Chapter 17
Cosmic Evolution
Science, God and the origin of the universe
Modern cosmology tells us that the universe began very small and hot, underwent a very rapid inflation, and has been expanding and cooling ever since. This theory shakes science to its foundations because physics is steeped in assumptions of eternity (Chapters 1 and 2). In this chapter I discuss the survival of old ideas about eternity in the thinking of physicists, and explore what truly evolutionary physics might look like.
The first version of science’s creation story was proposed in 1927 by Fr. Georges Lemaitre, who realized that the universe was expanding and saw its beginning as ‘the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation’. Einstein was appalled by this idea, even though Lemaitre’s equations were based on the recent discovery of galaxies receding from our own and on Einstein’s own theory of general relativity. After the detection of the cosmic background microwave radiation in 1965, this theory became the new orthodoxy, now called the Big Bang Theory.
Until the twentieth century, science had no creation story of its own. For the founding fathers in the seventeenth century, the universe was a great machine created about 6,000 years ago in more or less its present form, which had been running mechanically ever since, with mathematical laws framed and sustained by God. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Newton certainly did not did not think of the universe as an evolving, developing organism undergoing ‘complexification of all known systems’, as the astrophysicist Eric Chaisson has put it. The universe was a God-made machine, and its origins were left to religion, though God was now recast as a machine maker.
This seventeenth-century God was very different from the God conceived of by mediaeval philosophers, the most influential of whom was Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the thirteenth century. Aquinas, following Aristotle, saw the universe as an organism, and all living beings within it as organisms. Stars, planets, the Earth and all the species of animals and plants were living beings, animated by souls. God not only created the universe in the first place, but sustained it and continuously empowered all life within it. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century overturned the old philosophy of nature, and also led to a new mechanistic theology, adopted most readily by protestant theologians.
Some protestants, most notably William Paley, used the machine metaphor as an argument for the existence of God, seeing God as the intelligent designer of the world machine, and of all the animals and plants within it. Charles Darwin rejected Paley’s conception in his theory of evolution. Nature herself brought forth new forms of life, and shaped them through natural selection.
Ironically, the conflicts between evolutionary theory and fundamentalist religion stem not so much from the Bible as from mechanistic theology. In the first chapter of the book of Genesis, God is not portrayed as an intelligent designer of animals and plants. Instead he called them forth from the Earth and from the seas as living creatures capable of self-propagation: ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, and the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth, and so it was … And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.’ (Genesis 1: 11, 20).
In the early nineteenth century, physicists like Pierre-Simon Laplace tried to get rid of any kind of creation story by assuming that the universe was eternal: there had always been the same amount of matter and energy as there is today, and the laws that governed it were changeless. Laplace and his fellow atheists regarded God as ‘an unnecessary hypothesis’, but they still needed a free-floating transcendent mind as the source of the universal mathematical order. By contrast, Deists thought that God was an intelligent creator, whose transcendent mathematical mind sustained the mechanical order of things, but who did not intervene in his creation – unlike the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Both atheists and Deists agreed that the universe worked entirely mechanically.
Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection thrust biological evolution into a mechanical universe. In the 1930s and 1940s, neo-Darwinians fitted their theory of genetic evolution into a universe that was still mechanical. Neo-Darwinism remains the orthodoxy of biology, and still takes non-evolutionary physics for granted. However, biological evolution is no longer an exception to the rest of nature: it is part of an evolutionary universe. The hypothesis of formative causation, unlike the mechanistic theory, is based on the idea that all nature is evolutionary.
In ancient creation myths, the creator not only gave order to the world but was the source of power, breath, life and energy. In the tantric philosophies of India, the ordering principle of the universe, Shiva, is in continuous interaction with Shakti, the feminine principle of active energy. In Orthodox, Catholic and most Protestant churches, God is not an undifferentiated unity, but a creative trinity. In the Holy Trinity of Father, Son (or Logos) and Holy Spirit, the primary metaphor is of God as a speaker. Spoken words cannot come into physical reality without the breath that carries them. Breath is the fundamental meaning of ‘spirit’, as in respiration and inspiration. The Father is the source of the formative principle, the logos, and also of the energy principle, the spirit, the breath of life.
