part0015

The growth of scientific knowledge is only a special case of the growth of knowledge; and the growth of knowledge is a very special aspect of evolution. By evolution, I mean, here, not just the evolution of species or biological evolution, but the whole process of development which started with the Big Bang and has led, at the present moment, to the conditions of the universe in which we find ourselves. Little reflection is needed to understand that one can interpret the whole of evolution – physical, biological, cultural and scientific – as a growth of knowledge. There is always information transfer. Every evolutionary change – be it the emergence or figuration of the heavy elements, be it the emergence of life, be it the growth of cultures or be it the growth of scientific knowledge – always consists in the growth of a system which grows by encoding information about its environment, i.e. the rest of the world or, in some cases, those parts of the world which are reasonably close to it. Every evolutionary change can be seen as a picture or coded statement about a system’s environment. This picture is not a portrait or a mirror-image. Indeed, it bears no likeness to the object pictured at all, not even a structural likeness. It is more like a hologram than like a photograph, except that a hologram, when projected by the correct method, reproduces faithfully the scene it records. An evolutionary adaptation is like a hologram in that it does not contain any structural similarities with the scene recorded; it is unlike a hologram in that the information it contains rarely leads to a complete reconstruction of the scene it encodes. There is a lot of information about the air in every bird and in the gene pool of every bird species. But no amount of decoding will tell us everything about air.

For this reason, Popper’s well-known epigram that evolution from the amoeba to Einstein is always the same has to be amended in two ways. First, it has to be amended because we have seen that from the amoeba to Einstein the path of evolution is by no means continuous, and that the discontinuities we have tracked down and described are not accidental interruptions but important detours. The negative sociology of knowledge tells us that the evolution of conscious knowledge is a rarity which is likely to take place only under very special social conditions when social bonding is either very loose or cognitively very neutral. Second, it has to be amended because when we see evolution as a growth of knowledge, it applies to pre-biotic and thus pre-amoebic times. The most general principle is that the environment always constrains the changes which can and will take place. The changes, read backwards, contain information about the environment. The presence of hydrogen, under certain conditions will yield helium; the presence and interaction of the two, given certain conditions of temperature and of the presence of the forces of nature (gravity, electro-magnetism, etc.), will yield other elements.

Throughout this kind of evolution there is at work a principle which we can call the ‘Tropic Principle’. The environment always forces the changes which take place to take a certain ‘turn’ so that, given this ‘turn’, we can treat the changes as coded information about the environment. We can read back, from the presence and the nature of the heavier elements, what the universe must have been like before the heavier elements existed. From our galaxy or our solar system, we can trace back the conditions of the universe before our galaxy or our solar system existed. The ‘Tropic Principle’ is always at work and states that in all evolutionary change, there is a certain type of constraint between the environment and the results of evolution: the environment obliges changes to take a certain turn.

However, the nature of that constraint changes. We must distinguish: (1) pre-biotic evolution; (2) biotic or biological evolution; (3) cultural evolution; and (4) cognitive evolution or the evolution of knowledge.

In pre-biotic evolution, we get almost perfect constraint. Only such systems as are compatible with the environment evolve or are proposed. There is no ‘trial-and-error’ effort and one cannot say that the heavier elements have learnt to evolve. There are no conjectures and therefore no refutations. Only such proposals as are compatible with that kind of environment are made. The forces of nature together with the initial conditions do not make ‘mistakes’ which have to be weeded out; neither do they offer a variety of alternatives, some of which are more adaptive than others. This means that in this kind of evolution we get changes; but the changes are always right and there is no opportunity for selection. After every change, the resulting condition is therefore also a fairly accurate ‘picture’ or set of information about the earlier state or the environment.

With the advent of life, the pattern of change changes. We now get natural selection. Every time there is change, a variety of alternatives are proposed. These varieties compete with each other and those which are more adapted survive and the others die out, either immediately or after a span of time. The environment, here, selects, and the selection is always in favour of those organisms which encode more accurate information about the environment and against those organisms which encode less or no accurate information about the environment. The question of the accuracy of the information encoded in surviving organisms is extremely important. Most organisms which survive are underdetermined by their environment. They are only just compatible with it. This means that they contain accurate information about the environment, but that it is not accurate enough to enable an observer to reconstruct a complete picture of that environment from that information. Bearing in mind Uexkiill’s descriptions of the different worlds in which different organisms are living, 1 it is clear that each organism only encodes a sketchy description of its own environment. From its own point of view, it is accurate enough. One can think of progress in codification if one ranks those organisms which can infer information only about their own environment very low; and organisms which can derive information about the environment of other organisms very high. For example, Homo sapiens encodes information about man’s environment as well as about the environment of the frog, but not the other way round.

With the emergence of consciousness, we get a further change in the nature of change. Conscious organisms can create falsehoods: they can lie and delude and deceive both themselves and others. Using deceits and falsehoods, they can construct artificial species which we call human societies and thus surround themselves with a wall of protection against the ravages of the environment. Hence, natural selection can be made to cease. In this way, cultures are created. The most elementary strategy used in the development of cultures is the artificial protection of knowledge from criticism. Certain pieces of knowledge, though obviously not all knowledge, are set aside and protected from critical appraisal. The thunder is identified with a god, the shadow of a man with his soul, and twins, with cucumbers. Rational doubts are nipped in the bud by the mere absence of competing alternative proposals. Such protected knowledge can be used as a social bond. People who subscribe to it are members of a society; people who don’t are outside that society. In this way, a lot of knowledge is syphoned off and used for noncognitive purposes – that is, as a catechism. But such syphoning-off, though initially obviously counter-adaptive, is an oblique advantage. A society so constituted is larger than a group of people bonded by nothing but the web of kinship and is therefore capable of effective division of labour and co-operation. Thus, we get the astonishing spectacle of societies which cherish a mountain of false knowledge and which thrive for a long time not in spite of that false knowledge, but because of it. These cultures, though they are not coded information about the environment, have nevertheless enormous adaptive value. The information they encode is information about co-operation and division of labour as well as information about their relations, co-operative or hostile, with other societies, rather than information about their natural environment. Every culture makes division of labour and organised co-operation possible. This is an enormous advantage both for defence and for the provision of food and shelter. For this reason, cultures can survive by employing an oblique strategy, where natural selection – given the poverty of knowledge they harbour because of epistemic protectionism – would have made short shrift of them. The question of compatibility with the environment becomes relatively and, at times, totally irrelevant because division of labour and co-operation are more than ample substitutes for the environmental pressures which would have acted upon the gene pool of the population of any culture. In this sense, we now find a sort of evolutionary mercantilism or artificial protectionism. Mercantilism is the socio-economic strategy which made it possible for whole societies to provide for themselves the necessary food, shelter and defence in environments which were partially, or sometimes wholly, unsuitable. They achieved this by artificially protecting certain industries against competition so that they thrived where an open-market situation would have wiped them out. We can detect the same effects in cultural evolution and therefore speak of evolutionary mercantilism. As a result, the information encoded in any culture is only minimally relevant to the environment in which that culture manages to survive. That information is, for the most part, actually inaccurate and misleading. Culture employs an oblique strategy and, through consciousness, manages to invent institutions and habits which make up for the lack of accurate information.

The ‘Tropic Principle’ is nevertheless at work. One can learn very little about any environment by looking at any culture which exists in it. But one can learn a lot about the environment when one is looking at the consciousness 滱d the nervous systems which make that mendacious culture possible. The information about the environment comes from the consciousness and the nervous systems of the people who have created the cultures.

Finally, under certain conditions of socio-cultural development, it becomes sometimes possible to release human knowledge from the job it had to be put to in cultural evolution. In cultural evolution, human knowledge was used to a large extent to act as a method of social bonding. Knowledge was in bondage to the need to create social bonds. In order to do the job of social bonding, it had to be protected from confrontation with the environment. As a social bond, false knowledge is as effective as, if not more effective than, correct knowledge. Cultures are built around entire systems of false knowledge, artificially protected from rational criticism. Such false knowledge can cover almost every field – from medicine to the belief in an immortal soul; from the belief that certain incantations will produce rain and certain rituals assure the fertility of the soil. They are doubly effective in promoting social behaviour because, not being exposed to rational criticism, they enshrine emotionally comforting and solidarity-producing attitudes. When it is possible – and there have been times and places where this has happened – to organise societies by methods other than grouping people around shared knowledge or shared beliefs, knowledge can be exposed to criticism and natural (i.e. critical) selection. Under these conditions, truthful knowledge can emerge in free and unlimited competition with false knowledge, and the accuracy and universality of such scientific knowledge can become very great. Such knowledge not only encodes information about the environment, but actually states information about the environment in a very explicit manner – by making use of concepts and language which can be written down so that it becomes an objective artefact or an artificial object.

