The Forbidden Universe (40 page)

He offered two possible explanations. The first he called the ‘heroic’ version, which is that evolutionary biologists came up with the right answers through an objective evaluation of the evidence. The second, the ‘cynical’ version, is that the advocates of natural selection were themselves guilty of selection, by picking only the evidence that fitted the emerging consensus and dismissing the rest:

If the cynical version is right, Gould pointed out, it might be preventing a proper understanding of evolution by ignoring factors other than natural selection. But which is right? Gould concluded once again: ‘The only honest answer at the moment is that we do not know.’
⁵⁶
That was 1981, but the situation is still pretty much the same.
Neo-Darwinism
still dominates, but perhaps that’s because it refuses to look too closely at potentially hostile data.

The ‘hardening’ of the theory was almost entirely due to one man. Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–75) was a
Russian-born
,
naturalized American biologist and it was his 1937 landmark book
Genetics and the Origin of Species
that showed the way to reconcile natural selection and genetics.

Flick through the pages of any academic book on
neo-Darwinian
theory and Dobzhansky is a star, acknowledged for his revolutionary insight that laid the foundation for everything that came after. But look in any more popular account and you’ll be lucky to find him so much as mentioned. He doesn’t rate a single reference in Dawkins’
The Blind Watchmaker
or
The Greatest Show on Earth
(although he is mentioned in passing in
The Ancestor’s Tale
, as ‘the great evolutionary geneticist’.)
⁵⁷
There may be a good reason for the difference between the way specialists talk about him among themselves and the relative silence in their public pronouncements. It’s quite simple. Dobzhansky is something of an embarrassment because he was unashamedly a devout Christian. (Neatly, Theodosius means ‘God-giver’.)

Not only was he an active member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but he saw no incompatibility between his faith and his belief in evolution. He even saw evolution as God’s way of expressing and achieving his purpose, writing in 1970 that, ‘man was and is being created in God’s image by means of evolutionary developments’.
⁵⁸

Dobzhansky regarded evolution as a ‘creative process’.
⁵⁹
To him this did not compromise the essential blindness of natural selection: chance was an important part of the process. He thought that the putative universal designer – to him the Christian God – had set in motion a system that enabled life to develop and find its own way. He preferred to talk of natural selection as
groping
its way forward, having ‘tried out an immense number of possibilities and … discovered many wonderful ones. Among which, to date, the most wonderful is man’.
⁶⁰

Even this was part of his much wider vision. In the words
of Greek geneticist Costas R. Krimbas, one of Dobzhansky’s research students in the late 1950s, he:

Dobzhansky took the image of groping forward from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit palaeontologist who we mentioned briefly earlier, writing: ‘This is a splendid, though somewhat impressionistic, characterization of evolution moulded by natural selection.’
⁶²

Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a paradoxical combination of Jesuit priest and evolutionary theorist. His eagerness to combine evolution with Catholicism was not shared by his fellow Jesuits, who wasted no time in posting him to China to prevent him lecturing on the subject. There he was part of the team that discovered Peking Man, fossil remains of
Homo erectus
over half a million years old. Teilhard was forbidden to publish any philosophical works or, on his return to Europe twenty years later, to apply for academic posts. As a result, he went into self-imposed exile in New York. His classic work,
The Phenomenon of Man
(
Le phénomène humain
) was published shortly after his death in 1955, when the ban expired with him.

Teilhard saw the universe as absolutely purposeful, the aim of matter being to engender life and the goal of life being to attain consciousness. He argued that human
consciousness
would eventually create a planetary spiritual
entity that he called the noosphere, which would eventually link with extraterrestrial intelligences; life and mind would then permeate and take control of the universe. The goal of the entire process was the ‘Omega point’, at which creation reunites with its creator. To Teilhard this meant reunification with the Christian God. He declared that ‘evolution is an ascent towards consciousness – therefore it should culminate forwards in some sort of supreme consciousness’.
⁶³

Although most of his concepts had already been around for thousands of years, Teilhard’s contribution was to link them with twentieth-century ideas, particularly those from the biological sciences. The idea that the divine is present in everything and that creation is unfolding and moving determinedly towards a specific end underpins many ancient mystical systems – ironically for Catholic Teilhard, most of them Gnostic. It also very much underpins Hermeticism – especially the prime role of mind in the evolution of the cosmos – and the all-important arcane school of Heliopolis from which it developed.

