How The Universe Is Evolving

God and the Evolving Universe: The Next Step in Personal Evolution
by James Redfield, Michael Murphy

(Page 3 of 5)

But in spite of the ever-growing evidence that evolution is real, some people still deny its existence. One cause of such misunderstanding is a failure to distinguish evolution-as-fact from theories of how and why it is happening. We know that the cosmos, animal species, and humankind are evolving, but we are still learning about the ways in which evolution works.

It is important, for example, to remember that Charles Darwin's discovery that living creatures have evolved from a common ancestor must be distinguished from his theories of how that happened. Darwin (and his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace) proposed that among plants and animals, those individuals best adapted to their environments generally survive in greater numbers and have more offspring than organisms that are less well adapted. By increasing the relative number of their more successful genes among members of their species, organisms improve the survivability of their species. Darwin believed that all species emerged through this process, which he called "natural selection."

However, the more scientists have learned about the history of living things, the more they have had to refine and broaden their theories to account for evolution's complexities. Contrasting evolutionary theory at each of the three Darwin centennials (1909, the hundredth anniversary of Darwin's birth; 1959, the hundredth year after publication of his landmark book The Origin of Species; and 1982, the hundredth anniversary of Darwin's death), Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

. . . 1909 marked the acme of confusion about how evolution happened in the midst of complete confidence that it had occurred.

[But] by 1959, confusion had ceded to the opposite undesired state of complacency. Strict Darwinism had triumphed. . . . Nearly all evolutionary biologists had concluded that natural selection, after all, provided the creative mechanism of evolutionary change. At age 150, Darwin had triumphed. Yet, in the flush of victory, his latter-day disciples devised a version of his theory far narrower than anything Darwin himself would have allowed.

[Some] experts even declared that the immense complexity of evolution had yielded to final resolution. . . . [But] now [in 1982], Darwinian theory is in a vibrantly healthy state. Confidence in the basic mechanism of natural selection provides a theoretical underpinning and point of basic agreement that carries us beyond the pessimistic anarchy of 1909. But the constraints of an overzealous strict version, so popular in 1959, are loosening. Exciting discoveries in molecular biology and in the study of embryological development have hinted at modes of change different from the cumulative, gradual alteration emphasized by strict Darwinians.

Gould himself contributed to this break with strict Darwinism. With Niles Eldredge, he developed a scheme of evolutionary development called the model of punctuated equilibria, which modifies Darwin's emphasis on the gradual change of living species. Darwin believed that new species developed gradually over enormous periods of time, but his view was at odds with the fossil record, which has many gaps between species. To account for this discrepancy, Eldredge and Gould (as well as other biologists) have proposed that such gaps remain in the record because new species develop rapidly, usually at the edges of their ancestral populations, and for that reason leave relatively few traces of their transitional forms. If they do not develop in this manner, they will be reabsorbed into the species from which they arise. "Lineages," Gould wrote, "change little during most of their history, but events of rapid speciation occasionally punctuate this tranquility."

Another change in evolutionary theory is underway among scientists studying self-organization, the tendency observed among both inorganic and living forms to create orderly, self-perpetuating patterns. Until recently, most evolutionary theorists, following Darwin, believed that natural selection worked with random changes in living things to produce species best adapted to survive in a given environment. But reflecting the newer view, biological theorist Stuart Kaufman wrote:

We have all known that simple physical systems exhibit spontaneous order: An oil droplet in water forms a sphere; snowflakes exhibit their six-fold symmetry. What is new is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we have supposed. Profound order is being discovered in large, complex, and apparently random systems. I believe that this emergent order underlies not only the origin of life itself, but much of the order seen in organisms today. So, too, do many of my colleagues, who are starting to find overlapping evidence of such emergent order in different kinds of complex systems.

Most biologists, inheritors of the Darwinian tradition, suppose that the order of ontogeny (the development of organisms from fertilized egg to adult) is due to the grinding away of a molecular Rube Goldberg machine, slapped together piece by piece by evolution. I present a countering thesis: Most of the beautiful order seen in ontogeny is spontaneous, a natural expression of the stunning self-organization that abounds in very complex regulatory networks. We appear to have been profoundly wrong. Order, vast and generative, arises naturally.

[If] this idea is true, then we must rethink evolutionary theory, for the sources of order in the biosphere will now include both natural selection and self-organization.

To repeat, evolutionary scientists realize that evolution has features that remain mysterious to us. We emphasize this because our basic proposals about human transformation do not stand or fall with the changes of evolutionary theory that will come with new scientific discoveries. Our acceptance of evolution as a reality must not be limited by the fact that evolutionary theory is incomplete.

As you will see in the pages that follow, knowledge of how evolution has brought us to where we are and continues to operate in human affairs can help us create practical ways to realize our greater potentials. If we deny that it is a fact or dismiss it as irrelevant to our further development, we forfeit a wondrous inheritance.

Copyright © January 2002, J.P. Tarcher, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

James Redfield is the author of The Celestine Prophecy, one of the bestselling spiritual novels of all time. Redfield's other bestsellers include The Tenth Insight, The Celestine Vision, and The Secret of Shambhala.

Michael Murphy is the cofounder of the Esalen Institute, the leading personal and spiritual growth center in the world, in Big Sur, California. Murphy is the author of Golf in the Kingdom, The Future of the Body, and The Life We Are Given.