In this last stage of evolution, the ‘Tropic Principle’ is at work because when knowledge is treated as knowledge, rational criticism will be completely selective and eliminate knowledge which is not compatible with the environment. The growth of knowledge will be subject to the ‘Tropic Principle’ by the mere fact of open competition. However, the process is here very complex, for the environment consists not only of nature, but also of cultures. Knowledge will be of both nature and cultures and also of those special cultures which have released knowledge from bondage to themselves and can, relying on different and non-cognitive bonds, afford free competition between theories and conjectures.

In the whole argument of the preceding chapter, evolution has been the key concept. We have argued that knowledge is historical, i.e. that it is an evolution. We have tried to show that the conditions which make the growth of science possible are governed by evolution and that the prevalence of societies in which science cannot grow is an evolutionary phenomenon. Similarly, we have seen that the most fertile philosophy of science is a philosophy which understands science as part of evolution and that the most intelligible way of writing the history of science is by using the evolutionary philosophy of science and an Evolutionary Epistemology which distinguishes between mutation and selection, or between the chance and the anti-chance factors. Again, by contrast, we have seen that all those philosophies of science which are non-evolutionary or anti-evolutionary in that they are based on the paradigm of closed systems which replace one another in a random, and non-evolutionary fashion, cannot do justice to the phenomenon of science.

Evolution as the key concept is quite specific. It does not mean, generally, that everything is in flux or that everything changes. It asserts very much more than that. It even asserts more than the minimum theory of progress. The conventional theory of progress asserts too much. It holds that we know of a goal and that we can align everything that has happened as a progression towards that goal. In this form, the theory of progress is clearly untenable, for we can have no knowledge of the goal which will withstand criticism. The minimum theory, however, asserts something perfectly plausible. It states that all change has been change away from a primitive condition. Evolution says a little bit more than this. It says that everything evolves in the sense that there is an incessant selection process of incessant mutations or inventions. This means that in evolutionary change some changes are favoured against others. At certain times, such selection is determined because no varieties or alternatives are proposed – as in the pre-biotic state. Nevertheless, on this level we can see that there are good reasons why the changes which have occurred were much more likely than those which have not occurred. At other times, selection is controlled by the environment in a ruthless and relentless manner – as when the environment selects for retention those changes which are more compatible with it than other changes. In this case, we speak of natural selection. We speak of artificial selection where conscious organisms invent oblique strategies for survival which, if left to natural selection, would be eliminated. In making division of labour and co-operation possible, these strategies compensate for any lack of ‘fit’ to the stark environment. And finally, in some rare cases, there is a conscious or critical selection (at a very fast rate) of theories which are directly informative about the environment. As a consequence, we detect evolution wherever we detect changes which were more likely than those which did not occur and wherever we find progressive selection of some changes and the elimination of others. Generally put, we speak of evolution wherever we see that the relation between change and the passage of time is not random. In every case of evolution, we have a response favoured or selected at the expense of another response. The selection is done by an independent system – a system which, however, may well be subject to evolutionary changes itself. The important point is that there is incessant interaction. On one side, there are the changes; and, on the other, the system which selects some changes rather than others. In the case of pre-biotic evolution, there is, of course, no real sclcction bccause all changes which take place are automatically correct changes which ‘fit’: the changes, here, are merely favoured.

Evolution has taken place whenever the result of change is compatible with the environment. The emphasis is on ‘compatibility’ and the leading question we have to ask is how this compatibility is achieved. When heavy atoms and molecules evolve, they are automatically compatible with the surrounding system of other atoms and molecules. Otherwise they would not have evolved. Incompatible changes do not take place in this part of the universe because all possible changes result from certain forces such as electro-magnetism, gravity, the weak force and the strong force, and alternatives which might have to compete for survival do not emerge. Hence, there is no selection because there is nothing to be selected from. One might say that this part of the universe is automatically self-selecting. When living organisms appear and divide or reproduce, the opportunity for error and novelty appears and, hence, there is a possibility of the appearance of systems which are incompatible with the environment or less compatible than others. Thus, there starts competition and, of course, selection. Some changes, unlike in that other part of the universe, are more compatible with the environment than others. The selection which now takes place is completely natural and both ruthless and relentless.

When organisms become conscious, they can shield themselves from the effects of the environment because they can build up artificial strategies to assure the survival of societies which are not very compatible with the environment. As a result of such artificial selection, ‘non-fit’ societies survive and flourish. They can become fit through the deviousness of their institutions. Division of labour, co-operation and solidarity resulting from adherence to a belief no matter how absurd, can hide multitudes of cognitive sins. There is selection; but the selection is not natural.

Next, we reach critical selection where conscious organisms propose a variety of consciously formulated theories about the environment and discard those which are not compatible with the environment. Here, the process of selection becomes again quite ruthless, though the consequences of making mistakes have to be evaluated critically rather than naturally. Here, it is very rare for the consequences of a failure in criticism to be experienced directly and fatally. The social system in which criticism can flourish is only cognitively neutral. Being a social system, it will nevertheless provide a lot of co-operative support and help protect its members from the fatal consequences of at least some errors.

There is no need to tell again the story of how Hutton discovered uniformitarianism and opposed it to catastrophism; of how Lyell developed a proper methodology of change by pointing out that there are general laws which operate in the past as well as in the present, and how one can determine the nature of change by watching the way in which these laws transform initial conditions into something else; and of how Darwin absorbed the general methodology of Lyell during his long journey around the world. In modern times, this methodology was formally stated by Karl Popper in his account of ‘causal explanation’. Popper argued as far back as 1934 (in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery ) that a proper causal explanation consists in the deduction of a prognosis from an initial condition and a general law. This model of causal explanation has since been christened the ‘Covering Law Model of Explanation’, presumably because the two particular events – the initial condition and the prognosis – are brought into a causal relationship with each other by the help of the general law which could be said to ‘cover’ the two particular events which are, by themselves and without the general law, not connected with one another. The heart of this matter, from Hutton to Popper, is that one explains past effects in terms of presently acting causes. The real meaning of uniformitarianism is that one uses the same set of general laws to explain past events. If one does, one is a uniformitarian – even if and when such explanations result in the explanations of catastrophes rather than in explanations of uniformly gradual change. The debate about whether gradualism, saltationism or uniformism is true, is a debate about the substance of changes, not about their mode of operation and our method of describing them. When catastrophes or saltations occur, they are still capable of a uniformitarian explanation. Uniformitarianism can explain much more than mere gradual change. 2

Unfortunately, in their enthusiastic espousal of evolution, most thinkers have made at least one of two fatal mistakes. Some believed that evolution by natural selection operates not only in biological evolution, but also in the history of mankind. An almost unbroken succession of thinkers – from Herbert Spencer to Konrad Lorenz and C.H. Waddington – has thus helped to bring the idea of evolution into disrepute. On the other side, there were thinkers who paid no attention to uniformitarianism and assumed, instead, that evolution is governed by a developmental law which determines human history. Here, we get a succession from Comte, Maine, and Morgan to Tylor and Frazer. These men were all historicists. 3

Given these fundamental errors, it is not surprising that in our own century there has been a reaction against evolution outside the narrow field of biology. The discovery of anti-evolutionary functionalism and its explanatory potential in both anthropology and sociology helped to confirm the notion that all human societies are ‘equidistant from God’. Such confirmation was aided by moral scruples about evolution. For if human societies evolve, some are more primitive than others; in our age of anti-colonialism, this implication of evolutionary thinking became ethically suspect. Finally, Karl Popper’s famous attack on all forms of historicism did not help because it included a casual reference to Darwinism as a species of historicism. 4 For this reason, C.H. Waddington 5 believed that Popper had attacked Darwinism and rushed to a defence of historicism. Matters were not improved when Popper described Darwinism as a ‘metaphysical’ research programme and thus provoked Michael Ruse into a running battle against Popperian thought. 6 In reality, Popper himself has eventually formally withdrawn his earlier classification of Darwinism as historicism. 7 The matter can be put right if one recalls that Darwin’s uniformitarian method, which explains past effects in terms of present causes, is impeccably Popperian and bears no likeness to any form of historicism. Moreover, Manfred Eigen has shown that ‘fitness’ can be understood without recourse to survival, so that the notion ‘survival of the fittest’ loses its tautological and therefore its metaphysical character. 8 Finally, the so-called Central Dogma of molecular biology has helped to make evolution by natural selection rather than by the inheritance of acquired characteristics a falsifiable, and therefore a non-metaphysical, theory. 9

The great obstacle to the reception of evolutionism is the difficulty one experiences in extending the principle of natural selection beyond the realm of biology. Darwin’s theory of evolution was a theory about the origin of species and the descent of man. Darwin himself thought this evolution to be, at one end, continuous with the history of the earth and was, unfortunately, won over to see it as continuous at the other end by Herbert Spencer. But unlike Lyell, Spencer was not a good guide. Lyell’s history of the earth was based on the sound methodology that one explains past effects in terms of presently acting causes; it made no reference to natural selection. Herbert Spencer, on the other side, made no reference to the sound methodology but transferred, instead, the principle of natural selection and the survival of the fittest to the history of societies and cultures. In order to disengage Darwin from Spencer, one has to find the common denominator in pre-biological, biological and cultural evolution.

