Chapter 9

What Do Those Fossil Gaps Prove?

Everybody knows about the fossil gaps—the apparent lack of geological evidence of transitions between distinct higher forms of life. Contrary to the expectations of a great number of biologists since Darwin, the fossil gaps have not yet filled up with thousands upon thousands of predicted intermediate life forms. The vast majority of the gaps are real. So what do they signify? What do they prove?

The neo-Darwinists—and the majority of biologists fall into this category, still insist that the gaps mean nothing. They are sold on a promissory evolutionism—the idea that eventually the gaps will fill up.

The most vocal public opponents of this view are followers of the Biblical Genesis creation or creationism, the idea that God created life literally as it says in Genesis, all at once. According to them, there is no evolution. Fossils mean nothing significant and the fossil gaps are the living (or should we say “dead”?) proof of that.

According to creationism, there cannot be any intermediates whatsoever. So today, biologists tout the few intermediates that are found to fill in the fossil data as evidence for evolution as well as for Darwinism. This is highly misleading. It is true that the existence of intermediates between two fossil lineages (as between reptiles and birds) refutes creationism and proves evolutionism, but evolutionism is not synonymous with Darwinism, which would require thousands upon thousands of such intermediates to verify it.

A slightly less radical group than either of the two above subscribes to a philosophy called intelligent design. Like creationists, they (at least most of them) believe (unnecessarily) that the fossil gaps mean no evolution ever. According to them, species do not change much and an intelligent designer created them all at once. Implicitly, the intelligent designer is assumed to be God, but no reference is made to the Bible.

It is easy to criticize the creationists and the intelligent design theorists. The Biblical account of the creation of the world and the life in it, if taken literally, is just plain wrong; the geological and radioactive dating evidence for the age of the earth is conclusive against it. The intelligent design proponents are also wrong in part. There is much evidence that species evolve from older species: we have too much common with monkeys, they have too much in common with mammals lower on the evolutionary ladder, and so forth. If you look at the early development of the embryo of a “higher” species, you will find that the stages resemble those of the development of lower creatures of an earlier era. The Darwinists got this one right! Later species evolve from earlier ancestors; there is no doubt about it.

But neo-Darwinists are dead wrong when they say that there is no meaning and purpose to evolution, that there is no play of intelligence in the design of life and how it evolves, and that there are no “lower” and “higher” creatures. Their insistence that evolution is a material process of blind chance and survival necessity is myopic. As Abraham Maslow said, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Neo-Darwinists are materialists; the hammer they have is the idea that everything is made of matter via upward causation, and that all life is the play of genes that carry hereditary information. There is no scope in such a philosophy to talk about meaning or purpose or intelligent design, except for any value that these ideas may have for survival of a species.

Let's take the case of meaning. For meaning to evolve as an adaptive survival value, matter must be able to process meaning. But in grammar, there is a category difference between syntax and meaning. The symbol processing by matter in the form of a computer is akin to processing syntax; so the idea of meaning processing by matter has always been a little suspect (Searle, 1980, 1994). And recent research (Penrose, 1989) has confirmed that computers and thus matter can never process meaning. (See Chapter 12.) How can nature select a quality from matter that matter cannot process?

This shortcoming, to explain intelligent qualities as evolutionary adaptation, becomes even more obvious when we ask, “How does our ability to discover scientific laws arise?” Such a discovery has survival value; that is not the question here. The question is “Can the knowledge of scientific laws be coded in matter somehow? Can they arise from the random motion of matter somehow?” Attempts to prove that this is the case have had no success whatsoever.

The question of how consciousness can evolve in matter is another case in point. “Can matter codify consciousness?” is the hard question. How can interacting objects ever produce a subject-object split awareness? If material interactions can never produce consciousness, to think of consciousness as an adaptive evolved value does not make any sense.

So intelligent design aficionados have got this one right—or have they?

Not quite. The conclusive scientific proof that there is purpose in God's creation is that there is a biological arrow of time. By looking at the fossil data, you can tell the direction of time—that time has gone from the past, from when the fossil data show only relatively simple life forms, to later times, from when they show more and more complexity of life forms. And only the most recent fossil data show us humans, the most complex of living creatures. So the purpose of evolution is to create complexity, and time's biological arrow moves from simplicity to complexity of living organisms.

