On November 24, 1859, a little-known biologist from England quietly published a book introducing a significant new scientific theory, proposing that a process he termed ânatural selectionâ could explain how human beings had evolved from other species. The title would soon become known the world overâOn the Origin of Species. The first edition sold out within days, all 1,170 copies, and the rest, as they say, is history. . . .
One hundred years later, in 1959, this event had become reason for celebration. A number of leading evolutionary pioneers gathered together at the University of Chicago to commemorate the centennial of the publication of Charles Darwinâs first book, spending several autumn days on the beautiful tree-lined campus paying homage to his unique genius and reflecting on the meaning of evolution. The star-studded interdisciplinary conference featured presentations from experts in the fields of biology, paleontology, anthropology, and even psychology. The best and brightest were in attendance, including legendary evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, who each shared their wisdom with the assembled audience. Even Darwinâs grandson was present.
But perhaps the most famous guest of all was the grandson of another great evolutionist, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the early supporters of Darwinâs revolutionary theory. Julian Huxley, his descendant, was a brilliant scientist, humanist, and world-renowned intellectual. As he ascended the podium to address the international audience, expectations ran high. Here was a man who had worked to convince the world that Darwinâs natural selection was a driving force of evolutionary change. The audience would have also known Huxley for his humanitarian ideals, which had helped inspire the great humanist movement, the twentieth centuryâs intellectual alternative to religious faith. Some may have been aware of Huxleyâs interest in the existential implications of evolutionary theory, a passion that had led him to coin the phrase âWe are evolution become conscious of itself.â Perhaps some even knew him as the fiercely independent thinker who had endured the outrage of his secular-minded colleagues to write the introduction to the controversial book on religion and evolution, The Phenomenon of Man, by recently deceased Catholic priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. What would Huxley offer his audience on this momentous anniversary, when some of the greatest minds of the era had their attention trained on his pulpit?
Huxleyâs talk was called âThe Evolutionary Vision,â and he delivered it with an almost religious passion, attendees recalled. He suggested that religion as we knew it was dying, that âsupernaturally centeredâ faiths were destined to decline, to deselect themselves out of existence like nonadaptive species in a hostile environment. âEvolutionary man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness in the arms of a divinized father figure whom he has himself created,â Huxley claimed, ânor escape from the responsibility of making decisions by sheltering under the umbrella of Divine Authority, nor absolve himself from the hard task of meeting his present problems and planning his future by relying on the will of an omniscient, but unfortunately inscrutable, Providence.â Huxleyâs words were strong, spoken with the conviction of one who had worked his whole life to free the human spirit from belief systems unsuited to the modern world. But before proclaiming the death of religion altogether, he added a notable line. âFinally,â he concluded, âthe evolutionary vision is enabling us to discern, however incompletely, the lineaments of the new religion that . . . will arise to serve the needs of the coming era.â
For Huxley, evolution was not merely a final nail in the coffin of traditional religious belief. It represented much more than the victory of a scientific theory over the historical forces of superstition and ignorance. The triumph of evolution also pointed us toward the futureâtoward a post-traditional synthesis that would arise out of our new understanding of who we are and where we came from.
In the fall of 2009, I attended another conference at the University of Chicago, held exactly fifty years following the first gathering and one hundred and fifty years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Like its predecessor, the event was also a meeting of some of evolutionary theoryâs brightest lights, and I was curious to see what the intellectual descendants of Huxley, Mayr, and Dobzhansky might have to say about the âevolutionary visionâ fifty years on down the road.
I found the conference to be fascinating, the lectures and discussions on the latest findings in evolutionary science wonderfully informative. Religion, too, was a major subject of the day. Todayâs evolutionary scientists are veritably obsessed with their ongoing struggles against creationism and intelligent design; they are deeply vexed about the resistance to Darwinâs ideas and biologyâs discoveries that still characterizes so many of todayâs religious communities. As someone who grew up in the Bible Belt, where such controversies rage unchecked, I understood and shared their concerns. But what of Julian Huxleyâs vision? What of his observation that a rich, novel kind of evolutionary knowledge might change our worldview, our sense of self and humanityâs place in the scheme of things?
There was little to report from Chicago on that front. To hear the version of things presented in those hoary halls, there is the ongoing march of new science, the ongoing resistance of old-time religion, and thatâs about the extent of it. Admittedly, there was an occasional nod to the heroic attempt to reconcile evolution and faith, but no one was on the lookout for the emergence of a new evolution-inspired spirituality. No one was talking about the way in which evolutionary ideas might transform culture and human thought in the new century. In fact, it seemed that no one was paying much attention at all to the vision that Huxley had presented on that November day in 1959.