This common denominator is the notion that, in all cases, the relationship between changes and the passage of time is not random and that therefore we can understand changes as a function of time. In other words, it is no accident that some events are earlier and others later. Apart from this common characteristic, biological and cultural evolution, though not pre-biological evolution, have a set of events in common. There is (1) mutation; 10 (2) the maintenance of invariance and (3) speciation. But in biological evolution, these three events are brought about by circumstances different from those by which they are brought about in cultural evolution. In culture, there are different mechanisms for mutation, invariance and speciation.

Finally, there is a difference between biological and cultural evolution. In biological evolution, changes and natural selection concern the individual organism but need the speciation of adaptive individuals to produce a large gene pool. If hybridisation occurs, especially if it occurs too rapidly, an adaptive mutation will be dispersed and lost too soon. 1 1

In cultural evolution, the individual, though a biological organism, is almost completely subtracted from the process of biological evolution. The changes concern both individuals and collections of individuals (i.e. societies or cultures). It is therefore important to establish that in cultural evolution the unit to focus upon is not the species, but the pseudo-species. 12 If one thinks of cultural evolution and takes the biological species as the significant unit, one will be lost. Biologically, Homo sapiens is indeed a species. But culturally, Homo sapiens is a genus and the separate species are the innumerable societies formed by men. Indeed, human societies show very remarkable similarities to animal and plant species. To start with, human societies until quite recent times have erected artificial barriers to prohibit marriage between different societies so that, on the cultural level, the infertility which results from the mating of members of different biological species is reproduced artificially. Next, just as any species considers all other species as potential food, so any human society has always felt free to prey upon all other human societies. And finally, inside every human society great care is taken to protect and preserve the purity of the cultural strain by the nurture of a specific language, specific religion, specific rituals and traditions. This is the analogue of the biological fact that members of every species always reproduce like offspring. For these reasons, there is a real analogy between biological species and human societies, which one might consider therefore as quasi-species.

Evolution is subject to evolution. However it evolves, the relation between changes and the passage of time is not random. But the mechanisms which bring about this non-randomness of change and the units which evolved, are themselves evolving. Biologists have had no great difficulty in understanding that biological evolution has been subject to evolution, for there has been an evolution of sexual reproduction and of death. But beyond this, biologists themselves have shown the same resistance as everybody else. Biologists who have turned their attention to the history of man and culture, though admitting that education here takes the place of genetic inheritance, have proceeded as if natural selection and the survival of the fittest are still applicable. One only has to look at the last chapters of Konrad Lorenz’s Behind the Mirror or at his famous The Seven Deadly Sins of Mankind (both of 1973) to see what happens when a biologist tries to extend evolution beyond biology. Lest it be thought that Lorenz is an exception, one will find the same shortcoming in Waddington’s The Ethical Animal (1960) and in Bernard Rensch’s Biophilosophy (1968). All in all, there is widespread resistance to the idea that evolution itself evolves.

When we speak of the evolution of evolution, we mean that there are, from time to time, thresholds beyond which, for certain parts of the universe, the mechanisms of evolution change. The general relation between the passage of time and change holds: it is not random. 13 But the absence of randomness results from different mechanisms in different parts of the universe.

On the pre-biotic or material level, evolution results quite simply from the operation of the forces of nature. One can reconstruct the evolution of the material universe with the help of the laws of gravity, electro-magnetism, the weak force, the strong force, the laws of thermodynamics, and so forth. One can reconstruct the evolution of the earth with the help of those laws and use, in addition, the laws about viscosity, friction, the action of water on rocks, and so forth.

With the emergence of life, the mechanisms of evolution change radically and drastically. We now get a completely different scenario. We get constant innovation through faults of reproduction. We get natural selection by the environment of those reproductions of living cells which are a better adaptation to the environment than others. Moreover, we get the formation of species because there has to be a gene pool which keeps to itself, lest the successfully adapted genes get too easily hybridised and diffused before they can reproduce at a fast rate among themselves. We get a maintenance of invariance through genetic copying to ensure that a given gene pool which is adapted survives.

With the emergence of consciousness we cross yet another threshold. It is impossible to locate this new threshold in time. We know that it is not to be linked to the appearance of Homo sapiens and we surmise that it might not be linked to any biological change at all, but that it might have taken place during the life-span of any of man’s direct ancestors. We can, however, connect it to the emergence of consciousness and the formation of societies by ritual and myth or shared belief – of societies, in short, which were less volatile than troupes of non-human primates. Non-human primates are quite ‘social’. But their sociability is a sociability which comes from the primary bond between mother and babies, and the pair bonds between male and female. These bonds are not lasting and rarely last for more than the life-time of the members. Moreover, they do not provide sufficient basis for organised division of labour and co-operation beyond the immediate tasks in hand, such as rearing the young, getting food and keeping watch for predators. The emergence of human or hominid societies represents a change in quality. These new societies emerge because they use an invention of a ritual or a myth or both in order to form a lasting social bond. People marry inside that bond and the next generation grows up inside that bond. Educated in the prevalent ritual and myth, the next generation continues to nurture that particular bond instead of drifting away. The mechanisms of evolution now change. Mutation is brought about by inventions. Invariance is maintained by education; and societies are formed because people group themselves around new inventions. Co-operation brings natural selection to a standstill. Mutations (i.e. inventions) are not adaptive because they fit the environment, but because they enable people to form a society. They are selected not by their degree of adaptiveness to nature and do not compete with other adaptive mutations, but because they perform a social function. In so far as they can be used as a social bond, they make division of labour and co-operation possible within a given circle. They are selected, usually naturally, for maintenance or retention because of this function, but not because they are a fit to the environment. We thus get the seemingly strange phenomenon that inventions which are not a fit to nature are nevertheless passed on by education. In fact, since ‘fitting nature’ is not the criterion of selection in this case, there is a sort of inverse proportion between being selected and being non-fitting. The more absurd an invention, the more likely its usefulness as a social bond. This seeming paradox is not hard to explain. The formation of society is supposed to be a brake on natural selection. It is a strategy to frustrate the survival of the fittest and to replace that survival by the survival of a group whose members co-operate with each other. Hence, the bond most likely to succeed in this purpose is the sort of knowledge which is the most absurd or the most false and which would, if held by a non-social organism, lead to almost certain distinction.

After this threshold is passed, we still recognise the operation of evolution. There is mutation, maintenance of invariance and, after the inventions, ‘speciation’ or formation of exclusive societies. However, knowledge is held in bondage and cannot grow because it must, for society’s sake, be protected against criticism. Where knowledge is used as a social bond, people cannot afford the luxury of exposing it to criticism, lest their co-operation be endangered or cease.