All creationists and most intelligent design theorists deny evolution, and they justify their denial because an evolution in complexity is against the entropy arrow of time and is seemingly in violation of the entropy law—entropy always increases. These theorists, by denying evolution, are overlooking one of the best pieces of evidence for the existence of God. Of course, evolutionists miss the purpose and design in life.

So what do the fossil gaps signify? Apart from the slow tempo of evolution that Darwin suggested and neo-Darwinists agree on, there is also a fast tempo of evolution—so fast that there isn't time for the formation of fossils. This fast tempo is what produces the fossil gaps. In other words, evolution is like punctuated prose; there are abrupt and discontinuous punctuation marks within the otherwise continuous prose (Eldredge and Gould, 1972). The proponents of this idea are called punctuationists.

A class of biologists called developmental biologists (or organismic theorists who emphasize the role of the organism) has offered de facto support for this idea of a second tempo. This is because they believe that significant evolution at the macro level must involve the development of a novel organ. But a complex organ cannot evolve piece by piece. A little piece of an eye is useless for seeing. So such “macroevolution” must be discontinuous, requiring a fast tempo. But because there has never been any plausible suggestion of a mechanism for a fast tempo, the idea has not found general acceptance in the biological community. Scientists don't like living in an explanatory vacuum. If no theory of fast tempo is available, let's proclaim that Darwin's covers all evolution and explains away the fossil gaps!

There are biologists who point out another important piece of data that also suggests discontinuity. Before all great creative evolutionary epochs of macroevolution, there always occurs some kind of catastrophe leading to a massive extinction of biological species (Ager, 1981). These catastrophes clear up the biological landscape for a new evolution of species. And since the new evolved species have no need to compete for survival, another pet idea of Darwinism goes down the drain.

So here's what I intuit. Fossil data are some of the best proof of the existence of God and of God's creativity. Creativity occurs through quantum leaps, taking no time. I submit that here is the new mechanism for the fast tempo of evolution! I will show below that this theory integrates the thinking of everyone: of the intelligent design theorists, because the design arrived at via creativity is obviously intelligent and also because the designer is God; and of the developmental biologists, because indeed it takes creativity, one giant leap to “see” all the right possibilities for making a new organ and then making it. This theory satisfies the catastrophe thinkers, because death is part of creativity, destruction before creation. The destruction is also needed to open ground for the play of the new creations. The appropriate metaphor for God in this aspect of creativity is what Hindus would call Siva's dance (Figure 9-1). God in this special aspect of Siva, the king of the dancers, is first a destroyer and then a creator. The idea of creative evolution should even please the few open-minded Darwinists: Darwin's slow mechanism is the conditioned limit of God's creative downward causation—call it situational creativity.

FIGURE 9-1. Siva's dance—destruction before creation.

UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSING

The biggest problem of biological macroevolution is that such a giant step requires so many changes at the genetic level, so many mutations or variations! For example, the development of an eye from scratch requires literally thousands and thousands of new genes. But each gene mutation or variation, according to neo-Darwinism, is selected individually. The likelihood of its being individually beneficial (contributing some adaptive macro-level function to the organism) is quite small; in fact, gene variations are often just the opposite—downright harmful to the survival of the organism. So chances are high that individual selection would eliminate most gene variations. Considering this, it is easy to see that it would have to take a very long time—much longer than the geological time scale over which evolution occurs—to accumulate the many beneficial gene variations necessary for macroevolution.

However, this situation of biological macroevolution is saved by the idea of unconscious processing, part and parcel of the creative process. It is conscious processing that takes too much time, being guided by trial and error. But in quantum thinking, the gene variations are quantum possibilities anyway (Elsasser, 1981). Biologists using classical thinking assume that the quantum gene variations would collapse without any help from consciousness. But we know better: quantum collapse requires consciousness and its power of downward causation. And any gene that is not expressed in creating a macroscopic trait remains uncollapsed, even from one generation to the next. Consciousness does not collapse the unexpressed genetic variations—quantum possibilities all—until a whole configuration of them will make a new organ when expressed. Consciousness waits for the right moment, as we do in our own creative process.

