Creative Evolution: A Physicist's Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design

by Amit Goswami

Overview

By denying evolution altogether, says quantum physicist Amit Goswani, intelligent design believers fly in the face of scientific data. But the idea of intelligent design does contain substance that neo-Darwinists cannot ignore. Goswani posits that consciousness, not matter, is the primary force in the universe. Biology must come to terms with feeling, meaning, and the purposefulness of life, as well as with the idea of a designer. What’s more, reconciling the question of life’s purposefulness and the existence of the designer with neo-Darwinism also answers many other difficult questions. The result is a paradigm shift for biology and the vision of a coherent whole that Goswami calls "science within consciousness." In this timely, important book, the author offers clear arguments supported by the findings of quantum physics that represent a major step in resolving controversies between science and religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780835630955
Publisher:	Quest Books
Publication date:	01/23/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Amit Goswami, Ph.D., was born in India and raised in the Hindu tradition. He earned his Ph.D. from Calcutta University in theoretical nuclear physics in 1964 and is professor emeritus in the physics department at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon, where he has served since 1968. He taught physics for 32 years in this country, mostly in Oregon, before fully retiring in 2003. Goswami was a senior scholar in residence at the Institute of Noetic Sciences during 1998-2000. He teaches quite regularly at the Holmes Institute and the Philosophical Research University in L.A.; Pacifica in Santa Barbara, CA; and UNIPAZ in Portugal.

Goswami is a pioneer of the new multidisciplinary paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness called "Science within Consciousness," as well as the author of the highly successful textbook, Quantum Mechanics. His two-volume textbook for nonscientists, The Physicist's View of Nature, traces the decline and rediscovery of the concept of God within science. His research has been published in scientific journals in three different fields: physics, biology, and psychology.

Goswami has also written eight popular books based on his research on quantum physics and consciousness. In his seminal book, The Self-Aware Universe, he solved the quantum measurement problem elucidating the famous observer effect while paving the path to a new paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness. Subsequently, in The Visionary Window, Goswami demonstrates how science and spirituality can be integrated. In Physics of the Soul, he developed a theory of survival after death and reincarnation. His book Quantum Creativity is a tour de force instruction about how to engage in both outer and inner creativity. Goswami's last book, The Quantum Doctor, integrates conventional and alternative medicines.

In his private life, Goswami is a practitioner of spirituality and transformation. He refers to himself as a "quantum activist." The public knows Goswami perhaps the best since his leading role in the hit independent film, What the Bleep Do We Know!? He has also appeared on numerous radio talk shows, including New Dimensions and Thinking Allowed.

Goswami currently resides in Eugene, Oregon.

Read an Excerpt

Creative Evolution

A Physicist's Resolution between Darwinism and Intelligent Design

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By Amit Goswami

Theosophical Publishing House

Copyright © 2008 Amit Goswami
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-3095-5

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CHAPTER 1

GOD and a NEW BIOLOGY

THE OVERVIEW

Darwin's theory of evolution is the foundation of biology, but every modern biologist—in moments of total honesty—hears the foundation creaking. Darwinism is a theory of continuous evolution. But it's now an open secret that fossil gaps—discontinuities in evolutionary fossil lineages—pose a serious threat to the complete validity of Darwin's theory. It is also well known that Darwin's theory and God's existence are mutually exclusive ideas. But if Darwin's theory is at best an incomplete theory of evolution, only able to explain its continuous epochs, there's room for God to make a comeback.

Intelligent design theories try to revive God, either explicitly, as in creationism, or implicitly, by pointing to the intelligence and leaving us to infer a designer, but end by denying evolution altogether. What an ingenious way to sidestep the fossil gaps: no evolution, no fossil gaps to explain. Unfortunately, too much credible evidence exists in favor of our evolutionary ancestry for this dodge to work.

But should we throw the baby out with the bath water? Is there any substance in intelligent design theory (let alone creationism) that warrants serious scientific attention? Do these theories present any ideas with which biologists must come to terms? The unprejudiced scientific answer to both questions is yes. And the important idea I am talking about is this: An intelligent design of life suggests that biology must come to terms with the feeling, meaning, and purposiveness of life and with the idea of a designer.

The current materialist basis of biological theories, including Darwinism (and its more recent revision, neo-Darwinism), prevents these theories from properly including these theologically tinged ideas. In this book I demonstrate that including the idea of creativity in biological evolution reconciles the notions of evolution with those of intelligent design by a purposive designer. In fact, I show that evolution proves intelligent design. Furthermore, when the question of the purposiveness of life's design and the existence of the designer are reconciled with the evolutionary ideas of Darwinism by using quantum physics and the primacy of consciousness, many other paradigmatic difficulties of biology and biological evolution are also resolved.