In the modern world and only in very recent times and some parts of the world, men have crossed yet another threshold. They have managed to establish societies which are not dependent on the preservation of the purity of any given cultural strain and which are bonded by criteria other than the adherence to any particular belief system and its rituals. In the earlier primitive societies, membership had been defined by adherence to the catechism and everybody who was not explicitly included was excluded. In the modern, nonprimitive societies, definition works the other way round. People who are excluded are specifically defined and all people who are not so defined are deemed to be included, regardless of the catechism, if any, to which they subscribe. Such a principle of residual inclusion of anybody no matter what his race, religion, belief or habits are, is a fairly neutral principle of inclusion. In those societies, evolution has taken yet a new turn. It has made the development of rational knowledge about the natural world and about human societies possible by subjecting any theory which is invented to radical, no-holds-barred, criticism. When, and only when, this threshold is crossed and where it is crossed, can we find the growth of knowledge. Its evolution is governed by critical discussion and its possibility depends on the presence of neutral social structures which are not damaged or eroded by the criticism of theories because the theories offered for radical criticism are released from the job which they used to perform on the pre-scientific level. Under these conditions of radical criticism, only very few theories are selected for retention; among those which are selected, there is further competition so that those which are more universal are selected at the expense of those which are less universal. Invariance is maintained over shortish periods by the practice of what Kuhn has called ‘normal science’. This invariance depends on learning and teaching and on the presence of scientific institutions. The place of mutation is taken by inventions. Inventions are proposed in a manner which is random relative to the process of selection; but not altogether random relative to the cultural context in which the inventions are made. All this has been discussed more fully in earlier chapters. Here, it is merely recapitulated in order to show where rational criticism and scientific practice belong in the evolution of evolution .

The evolution of evolution is not a historicist idea. It is not claimed that there are stages in evolutionary mechanisms and that these stages have to take place in obedience to a developmental law which says that they have to take place. The stages can be distinguished because of the thresholds; and the thresholds, in turn, are crossed or brought about by the changes in the nature of the subject-matter. The emergence of living cells, the emergence of human societies, and the emergence of human societies sufficiently neutrally bonded to allow critical discussion of knowledge – these are the three most obvious thresholds. At each threshold, the mechanisms of evolution change in response to the changes in the evolving subject-matter. The resulting series – the evolution of evolution – can be explained, and its existence is not the result of a developmental law.

In every phase, we use the theory of evolution. For all phases, the theory that evolution has evolved can be used as a theory in terms of which particular events can be chosen and linked to each other to make a continuing series. This series, as was explained in chapter 2 , is not identical with the time series. The theory of evolution and the theory of the evolution of evolution is a meta-history. It is a theory with the help of which one can compose historical series. The theory itself, however, cannot be inferred from watching history. It helps us to construct one historia rerum gestarum ; but its truth cannot be established inductively from the study of res gestae .

The term ‘ meta-history’ is comparatively new. It was first used by Hayden White, in 1973, in order to describe the non-historical ingredients in every historical narrative. In his Metahistory , Hayden White brought out the meta-historical elements in some major nineteenth-century historians. The idea that there always must be a meta-history in every history is, however, not new. Gibbon referred to it explicitly in his autobiography when he explained how his own experience in the Hampshire Grenadiers had proved useful for an understanding of Roman military institutions. F.M. Cornford laid bare, in 1907, the meta-historical elements in Thucydides which he had culled from Aeschylus and the tradition of Greek tragedy. In my The Shapes of Time , I have explained in general terms why it is impossible to compose a historical narrative or any historical sequence without a meta-history. One of the most detailed meta-histories we have is the biological theory of evolution, which enables biologists to narrate the actual history of biological organisms from the hyper-cycle and the primeval ‘soup’ to the emergence of Homo sapiens . There are, to be sure, many debates about the details of this meta-history. But as meta-histories go, we have here more consensus and more structured detail than in the meta-history for cultures. Above, I have attempted a brief sketch of a meta-history for narrating the evolution of cultures by indicating the changes we have to make to the meta-history of biological evolution if we want to use an evolutionary meta-history for the evolution of cultures. But this meta-history is still a wide-open field and will probably remain one for many years to come. When we come to the most recent part of the evolution of evolution – to the evolution of science – I have argued in chapter 6 that Popper’s philosophy of science provides very sure ground for a meta-history of the history of science and the growth of knowledge.

Like our forebears in the plant and higher animal kingdoms, we humans store correct knowledge. In our pre-human forebears, this knowledge is stored in the gene pools of populations and is species-specific, so that each species has a different knowledge of the reality it lives in because each species is a temporarily successful adaptation to a specific environment. In human beings, this knowledge is partly stored in the gene pools and partly held collectively in the memories and traditions of each society. This knowledge is not the private opinions or convictions of individuals. Human beings know what to eat, what foods are poisonous, how to conceive babies, how to deliver them, how to rear them and how to hunt or gather food. Without such correct knowledge, handed down from generation to generation, human beings could not survive.

With the enlargement of the brain and the development of the neo-cortex, this knowledge became consciously held knowledge. There is an enormous evolutionary advantage in consciously held knowledge. When knowledge is held consciously, every individual can make experiments in thought and try out very quickly a large variety of possibilities and conjectures in order to decide which might be the most suitable conjecture. In such a situation, the process of selection ceases to be natural and becomes critical. The evolutionary advantage of conscious selection consists in the fact that there is a great saving in time, energy and risks. When knowledge is held consciously, its holders can learn by trial and error. They do-not have to wait for their genes to be outnumbered and bred out of existence by genes which store more suitable knowledge. Organisms which hold knowledge consciously can provide an enormously fast turnover of knowledge. The extraordinary fact, however, is that this clearly advantageous energy-, time- and risk-saving strategy was rarely followed and, in most cases, after the acquisition of basic information about food and elementary conduct of life, not followed. Why?

There is no disagreement in regard to the presence of consciousness. But there is enormous disagreement as to the manner of its evolution. This disagreement is in part due to the vast areas of doubt surrounding the precise nature of the phenomenon of consciousness. There are philosophers who maintain that consciousness is simply another word for the operations of the nervous system. Other philosophers believe that consciousness is a mental state which interacts with the nervous system without being reducible to it. Some hold this interaction to be of a causal nature and that it consists therefore in a one-to-one relationship; others maintain that there is no one-to-one correspondence between mind and nervous system but that the two interact only tangentially and intermittently. The debate and the disagreements are very old and there is no sign that our recent enormous advances in neurology and neuro-science have shed any clear light on the matter. The disagreements are profound and the evidence inconclusive. One of the basic difficulties in the debate about consciousness is the difficulty – ought we to say impossibility? – of registering consciousness as anything other than consciousness or awareness. We can be aware of being aware and we can be aware of being aware of something that is happening at the same time. But we cannot be aware of something that is happening at the same time unless we are aware of that something. None of this proves that awareness does not have non-awareness correlates; but it does mean that by the nature of the case we cannot detect them if they are there. There is a lot to be said for the view that the problem is incapable of solution because we are really trying to use the human brain to make conjectures about itself. The hope of making a successful conjecture might be doomed because no system can completely refer to itself or understand itself in its own terms. By the nature of the case, there is no outside system, no external reference. As a result of this gap in our knowledge, it has been impossible to form a viable theory as to how consciousness emerged – for we do not really know what sort of emergence we are looking for.

However this may be and however mysterious the emergence of consciousness is, we have made some progress in determining the time at which it emerged. With the help of palaeontology and archaeology it has been possible to find clear evidence of the presence of consciousness in certain places and at certain times. The most striking evidence comes from the history of primitive flints. Many primates are known to use sticks and stones to find or hunt food. Early hominids followed this practice and there is no reason for assuming that one has to be conscious to make use of such simple tools. Unlike non-human primates, hominids appear to have chosen special stones for hunting. Obviously, some stones are more efficient than others. Trial and error will tell and one does not have to be conscious to learn to select the most suitable stones. Suitably shaped stones can be found lying around and when they are not lying around, other stones can be shaped to imitate those which have been found most useful. This, again, is an imitative process and does not require consciousness. The change must have come when hominids created stones rather than imitated existing shapes. The first flints made as artefacts rather than as imitations of existing stones can only have been created by a conscious mind, for to make an artefact one has to have an ‘image’ as to what one wants to make. One has to think before the actual making. To have an image presupposes some kind of language or linguistically formed and defined imagery. If one makes a copy, one follows precedent. This can be done without consciousness. But if one makes a new shape, a shape which is not a copy and which does not already exist, one has to be able to imagine. We know of teardrop hand-axes of the Acheulean industry which were made about one and a half million years ago and which are associated with Homo erectus . This Homo erectus , therefore, must have been capable or possessed some kind of consciousness. 14 The whole question is, of course, bedevilled by lack of further evidence. Conscious hominids may have evolved and then, because of lack of population density and absence of competition, subsided again.