What is crucial is that consciousness has the vital blueprint of the organ unconsciously giving it a rough guideline of what to process. When there is a match, a match that Rupert Sheldrake calls morphic resonance, a quantum leap takes place all at once and consciousness makes a physical (organ) representation of the morphogenetic blueprint expressing all the necessary uncollapsed genes at once (Goswami, 1997a, 1997b). There is no fossil record for intermediate stages, because there are no intermediate stages!

In this way you see clearly that the fossil gaps are evidence of biological creativity, of quantum leaps in evolution. And as such they provide us with the most spectacular evidence for God (as quantum consciousness) and God's creativity.

How about the occasional intermediate that shows up in nature? The morphogenetic blueprints are vital representations of archetypal functions. Sometimes in the journey of creative discovery, two archetypes become involved and their physical representations simultaneously give rise to an intermediate.

One question still needs to be addressed. Human creativity consists of the individual creatively taking a quantum leap to God (quantum consciousness), making the creative quantum collapse possible. Clearly, the individual has a role to play. What is the role of the individual organism in biological creativity? We will return to this question later.

SYNCHRONICITY

There is now consensus that the dinosaur extinction some 65 million years ago was brought about by a large meteor shower. This made room for the very important explosive evolution of the mammals, who were already on the scene but not as major players, which eventually led to the evolution of the human being.

So did the evolution of humans on earth occur through pure meaningless chance? If that is so, then how can we uphold the purposiveness of biological evolution, when clearly God's purposiveness needed the help of a chance event?

There is no contradiction with the scenario of biological creativity and purposiveness. Chance contingencies are often very important in the history of a creative act, except that we see them as components of synchronistic events.

Take, for example, the case of Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin. While Fleming was on vacation, a mycologist on the floor below his lab happened to isolate a strong strain of the penicillin mold that became airborne and found its way to a petri dish upstairs in Fleming's lab. An unusual cold spell for that time of the year helped the mold spores to grow while preventing bacterial growth. And then the temperature rose and bacteria immediately grew everywhere except in the petri dish. So a quantum leap occurred in Fleming's mind in the form of the question: What is in the petri dish that prevents bacteria from growing?

Similarly, an event outside in the material arena (the meteor shower) and one inside the biological arena (the act of biological creativity) occurred simultaneously, and meaning and purpose emerged in the evolution of many new mammals. This kind of coincidence of events is what the psychologist Carl Jung (1971) calls synchronicity.

In fact, as catastrophe theorists point out, these events of synchronicity are important because they open up the evolutionary landscape for the newly created macro organism. They also create a sense of survival urgency for evolution in the organisms that survive the catastrophe. A sudden change of environment requires an equally sudden evolutionary jump. There is no time for waiting for slow Darwinian evolution to bring adaptation.

THE ROLE OF THE ORGANISM

Now we can see the role of the organism in biological creativity that is responsible for the fast tempo of biological evolution. In neo-Darwinism, the organism has no role to play. This is bitterly disputed by organismic biologists, who maintain that the development of the organism, in fact the organism itself, must have a role to play.

In the above scenario showing how the quantum leap takes place, it is clear that development (of an organ) does play a crucial role. We can enunciate the role of the organism as well when we take account of the catastrophes that precede quantum evolution.

All creative people know that human creativity requires a motivation and an urgent demand, usually a burning question. From the point of view of the whole quantum consciousness or God, there is the motivation of purposive evolution (also, see later). When an environmental catastrophe occurs, this evolutionary motivation percolates through to the individual organisms in a hurry because it coincides with survival necessity.

I further suspect that biological organisms have nonlocal connections through the vital arena, the morphogenetic fields. Because of the dominance of the mind, this vital nonlocality is somewhat obscure for us humans. But the rest of the biological world, being nonmental or at least largely so, is not limited that way. So this nonlocal connection through the vital body acts as a species consciousness (a generalized species ego). I think it is this species consciousness that intends evolution in response to rapid environmental changes, and quantum consciousness/God responds to this evolutionary call.

CONNECTION WITH NEO-DARWINISM

In between the quantum leaps of quantum evolution, what happens? It is easy to see that the slow Darwinian mechanism is now enough to cope with slow environmental changes. Gradually, this builds up a gene pool of already environmentally adapted genes for the entire species, a pool that now can meet the adaptive needs of periodic environmental changes without having to develop new genes.