Although intelligent design theorists miss it, one piece of compelling experimental evidence exists for design and purposiveness of life: The evolution of life proceeds from simplicity to complexity. By looking at the fossil data alone, any intelligent person can distinguish between time past and time future. In other words, the fossil record of biological evolution gives us an unmistakable arrow of time. The intelligent design theorists miss the importance of this fact because of their contention that there is no evolution at all.

Darwinists, on the other hand, do attempt to understand the evolutionary trend to develop complexity and intelligence. But their attempts are based on the idea of genetic determinism—that evolution is determined and driven by genes' need to survive (Dawkins 1976). This idea enables biologists to attribute all sure signs of the intelligence of life—feeling, meaning, and indeed consciousness itself, just to name a few—to adaptive epiphenomena of the genetic drive to survive environmental changes. The notion is very weak on two scores. First, compelling theoretical arguments have been presented showing that the molecules of which genes are part do not have the capacity to process feeling, meaning, or consciousness. How then can such qualities evolve adaptively from nothing? Second, most biologists believe that biology at its most basic is connected to physics, but in recent years physics itself, under the pressure of compelling experimental data, has abandoned strict determinism and made room for occasional conscious choice. Despite this ideological change, physics has escaped major revision because it concerns itself with behavior en masse: It rests on a statistical determinism that holds for a large number of objects or a large number of events, or both. The biologist has no such consolation, because in biology the behavior of a single organism is as much a concern as that of the many.

In short, biology must reconcile itself with the revolutionary aspect of quantum physics: that is, indeterminacy and choice by a quantum consciousness. I show in this book that such a reformulation of biology puts the idea of creative evolution on a firm footing. With such a footing, a theory of creative evolution can not only integrate such disparate ideas as intelligent design and evolutionism or discontinuity and continuity, but also unify ideas of development (how biological form arises from a one-celled zygote) with ideas of evolution.

The sympathy that a portion of the American public feels for intelligent design theory is not merely of religious origin. It can also be traced to an uneasiness about the attitudes implicit in Darwinian evolutionism, and indeed in scientific materialism itself. How can we take these viewpoints seriously when they denigrate our intelligence, our capacity to process feeling and meaning, and our consciousness itself by naming them a meaningless, epiphenomenal dance of elementary particles and their conglomerates, the genes? We are also uneasy because Darwinism tells us nothing significant about the future of our evolution. Does evolution lead to increased intelligence? Darwinism is equivocal: Evolution can lead to more complex or less complex organisms, more intelligence or less. We cannot predict; the outcome is left to chance and survival necessity.

The theory developed in this book, creative evolution, is unequivocal. Creative evolution is geared toward higher and higher intelligence, toward developing qualities of intelligence that our religions and spiritual traditions identify as godly. If you hear in that statement the echo of the ideas of such philosophers as Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that is no coincidence. Creative evolution incorporates the revolutionary ideas of these two great thinkers.

In addition to making room for such ideas, the inclusiveness of creative evolution permits resolution of several long- standing sore points in biology. For example, the ideas of Lamarckism—that traits acquired in an individual lifetime can be inherited by offspring—are reintegrated into biology, ending a long controversy. This reconciliation is accomplished in the context of a much-needed explanation of instincts. The new biology proposed here incorporates a proper resolution of the mind-brain problem: Specifically, it presents a paradox-free treatment of the neurophysiology of perception. Most importantly, an integrative reformulation that locates biology within consciousness enables us to arrive at a proper formulation of biology that includes feeling and that can begin to treat heterogeneity, the individual differences between organisms. Furthermore, locating the new biology within consciousness leads to a satisfying bioethics and a deep ecology. It also gives us a new perspective for dealing with the issue of survival after death, a perspective that opens the door for additional reconciliation of biology and religion.

Apropos of religion, a word about the title of this chapter, which links God and biology. I freely use the terms God and quantum consciousness—the causal source of conscious choice in quantum physics—as interchangeable concepts, an equivalence I explore further in chapter 2. This choice to use the term God, made as a gesture toward the viewpoint of the faithful believer, should not be taken as an affront to the scientific sensitivity of the professional biologist. As you will see, the God of this book is an objective organizing principle. Seen as a new, objective organizing principle, the idea of God becomes useful under the most stringent qualifications as an element of new science.

SO WHERE'S THE PROBLEM?

