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New humanism,
new self, from
Lamarckism
Transcript of a video presentation, in six installments
by Shaun Johnston
Copyright 2010 Shaun Johnston
shaun@evolvedself.com
evolvedself.com
1. Why a New Humanism?
Why bother with humanism? In my case, it was discovering a local humanist group. I liked
the sound of humanism. Like “secularism,” only not so angry, not so negative, a more
complete philosophy, not just against religion. From what I’d read about humanism, I came
to it expecting to find a self made up of a happy blend of reason and free will.
That’s not what I found. What my fellow humanists now called “Reason” seemed to me
nothing more than physics, and there was no room in their “self” for free will. To me, that’s
the wrong way round. For me, the self starts out with free will. Don’t we have to have free
will to make rational choices we can trust?
To bring reason and free will back into harmony, we may need to come up with a new vision
of the world around us.
I’ve done something like that. In the course of writing a series of four books, two of them
fiction, another one a self-help manual, I’ve come up with a new way of looking at the
world. I think it’s a better basis for humanism. It tells us where our free will comes from.
And I think it’s a better basis for the self.
In this series of video installments, I tell how I came to a new humanism and a new self. An
evolved self.
I start with what’s most obvious—the hands in front of my face.
What an amazing piece of machinery.
But that’s not all. Look, I put my two hands side by side. Something else emerges. My two
hands are very nearly identical. The shapes of the nails, the distribution of the hairs, the
lengths and wrinkling of the fingers—the similarity is astonishing.
The blueprint for one hand able to type and operate a mouse must be awesome, but the
blueprint is so detailed that both my hands came out precisely the same. And as if that
wasn’t enough, I see something else about my hands. Not only can this blueprint define
hands so precisely that they come out identical, they’re mirror images of each other.
What makes that remarkable is, molecules in our bodies large enough to act as blueprints for
hands don’t come in both left and right forms, they come only in one or the other. So are
there two molecules defining your hands, one for the left hand, another for the right hand,
evolving separately? Almost certainly not, or your hands wouldn’t be so similar. There must
be only one blueprint, presumably defined in terms of some of these molecules. And besides
the blueprint there has to be a process able to read from it both left hands and right hands.
What else can we find out about this mysterious process?
Look, I extend my two arms out in front of me, with my palms together. I want to see how
long my two arms are, compared to one another. I pull my hands in towards me and see my
finger tips are almost exactly level with each other, to within one eight of an inch. My arms
are the same length!
That’s amazing. First, arms don’t come with a fixed length. A century or two ago people like
me would have been much shorter and had shorter arms. Yet despite growing out of sight
from each other even since they first budded off my fetus they’ve stayed the same length.
And, I’m right handed so I use my right hand and arm more than the left. But even that
hasn’t made any difference. Something is keeping my two arms exactly the same length.
Why that amazes me is, between the finger tips of my two hands there’s almost five foot of
hand, arm and shoulder. Suppose one of my arms discovered it was shorter than the other,
how would it discover that, over such a long distance? And having started growing to catch
up, how would it know when to stop? What controls growth?
Science has an answer to this, that’s almost certainly wrong. Each stage of growth, it says,
consists of a very very complex chemical map, laid out in gradients of all the chemicals
involved, running from more concentrated to less concentrated, all overlapping and running
together. These chemical gradients, supposedly act as a template, each stage of them
directing the next stage. Seems to me this can’t be right. First, the human adult is made up of
over 200 kinds of cells, the original egg it grows from is just one kind of cell. How can
chemical gradients in one cell lead to different chemical gradients making up all the different
cells of an adult? It should be the other way around. The complexity of the adult would have
to lie in an even more complex set of chemical gradients, not those in a single cell.
And here’s another reason this chemical gradient idea can’t work. They’re being stirred up all
the time. If you wanted to make a stirrer, you couldn’t do much better than a living creature.
Take a baby whale, for example, it’s stirring itself all day by swimming. All complex chemical
gradients would be lost at once. Yet a six foot long baby whale grows into a one hundred
foot long adult whale while staying in precisely-correct proportions. And its flippers too,
which are the ultimate stirrers in the whale’s body, they stay precisely the same length as each
other. We know that, because if they didn’t whales would all be swimming in circles.
Each part of a whale seems to know how big all the other parts are, since they stay in perfect
proportion from head to tail as they grow. So whatever drives the process of growth must be
able to communicate over a distance of at least 100 feet. How? I’ve no idea. And science
doesn’t seem to know either.
Here’s clear evidence that today’s science is not complete. If you agree we’ve already broken
through what science knows then, as long as we stay within reason, we’re free to take further
steps without worrying too much about what today’s science says.
I’ve come up with my ideas primarily through creative writing. The first book I wrote and
published, under the Evolved Self Publishing imprint, was a utopian novel titled “Father, in
a far distant time I find you”. In it I describe five civilizations that succeed each other over
the next 5000 years. This allowed me to study the implications for human nature of each
advance in evolutionary theory over the past 200 years, beginning with insight into geology,
then nature red in tooth and claw, and so on. By projecting them as a series of civilizations
over thousands of years I could explore the implications each step had for us, that we may
have passed through too rapidly to judge its effects.
And I did something else. I associated each civilization, and so each step in evolutionary
theory, with a World figure, a mythical agent that people in each civilization thought of as
the driving spirit of their age. From writing this book I trained myself to personalize
evolutionary theory, and view it through the personality of an agent.
Can I apply that training now? The lessons I absorbed from my hands, and from thinking
about development, of whales for example, suggest to me that we’ve been missing an
important principle in nature. Would it help to suppose there’s a new player in nature
representing that principle? In my next installment I set about identifying such a player.