Tantalizingly, there is even a specific connection, albeit an indirect one, between Teilhard’s ideas and the great Egyptian school. The same underground stream sweeps certain luminaries along throughout the millennia. Teilhard’s formative influence was the philosophy of Henri Bergson, particularly his
Creative Evolution
(
L’Évolution Créatrice
), which Teilhard read just before his ordination in 1912. Bergson (1859–1941), in turn, was heavily influenced by the works of Plotinus,
⁶⁴
the ‘Neoplatonic’ philosopher who we argue was more accurately neo-Egyptian given that he ultimately drew his inspiration from the religion of Heliopolis. Bergson also gave a series of lectures on the ‘numerous and impressive’ parallels between Plotinus’ system and Leibniz’ theory of monads.
⁶⁵

Teilhard’s ideas on purposeful evolution were surprisingly
influential, particularly in the French-speaking world, and remain cautiously debated by scientists such as Christian de Duve, John Barrow and Frank Tipler. The latter two wrote in
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
that ‘the basic framework of his theory is really the only framework wherein the evolving cosmos of modern science can be combined with an ultimate meaningfulness to reality.’
⁶⁶

Teilhard de Chardin obviously represents the polar opposite to Richard Dawkins, which is deeply ironic given that Dobzhansky, founder of Dawkins’ discipline, embraced Teilhard’s creative evolution. Not only did Dobzhansky greatly respect Teilhard’s philosophy, in the 1960s he even became President of the American Teilhard de Chardin Society. Significantly, however, he did not begin as a ‘Teilhardist’ and tailor his work in evolutionary biology to fit. Quite the reverse. It was his work on the
neo-Darwinian
synthesis – especially the implications of a creative element in evolution – which led him to Teilhard. To Dobzhansky the genetic system was fully compatible both with the idea of a creative, intelligent universal power
and
a universe evolving towards an ultimate goal.

However, the mysteries discussed in this chapter suggest that even this fails to present the complete picture. As Dobzhansky saw it, God made DNA and left it to get on by itself, confident it would eventually reach its destination. But perhaps Dobzhansky stopped short of a full answer. It does appear that other events, elements of ‘luck’ with no connection to the genetic system, were contrived to get life past particular blocks on the evolutionary road … perhaps with GUD’s helping hand.

The belief that a purely mechanistic explanation must lie behind the processes that shape evolution might hold up if the sciences generally had found no evidence of design in the rest of creation. But they have. Physics, in particular, has moved on since the mechanistic Victorian science in
which Darwin advanced his theory. Biology hasn’t.

To us, towering above all the other tantalizing hints about
true
intelligent design is the uncanny suitability of DNA and its mysterious origins. There does seem to be something scarily made to order about it. It is not just that a molecule with all the right, miraculous properties for life should have come into being. Whatever process produced DNA did not necessarily have to make something that was also able to adapt to changing conditions. LUCA might have turned out to be an organism that could happily survive and thrive in the conditions of a four-billion-year old Earth, but would die off as soon as those conditions changed.

Similarly, the single-celled life forms that developed from LUCA and populated the planet for the first two or three billion years had limited potential for evolution. Something else had to enter the equation in order to create the revolutionary new type of nucleated cell that enabled more complex organisms to evolve. The standard theory can only ascribe this to sheer fluke. Another fluke started sexual reproduction, speeding up evolution and allowing even more complex forms of life to develop. But sex, too, faced an obstacle that would have limited the genetic diversity that it otherwise allowed had that obstacle not been removed by the appearance of the genes for ageing and, ultimately, death. Is it just us, or does that seem rather contrived?

Such ‘luck’ suggests that a proper understanding of evolution
does
require some ongoing creative factor,
something
somehow capable of comprehending the bigger picture. This, of course, fits elegantly into the designer universe scenario, and supports the evidence from
cosmology
that the universe was fine-tuned for intelligent life. It also implies, however, that evolution is working towards a specific end, and that the development of ever-more complex life forms is at the core of that process. This in turn implies that humanity represents its cutting edge.

 But is there any evidence that human faculties such as intelligence and consciousness are more than just freak products of a blind universe? And could they be in some way actually fundamental to the cosmos?