The logos-like principles of form in modern physics are the mathematical laws of physics, expressed in nature through the formative influences of fields, such as gravity and electromagnetism in the matter fields of quantum theory. The spirit-like principle is energy, the basis of all activity, movement and change. From the very beginning, the universe has been inflated as if by a creative breath, blowing it up.
The evolution of the known fields of physics
Albert Einstein’s unfulfilled vision was a unified field theory: a theory that would enable the fundamental fields recognized by physicists, the gravitational, electromagnetic and quantum matter fields, to be understood in terms of a single fundamental field. The ultimate goal was to find a single set of equations that could be used to predict all the characteristics of these different kinds of fields. This vision continues to attract many theoretical physicists and is the goal towards which much contemporary theorizing is directed. If this goal were achieved – if physicists understood ‘the basic laws of the creation and subsequent evolution of the universe’1 – then some physicists believe that theoretical physics would reach its end.2
A step in the direction of a unified field theory was taken in the 1960s with the unification of the electromagnetic field and the ‘weak force’ field associated with particles such as electrons and neutrons. In the 1970s, several approaches to further unifications grew out of high-energy particle physics. One type of conceptual scheme went under the name of grand unified theories, or GUTS; another was called supersymmetry. In the words of the physicist Paul Davies:
Together these investigations point towards a compelling idea, that all nature is ultimately controlled by the activities of a single superforce. The superforce would have the power to bring the universe into being and furnish it with light, energy, matter, and structure. But the superforce would amount to more than just a creative agency. It would represent an amalgamation of matter, spacetime, and force into an integrated and harmonious framework that bestows upon the universe a hitherto unsuspected unity.3
One conjecture is that the various fields and forces arise from ten dimensions, nine of space and one of time. This is the basis of a class of theories called superstring theory. In these theories, particles are no longer treated as points, but as vibrating and rotating ‘strings.’ Some superstring theories treat these as open strings with free ends; others postulate closed strings joined into loops. Such theories involve ‘a profound generalization of the conventional field theory framework’.4 Some physicists, like Stephen Hawking, prefer eleven-dimensional extensions of superstring theory called M-theory, or rather M-theories, because there are several of them.5
These new field theories embody a conception of an original unified field, whose unified nature is manifested at ultra-high energies such as occurred very briefly at the beginning of the universe. As the universe expanded, one by one the known fields of physics separated in identity from the unified field through ‘spontaneous symmetry breaking’ (Fig. 17.1). As the fields separated out, energy gave rise to matter: ‘Step by step the particles which go to build all the matter in the universe acquired their present identities. It was also at this stage that the beginnings of galaxies were generated.’6
Figure 17.1 The evolutionary tree of the fields of nature which underlie the four known kinds of force. According to modern field theories, at the very earliest times, the fields of nature that are now seen as distinct were unified; the known fields of physics evolved through successive processes of symmetry-breaking. (After Pagels, 1985)
Although physicists discuss the evolution of the fundamental fields of nature, most remain convinced that once they have explained the origin of the fundamental fields and particles everything else is merely a matter of detail. The cosmologist Lee Smolin expressed this belief as follows:
Twelve particles and four forces are all we need to explain everything in the known world. We also understand very well the basic physics of these particles and forces. This understanding is expressed in terms of a theory that accounts for all of these particles and all of the forces except for gravity. It’s called the standard model of elementary-particle physics – or the standard model for short.7
Smolin makes the breathtaking assumption that all the phenomena of chemistry, life and mind are explicable once there is a comprehensive mathematical theory of the fundamental particles. In short, this is the old atomist or reductionist agenda in a new guise. The evolutionary spirit of Big Bang cosmology has not yet penetrated physics very deeply.
Mathematical universes
The old assumption that the universe is governed by fixed laws and fundamental constants is almost unquestioned within theoretical physics and cosmology. This assumption gives rise to a baroque elaboration of speculative and untestable theories.
