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Evolutionary Theory Conference Overview
A comprehensive narrative describing the origin, development, and fate of our cosmos and the role of human evolution within it is indispensable for any vision of higher human purpose. Mainstream academia tends to ignore the broad sweep of our evolutionary heritage and the human potential for further evolution. This conference aims at a broader conciliance between the physical, biological, and noetic sciences and seeks to articulate the common principles of our continuing evolutionary story. Starting off with diminished hopes (due to several last-minute post-September 11th travel cancellations), the third conference in this annual series surpassed expectations by convening its most dynamic and fruitful meeting to date. Day One: Emergence, Complexity, and Story "Emergence" and "complexity" are two words currently receiving a great degree of interdisciplinary attention from physics, biology, sociology, and economics. Simply put, recent advances in science have revealed that our universe is one in which complex things emerge. Yet, science is still far from a clear consensus about the precise meaning and full scope of application for both of these terms. One area where these two words have been discussed recently is in research into the origin of life. How did complex life forms first emerge on earth? As a well-respected biologist from the Santa Fe Institute, Stuart Kauffman opened the conference on Monday morning by highlighting a fundamental shift in the way scientists think about the emergence of complex life in the universe. For years, prominent scientists, such as the Nobel prize winning molecular biologist Jacques Monod, have thought that the chances that life could originate on earth were infinitesimally small and that our existence therefore must be a fluke. But if Kauffman's theory about collective autocatalysis (meaning how a sufficiently rich collection of molecules can jointly catalyze each other's metabolic processes) is verified, then the emergence of life is not a fluke at all. Instead, it is a natural and expected part of our universe wherever the conditions are ripe for it to flourish. Far from being strangers in this universe, Kauffman has written that we are "at home in the universe," which is the title of one of his books. Following Kauffman, former Stanford professor Peter Corning highlighted how during the history of life on earth there have been numerous instances in which mutual cooperation has been a prominent factor sparking the rise of novel, more complex life forms. Corning thinks that the economic payoffs derived from team-work of various sorts have driven the rise of complexity. Coining the term "synergy" to describe such benefits, Corning gave a bevy of examples stretching from how the molecules of hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water to penguins who bunch together to stay warm in Antarctica. Corning submitted that synergy, not Darwinian-styled competition, has been the main driver of the evolution of higher levels of complexity. But just what do we mean by "complexity" in living organisms? The next presenter, UC Santa Cruz astrobiologist David Deamer, took a stab at this vexing question by presenting his approach to a quantifiable assessment of biocomplexity from the standpoint of biophysics and molecular biology. Biocomplexity must first be understood in terms of structural complexity (molecules, cells, tissues) and functional complexity (metabolism, genetic information, nervous function). Biocomplexity increases over evolutionary time first by adding structure-function relationships to a given organism and then linking them to produce emergent properties. Any quantitative description of biocomplexity must reflect these two parameters. Deamer also noted that in a multi-disciplinary conversation the word "complexity" should be separated into three distinctive processes: 1) evolutionary complexity - the historical rise of complex individual units of life from bacteria to cells to humans 2) phylogenetic complexity - the hierarchy of complexity arrayed along the phylogenetic history of life; and 3) developmental complexity - the increase in complexity in the course of an multicellular organism's maturation from a single cell stage to an adult. By separating these out, Deamer suggested that much semantic confusion can be avoided. Deamer noted that a useful perspective on complexity is to consider what happens upon death of an organism, in which the layers of complexity disappear in successive stages, from loss of nervous system function and metabolism, to disruption of cellular and molecular order, and finally to degradation of biopolymers to simple molecules that can be incorporated into the next generation In the evening of day one as the Esalen fireplace roared, philosopher Jay Ogilvy led a spirited discussion about the human appetite for stories;that is, symbolic narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. Humans have been spinning stories since we first sat around fires about 2 million years ago. Even today, our minds are attuned to storytelling because their symbolic structure helps us make sense of our day, our lives, and our place in the cosmos. Day Two: The Topology of Causality, Intersubjectivity, and Globalization Former Harvard neuroscientist-anthropologist Terrence Deacon opened the second day by demonstrating the need for science to think more complexly about the nature of causality. Because classical science has focused so much on linear causation (an event has only one past causative factor), scientists studying the evolution of dynamic-complex processes have begun questioning the explanatory effectiveness of reductionism (the strategy of explaining something by reducing it to its constituent building blocks and simple past causes). Proposing that complex-emergent phenomena warrant their own complex explanations, Deacon described how the explosion of combinatorial possibilities in a complex system (like a brain, for example!) demonstrates the need for what Deacon calls a "topology of causality," meaning a more sophisticated way of assessing the compound, amplified, and accumulated causes of events. Overall, Deacon’s research has led him to the view that we live in not just an evolving universe but an emergent and hierarchically structured one—rich with complexity and infinite in creativity. As a Gestalt psychologist and Esalen board member, Gordon Wheeler began by asking the questions: what is narrative? Why is story so central and so universal as a form in human cultures, to the point that culture and story are actually one and the same? How does story function to support and also constrain our thinking, about who we are and where we come from, at every level? And what is the relationship between story and evolutionary theory? Wheeler then drew on the Gestalt psychology model of cognitive process, of attentional figure against a distributive, hierarchically nested background, in combination with evolutionary theory, to explain the universality and function of story. Our evolutionary nature as a flexible, problem-solving, "low-instinct/high-learning" species depends on this distributive cognitive structure, as Deacon's work develops and exploits. The relevant patterns of learning for survival are predictive sequences, gestalts with a time element. This sequential pattern of "a-accompanied-by-b-leads-to-c" is the basic form of narrative. Thus we see that narrative is embedded in our cognitive structure/process, as the basic learning pattern. Evolutionary theory is of course such a narrative -- of who we are, how we got here, and thus what our nature is. If, as Kauffman shows, a random universe under certain probable constraints may spontaneously tend to self-organize in ordered patterns, then in what sense may we say that the universe is "biased" for order from the start, that complexity is immanent in the evolving universe? May order, complexity, and finally story itself be meaningfully regarded as inherently emergent in the evolving universe? Is consciousness an emergent property of the universe from the start? To the extent that we may say this, we begin to build a new bridge, between scientific models and "spiritual" models of evolving consciousness as the mainspring of reality. Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris concluded the second day with a visual presentation of our evolving planet from the first forms of bacterial communities (who built a global system of genetic information exchange) to our current moment of human globalization. Sahtouris emphasized that our present "globalization crisis" has been faced before by the bacteria, who successfully adapted by learning how to cooperate within the constraints of their ecosystem. Likewise, Sahtouris suggested that humanity’s challenge is to learn to live cooperatively with the other species inhabiting our planet before we destroy them and ourselves. Day Three: The Mystery of Consciousness and the Further Evolution of Human Nature As a scholar of Indian philosophy from the University of Copenhagen, Anindita Balslevopened her presentation by asking why is it that something so near to us all—our consciousness—is yet so far from being understood? Balslev compared Eastern philosophical approaches to the mystery of consciousness with their counterparts in Western science. In particular, Balslev pointed out that a number of the philosophical positions and descriptions used by contemporary Western cognitive science have been studied for several centuries in Indian philosophy. For example, the philosophical insights from the school of Charavakra naturalism have many parallels to the work of modern Western philosophers and scholars, such as John Searle. To grapple with the full scope of the mystery of consciousness, Balslev called for a more multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach among scholars. Esalen President George Leonard followed Balslev with an historical presentation covering the evolution of Esalen’s programming and philosophy. Recounting several memorable vignettes, including samurai trainings and inter-racial encounter groups, Leonard described the lessons and wisdom he has garnered from his thirty-seven year involvement with Esalen. After surveying an immense variety of programs and spiritual growth seminars, Leonard, in tandem with Michael Murphy, started Integral Transformative Practice (ITP) in the early 1990s, which is a comprehensive growth program becoming increasingly popular around the world. In brief, ITP provides a balanced and scientifically tested program to foster the further evolution of human nature. This, after all, was part of the original mission of Esalen: to explore, expand, and evolve the boundaries of human experience. In the afternoon, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy and Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences Marilyn Schlitz gave back to back presentations introducing both past and contemporary research into humanity’s extraordinary capacities, including examples of extra-sensory perception and "non-local mind." Murphy and Schlitz suggested that when taken together as a whole, humanity’s broad range of supernormal capacities may herald the emergence of a qualitatively different human nature – one in which our "normal" human capacities for communication, movement, perception, and love are raised to new heights. During his presentation Murphy described some notable episodes in the history of research into exceptional human performance. He pointed out that in this field there is a "broken lineage" of scientific inquiry into extraordinary capacities dating back for several centuries. Researchers such as psychologists William James and Frederic Myers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have documented exceptional states of human experience, perception, and transformation, but sustained inquiry into such capacities has never coalesced into a fully recognized and funded academic field. In the 1970s and 80s Murphy collected a broad range of experiential and anecdotal data from athletes, mystics, and others who reported exceptional human experience. This database is housed at the Stanford University Medical School and served as the foundation for Murphy’s book The Future of the Body. Marilyn Schlitz followed Murphy by highlighting the results of some recent rigorous scientific experiments assessing the effects of "non-local mind." Under strict experimental protocols, people physically isolated from each other have demonstrated the ability to create statistically significant and measurable influences on each other’s galvanic skin responses and even health outcomes. The accumulating research conducted by Schlitz and other experimental scientists is lending credibility to the speculation that conscious human intentionality may be able to non-locally influence other people and the physical world. Day Four: The Interdependence Paradigm and Brainstorming the Book Project On the last day of the conference author of Nonzero Robert Wright gave a narrative tour of our human and biological past, arguing that history is not just "one damn thing after another" but rather a semi-predictable process of expanding "non-zero-sumness," meaning an increase in interdependence, i.e., in the number of relationships that can have win-win or lose-lose outcomes. Countering the eminent Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, who maintains that evolution is essentially directionless, Wright thinks that the rise of intelligent life was, as he put it, "in the cards" from the start. Drawing on the insights of game theory, Wright pointed out that the missing factor in Gould’s much touted perspective is the continuous ratcheting up of positive feedback cycles among organisms. According to Wright, this non-random factor has lead not only to the likely rise of complex biological life forms but also to richly inter-linked cultures and economies as well. In effect, given the inexorable and cumulative logic of non-zero-sumness, the rise of a globally-interconnected, intelligent society should not been seen as a "glorious accident," but as a highly likely result of the evolutionary process. On the afternoon of the last day, the participants brainstormed various titles, topics, and chapters for the pending book project, for which David Deamer and Jay Ogilvy will serve as the editors. One possible title offered was "the evolution of everything." Considering the wealth of information presented at this conference, that probably would be a fitting description. We would like to extend special thanks to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which has co-sponsored this conference series since its inception.
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