Note also that the creative leaps express a whole range of new genes. In some combination, these genes make specific organs. But a gene can be used and is used in more than one combination and in more than one context. In this way, you can easily see that the creative leaps of evolution also contribute to the cumulative buildup of the gene pool.

In human creativity, the ability to adapt to societal needs by inventing new combinations of old ideas is called situational creativity, as opposed to the fundamental creativity of discovery (Goswami, 1999). Thus the Darwinian mode of evolution can be seen as a special case of creative evolution involving situational creativity.

A good example is the famous case of the peppered moth around London, Birmingham, and other large industrial centers that underwent a change in color in the mid-19^th century from speckled brown to black because of air pollution. The “black gene” was already in the gene pool.

The individual moths that were born with this “black gene” had an advantage over the speckled brown moths because their color camouflaged them better against trees blackened by soot. Hence, more of the black moths survived predator birds and fewer of the speckled brown moths did. So, rapidly, natural selection wiped out many of the formerly predominant speckled brown moths and favored the black moths.

Finally, as Stephen Gould and others (intelligent design theorists included) have noted, the fossil data also show vast epochs of virtual stasis in the evolutionary history of all species. This corresponds to the limit of conditioned existence when no creativity, situational or fundamental, was needed.

THE BIOLOGICAL ARROW OF TIME AND THE FUTURE OF EVOLUTION

As mentioned above, there is a clear biological arrow of time: biological organisms evolve from simplicity to complexity. What defines “complexity” should also be clear from our account of creative evolution. Complexity consists of new organs, which are either more sophisticated expressions of previously expressed biological functions or expressions for entirely new functions previously not represented in the physical.

Neo-Darwinism cannot explain an arrow of time. Both of its steps, production of chance variation and natural selection, are no more likely to favor complexity over simplicity than simplicity over complexity. Chance is, of course, another word for random: so chance variation can lead to simpler designs or more complex designs. Natural selection also, in the final reckoning, selects only according to fecundity, the capacity for producing more offspring, not complexity.

In contrast, creative evolution has a built-in propensity for producing new organs of complexity. It solves the problem of the biological arrow of time: evolution proceeds in the direction of making more and more sophisticated expressions of more and more biological functions.

We can still ask: What is the ultimate objective of evolution? Where is evolution going? Or an even more basic question: If evolution is God's creativity, what is God's purpose in evolution? Why create more sophisticated organisms? What is the meaning of this wonder-filled evolving biological universe?

As you know, Christian theologians are usually antievolution. But one glaring exception to this general rule is a Jesuit priest of the 20th century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1961). He not only supported evolution, but he also saw clearly that evolution rises against the march of entropy, to create increasing complexity and order by first creating the biosphere and then creating the noosphere—the sphere of the evolving mind. Then he proposed that the future of evolution lies in the Omega point: a time when godliness becomes dominant. It is easy to see the parallel to the idea of the Second Coming here.

One common thing in the history of creative ideas is that often a truly creative idea nonlocally expresses through more than one visionary. A second visionary to intuit this way even before Teilhard de Chardin was the Hindu mystic-philosopher Sri Aurobindo (1996) in the first half of the 20th century.

Hinduism is quite different from Christianity in its perspective on evolution. The Hindu puranas (texts narrating the history of the universe) in the mythology of the avataras—descent of God in biological form—can already be seen as depicting evolution. According to the puranas, God's first avatara is in the form of a great fish. The second is a great tortoise. The third is a boar. The fourth is a man-lion. The fifth is a dwarf man. The sixth through the ninth avataras depict an evolution of the human being, from the primitive highly emotional mind to Buddha, a man of mental maturity and emotional equanimity. The tenth avatara is yet to come, again alluding to something like the Christian Second Coming (except that for Hindus it is the Tenth Coming).

Of course, on the other side of Hinduism is a general dismissal of the manifest world as illusory and ephemeral, not worthy of one's creative attention, evolving or not. Only the realization of the permanent, of the unchanging reality underneath the manifestation of consciousness as the ground of being, is the highest goal human life can be dedicated to achieving.