According to the Cosmological Anthropic Principle (see above) the fact that the ‘laws’ and ‘constants’ of nature are just right for life to emerge shows a very strong selection effect among all the possible values of the constants. One response is to suggest that a cosmic designer fine-tuned the laws and constants of nature at the moment of the Big Bang so they were exactly right. But this appeal to an intelligent designer is contrary to the atheistic spirit of much modern science. This remote mathematical mind is also far removed from the faith of religious believers, whose God is engaged with the ongoing life of the universe. The God of cosmic fine-tuning represents a modern form of Deism, a belief in a rational God who designed the Universe and started it off and thereafter left everything to function mechanically with no need for further interventions.
Instead, many cosmologists prefer the idea that there are innumerable actually existing universes besides our own, each with different laws and constants. In these ‘multiverse’ models the fact that we occupy a universe that is just right for us is nothing but a human selection effect. This is the only universe that we can observe precisely because it is the only one suitable for our existence.8
One of the main attractions of the multiverse is that it seems to get rid of God. But it fails to do so, in spite of its wild proliferation of unobserved universes. As the philosopher Robin Collins pointed out, ‘Since within the world’s theistic traditions, God is considered infinite and infinitely creative, it makes sense that creation would reflect these attributes, and hence that physical reality might be much larger than one universe.’9 But the multiverse theory has become popular among cosmologists for theoretical reasons as well. Models of an ultra-rapid period of inflation in the earliest stages of the Big Bang suggest that if this period of inflation could generate one universe, our own, it could also generate many others, and go on generating them. This model, called eternal inflation, keeps creating ‘pocket’ universes, of which ours is merely one.10
Another theoretical reason for the popularity of the multiverse is superstring theory. This ten-dimensional theory, or its eleven-dimensional relative, M-theory, turns out to generate far too many possible solutions, which could correspond to a vast diversity of universes. In some estimates are at least 10500 possible universes, all with different values of the fundamental constants.11
Some theorists go even further. The cosmologist Max Tegmark proposes that all mathematically possible universes must exist somewhere. There is no need to limit the mathematics to superstring or M-theories.12
All these speculations assume that the laws and constants are ‘imprinted’ on each of the separate universes at the moment of their origin. But how are they remembered? How does the universe ‘know’ what laws and constants are governing it, as opposed to the different laws and constants of other universes? ‘Imprinting’ seems to imply a kind of memory, but physicists are reluctant to admit this possibility. The question is left unanswered. As the cosmologist Martin Rees put it: ‘The mechanisms that might ‘imprint’ the basic laws and constants in a new universe are obviously far beyond anything that we understand.’13
Some physicists and cosmologists are unhappy with these speculations. The idea of a vast or even infinite number of unobserved universes for which there is no evidence seems to violate any canon of scientific testability. Even tests within our own universe for some of the predictions of superstring and other related theories have not fared well. Lee Smolin summarized the situation in 2006 as follows:
It is not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of careers and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in the last 30 years in the search for signs of grand unification, supersymmetry, and higher dimensions. Despite these efforts, no evidence for any of these hypotheses has turned up. A confirmation of any of these ideas, even if it could not be taken as a direct confirmation of string [superstring] theory, would be the first indication that at least some parts of the package deal that string theory requires has taken us closer to, rather than further from reality.14
Some physicists who reject the multiverse theory pin their faith not on a designing God, but on what they call a ‘final theory’, a mathematical formula that would predict every detail of our present universe, including all the so-called constants of nature. The uniqueness of the universe would be a necessary consequence of the mathematics. But this ultimate Platonic dream remains unfulfilled; even if it were realized, there would still be the question of where this mathematical formula came from, and why it existed in the first place.
What all these theories have in common is a belief in the primacy of mathematics. Even for those who accept a multiverse theory and believe in an infinite number of unobserved universes beside our own, the question remains: what ultimately underlies all these universes and sustains them? The answer is a mathematical formula outside space and time, transcending all the universes it governs. In other words this is a new and extravagant form of Pythagoreanism or Platonism. It raises a further question: how can a mathematical formula result in a universe? As Stephen Hawking expressed it, ‘What is it that breaths fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern?’15
Is there a purpose in evolution?
