Chapter 1
Eternity and Evolution
Evolution in an eternal world
Science inherited a dual vision of the world from the nineteenth century: on the one hand a great evolutionary process on Earth, and on the other, the physical eternity of a mechanistic universe. In this vision all the matter and the energy in the cosmos were eternal, and everything was governed by eternal laws of nature.
From this dual perspective, life evolved on Earth within a physical eternity. The evolution of life made no difference to the fundamental realities of the physical universe. Nor would the extinction of life on Earth. The total amount of matter and energy and electric charge remained exactly the same, and so did all the laws of nature. Life evolved, but fundamental physical reality did not.
This double worldview has become deeply habitual, and in many ways continues to shape scientific thinking. In this chapter we examine this conventional split in more detail, and see where it has already begun to be transcended. What is emerging in its place is an evolutionary vision of reality at every level: subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, social, ecological, cultural, mental, economic, astronomical and cosmic.
Physical eternity
The mechanical universe of nineteenth-century physics was eternal, a vast machine governed by eternal laws.
The idea of the world machine of physics started life in the seventeenth century. The machine was thought to have been made by God, set in motion by his will, and thereafter to work automatically in accordance with his immutable laws. Nevertheless, for the first century of its existence, the Newtonian world machine had a persistent tendency to run down. From time to time the celestial clockwork had to be wound up again by God.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the theoretical machinery had been perfected and the world became a perpetual motion machine. The machinery was eternal, and it would always go on, as it always had done, in an entirely deterministic and predictable way; or at least in a way that would in principle be predictable by a superhuman all-knowing intelligence, if such an intelligence existed.
For the great French physicist Pierre Laplace and for many subsequent scientists, God was no longer needed to wind things up or start things off. He became an unnecessary hypothesis. His universal laws remained, but no longer as ideas in his eternal mind. They had no ultimate reason for existing; they were purposeless. Everything, even physicists, became inanimate matter moving in accordance with these blind laws.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the world machine started to run down again. It could not be a perpetual motion machine because, according to the newly formulated laws of thermodynamics, perpetual motion machines are impossible. The universe must be running down towards a final heat death, a state of thermodynamic equilibrium in which the machinery would stop working, never to start again. The machine would run out of steam, and a God who had become an unnecessary hypothesis could not be expected to stoke it up again. Nevertheless, all the matter and energy of the world would endure forever; the remnants of the exhausted machinery would never decay.
The revolutions in twentieth-century physics transcended the old mechanistic metaphors in a variety of ways.1 The indestructible billiard-ball atoms became complex systems of vibrating and orbiting particles, themselves complex structures of activity. The rigorous determinism of classical mechanistic theory softened into a science of probabilities. And spontaneity re-emerged in everything. Even the vacuum ceased to be an empty void; it became a seething ocean of energy, producing countless vibrating particles all the time and taking them back again. ‘A vacuum is not inert and featureless, but alive with throbbing energy and vitality.’2
The world machine of matter in motion was transformed by relativity and quantum physics into a cosmic system of fields and energy. As Einstein conceived of it, the universe existed eternally within the universal field of gravitation. He did not conclude that the universe was essentially constant because of his general relativity theory, but in spite of it.3 He adjusted his equations to endow the universe with an eternal stability:
When Einstein first applied his field equations of general relativity to the cosmological problem he discovered that static solutions were impossible. Since there was at that time no observational evidence to suggest that the Universe was in a non-static state and the philosophical prejudices of centuries underpinned the notion of a changeless background universe, Einstein altered his field equations to include the cosmological constant, L. The Einstein equations with cosmological constant have a static cosmological solution: the Einstein static universe.
John Barrow and Frank Tipler4
Static models of the universe remained orthodox until the 1960s, and many of the habits of thought engendered by the idea of a physical eternity still persist with great power.
Evolution
We also inherited from nineteenth-century science a great evolutionary vision, very different in spirit from the eternal universe of physics. The many kinds of living organisms – centipedes, dolphins, bamboos, sparrows, and millions of other species – have come into being through a vast creative process. The evolutionary tree has been growing and branching spontaneously for well over 3 billion years. We ourselves are products of evolution, and evolution continues at an ever-accelerating pace in the realm of humanity. Societies and cultures evolve, civilizations evolve, economies evolve, and science and technology evolve.
