In a lecture given as part of a lecture series commemorating Darwin Evolutionary Biologist Professor Russell Gray of Auckland University described a series of questions he liked to pose to his undergrad students. Firstly he would ask; “how many of you think that humans are animals?” to which most students would raise their hands. Then he would ask how many thought that humans were the product of evolutionary processes to which around 80% of the students would raise their hands. Professor Gray related that he would then pose his final question; “how many of you think that human behaviour is the product of evolutionary forces?” In response to this final question only a few would raise their hands.
Professor Gray was making a point here that has huge significance to this work. It is that we modern western humans struggle to see ourselves as entirely of nature. Even as heavily entrenched religious views have given way in the last 200 years to an acceptance of our biological connection through an evolutionary pathway to, ultimately, all other life on Earth we have continued to maintain in our deeper psyche a belief or sense that something about humans is not inherited from the pathways and processes of life on Earth at all. Something in us is not only special, unique and different in a qualitative way from all other life on this planet but this part is, presumably, not of this Earth.
The argument raised to this challenge is that culture and consciousness are byproducts of evolution not direct products of it. Modern human behaviour is therefore more to do with the formulation of ethics and morals mixed with other perhaps less noble motivations that are together the products of civilization. However I believe that we can take arguments for the uniqueness of human behaviour as a symptom of resistance to letting go of spiritually derived notions of the God/human nature of our species. The question then is – can all the phenomena of human culture and consciousness be ascribed first to evolutionary forces? Behind this question lies another that is both mind boggling and at the same time defiantly self evident and it is this question that this work is concerned with. The question is – can evolutionary forces themselves be ascribed to fundamental dynamics of the physical world. In other words can we find a cause in the fundamental physics of the universe for the existence of evolution, human culture and consciousness? From a purely scientific and rational viewpoint the answer has to be – yes – because to propose otherwise is to again rely on something outside the scope of nature – a God force or some other notion that cannot fit science’s fundamental principal – cause and effect. Yet what are the ramifications for our understanding of life and ourselves if we can find a fundamental blueprint and causal factor for life, consciousness, society, culture and human behaviour in the roots of energy and matter? This is the subject of this work.
I will be discussing the reluctance to understand ourselves as fundamentally of the Earth at more length because I consider it to be like a veil or a delusion that has led our species a long way from understanding both ourselves and our place in the world. Perhaps such a belief was necessary for humans to strive for the heights of knowledge we have realized yet I believe our failure to recognize ourselves in our totality – body, behaviour, culture – fundamentally as primates and products of the natural world is now the cause of our inability to live sustainably on our own planet. Indeed the only way I have found to reconcile myself to what humans are doing to each other and the planet is by having learnt to strip away the great myth that we have robed ourselves in and seeing humans as primates. Ironically in so doing far greater wonders have been revealed to me and it is these I hope to share with you through this work.
If evolution is to be afforded its true meaning where else but from nature and evolutionary processes could any of our activity have originated? Yet as Professor Gray goes on to explain it is not only undergrads who struggle to see how human behaviour could be explained by evolution but even other academics and experts in the life sciences not to mention most of society beyond. This strange difficulty in reconciling ourselves to our true place in nature powerfully affects the way in which science and the life sciences in particular approach two crucial areas of enquiry. One area is the research into the presence of ‘human like’ higher cognitive processes in animals such as birds, monkeys and dolphins. Here the approach is informed by a baseline of skepticism that animals could have any cognitive processes shared with humans yet from an evolutionary stand point the question would have to be – why wouldn’t they? From this skewed starting place researchers go on to find incredible examples of abstract thought concerning the future or apparent evidence of theory of mind (the ability to recognize and predict thoughts, feelings, motives in another being). The emphasis is then to find ways of carefully testing the phenomenon to ensure it cannot be accounted for by explanations that conform to the standard human/anthropocentric understanding about what animals are and are capable of – namely neither thought or feeling that remotely resembles human cognitive function. Surely this is evidence of an undercurrent assumption that humans are special in some way that evolution and nature couldn’t have contrived? Called to mind are new findings into the theory of mind held by certain species of birds who have been shown to be able to anticipate the motives of other birds. We find such discoveries remarkable but my question is – why? Wouldn’t it be natural to assume that varying degrees of theory of mind would be shared by other species as an outcome of their own evolutionary shaping? The implicit assumption that there is a wall separating one species that has the capacity for abstract thought and theory of mind from all other species seems to hark straight back to creationist ideas. Furthermore if this assumption is, as it appears to be, widely held that would suggest we are not looking to the physical world as the source of the deepest mysteries of life even as science proclaims this very notion!