But just because theyâre not paying attention doesnât mean that there is nothing worth watching. Indeed, today Huxleyâs evolutionary vision is more culturally relevant than ever. It is living in the hearts and minds of thousands of individuals around the world who are experimenting with new cultural perspectives, new philosophical epiphanies, new spiritual ideals, new religious visionsâall based around the idea of evolution. Sadly, these cultural pioneers were not invited to the 2009 conference in Chicago. To find them, we must travel outside the conventional walls of the academy and beyond the ancient structures of traditional religion. We must journey to the frothy frontiers of culture, to the border between convention and controversy where the next great cultural breakthroughs are struggling to be born. This is a book about the search for that evolutionary vision and a new kind of worldview based on it.
Evolution is a fact. Given the seemingly never-ending controversy surrounding biological science and all of its many discoveries regarding the origins of life, itâs important to be clear right from the start. In this book, there is no controversy. I would say that I believe in evolution, only I donât think belief has anything to do with it. We donât say we believe the world is roundâwe know it is. Evolution is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of evidence, painstaking work, and breakthrough science. Any other conclusion stretches the bounds of credibility and retards the advance of knowledge. Evolution is simply true.
Now that I have stated my position clearly and unequivocally, let me confuse the matter. I also think that the discovery of evolution is the greatest cultural, philosophical, and spiritual event in the last few hundred years. I think its overall influence is destined, in the long run, to be seen alongside some of our cultureâs most significant inflection pointsâthe birth of monotheism, the European Enlightenment, the industrial revolution.
Are you surprised that I used the word âspiritualâ? Many, no doubt, will be. Hasnât the theory of evolution long been the number-one enemy of spirit in most religious circles? Isnât evolution the atheistâs answer to religious faith, the âblind watchmakerâ who has slowly fashioned life out of inanimate matter without any divine help? Didnât Darwinâs paradigm-shattering revolution of natural selection and random mutation explain away God with one momentous insight into the workings of Mother Nature?
Yes, that is certainly the story as it is often toldâthe story that causes consternation in the classrooms of Kansas, inflames the passions of Christians from the rust belt to the Bible Belt, and riles up Muslims from Baghdad to Birmingham. But consider this: evolution was never merely a scientific idea. For that matter, it wasnât even Darwinâs idea. Indeed, long before Darwin ever became fascinated by GalĂĄpagos finches, the notion of evolution was already at work in the culture of the nineteenth century, quietly subverting established categories of thought and changing religion, philosophy, and science, in unexpected and remarkable ways.
Please donât misunderstand me: I have the greatest respect for Darwinâs seminal contribution. He was the critical match that turned the sparks of a subversive idea into a world-engulfing conflagration. When the historian Will Durant was asked toward the end of his life if Marx could be considered to be the person who had the most influence on the twentieth century, he begged to differ. Darwin, he replied, was even more influential than Marx. The theory of evolution was one of the primary drivers in the undermining of religious faith, and so Darwinâs legacy loomed larger in the centuryâs embrace of a more secular culture.
I concur with Durantâs estimation of Darwinâs transformative role. But I do think he overlooked a significant point. In the broadest sense, Darwin and Marx were both driven by the same fundamental ideaâevolution! For better or worse, evolution was the context of each of their lifeâs work. Marx was a student of one of the first great evolutionary philosophers, Hegel. And while Darwin, a meticulous collector of data, was focused on biology and Marx on political theory and economic history, both drank liberally from the same philosophical insightâthat the given categories of life as it exists today are not static or fixed or unchanging, the âway things are,â but rather are a momentary snapshot in an ongoing developmental process. They both saw through the illusion of permanence created by the seeming solidity of the objects of their respective workâfor Darwin, the living world; for Marx, economic structures and historical processesâand understood that these are part of a deeper underlying process of evolution over time. I donât mean to endorse the ill-conceived nature of Marxâs historical materialism and its tragic human consequences. My point is simply that the evolution revolution may ultimately prove bigger than even many of our most capable thinkers have yet grasped.
