out in his book Motivation and Personality that individuals at higher stages of development have more free will than others. This would support the idea presented here and the idea that free will continues to evolve even within human cultural evolution.