So Aurobindo's philosophy was developed with this background. However, what is novel is that Aurobindo integrated the two forces of Indian thinking with the idea of first involution and then evolution of consciousness. Ken Wilber (1981) has put further flesh on the skeleton of Aurobindo's work, and so have I (Goswami, 2001). Figure 9-2 shows the evolved version.

FIGURE 9-2. Involution and evolution of consciousness.

Why involution? Aurobindo anticipated the necessity to see evolution in terms of a science within consciousness, beginning with consciousness as nondual, the ground of being. All possibilities are there—past, present, and future. So there is no time: it is a truly eternal unchanging reality—nothing happens. To make something happen, there have to be limitations. Hence, involution is the imposition of a progressive series of limitations.

The game is play, purposive play, a play of expression, expression of all that is possible to express, “to make the unconscious conscious.” When you play a game, the first thing you do is to make a set of rules. A game without rules is chaos. God makes man in His own image. As above, so below.

The first involution is to create a limitation of rules, contexts, and archetypes for all the movements and changes to come. This includes the rules of quantum physics; from here on out all permitted possibilities are quantum possibilities. So we now have the supramental world of quantum possibilities.

The next stage of involution is the further limitation of meaningfulness. Of all the quantum possibilities, let's restrict to those that are meaningful. This gives us the mental world of meaning.

The next level of involution created the possibilities of the vital world, the set of morphogenetic fields that help create the particular biological forms that get to play. The subtle cannot collapse of itself, because collapse requires tangled-hierarchical quantum measurement devices that come about only when micro makes up macro.

The final limitation of the involution is therefore the physical, which is made in a special design of micro and macro to first help collapse the quantum possibilities into actualities and then to make software representation of what has gone before: the subtle vital, mental, and supramental worlds.

Evolution begins with the creation of the first living cell. It goes through various stages, more or less, with directionality of more complexity and more order, with the purpose of making more and more sophisticated representations of more and more biological functions, whose blueprints are the morphogenetic fields. This is the evolution of life.

Eventually, the brain's neocortex evolves in biological beings and now the mind can be mapped. Evolution becomes the evolution of the representations of mental meaning. The evolutionary story here is told in the scientific research of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. And undoubtedly, there are signs of evolution, actual stages, in all these disciplines.

So what is the future of evolution in this picture? You can see it very clearly now. Mental evolution culminates with what Jung called individuation: when human beings learn en masse to mentally represent and integrate in their behavior all the supramental archetypes. This includes the integration of feelings and meanings, paying attention to the archetypal contexts of both. Aurobindo called this step the Overmind. The next step is unimaginably glorious. It consists of developing the capacity to represent in our bodies all the possibilities of the supramental archetypes of mental thinking: love, beauty, justice, good, and all that which we call godliness. Aurobindo poetically called this stage the Supermind, bringing down the divine to the earth level.

NOW WHAT?

How do we go from where we are now to there, to explore the supramental in manifestation? We can only speculate. I have indulged in such speculation elsewhere (Goswami, 2001, 2004). In this book I want to take a different track; I want to examine what we can do right now to facilitate the course of evolution. In short, I am proposing quantum activism. You have already glimpsed the idea in Part One. The idea is further developed in Part Five.

The evolution of mental representation making is stalled. Evidence is everywhere: in politics, in economics, in business, in education, and in religion, the furthering of meaning processing is no longer taking place. There is perhaps more than one reason for this temporary setback. But two reasons stand out. One is that we have not integrated feelings into our processing of meaning. The other reason is the current materialist paradigm, which is a killer of meaning.

So it is imperative for all thinking people to examine the theory and data presented here for rediscovering God and spirituality in our paradigms and in our lives. I hope it is convincing already. But there is much more to come when we discuss the evidence for the subtle bodies and for more quantum signatures in that context. This is the subject of Parts Three and Four.

One more comment in closing. The evolutionary outlook of God's creation solves one problem that many people worry about—why a good God allows evil to happen. Evolution begins with quite primitive and imperfect representations of godliness, but it gets better. So initially what takes place in the creation appears imperfect, even evil, but in time, as the representations get better, good more and more prevails over evil. A prejudice-free look at the evolution of humanity through history will readily show you the truth of this statement. Over time, we have gotten less violent and more loving. Sure, we have to go further, but the existence of today's imperfections should not dishearten anyone from accepting God.