So here is a glimpse of an irrational belief – humans have come into the world and are not of it – which therefore makes it remarkable (instead of simply obvious) that animals might have evolved, as we humans did, a range of cognitive functions that are similar to, or reflective of, our own. Indeed worse is the possibility that some aspects uniquely assigned to humans such as emotion might be common to possibly the entire spectrum of life as a fundamental language and programming code – a function without which life would not strive to survive. Yet where else would we have come by our emotion than through inheritance? That such a recognition has profound ramifications for our present treatment of animals is most likely the reason science does not discover anything here. Why shouldn’t aversion to loss through the sensation of grief, frustration through denial of purpose, boredom through lack of stimulation and play and the joyfulness of play be an evolutionary inheritance common to many forms of life? To imagine otherwise is to once again rely on the divine stage play in which we are the main act.
I alluded to 2 areas of enquiry particularly affected by the anthropocentric view. The other is the quest to understand the origin of life and here again the divine stage play sets our perspective backwards. If life was set here – matter quickened by the hand of God – then it is irreconcilably different from nonliving matter and how could we fathom its origins or nature? Strangely this view appears to inform our understanding of life and our scientific quest to explain its origins. If it did not would we not naturally assume that the preconditions for life are present within the laws of physics themselves and are perhaps even omnipresent throughout matter? On the surface science appears to assert this – of course all life is a derivative of something inherent in matter. Yet in trying to prove that life has arisen from simple building blocks science makes no attempt to uncover the origins of a tendency towards complexity present in matter. This search is not an attempt to explain increasing complexity – it is merely an attempt to show that some building blocks associated with life could have arisen spontaneously under early earth conditions. In other words we are not looking at the primeval soup to explain belief, culture and consciousness – but we should be. That we aren’t suggests to me that these things are not felt to be drawn from the world of matter – a nonmaterial origin belief is present.
It seems only natural, given our ideological and cultural history that we wouldn’t see this as obvious. After all it is only 200 years since we began to consider that we were related to other primates and all of life beyond them. Ideas and belief remain present for a long time after they have been overtly overturned. I shall devote a chapter to modern human belief’s about who we are in the world and what our destiny is as held by popular and academic culture alike – I call these beliefs ‘The dream of the Jetsons’ and it represents a huge divergence from the understanding of our true position in the world and what we are about as a species.
In this work I will be arguing that there is a simple pattern, observable in nature, which may even be rooted in the behaviour of atoms, that creates potential for complexity and that from which all the phenomena of life as well as many complex non living systems have arisen. In other words life, evolution, humanity and all our attributes need to be understood as not only having arisen from, but also continuing to express, potentials or dynamics inherent at the very roots of energy and matter. It is from this perspective that I shall be attempting to illustrate a commonality between what we currently see as widely disparate phenomena; from human behaviour and culture to living and non-living complex systems like beehives and ecosystems.
Yet does this not make sense? Does such an idea not pass the test of Occams Razor – pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate – the simplest explanation is the likeliest? Where else but from the world did we come? But if that seemingly self evident statement is true what does it mean? What is the true nature of the world if it could give birth to us?
I am aware that a critique of the argument I am building here is that it is akin to arguing that the potential a Ferrari is present in a bolt. Many possibilities can arise from different configurations of simpler material components but this does not mean that they are inevitable outcomes. Human consciousness and culture therefore did not need to have been embryonically present in the crude matter of the early universe for them to have arisen. This is correct. However I am arguing that a blueprint exists that seems to have arisen from the simple dynamics of matter and that this blueprint has given rise to and shaped all complex systems – living and nonliving, material and immaterial – and that to understand this blueprint is to understand the commonality of all complex systems. Therefore I am saying that the complexity of human culture is derived from a natural tendency towards complexity under certain conditions – the most vital of which is the existence of some form of boundary.
In describing this phenomenon I am presenting a unifying hypothesis that demonstrates how all complex systems thrive or fail. In light of this theory modern human treatment of the world is found to be glaringly erroneous and many older, longer-lived human cultures turn out to be the survivors of a trial and error process common to all human cultures through which many succumbed but a few, those surviving indigenous peoples, found a stable balance point and built sustainable survival practices into their respective cultures. Here I am particularly interested in the use of sacred or tapu sanctions used by cultures. These are not usually presented as protective sanctions because they are surrounded by cosmological beliefs but the end result of many sacred and tapu sanctions is the preservation of community and ecological health. In terms of this work such sanctions recognize the existence of interdependent systems – the realms of other beings – which the human realm depends on, and regulates the manner in which these realms can be disturbed for human purposes. I think a vital distinction between traditional and modern culture is the latter’s refusal, supported and reinforced by its science, to ascribe sacredness to any part of the physical world. I hope to show that through recognizing a reoccurring system, present throughout life and complex systems, we can begin to scientifically validate the meaning and purpose of recognizing the sacred in our physical world.