Other important evidence comes from the discovery of symbols. When Neanderthal man performed ritual burials, he was doing something which is neither biologically nor economically necessary. He was doing something which, in terms of mere survival at that time, was superfluous. An unceremonial disposal of the body would have done equally well and possibly better because it would not have consumed rare commodities and precious time. Hence, we must conclude that when he performed a ritual burial, he was doing so in response to some kind of awareness. He must have been conscious of something. In the absence of actual evidence, we are also forced to speculate that consciousness must have emerged when people started to lie, to hallucinate, to have delusions, to simulate and to deceive either themselves or others. The creation of such ‘alterity’ – of images and of behaviour which is not a copy of what people actually find in their environment – is a creation of an artefact which requires consciousness. Many animals have learnt to simulate to protect themselves against predators. But such simulation is the result of natural selection. Those insects which did not look like sticks were found too easily by birds to survive. It would be absurd to postulate ‘consciousness’ in this kind of simulation. But a hominid who simulates a turn to the right when he means to turn left, or who hides his captured prey to avoid having to share it with his family, must be consciously intending to gain an advantage.

The emergence of consciousness, by whatever means, almost immediately produces a positive feedback and therefore increases itself in strength. The positive feedback can be imagined to work in the following way. Many animals are capable of some kind of memory and such memory becomes quite developed as evolution approaches the higher primates. With the emergence of consciousness, hominids become also conscious of memory. Consciousness of memory is bound to produce a startling result. When one is conscious of remembering, as distinct from just remembering, one is also conscious of being able to envisage events which are no longer present. As soon as one can do this, one can envisage the possibility of events which are not yet present and which one can choose to make happen. The ability to think of something which is other than what is in front of one’s eyes is thus increased by one’s ability to see events which are no longer in front of one’s eyes. Consciousness of memory, therefore, enlarges and increases consciousness of alterity, of possibilities which have not yet been realised. One could almost say that the invention of alterities is a forward extension of memory – at least of the consciousness of memories.

There is, therefore, no doubt that consciousness emerged and no doubt that its emergence is a tremendous advantage. The amazing thing is that such consciousness was widely misused and not permitted straightway to operate in the purely biological sense of assisting the acquisition of knowledge. If one considers the speed and the saving of energy which would have resulted in the acquisition of knowledge if consciously held knowledge had been exposed to experiments and tests so that wrong conjectures could have been eliminated, it comes as an enormous surprise when one finds that, for over a million years after the acquisition of consciousness, human beings took no direct advantage of their consciousness. From the point of biological evolution, they proceeded almost immediately to put it mainly to the wrong use. For conscious knowledge to be used adaptively, it would have to be exposed to the environment so that natural selection could take place and scientific progress begin. Instead, we find that in all cases, apart from the exception of minor beginnings, progress was halted and conscious knowledge put to a different use. Being put to a different use, the coming of science was delayed and could easily have been prevented altogether.

In order to account for this curious fact, we have to take a closer look at the character of consciousness. Human beings had acquired, of course, basic information about their environment long before the emergence of consciousness. They knew how to get food and how to rear their babies. They would not have been there had they not ‘known’. With the emergence of consciousness, they could have vastly increased their store of correct information very quickly. They did not do so because of the curious quality of consciousness. Consciousness is, among other things a sort of ‘empty noetic experience’, as J.N. Findlay once put it. It is an ineffable awareness of awareness. Had it been just that, it would have had very little evolutionary advantage and might never have appeared or been selected for retention when it did appear. But the strange fact is that this empty noetic experience is, to quote Findlay again,

Whether consciousness first generates an uneasy and dimly perceived spiritual (noetic) awareness or whether this noetic awareness is a precondition or consequence of sensory awareness, does not really matter for our present case. The important thing is that since the noetic awareness is inevitably present but cannot be clearly apprehended or expressed, it gives rise to sensory images which, in turn, give rise to myths and rituals, to stories and performances which are biologically unnecessary but which bear witness to, or express, noetic awareness. It is thus this ‘extra’ element of consciousness which eventually leads to the formulation of a whole set of propositions and beliefs whose appearance and form are not distinguishable from propositions or instructions about how to hunt, how to educate children, how to build huts, what to eat, and so forth. Thus, we get speculation about life and death, about fertility and spirit, about power and health, which is formally indistinguishable from knowledge about the things which are necessary for physical survival.

If this ‘extra’ knowledge derived from, or generated by, the ‘extra’ element in consciousness had been exposed to natural selection, it would have disappeared almost immediately. But it was not exposed to natural selection because it clearly had an oblique usefulness. When turned into a catechism, it could be made to serve as a social bond. All people who shared a certain catechism were excluded from another catechism. In this way, the extra knowledge could become the social bond for a human society. Ordinary knowledge, acquired by trial and error and selected naturally for retention, could not have done this trick. It was shared by all humans and possibly by some animals and non-human primates. To form small groups distinct from other small groups of the same biological species – to form pseudo-species – it was necessary to use propositional knowledge which differed essentially from propositional knowledge similarly used by another group. Only ‘false’ knowledge can, in this sense, be sufficiently exclusive of beings which belong to the same biological species. ‘Correct’ knowledge would not have been able to provide a criterion of exclusion, for correct knowledge could be shared by members of other societies. Hence was born the famous maxim: extra ecclesiam nulla salus . This maxim would have lost its meaning and its usefulness had the definition of ecclesia consisted of correct knowledge. If it had, nothing would have been outside it; or, better, people who were outside would soon have come in and the maxim would have lost its point. With everybody in, it could not have distinguished those people who were supposed to divide labour co-operatively from those who were supposed not to divide labour but were available as prey. A single human being could, biologically, have survived if not alone – at least in membership of any human group at all. In order to make sure that he would stick with one group through thick and thin and keep away from all other groups, he had to be catechised. Through education, he had to share the given group’s propositional beliefs about spirits and powers, about fertility, magic and immortality or reincarnation.

Such epistemological lunacy – for this was, from a purely biological point of view, genuine lunacy – had, however, an immediate enormous advantage. A group whose members are exclusively committed to one another provides solidarity and cooperation. It makes possible the division of labour and creates stable and enduring social structures across several generations – all things which even the most advanced non-human primates are completely unable to achieve. Such an achievement then becomes, in turn, biologically valuable because it improves the survival chances of a well-structured group. It does so, paradoxically, through this kind of epistemological lunacy. To make sure that knowledge remains false and that false knowledge is always available, knowledge has to be protected from natural selection. It has to be held dogmatically. The maintenance of dogma in large societies and in dispersed societies like the Catholic church is institutionally quite tricky and fraught with many difficulties. But in a small society, one simply has to insist that there be no marriage outside the small society, no social intercourse, no taking of meals together. A perfect isolation produces automatically perfect protection for the knowledge which is not treated as information about the environment but as a social bond. Knowledge is placed in bondage to society and societies which grow on the basis of the knowledge they hold in bondage are indeed well bonded. The pursuit of knowledge is diverted from its natural path. As long as there is good insulation, any individual member who has original ideas can conveniently be treated as a deviant. With the growing disappearance of perfect insulation, the definition of deviance becomes correspondingly difficult both to enforce and to justify intellectually.

In this way the evolution of consciousness does hot, in the first instance, lead to an increase in genuine knowledge nor to a speeding-up of the growth of knowledge, but to an increase in false knowledge (if this contradiction in terms be permitted). Intellectual mercantilism or protectionism and epistemological lunacy are nevertheless evolutionary strategies which usher in, across the threshold from one set of evolutionary mechanisms to another, a new evolution of evolution. They yield an oblique reward – oblique, that is, when measured against the mechanisms of purely biological evolution by chance mutations and selective retention of those mutations which are a good ‘fit’ to the environment. In the new mechanism, the environment by itself tends to recede into the background. Societies form pseudo-species and manage to survive because they can, through the cultivation of false knowledge, provide social bonding. Moreover, inside the socially bonded area, there is a chance for a cognitive apparatus to develop. This cognitive apparatus develops best under intellectual protectionism. Its scope is enormous. It extends from the acquisition of reading and writing to the cultivation of quite complex intellectual discussion, even though such discussion remains in the grip of false knowledge. One can practise a large number of logical skills by discussing the implications of the proposition that God is omnipotent or that twins are cucumbers, even though one cannot afford to criticise the proposition itself.