Many people dismiss the idea of intelligent design offhand because "everybody knows" that Darwin and his followers have shown evolution rules out intelligent design and a designer. It is true that Darwin's theory attempted to explain evolution without invoking the concept of intelligent design. However, it is also true that, according to Darwin's theory, evolution is continuous and should produce a continuous fossil record of all evolution. Unfortunately, the fossil records show glaring gaps at many important junctures. In other words, evolution is not only continuous but also discontinuous (Eldredge and Gould 1972). Evolution has been compared to punctuated prose: The punctuation marks are discontinuities in otherwise continuous text. Darwinism cannot provide a fully credible explanation of such discontinuity. In this book, I take the discontinuity in biological evolution seriously and show that, like the well-known discontinuous jumps of our own creative experiences (Harman and Reingold 1984), the fossil gaps are signatures of biological creativity. And creativity is a definitive sign of intelligence. In this way, I show that evolution proves intelligent design.

However, creativity and intelligent design also imply a creative and intelligent designer, or, as I term it, a nonphysical and nonmaterial organizing principle. Such organizing principles have been proposed in biology from time to time, but until now it has not been clear how this kind of organizing principle could operate within a scientific framework. In this book I will show that some recent developments in quantum physics and elsewhere are telling us how much-needed nonphysical and nonmaterial organizing principles can be incorporated in biology.

Every biologist must be painfully aware that biology is an incomplete science. It needs new organizing principles, ones that are nonphysical and nonmaterial, to explain three perennial mysteries: the difference between life and nonlife (Davies 1988), the development of an embryo into an adult biological form (Sheldrake 1981), and, as emphasized here and by Eldredge and Gould (1972), the discontinuous epochs of evolution. Unfortunately, it is not politically correct for a biologist to admit these shortcomings in public. In this book, I will show that the introduction of new nonphysical and nonmaterial organizing principles (yes, principles, plural; we need more than one) can complete biology as a science. In this way I will set a framework from which biologists can work to rid their field of the paradoxes, controversies, and anomalies that have plagued it from its very inception to the present, including the highly politicized controversy pitting evolutionism against creationism and theories of intelligent design.

THE ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES OF OLD BIOLOGY

The current biological paradigm (the "old" paradigm) is based on two organizing principles. One is the principle of upward causation: All biological phenomena arise from the interaction of microscopic constituents of matter called molecules (and ultimately from the interactions of submicroscopic particles called elementary particles). This principle assumes a molecular basis of life, the idea that life can be reduced to the movement of molecules. This assumption has given us molecular biology—a science proclaiming that all the functions of a living cell and conglomerates of cells can be understood in terms of the physics and chemistry of molecules, especially large "macromolecules" called proteins, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid molecules), and genes (portions of DNA). In biology, the dogma of upward causation is expressed as genetic determinism: Genes determine all biological form and function.

The other organizing principle of old biology is that evolution is determined by chance and necessity. This principle, discovered by Charles Darwin in 1857 (Darwin 1859), forms the basis of the evolutionary model called Darwinism (see Mayr 1982 for a history) that is accepted, explicitly or implicitly, by most biologists. According to the latest version of Darwinism, evolution proceeds in two stages. The first stage is the chance production of variations in the hereditary components of life (the above-mentioned genes). The second stage is selection from among these variations, dictated by the necessities of survival for species coping with changes in the natural environment. This process is called natural selection. The genetic changes that cause the beneficial chance variations occur rarely, but working over millions of years this slow, two-step Darwinian mechanism accounts for all facets of evolution, according to most biologists.

However, both of these organizing principles are mired in controversy. A debate continues about whether molecular biology can ever explain what life is or how it originated. After some initial successes, the molecular synthesis of life in the laboratory has remained elusive (Davies 1999). Controversy also swirls around theories of development, that is, how a single-cell zygote develops into a full-fledged form, the organism. Is organismic development solely the handiwork of upward causation from the genes, or is there a role for the environment (Goodwin 1994)? Might there even be a role for new organizing principles in explaining the full intricacies of development (Sheldrake 1981)?

Perhaps it was such controversies that prompted this remark by the biologist Brian Goodwin (1994): "I don't think biology at the moment is a science at all, at least in the sense that physics and chemistry are sciences. We need to know the universal ordering principles just as Newton provided them for the inanimate world."

The most publicly visible controversy is, of course, about evolution. The main scientific evidence for biological evolution is the fossil data. According to Darwinism, the story of evolution is a continuous one: The transition from an earlier species to a later one is incremental and continuous, and the fossil data should reflect that. Unfortunately, this premise is not borne out; we find the famous fossil gaps already mentioned, gaps that appear when the fossil data are viewed as a chronology of evolutionary ancestry. Darwin himself knew about this problem, but he was optimistic, justifiably, that further investigation would turn up intermediates to fill the gaps. Indeed, we do occasionally hear about discoveries of intermediates, but according to Darwin's theory, thousands upon thousands of these intermediates should have been discovered by now. Such discoveries have not happened. So the fossil gaps raise legitimate doubts about the veracity of Darwinism (and its later incarnation, neo-Darwinism) as a complete theory of evolution. In science, we must take data seriously, and by now much research should have been carried out toward replacing Darwinism. But this has not happened either; the challenge to Darwinism (and neo-Darwinism) within biology has been sporadic, and even these sporadic efforts have, to a large extent, been ignored (see chapter 10 for a bit of history). Because biologists in the main have been less than candid about this matter, the challenge to Darwinism was taken up outside the scientific arena and has become highly politicized.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN?