Paul Davies suggested a radical alternative to these Platonic speculations. Instead of being governed by mathematical formulae outside space and time, the universe develops its laws and constants as part of the evolutionary process itself. Davies suggests it does so in accordance with a goal or purpose, which is the appearance of lives and minds, such as ours. He points out that theoretical physics has no barrier against causal influences working backwards in time. Some interpretations of quantum theory take retro-causation for granted, and even show that the minds of the observers, in the way they decide to do experiments, can have retro-causal influences on the behaviour of light or electrons. Davies goes so far as to suggest that influences from conscious minds billions of years in the future worked back on the very early stages of the universe to shape its laws and constants in such a way that these minds could later emerge, through a causal loop.16
Davies admits that some of the links in his chain of argument are weak. But he bravely shows that cosmic evolution need not be fixed in its nature and potentialities by Platonic principles outside space and time, or by laws and constants imprinted on it at the moment of the Big Bang, but could depend on organizing principles within nature itself.
The hypothesis of formative causation provides a different way of trying to understand the evolution of physics without the need for retro-causal influences from conscious minds billions of years in the future.
Formative causation and the evolution of physics
The hypothesis of formative causation cannot explain the origin of the universe itself, but instead of assuming that all the ‘laws’ and ‘constants’ were fixed at the moment of the Big Bang, it sees the regularities of nature are evolving habits, subject to natural selection. The habits that survive and become more probable are ones that are adapted to their environment and fit in with other habits. Just as natural selection enables biological adaptations to be understood without the need for an external intelligent designer, so the natural selection of physical and chemical habits enables the coherence of nature to be understood without the need for the intelligent design of ‘laws’ and ‘constants’, or without the need for countless extra universes.
Assuming that the earliest stages of the cosmos contained a chaos of evanescent vibrations, only those capable of forming stable repeatable patterns could become quantum particles, with the ability to persist through self-resonance. As the universe cooled, more complex structures such as atoms became possible, and again only stable vibratory patterns could persist and sustain themselves through self-resonance and propagate themselves by morphic resonance. In this process, the properties of the quantum particles and atoms gave rise to the ‘physical constants’ such as the charge on the electron and the masses of protons and electrons. These ‘constants’ appear to be constant because they are expressions of deep-seated habits established very early in the history of the universe. They were not determined by transcendent mathematical principles. In other words, stable forms of physical organization gave rise to the ‘physical constants’, rather than the other way round.
This hypothesis still implies an essential role for mathematics, but a much more limited one than in Platonic philosophies. Only certain patterns of vibration that repeat themselves through self-resonance are possible. For example in the orbitals of electrons, the stable orbitals contain a fixed number of wavelengths 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. The same principles govern standing waves in a stretched piano string, and give rise to a fundamental note and its harmonics. These principles are at the heart of Pythagoreanism. But they apply to the structures of quantum particles and of atoms not because they are dictated by mathematical laws outside space and time, but because they arise from vibrations resonating with themselves in standing waves.
The success of physics is greatest when dealing with simple physical systems where the number of possible patterns is small and relatively easy to predict from first mathematical principles. With the more complex forms, mathematical predictability breaks down in a combinatorial explosion (Chapter 7). Any attempt to calculate the forms of protein molecules, or cells, or organisms from the bottom up is doomed to failure because there are so many possibilities, and chance alone provides no reason for one rather than all the others being realized. This is where formative causation comes in.
Morphic resonance between planets
A natural extension of the morphic field approach is to regard entire planets as organisms with characteristic morphic fields. The fields of planets are nested within the fields of solar systems, galaxies, and galactic clusters.