The idea of evolution, the basic notion of process, change, and development over time, is affecting much more than biology. It is affecting everything, from our perceptions of politics, economics, psychology, and ecology to our understanding of the most basic constituents of reality. It is helping to give birth to new philosophies and, I will argue, is the source of a new kind of spiritual revelation. The individuals featured in this book have all been inspired by Darwin and the enduring insights of the past centuryâs breakthroughs in biology, genetics, and paleontology (some have even contributed to them). But they are also reaching beyond those laudable accomplishments to uncover new vistas. They are forging a rich, novel way of understanding the development of everything from the complex corridors of the human psyche to the outer reaches of the universe. They are drawn to discover the hidden structures deep within the interiors of the genome and also the hidden structures deep within the interiors of culture. Evolution, in these pages, is certainly about the birds and the bees, but itâs also about culture, consciousness, and the cosmos. On this evolutionary journey, the insights of evolutionary science will always apply, but they will have to share the spotlight with pioneering thinkers and theories from a surprising diversity of fields.
I believe that our emerging understanding of evolution in all its many shapes and sizes and dimensions is so fundamental that it would be hard to overstate its significance. Taken as a whole, it will constitute the organizing principle of a new worldview, uniquely suited for the twenty-first century and beyond. The outlines of this worldview are still being formedâspurred on by new insights and breakthroughs in the development of science, psychology, sociology, technology, philosophy, and theology. This book is about that new worldview and the people who are consciously engaged in its creation. Working across vastly different contexts and disciplines, these individuals are united not by creed or belief system but by a broadly shared evolutionary vision and a care for our collective future. They are scientists and futurists, sociologists and psychologists, priests and politicians, philosophers and theologians. They share no common title. I call them Evolutionaries.
CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING
The great geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky once declared, âNothing makes sense in biology except in light of evolution.â In fact, before the discovery of evolution, biology was largely just a way of classifying species. Evolution was the unifying idea that placed it on the academic map as a coherent and legitimate science, and it became the context for so much of our understanding of the forms and features of life. Dobzhanskyâs insight, I am convinced, is applicable to a much broader sphere than biology. Arguably, it is true that nothing in human culture makes sense except in light of evolution. This book will make the case that our emerging understanding of evolution is so transformative that eventually every important area of human life will fall under its revelatory spell. It will change the way we think about life, culture, consciousness, even thinking itselfâfor the better. In fact, it already is.
Among the first to recognize the scale and significance of evolutionary thinking was the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. âIs evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis?â he wrote in the early twentieth century. âIt is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.â
If this quote seems to succumb to a kind of triumphalism, let me also try to balance the record by noting that we are still in the beginning phase of building a coherent worldview that incorporates the transformative insights of an evolutionary perspective. The people and ideas represented in this book do not capture anything in its final form. Like scholars in a young field of study, Evolutionaries have plenty of material to build on from those thinkers that have forged the way forward in the last two centuries. Yet things have not progressed far enough that ideas have become fixed, ways of thinking established, or agreements settled. We are somewhere between the initial visions of whatâs possible and established, accepted cultural truths. We are still in the Wild West phase of development, between the earliest pioneers exploring virgin land and homesteaders looking to settle down and build a new life on secured territory. As the many truths, insights, cultural perspectives, and attitudes that make up this new worldview eventually work themselves into the mainstream, they will have greater and greater effects on all aspects of human culture.
âA philosophy of this kind will not be made in a day,â wrote the pioneering evolutionary philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri Bergson in his classic 1907 book Creative Evolution. âUnlike the philosophical systems properly so called, each of which was the individual work of a man of genius and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or left, it will only be built by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, competing, correcting, and improving one another.â
EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT EVOLUTION MAY BE WRONG (OR INCOMPLETE)
When Darwin spoke about evolution, he meant descent with modification, the idea that all organisms are descended from a common ancestor. His theory of natural selection was a theory about the mechanisms of that modification. Over time, with the discovery of genetics as the agent of heredity, Darwinâs theory became neo-Darwinism, or what is sometimes called the âmodern synthesisââthe idea that evolution is driven by a combination of natural selection and random mutation. The basic proposition is that random mutation at the level of the gene produces novel forms and features in an organism. Those few features that are adaptive increase the âfitnessâ of an organism, allowing it to better survive and pass on its genes, thereby transferring those same features to the next generation. Those mutations that are nonadaptive or nonadvantageous, on the other hand, will naturally disappear because those organisms will be more likely to die out, making them less likely to pass on their genes to the next generation. The combination, therefore, of random mutation and differential selection became a powerful and inseparable scientific duo, playing a central role in the fledgling field of evolutionary biology. This new sc...
