Future Darwinism- The Becoming Universe- Marx and Darwin

The Becoming Universe- Marx and Darwin
What did they have in common?

Ideas of general evolutionary development had been gestating for many years as biologists and naturalists observed the vast array of the adapted features of nature. It was only Darwin's monumental theory of natural selection that finally challenged the anthropocentric design arguments of the time. When the evolutionary paradigm arrived it led to a new interpretation of universal purpose in which natural phenomena evolve towards a final outcome, rather than being specifically designed by a creator.

Thomas Huxley, a co-founder of evolutionary theory, was one of the first to realise the wider implications of the evolutionary model. The laws of motion and energy conservation might he suggested, be examples of natural selection from a wider set of possibilities. In this conjecture, Huxley demonstrated great prescience. One line of cosmological reasoning today that is gaining increasing acceptance postulates that the laws and constants of nature may indeed vary over time and that our entire universe might be the result of a natural selection process, as postulated by eminent physicist Lee Smolin.

Evolutionary concepts were also starting to permeate the broad canvass of human history. Hegel, through his Philosophy of History in the 1820s, introduced the notion of understanding a subject by the unfolding of its history. He saw in history evidence of evolutionary progress expressed as a dialectic process of change.

This position is of central significance to a unified theory of evolution, as it demonstrates the notion of underlying structure in the chaos of past events. Hegel's dialectic was the foundation of Marx's communist philosophy supported by a conflict process between two opposing knowledge theses. The resulting clash of ideas produced a higher level of knowledge synthesis; a ‘becoming’ process which creates the essential mechanism for social progress.

In this notion of a dialectic, Hegel and Marx stumbled onto an essential element of the evolutionary process. Each interaction between a system and its environment generates new adaptive knowledge, generating a reaction which mutates and repeats until an optimal solution is reached.

This process of evolutionary tug-of-war between competing theories also results in a net gain in knowledge over time and is mirrored in the advances of philosophy itself; particularly in relation to the two great competing hypotheses of empiricism and rationalism.

It may be argued therefore, that all history is the outcome of the broader process of evolution, in which the underlying information flows drive all historical processes, resulting in continuously optimised outcomes for civilisation on a broad scale.
Each outcome ripples through the fabric of life, constantly changing the social landscape. Such a cumulative, multi-layered recursive process epitomises the essence of the evolutionary process.

Evolution in general does not have a specific teleology or goal, but is self-organising and dynamic. However it can be argued that an overall melioristic outcome can be discerned in the process, resulting in enhancement and refinement at every information level.

By the start of the 19th Century, evolutionary concepts had begun to dominate both philosophical and scientific thinking. The second law of thermodynamics known as the ‘heat death’, predicted the eventual extinction of life on earth and in the cosmos. This prognosis together with the collapse of traditional design theories under the impact of the Darwinian revolution, forced theologians to drastically modify traditional religious teleology, towards a more abstract view.

Philosophers such as Teilhard de Chardin interpreted the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis in terms of an ultimately progressive cosmos, with a melioristic outcome for life, as opposed to the pessimistic heat death view. He predicted the ultimate evolution of an Omega point or omnipotent manifestation of the Christian God in the far future.

This represented a new view of human history; a view that clearly indicated an advance or progression in the knowledge and understanding of the world through the physics of Newton and biology of Darwin; a progressive humanity coupled to an evolutionary universe. The universe could therefore be seen as evolving towards some goal and in doing so could be construed as a teleological organism.

A number of eminent 19th and 20th century philosophers championed variations on the theme of evolutionary progress including Marx, Bergson, Alexander and Whitehead.
The Marxist theory of human development predicts the evolution of social systems from capitalist to socialist to an egalitarian society.

Henri Bergson, whose work marked him as the leading French philosopher of the 20th Century, based his philosophy on a becoming universe in which a changing reality always creates something new, driven by a non-physical life force- Evolution. He rejected the static ‘being' or ‘existence’ paradigm of philosophers such as Sartre, in which time is regarded as illusory or irrelevant.

Samuel Alexander, the greatest Australian-born philosopher, believed the fundamental entity was space-time, from which was created in sequence- matter, life, mind and finally Deity.

Alfred Whitehead was a mathematical physicist whose philosophy postulated the natural world to be a living organism, applied to both living and non-living entities. He believed every object including God to be composed of events in a process of becoming. He asserted that the laws of physics, together with the elementary particles, also would undergo change and that in the fullness of time all logical universes would exist. This thesis is gaining renewed support from the current ‘many worlds’ physical theory.

It can be seen that as such theoretical models of philosophy evolve. In progressing from a static to a dynamic view of the cosmos, they uncover evolutionary models of the processes of life and thought itself which then uncover other evolutionary insights, in a never ending process.

Evolution is therefore seen not as a linear process, but operates at multiple levels in non-linear fractal form. There exists a process of evolution within evolution, as in the Russian doll model. This is a vital characteristic of the evolutionary process, which is demonstrated time and again. It is applicable to all physical, social, scientific and religious processes. The evolution of new knowledge uncovers an evolutionary universe in all its aspects.