In earlier chapters we have, from time to time, expressed serious criticism of the project conceived by the substantive sociology of knowledge which, in contrast to the negative sociology of knowledge, sought to devalue all knowledge by reducing it to a narcissistic reflection of society in the mirror of society. We now must face an even more serious criticism. Culture, we have argued, interferes with knowledge by protecting us from the consequences of falsehood and, in doing so, creates co-operation and solidarity which, in turn, have an adaptive advantage. The misuse of knowledge, in other words, can lead to an interference with the natural and critical selection of true theories and such interference can nevertheless have adaptive advantages.

This gives the lie to those sociologies of knowledge which assume that culture interferes with knowledge by creating bias, self-interest and class interest in order to serve communities or classes or dynasties. Jügen Habermas suggests that we can seek to combat this kind of interference by focusing on an ‘ideal-speech situation’. By this, he means that we can always imagine what we would have said in a given situation had we not been misguided or misled or seduced by partisan interest and then subtract it from culture-conditioned knowledge. What will be left, Habermas suggests, will be the truth. The so-called ‘ideal-speech situation’ is an idealised version of the absolute. It is certainly a version of something absolute; and since it is so unlikely a version, one must think of it as an ‘idealised’ version of the absolute, if such a thought is possible. The absolute is already something idealised; but Habermas’s introduction of the absolute is nothing if not an idealised version of something idealised. This idealised version of the absolute assumes that culture’s interference with knowledge is a straight distortion which one can isolate and diagnose in terms of a partisan interest, and that one can get the truth by subtracting what one has diagnosed from total knowledge. What one will be left with, Habermas says, will be the truth, i.e. what one would have said had one been in an ‘ideal-speech situation’. However, as we have seen – gross and strident exceptions apart – the social interference with knowledge is not a matter of bias or self-interest; but results from the use of knowledge as a social bond. Such bonding is obliquely adaptive and therefore very different from the vulgar bias Habermas thinks it is subject to. Habermas sees in the cultural distortion of the truth nothing but self-interest and self-serving policies. He fails to recognise the oblique advantage of catechismic societies. On the other hand, societies which do not stand in need of this kind of social bonding, expose ail knowledge automatically to criticism so that Habermas’s strategy would appear redundant. Neutrally bonded societies can afford the luxury of the growth of knowledge by critical competition and do not have to resort to an idealised absolute like ‘ideal-speech situation’. Habermas and many other advocates of the need for a sociology of knowledge appear to misunderstand the important role which captive or bonded knowledge has to play in cultural evolution .

Thus the stage was set for a problem of enormous importance which has proved intellectually challenging and very time consuming: the conflict between science and religion. Unless one has a proper philosophy of science, it is notoriously difficult to distinguish the vast amounts of false knowledge which have been pressed into the service of social bonding from genuine scientific knowledge – that is, from knowledge which is left standing when all conceivable criticisms have been temporarily exhausted. Obviously, as was indicated, the two had to exist side by side right from the beginnings of cultural evolution. Without a minimum of genuine knowledge, no society could have kept going. But the minimum was usually quite small and there was never a limit to the amount of false knowledge that was hitched to it. Both types of knowledge had to be withdrawn from the simple process of natural selection. If they had both been exposed, the false knowledge would not have been able to do its social job and since there was no way of distinguishing the one from the other and allow the one to be exposed and the other to be protected, both kinds of knowledge had to remain mixed up and equally protected. As mankind grew in numbers, more and more societies, each carrying its own set of beliefs, came to rub shoulders. There began, inevitably, a clash of different knowledge systems. From the sixth century BC onwards, we find a large number of attempts to cope with these clashes intellectually. Since there was no clear method in which the false could be distinguished from the true, there were really only three strategies available, each of which was employed at one time or another. The first strategy found its finest manifestation in Louis XII, the saintly thirteenth-century King of France who declared that when confronted with a ‘heretic’, he would run his sword through him rather than argue. Whatever one might think of this saint’s morals, one has to concede that he had a firm grasp of the insuperable intellectual difficulties involved in the situation. When one cannot distinguish, on the basis of a proper philosophy of science, between science and non-science, all intellectual debate about who is right and who is wrong is really a non-debate. Hence, the royal saint’s sword.

The second strategy was morally impeccable, but intellectually very cumbersome. It was started quite early, by the Prophet Isaiah in Israel and by the Ionian philosophers in Asia Minor. It consisted in the reinterpretation of old pieces of knowledge. When one has two propositions which are held in two different societies but which are incompatible with one another, one can try to resolve the conflict by arguing that they are really compatible provided one understands them in a new way or considers one to be a prefiguration of the other. Thus Isaiah claimed that circumcision should not be taken literally but should be seen to foreshadow the ‘circumcision of the heart’, i.e. an act of humility to God. The Ionian philosophers, right down to Hesiod himself, used ancient Babylonian and Hittite mythology and reinterpreted it to produce their own cosmogonies which had a much clearer air of verisimilitude about them. When the Christian Fathers of the Church came face to face with the science and philosophy of the ancient Greeks, they tried similar reinterpretations and reconciliations. Plato, they said, had been a sort of Moses of Attica; or the other way round. When confronted with the tribal lore of the Old Testament, they said that the passage of the children through the Red Sea had prefigured, dimly, the ritual of Christian baptism and that Abraham’s sacrifice had prefigured the redemptive sacrifice of God’s own Son on the cross.

The third strategy was also the most ambitious. It attempted to reconcile intellectually conflicting systems of knowledge. Its finest representative was St Thomas Aquinas. St Thomas sought to distinguish between rational knowledge and revealed knowledge and argued that there could be no real, though at times an apparent, conflict between the two because God had not only revealed certain propositions but had also created human reason. One would therefore have to assume that the knowledge yielded by one source would have to be compatible with and complementary to knowledge derived from the other. In the light of our modern hindsight, however, St Thomas’s effort was nothing more than a valiant apologia for our inability to distinguish between the artificially protected, and hence false, knowledge and those few pieces of true knowledge which had to be available.

The conflict between science and religion began in earnest during the seventeenth century. There are many explanations why knowledge began to be exposed to the environment and why the protective mercantilism which had prevailed came, at that time, to an end. I would like to propose, without infringing on other views of this matter, that it came to an end because societies in Western Europe at that time began to find alternative social bonds and were therefore able to release knowledge from its social duties. In this way, scientists were able to test theories, propose alternatives, weigh them and compare them. The order of release was very slow in coming and many scientists in that century took great care to avoid too stark a confrontation with the traditional pieces of knowledge which, though they no longer performed the old job of social bonding, were often still believed to do so. Further, it is really impossible to say whether the growth of scientific knowledge and the sorting out of false knowledge from true knowledge at that time was the cause or the result of the coming of alternative social bonds. However this may be, the sorting out was started and grew rapidly. There remained a certain amount of cross-fertilisation, stretching from the influence of Kepler’s solar mysticism on his determination to find the planetary orbits to Einstein’s reason for objecting to the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics on the ground that ‘God does not play dice.’ Bit by bit, the religious knowledge about the soul, about immortality, about divine Providence and the design, about creation and the age of the earth, disappeared. It was found wanting and could not survive in the struggle for existence. Exposed to criticism, it failed to be selected for retention.

The growth of knowledge was accompanied by great emotional ravages. As the older knowledge had been protected from natural selection and not exposed to radical criticism, it is not surprising that in almost all cases it should have been fashioned in a way that was somehow comforting to the human condition. As it was free to grow without external control as long as it performed the useful function of social bonding, the framers of this knowledge took liberties to please themselves and their fellow-men. This knowledge contained comforts about immortality and rewards for good behaviour and contained information about a built-in purpose to promote confidence in an ultimate meaning of human life. Today, in the second half of the twentieth century, we have become so used to living without the comforts of religion that it is at times hard to imagine the emotional agonies, the soul-searching and soul-searing pain caused by the disappearance of the customary religious comforts. They are frequently described in nineteenth-century novels and it is sufficient to refer to George Eliot’s Middlemarch , Jakobson’s Niels Lyne and to the struggles of Ivan in Dostoievsky’s Brothers Karamasov . Nietzsche always strikes one as the most heroic real-life victim. If there were a God,’ he exclaimed, ‘how could I bear not be Him?’ There was no God and he could not bear it. There is no real evidence that his tragic illness was the direct result of his intellectual torment; but the two certainly run along parallel lines – a theme beautifully treated and elaborated by Thomas Mann in his Nietzsche novel, Dr Faustus .