Little is known about planetary systems in other parts of the universe because most are undetectable by today’s astronomical instruments. Nevertheless, mainly using indirect methods, by 2010, more than 500 planets had been detected around stars other than our sun. Most are gas giants, like Jupiter, but this may simply reflect the fact that large planets are easier to detect. The astrophysicist Alan Boss estimates that there may be 100 billion planets in our galaxy alone.17 Perhaps planets fall into distinct types, like species, associated with characteristic morphic fields. Our own planet, Gaia, may not be unique; and if there are others like it, then the field of Gaia may be influenced by morphic resonance from other Earths, and our planet may influence them in turn. The other planets in our solar system may likewise be members of ‘species’ that occur elsewhere, a Mercury species, Venus species, Saturn species, and so on. And in other solar systems there may be many other kinds or species of planet that do not occur in our own.
The possibility of other planets very similar to Earth immediately opens another vista of speculation. If such planets exist, Earth may be following a developmental pathway that is already established and stabilized by morphic resonance; and perhaps the entire process of biological evolution is organized by a well-worn chreode.
On the other hand, it is possible that Earth is the first planet on which life of our own kind has evolved; in this case there would be no established evolutionary chreode; rather, a new one is developing. If similar forms of life arose subsequently on other, similar planets, or arise in the future, their general course of evolution may be shaped by evolution here; they may follow along behind us.
When a new pattern of organization appears on Earth – say, a new kind of molecule or a new pattern of animal behaviour – if the same pattern has already existed billions of times elsewhere, the morphic fields should be well stabilized, assuming that morphic resonance does not fall off at astronomical distances. Consequently this background resonance would swamp any incremental effect of morphic resonance from the new patterns of organization here on Earth. None of the experimental tests of the hypothesis of formative causation would work, because they depend on detecting changes in the strength of morphic fields.
On the other hand, if experiments do indeed detect the effects of morphic resonance, this might mean that morphic resonance falls off over astronomical distances, or else that these new patterns of activity originated here; they were unique when they first appeared. A truly creative evolutionary process may be happening here on Earth, not a repetition of what has happened elsewhere.
What we know of the rest of the universe indicates that similar patterns of organization appear again and again throughout all space. These patterns are apparent at the highest level of organization, in galaxies and stars, and also at the lowest: the spectra of light emitted by the stars indicate that they arose by processes in atoms which behave in the same way as those in the solar system. We could, of course, suppose that this fact simply shows that they all obey changeless universal laws, as science has always assumed. Instead, we could suppose that these similarities are maintained by morphic resonance over vast distances. There may be universal morphic resonances among galaxies, stars, and atoms – and also among molecules, crystals, and forms of life.
If morphic resonance works over astronomical distances, how fast does it travel? There are at least three possibilities. Either this influence is analogous to the non-local correlations in quantum theory, which are instantaneous. Or it propagates at the speed of light. Or it propagates at its own characteristic speed, which might be greater or less than that of light. At present there seems to be no way of deciding between these possibilities.
Dark matter and dark energy
Could morphic fields help in the understanding of the largest structures in the universe, the galaxies and clusters of galaxies? Their behaviour presents a seemingly insoluble problem.
In the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astrophysicist, studied the movements of galaxies within galactic clusters and came to the conclusion that they could not be held together by normal gravitation. The galaxies were attracting each other too strongly. The force holding them together seemed to be hundreds of times greater than the visible matter within them could explain.18
Zwicky’s results were ignored for decades, but were taken seriously again when it became apparent that another anomaly arose: the orbits of stars within individual galaxies could not be explained in terms of the gravitational attraction of the matter within the galaxies. There was too much force acting upon the stars. Astronomers mapped where the gravitational influences were coming from in order to account for the movements of stars, and found that this gravitational force did not map on to the familiar disc-shaped structure of the galaxy. Instead, there was a roughly spherical distribution of invisible matter, ‘dark matter’, that stretched far beyond the fringes of the luminous galaxy, forming a vast cloud or halo extending into intergalactic space.19
Dark matter helps to explain the structures of galaxies and attractions between galaxies in clusters, but it does so at a heavy price, because nobody knows what it is. Its nature is literally obscure. Theories to explain it include vast numbers of unobserved black holes or other massive objects, or enormous quantities of undetected particles called WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles).