We experience the evolutionary process directly in our own lives: the world around us is changing as it has never changed before. Stretching back behind the changes that we ourselves have seen is the evolution of modern civilization, itself rooted in earlier civilizations and more primitive forms of society. Beyond these is a long, mysterious period of prehistoric humanity; further back still, our apelike ancestors; beyond them, more primitive mammals, then reptiles, then fish, then primitive vertebrates, then perhaps some sort of worm, right back to single cells, to microbes, and ultimately to the first living cells on Earth. Beyond these we go back into a chemical realm of molecules and crystals, and finally to atoms and subatomic particles. This is our evolutionary lineage.
In the course of our growing up and education, most modern people have implicitly or explicitly accepted both models of reality: a physical eternity and an evolutionary process. Within the sciences, both models coexisted peacefully until quite recently. They were kept safely apart. Evolution was kept down to earth, whereas the heavens were eternal. Evolution was the province of geology, biology and the social sciences. The celestial realm was the province of physics.
Charles Darwin and biologists who followed him had to try to fit the evolutionary tree of life into a mechanical universe that was not evolving – it was devolving. The world machine had no ultimate purpose, and no such things as purposes could be admitted within it. From the mechanistic point of view, living organisms are complex machines, inanimate and purposeless. The Darwinian doctrine is that the evolution of living organisms in no sense involves a process of purposive striving, nor is it divinely designed or guided; rather, organisms vary by chance, their offspring tend to inherit their variations, and through the blind workings of natural selection, the various forms of life evolve with no design or purpose, either conscious or unconscious. Eyes and wings, mango trees and weaver birds, ant and termite colonies, the echolocation system of bats, and all other aspects of life have come into being through the operation of inanimate forces, through blind chance and by the power of natural selection.
The Darwinian theory of evolution has always been controversial, and remains so today. Some people still deny that evolution has happened at all; others dispute that it is purposeless and depends on blind chance; and some go much further than Darwinism: they see the evolution of life on Earth as part of a universal evolutionary process.
Philosophies of universal evolution, such as the theories of progress so popular in Victorian England, conflicted with the universe according to physics. So did evolutionary visions such as that of Teilhard de Chardin,5 who saw the evolutionary process being drawn towards an end or goal, an inconceivable state of final unity. From the point of view of mechanistic science, such philosophies and visions have generally been regarded as illusory: the evolution of life on Earth is not part of a cosmic evolutionary process that is leading somewhere; it is a local fluctuation within a mechanistic universe that has no purpose at all.
We are all familiar with this point of view, which had a deep and pervasive influence on twentieth-century thought. This is how the philosopher Bertrand Russell expressed it in the context of the devolving world machine:
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collisions of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be built.6
This cheerless prospect has indeed seemed inevitable to many modern people, and the replacement of the devolving world machine with an Einsteinian static universe made little difference to this pessimistic outlook. The mechanistic theory is more than just a scientific theory: it has been taken to be a dreadful truth that no rational person can deny, whatever existential anguish it may cause. In this austere faith the molecular biologist Jacques Monod proclaimed:
Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings and his crimes.7
But scientific theories are subject to change, and in the 1960s the theoretical universe of physics broke out of its eternity. It no longer looks like an eternal machine, but more like a developing organism. Everything is evolutionary. The evolution of life on Earth and the development of humanity are no longer a local fluctuation in an eternal physical reality; they are aspects of a cosmic evolutionary process. A variety of philosophers and visionaries have been saying this for years, but now this is orthodox physics as well.8
The evolutionary universe
Most cosmologists now believe that the universe began in a primordial explosion some 14 billion years ago and that it has been growing ever since. There are two possible futures. Either the universe will expand forever; or its expansion will slow down, stop, and begin to contract, ultimately resulting in a reversal of the Big Bang in a terminal implosion called the Big Crunch. Fashions change fast in cosmology, and the shifting theories depend on the estimated amounts of dark matter and dark energy that the universe contains. The nature of both is literally obscure. Dark matter contributes to the gravitational pull that slows down the universal expansion, while dark energy pushes the universe apart, increasing its rate of expansion. In 2010, the best estimate was that regular matter made up less than 5 per cent of the universe, with dark matter accounting for 23 per cent and dark energy 72 per cent. Most physicists seem to favour continued expansion; but some prefer the Big Crunch, and see in it a way to return t...