The Enlightenment, of course, had to triumph. Here, we get a long line of theories to account for the millennia in which people had espoused religious knowledge and had been comforted. Voltaire argued that the delusions had been due to the cunning of priests. Marx suggested that the delusions had been invented and fostered by the exploiting classes to keep the exploited classes drugged with the comfort of opium. If one could distinguish between knowledge used for political suppression and economic exploitation and knowledge not so used, Marx said, one could separate science from religion. Unfortunately, most of his modern disciples refuse to make this distinction and tend to see even natural science as a strategy for the exploitation of the proletariat and the Third World. Freud maintained that these false beliefs were childhood projections of wish dreams, infantile neuroses of dreams of omnipotence and immortality. If one could help people to mature emotionally, he said, one could help them to distinguish genuine knowledge from neurotic fantasies. The last chapter in this Enlightenment saga was written by Jean-Paul Sartre and by Bertrand Russell, who came, independently, to very similar conclusions. Sartre described that contrary to traditional belief, this world consists of nothing but ‘contingencies’ and accidents; our realisation of this situation caused ‘nausea’. His hero Roquentin is sitting in a park, gazing at a chestnut tree. Its blackness is

Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; … his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collisions of atoms … Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundations of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. How, in such an alien and inhuman world can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth a child, gifted with sight … with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. 17

The conflict between science and religion had to be decided in favour of science. The question we have to ask ourselves, however, is whether Sartre’s nausea or Russell’s elation was justified. The position of man’s hopes and the question of the meaning of life appear more complex than either Sartre or Russell, let alone Freud or Marx, had envisaged.

Let us return for a moment to Darwin. Darwin had been very conscious of the enormity of his theory of evolution by natural selection and the well-known reaction of Bishop Wilberforce, to mention a dramatic instance, is proof that he was right in sensing the enormity of his theory. But Darwin had perceived – though in his own age there was no knowledge of chemistry, molecular biology or cosmology to support this perception – that while he had rejected the argument from design, he could not question the view that there is design brought about by natural selection. The argument from design had simply asserted that since there are so many ‘fits’ in the universe, God must have created and designed it. The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot possibly accept such reasoning. But it had become obvious to Darwin, and has since become more and more obvious to many other people, that natural selection produces design and that the Sartrean and Russellian views of contingencies and accidents are untenable – regardless of whether one treats them as an occasion for nausea or an occasion for elation.

The central figure in this story is Immanuel Kant. In order to solve the thorny question of how we can know the regularities of nature as presented in Newtonian Mechanics, Kant had proposed that we do not learn them from nature but that the human mind prescribes them to nature. Since all tests and all experiences conceivable for testing our knowledge of these regularities have to pass through the same human mind which imposes these regularities upon nature, there is no chance at all that we may one day discover, in making observation, that there are no such regularities. This volte-face of all thinking was described by Kant as a sort of Copernican Revolution.

There was a deep irony in his choice of Copernicus as an example for this volte-face. Copernicus, it is true, had proposed a volte-face too when he suggested that the sun rather than the earth is at the centre of the planetary system. We have become used to looking upon this Copernican change as the beginning of all those reorientations which have made man to be the result of accidents and which have placed him not in the centre, as the old story of divine Providence had had it, but on the very periphery, if that. After Copernicus, there had been other blows to human pride. There had been Darwin’s rejection of teleology and his theory about our animal ancestors. Then there is Freud’s demonstration that our will is not free to choose between good and evil but that, at best, we can struggle to acquire a certain amount of freedom through years of psychoanalysis. The irony in Kant’s role in this story is that though he performed something like a Copernican Revolution, he really did his level best to make sure that man would remain at the centre. The thing in itself, to be sure, Kant had argued, is something we can never know. But the world as it appears to us, he had said, appears to us in a certain way because we are at the centre; or better, where we are, there must be a sort of centre. Kant had thus reinforced the belief in the centrality of man’s mind. The one great question which he never asked, though the matter must have been a bit of a mystery to him, was how it had come about that the mind was able to prescribe regularities to nature. The world of appearances, according to him, is a closed world and we are, as knowing subjects, entirely confined in it. But it must have been a mystery to him why the human mind of all minds or of all things, for that matter, should be in that peculiar position. Whichever way one looks at it, we should really say that Kant performed something more like a Copernican Counter-revolution. The consequence of this counter-revolution was that Kant placed a sort of philosophical iron curtain in front of the world as it is in itself and introduced a complete dichotomy: on one side, there was the world as it appeared to us and as we know it, in parts; on the other side, there was the world as it really is, but totally unknowable. There was no bridge between these two worlds other than in non-cognitive action. In acting autonomously, the self, Kant pointed out, participates in the noumenal world.

Looking back after a century of evolutionary thought, we are able to clear up the mystery which Kant had left. 18 The human mind, with its categories and forms of perception, must be the product of evolution. It could never have survived and been selectively retained had it not been formed in such a way as to be able to pick up precisely the fact that there are regularities in the real world. The reason why the mind can have some genuine knowledge of the real world is because it is a product of that world – a product, that is, in the sense of evolution. We can understand the world not because the world is understandable, but because the mind is worldly. With evolution, the absolute distinction between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world breaks down.

How exactly should one envisage the Kantian categories in evolutionary terms? If one thinks of the human organism as an evolved system, the categories – be they purely mental or be they neutral structures – must be fairly adaptive. An organism with nonadaptive categories of perception and understanding could not have evolved. The notion that there is a totally other ‘thing in itself to which the categories do not apply must be abandoned. However, since the human organism is also separate from the environment it can live in and since it is a self-regulating system, these categories may well have a bit of a will of their own in that they must have suffered from the feedback of the system of which they are a part. They are, in other words, not only adaptive to the environment in which the organism is living; but also adaptive to the organism of which they are a part. For this reason, Kant was right in supposing that the categories are not just part of the environment or are mirroring the thing in itself with complete accuracy. Being apart from the environment, they help us to prescribe laws to it; but having been selectively retained by evolution, they help us to prescribe laws which are not arbitrary and which contain adequate information about the environment.

With this amendment, Kant’s transcendental idealism is transformed into hypothetical realism. Kant had argued in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that there must be a world of things in themselves of which the world we know is an appearance. If it were otherwise, he had written, we would be committed to the irrational conclusion that there is no world the world of appearance is an appearance of. This argument is the crux of his transcendental idealism. It was an idealism which differed from vulgar idealism in that it asserted that there is a real world and that our inability to know it is the result of mental methodology.

It is quite easy now to transform this transcendental idealism into hypothetical realism. 19 If we say that the human mind is the product of evolution and that it has been selected for retention because it is a ‘fit’ to reality, we can change the argument. We must now say that the world we experience is the product of a mind which has been selected. But it would be a contradiction in terms if we did not also add that if the mind has been selected, there must have been something there to do the selecting. This argument is the crux of hypothetical realism. We do not quite know what the real world really is like; but we must think that it is there and that it has interacted with the nervous system for millions of years to produce, by natural selection, the sort of nervous system which can pick up at least some correct information about that real world. If we trace the possibility of this transformation of transcendental idealism into hypothetical realism back to Kant, we can also see that the so-called ‘Anthropic Principle’ which is beginning to loom so large in modern cosmology and philosophy is to be traced back to Kant.

The ‘Anthropic Principle’ says that since man is the product of natural selection, we can learn a lot about the world which has done the selecting by looking at man. If the world from the Big Bang onwards had been significantly different, we would not be sitting here today to think about it. 20 The ‘Anthropic Principle’ is really only a special instance of the ‘Tropic Principle’ which, we argued at the beginning of this chapter, accounts for the fact that there has always been interaction in evolution. Whatever evolves has been constrained to evolve in a certain way rather than in another: 2 1

With this insight we can see the conflict between religious knowledge and science in a new light. The initial conflict, as we have sketched it from Voltaire to Sartre and Russell, had led to nausea or to elation. Man, philosophers had concluded, is the accidental outcome of non-designed, undetermined happenings. We now see, through Kant and with the help of the ‘Anthropic Principle’ that this conclusion is not really correct. Man is anything but the outcome of innumerable accidents. There was no design at the beginning. But thanks to the ‘Tropic Principle’ in general and to the ‘Anthropic Principle’ in particular, all through evolution, design has been produced. It is no accident that we are sitting here today and are capable of contemplating the whole process.