In the mid 1990s, the problems for cosmologists worsened dramatically. Detailed observations of supernovas in distant galaxies showed that the expansion of the universe was speeding up, contrary to expectation. Gravitation ought to be slowing it down. Something else must account for this accelerating growth. Physicists were forced to conclude that there must be an antigravity force, called ‘dark energy’, which they thought of in terms of a ‘negative pressure’ of empty space, or as an invisible field permeating the universe.
In 2011, dark energy was believed to make up about 74 per cent of the mass of the universe, and dark matter about 22 per cent. Only about 4 per cent was made up of familiar matter such as atoms, stars, galaxies, gas clouds and planets.20 Far from providing a satisfyingly complete explanation of the universe, modern physics has revealed that we understand only a small proportion of physical reality.
Morphic fields of galaxies
If the development of galaxies takes place under the influence of morphic fields, galaxies of similar kinds will resonate with each other, and show repeatable, habitual patterns of organization and behaviour. These patterns of organization are not simply gravitational. Galaxies are filled with plasma through which electric currents flow,21 associated with vast magnetic fields, stretching over thousands of light years.22
The morphic fields of galaxies shape them from their earliest stages of development, just as the morphic fields of embryos guide their development from the outset. This means that there is no need to try to explain their structure and activities in terms of gravitational and electromagnetic forces alone. Morphic fields might provide a simpler explanation for the behaviour of galaxies and galactic clusters than the hypothesis of dark matter. Consider the analogy of a flock of birds. If someone tried to understand how the flock held together in terms of gravity, he would soon find that this force was far too small to explain the birds’ mutual attractions and coordinated movements. So to solve the problem he might propose that there was a huge amount of dark matter within and around the flock that created a strong enough pull to keep the birds together. But he would be wrong.
If physics were truly evolutionary, rather than Platonic, then the evolution of the fundamental particles as well as the largest structures in the universe could be thought of in terms of formative fields and powerful habits. Some of the most intractable problems of modern physics would dissolve away.
Universal self-resonance
In nineteenth-century physics the endurance of matter and motion was taken for granted. Atoms were considered eternal; the total amount of mass and energy was always the same; and changeless mathematical laws governed everything (Chapter 2). Evolutionary cosmology not only raises the question of the origin and evolution of the fields of nature, but also the question of why anything endures, persists, or continues.
The concept of morphic fields helps to explain why patterns of organization at all levels of complexity are repeated again and again. It also suggests an explanation for the persistence of particular systems in space and time: their morphic fields are stabilized by a cumulative resonance from their own past states. In general, a system resembles itself most closely in the immediate past, hence the most specific self-resonance will be from its own most recent states.
Perhaps the persistence of moving photons of light-energy depends on self-resonance with their own past vibratory movement. This can continue indefinitely: the light reaching us from distant galaxies embodies a memory of them as they were millions of light years ago, and light is still reaching us from stars that have died. The cosmic background radiation is thought to have originated soon after the Big Bang itself and to have continued to vibrate ever since.
The universe contains structures of activity at all levels of complexity and magnitude, from subatomic particles to crystals, to trees, to solar systems and to galactic clusters. Ex hypothesi, all of these patterns of organization depend on morphic fields. The entire universe is an all-inclusive organism, with an all-inclusive field that includes, influences, and interconnects the morphic fields of all the organisms it contains. Gravitation is one of the manifestations of this universal interconnectedness.
If a universal morphic field exists, its properties and structures will be shaped by morphic resonance. It could, perhaps, be influenced by morphic resonance from other previous universes, or even from other similar universes within a multiverse. At the very least, the universal field will be subject to morphic resonance from its own past states, most specifically from the immediate past. This self-resonance could help to explain the continuity of the universe, as well as the continuity of material systems within it. Their own persistence, as we have seen, may depend on self-resonance with their own past; and the self-resonance of the universal field within which they lie and through which they are interconnected may help to sustain their positions, movements, and interactions. This hypothesis also suggests a deeper understanding of inertia, the tendency of material bodies to stay where they are or continue to move in the same way as before.
Although morphic resonance can help to explain the repetition of forms at all levels of complexity, it cannot explain their origins. We come again to the question of creativity.