In the public arena, the challengers who have gotten the most visible support are those who challenge the idea of evolution itself. Suppose there is no evolution; it is a fact that the fossil data indicate much stasis; many organisms seem not to change for long periods of geological time. The challengers posit the following: Suppose that, instead of being the result of evolution, all life is the result of intelligent design by a designer who acts all at once. Certain biological forms are too complex to have originated through chance and necessity, these challengers maintain.

Some intelligent design theorists resort to an old philosophy called creationism, following the Genesis chapter of the Old Testament of the Bible (Gish 1978). This theory flatly declares that God created the world and all the biological species six thousand years ago in six days: There is no evolution.

The idea of creation by God is an aspect of God's downward causation. The term reflects the tendency to picture God as an emperor sitting on a throne "up there" in the heavens, brandishing the causal wand of downward creation in is hand. Such anthropomorphic pictures of God irritate scientists (and probably many nonscientists as well).

The resurgence of creationism as an alternative to evolutionism has increased the stakes, because the context of the controversy has reverted to the old struggle for "worldview control" between science and the Christian church, and so a lot of negative emotion has been generated. Scientists feel invaded by theology: How can it be called science when an idea of faith (the biblical God) is brought to bear on science? On the face of it, creationism does sound unscientific, even to an unprejudiced reader, because of its biblical origin; it is true that the validity of the Bible is based on faith, not experimental data.

Can religion be taken out of this debate? More recently, some serious scientists, among them some professional biologists, have begun positing the idea that species are created by an intelligent designer—maybe God, but it is kept implicit—without subscribing to the biblical baggage. In scientific language, this "causal creation by the intelligent designer" is just another organizing principle, albeit a nonphysical and nonmaterial one.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Creative Evolution by Amit Goswami. Copyright © 2008 Amit Goswami. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Preface,
PART 1 Introduction,
1. GOD AND A NEW BIOLOGY,
2. QUANTUM PHYSICS AND DOWNWARD CAUSATION,
3. CONNECTING BIOLOGY TO PHYSICS,
4. BIOLOGY WITHIN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OTHER ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES,
5. EVOLUTION: FROM WHAT TO WHAT?,
PART 2 Life and Its Origins,
6. MATERIALIST THEORIES OF LIFE AND ITS ORIGIN,
7. THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE, THE ORIGIN OF LIFE, AND THE QUANTUM OBSERVER,
8. A DESIGNER NEEDS BLUEPRINTS,
PART 3 Creative Evolution,
9. THE EVOLUTION AND FUTURE OF DARWINISM,
10. POST-DARWINIAN IDEAS AND THE JOURNEY TO THE NEW PARADIGM,
11. CREATIVE EVOLUTION,
12. RECONCILING DARWINISM AND GAIA THEORY,
PART 4 Form, Feeling, and Vital Energies,
13. MORPHOGENETIC FIELDS, EVOLUTION, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF FORM,
14. A NEW BIOLOGY OF FEELING,
PART 5 Neuroscience within Consciousness,
15. THE RELATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS, THE BRAIN, AND THE MIND,
16. RECONCILING COGNITIVE SCIENCE WITH THE PARADOX OF PERCEPTION,
17. THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND,
PART 6 More New Biology: The Supramental Dimension,
18. THE BIOLOGY OF DEATH AND SURVIVAL AFTER DEATH,
19. A NEW BIOETHICS AND DEEP ECOLOGY,
20. LAMARCKISM AND THE MYSTERY OF INSTINCTS,
21. EVOLUTION: THE NEXT STEP,
References,

Editorial Reviews

"Goswami ranges far, wide, and deep." —Rupert Sheldrake, co-author of The Evolutionary Mind

Reviews

"Professor Amit Goswami presents here a highly rational, objective, and persuasive counter argument to the old materialistic assumption about mind and matter being irrelevantly related with mind a mere epiphenomenon of matter. Goswami is not shy here--he posits a whole new way of thinking that could change both our mindsets about God, mind, and matter and the very nature of what we mean by a physical world as different from a spiritual world. This is an important work to consider regardless of how you feel about the subject." --Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D, author of Mind into Matter, The Yoga of Time Travel, and many other books.

"Goswami ranges far, wide, and deep." --Rupert Sheldrake, co-author of The Evolutionary Mind

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