When we are thinking of space and the growth or extension of space, we are always quite pleased because the extension of space is an enrichment. As things grow in space, that growth is increased extension of anything at the same time. When we notice an increase in differences at one and the same time, we speak of creation or an extension of spatial dimension. Such an extension is a growth, an enrichment. We feel happy when we notice it. As a result of such growth, there is something where there had been nothing .

Our attitude to time is quite different. When we look at any one point in space and begin to notice differences, we say that time is passing. As it is passing, qualities or attributes of the point we are watching are wiped out. They disappear or appear to have disappeared. Whichever, we notice that something has gone and feel impoverished. For this reason, we have a positive attitude to the extension of space, and a negative attitude to the extension of time. The more time passes, the more we are impoverished. The passage of time is an experience of loss. At one moment, we had something; the next moment, we are without it. There may be something ‘new’ at that next moment. But it is unfamiliar, we are not used to it, the chances are it will disappear again and, therefore, at the best of times, the new moment is not really an adequate compensation for the moment we have lost.

As a result of this asymmetry between our experience of space and our experience of time, we have developed a hostile attitude to the passage of time. We are afraid of the passing of time and, by all manner of subterfuges, we have tried to convince ourselves that time does not really pass. We have used elaborate rituals to convince ourselves that the changes we know to have taken place are ephemeral and that the condition which prevailed at the beginning of the world – arch-time, as Mirca Eliade calls it – is still with us. We have developed complicated philosophical arguments to show that the passing of time is a delusion and that, deep down, behind the appearance of changes, time stands still and changes do not happen. Much of the cosmology and theology of the higher religions is devoted to the doctrine that the passage of time is unreal and that the deity or the non-deity is a timeless condition of eternity without changes. The practitioners of almost any religion one cares to think about are promised, as the highest reward for faithful and punctilious observances of works or faith, that in the end they will be united with that eternal deity or absorbed into a state of Nirvana and cease to be reborn. Escape from change, avoidance of change, fear of change, proclamation that change is unreal or illusory – such is the main burden of religious thought and practice. On the more vulgar level, this theme is pursued by embalming corpses, by the pretence that death is the entry into eternity and an escape from change, or by the burial of corpses in funerary monuments of gigantic proportions as if to say: Here is our ultimate protest against the passage of time. The corpse may wither away and decay and we are not so sure about the ‘spirit’ either. But we can, at least, make sure that the stone monument we have erected on top of the ashes will remain. From the desire for fame to the belief that we have a soul which will survive the body, not to mention the idea that bodies will be resurrected, man’s grand religious aspirations and efforts are dedicated to the denial of change and the belief that time is not for real.

Philosophers who have endeavoured, from Plato to Marx, to improve the lot of mankind, have always thought that the greatest contribution they could make is to devise ways to arrest change. Plato thought he might stop change in one fell swoop by setting up the regime of his philosopher kings. Marx thought that he had discovered that the changes which had taken place would lead, before long (provided we make one last great effort), to one last and final revolutionary change after which there would be no further changes. In between, there were countless theologians like St Augustine who had persuaded themselves that the changes which were taking place were willy-nilly destined to lead to the cessation of change. There were political thinkers who thought that it was the task of political thought to find out how change can be stopped. Some, like Machiavelli, believed that they had plumbed the secret of how change can be stopped. If one surveys this vast and almost universal conspiracy against time and change, one is less impressed by the differences in the visions of ultimate stability as by the fact that everybody equated happiness with absence of change and considered change, even change for the better, to be intolerable. If at all, change was held to be tolerable because and when it presaged cessation of change.

As long as men are preoccupied with that fear of time and as long as they devote their efforts to sustaining the belief that time is an illusion and, at best, confined to the ephemeral world of our experiences, the theory of evolution is impossible to accept. For the theory of evolution implicitly or explicitly presupposes a very different view of time. Since the changes which are selected for retention are the results of time and since the connection between changes and the passage of time is not random, all evolutionary thinking requires a positive evaluation of the passage of time. The more, the merrier! The evolutionist, we are almost tempted to think, not only welcomes the passage of time but must wish that it could be speeded up. Evolutionary thinking considers the passing of time as an enrichment. Only the passing of time produces new fulgurations – to use the term invented by Konrad Lorenz. Even if old inventions and old species pass away, the continuation of the process which was responsible for their fulguration is to be welcomed as an enrichment, not as a loss. Sometimes, I suspect that the spontaneous and deeply ingrained hostility to evolution was not due to the fear that man might have something in common with animals, nor to the worry that revealed religion might not be true. It had, most probably, a lot to do with the realisation that if evolution has taken place, the passage of time must have been real and all attempts to recapture or re-enact arch-time – the still moment at the centre of the turning wheel – must have been useless and perverse. Compared with that anxiety about time, Wilberforce’s fear that his grandfather might have been an ape would indeed appear to be a minor worry.

The man who cleared the ground for an acceptance of evolution by suggesting that we alter our attitude to change was Nietzsche. Nietzsche has many claims to fame – as a precursor of Freud, as the man who inspired Thomas Mann’s masterpiece Dr Faustus , and as the man who challenged not only the fond hopes entertained by Christians, but also exposed the hypocrisy of Christian love. The truths of religion and especially of the Christian religion had been questioned long before Nietzsche; but Nietzsche mounted an original attack in that he did not worry much about whether the historicity of the Christian revelation was true. He challenged the wisdom and honesty of the content of Christian teaching and bypassed the question as to whether that content was revealed as claimed or not. There is one doctrine which he considered central to his teaching. This is the doctrine of eternal recurrence. This doctrine is recognised by all Nietzsche readers, but rarely understood. It is often considered as some kind of embarrassment. Nietzsche considered it crucial. He kept a special record of the moment in which the idea first crossed his mind: ‘August 1881, “beyond man and time”, near Surlei.’ 23

On the face of it, the notion that everything will and must happen again and again is essentially absurd and untenable and one keeps wondering why Nietzsche considered such a mystical vision (compared with which most ideas he attacked as rank superstition were plain common sense) not only crucially important, but referred to it as ‘scientific’ – only to add immediately that the doctrine should not be taken literally and would, in any case, not stand up to logical analysis. The truth is that the vocabulary at his disposal was inadequate and not equal to the task. He couched his revaluation of time in the form of a declaration of eternal recurrence. This doctrine, as it stands and on the face of it, reads like a vulgar prophecy. One has to allow for the traditional vocabulary of cyclical time and place it into the context of Nietzsche’s thought. What he meant was that we should act in such a way that we could wish for the consequences of our action to occur again and again. 24 Do not live, he said, as if the passage of time was to be feared, but as if it was to be welcomed. He considered this revaluation of time more fundamental than any of his other revaluations and believed that all the other revaluations would follow from his revaluation of time. We should try to understand what he meant. T, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,’ he wrote, 25 T, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.’ Nietzsche sought to show that time is not to be feared and that change is to be welcomed. Therefore he created the image of his superman Zarathustra, who dances time away and does not present, as deities are wont to do, a static image of eternity. Eternal recurrence, to Nietzsche, meant openness to the future. When he wrote in one of his poems that all joy demands eternity, he did not mean to say that all joy demands to last for ever, but that we should appreciate that, in one form or another, it will recur time and again. In short, Nietzsche’s ultimate message, his ultimate transformation of all values, consisted in the invitation that we change our attitude to time. Instead of abhorring and fearing the passage of time, he said, we should welcome it. Nietzsche’s superman is a man who has conquered the fear of time and rejoices in the future. Nietzsche, to the best of my knowledge, was the first philosopher who taught us to enjoy the passage of time and who wanted us to realise that the passing of time, far from depriving and impoverishing us as all people had thought, is enriching. It produces more species and, on the level of consciousness, it can generate more truths. At least this is what he would have added had he thought in evolutionary terms. He also expressed the joy he took in the passage of time by his rejection of teleology. Time, he wrote in his famous ‘Sils Maria’ poem of 1881, was without goal. By the ‘Tropic Principle’, the more time passes, the greater the number of systems which will show in their workings the constraints exercised upon them by other systems. This self-generation of designs on all levels – cosmological, biological, cultural and scientific – is very different from the preordained creation of one single Design. Its self-display and its fulgurations depend on the passing of time. An understanding of evolution should move us closer to Nietzsche; and, conversely, an appreciation of Nietzsche, should pave the way for an acceptance of evolution. We ought to abandon the fear of time and replace it by amor temporis fugacis :