Evolution's Seamless Knowledge Web

Many scientists continue to postulate a territorial imperative over the evolutionary paradigm, reluctant to concede its applicability to a wider range of non-life processes.
This may stem from the fact that the first evolutionary model to be recognised and accepted by society at large was that applied to biological development. Although Darwin focused attention on evolution as it applied to all life, the broad concepts have been articulated by a number of philosophers both before and since Darwin's hypothesis.

As early as 500 BC, the master philosopher Lao-Tzu defined an all-encompassing phenomenon which he called the Tao or Way, as the dominant force shaping all aspects of nature and society. Today the Way could be re-interpreted as the all-pervasive force of evolution. By the start of the nineteenth century, evolutionary concepts had begun to receive broad philosophical acceptance. Scientific advances, particularly Newtonian physics and astronomy, also indicated an evolutionary advance in human knowledge.

By the twentieth century, it had become generally accepted that any realistic picture of the Universe had to be evolutionary. Philosophers such as Teilhard de Chardin, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Schelling, Alfred Whitehead and Samuel Alexander all developed the theme of an evolving, 'becoming', Universe rather than a static or nihilistic state of 'being'.

For Samuel Alexander, the pre-eminent Australian born philosopher, the fundamental entity was Space-Time, which he proposed engenders first Matter, then Life, next Mind and finally Deity in the form of emergent evolution; an evolving God which does not exist in the distant past, but comes into existence in the far future.

Today, every person has an innate understanding of evolving processes and systems applying the notion to all spheres of activity - political, economic, technological, psychological and cultural. However, the full majesty and power of the paradigm has still been largely unexplored. This is partly related to the massive rate of advance in all fields of human knowledge, forcing its partition into countless sub-disciplines, creating realms of ignorance between fields and reinforcing territorial behaviour within the professional and academic communities.

How many physicists, for example, have more than a fuzzy understanding of the social impact of investing billions of dollars in a super particle collider rather than cancer research? And how many economists comprehend even vaguely the cultural values of past civilisations or the ecological value of a rainforest?

But the current acute myopia of disconnections between social and scientific disciplines is slowly breaking down in the face of major intractable problems such as global warming, third-world poverty, over-population, loss of biodiversity and human rights violation. Solutions to problems of this global magnitude require the reintegration of dozens of knowledge domains involving the collaboration of many experts amplified by the large-scale computational resources of the Web.

Once knowledge is again perceived as a seamless web as in ancient times, the arguments that evolution is a random local phenomena or that it applies only to biological phenomena, will collapse. Biologists more than most should be aware of the holistic nature of life.

Certainly chaos theory teaches us that no event occurs just locally. Even the smallest perturbation generates ripples elsewhere in the Universe.


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