2. A New “World Figure”
I started out wondering what could be keeping my two hands so similar. Whatever it was, I
knew it could act across a distance of at least five feet, from one hand, across my chest, to
the other. In fact, I know it can act over a distance of up to 100 feet, in whales, to keep them
in precise proportion as they grow. Can it act over distances greater than that? Can it act
from one creature, to another?
It can. I’ve seen that myself in a pair of identical twins I met. One I knew quite well. When I
met the other, it was extraordinarily difficult to accept it wasn’t the person I already knew.
Not only did they look as alike as my two hands, but the identity extended to the sound of
their voices, their facial expressions, their gestures, even their responses in conversation, my
experience of their selfs. And this even though they seldom saw each other and lived very
different lives hundreds of miles apart.
There’s the missing clue. We know what makes identical twins so similar. It’s their genetic
makeup. It’s identical for them both. If it can direct their growth to make them so similar in
such complex ways, even to temperament and responses in conversation, then it’s capable of
maintaining identify between the two sides of our own bodies, and the bodies of whales,
during growth.
Our genetic makeup. That must be my new World Figure.
“Oh, that!” science will say. “I know all about that.” But actually science knows very little
about it. It knows the molecules it’s made of, but that could tell you as little about our
genetic makeup as counting and measuring all the stones a cathedral is made of tells you
what that cathedral is for. Providing we rely on scientific data, observation and reason we’re
fully entitled to come to our own conclusions about our genetic makeup.
Scientific data: Our genetic makeup consists of a couple of dozen long molecules in the
nucleus of each cell in our bodies--our chromosomes. It’s written in the form of molecular
units that spell out our characteristics. String them all together and you have a sequence of
three billion “letters”—the human genome.
You can see why science thinks it knows everything it needs to know. Our genetic makeup is
simply long molecules. It can’t be or do anything more than what you can expect of
molecules. But our brain too is made of molecules, and we’ve not found limits to what that’s
capable of. Apart from that, our brains, there’s nothing to compare our genetic makeup to,
from which we can assess ways it’s limited. There’s nothing we know enough about, that’s
anything like our genetic makeup.
Here are some ways to appreciate how unique the genetic material in each of our cells is. It’s
3 billion “letters” long. Suppose you represented those letters by beads strung eight to an
inch on a necklace. If you started in Venice Beach in Los Angeles on the shore of the
Pacific, you’d be stringing beads out past Pasadena, out into the desert past Palm Springs, on
to the foothills of the Rockies, over the Rockies into the midWest, through the midWest and
on to the east Coast, say New York City, Then you’d still have to string beads all the way
over the Atlantic to London, and on for another few hundred miles. 6000 miles in all. There
is nothing else on earth remotely like that.
The genome is 4 billion years old. For all that time it’s been dividing in two, making itself
whole again, dividing again, and so on, not only replicating itself perfectly each time but
lengthening and becoming more complex as it goes.
What else does science tell us that we might doubt? Science tells us most of the genome is
“junk,” meaningless repeated sequences of molecular units with no apparent function. It’s
like a Martian dismantling a radio station and dismissing all the girders making up the
communication tower as “junk.” Given that the genome appears to be able to communicate
over quite long distances you’d expect something similar in the genome.
Science tells us it’s found individual genes that correspond to features of a living creature.
Much more often though, it takes several, or even many, genes to define a feature. Suppose
the genome acts more like a hologram, with the information for any feature smeared out
along it. And what science calls “genes” are actually just hotspots in those holographic
impressions. There’s no way today’s science could tell the difference..
So actually science can tell us very little about the genome. We’re free to use observation and
reason to learn more. What we do know is that the genetic tissue is capable of reading out
information from the genome to direct each stage of growth of a living creature. If it can do
that, what else might it be capable of?
I found my new World Figure. Now I wanted to learn more about it.
Once again I explored through creative writing. The second of the four books I’ve written
and published under the Evolved Self Publishing imprint is Me and The Genies. This is a
light romantic novel that explores the impact of evolutionary theory on our world now. In it
a young girl’s diary provides inspiration for a new television series for children, that turns out
to be a covert operation by a foreign power to set a new agenda for the world’s mass media.
The key is a set of genies, based on the genome, that the young girl imagines to be the
driving force in nature.
From writing that book, I came to more fully appreciate the amazing capabilities of our
genetic tissues. I’ll tell you what I found, in the next installment.
3. A New Creator of Species
I started out marveling at my two hands being so similar, even though they’re separated by
five foot of flesh and bone? Then, realizing I’d come across a similar effect in identical twins,
I realized the agent involved is our genetic tissues. How they exert their influence, and what
that influence consists of, science can’t tell us. Yet there, in front of me, in my hands, every
day, is the evidence. Maybe the world isn’t entirely the way science says it is. Maybe we’re
missing something very important.
I explore such problems through creative writing. It gives you great freedom to speculate.
But you’re not entirely free. You’re bound to operate with certain assumptions. And in this
case some of my assumptions come from what I think humanism involves.
Here are some of them.
One assumption is, human beings can be creative and have free will. No matter what science
says, that has to be true, else no kind of science would make sense. If scientists insisted they
weren’t free to make up their own minds we wouldn’t believe anything they said.
Another fundamental assumption is, creativity and free will originate in consciousness. And
again that has to be true for there to be any kind of science. Everything in science begins
with a conscious choice, a hypothesis, every finding has to pass through conscious judgment
that’s free to accept it or reject it. And the same is true for the humanities. All this creativity
and judgment involves operations originating in consciousness.
A further assumption is, mind and matter can communicate with one another in both
directions. Again, it’s a simple matter of experience. You stub your toe, you feel pain.
Something physical happening gives you an experience in consciousness, which isn’t
physical. And an experience in consciousness, like you deciding to paint your house, can
result in something physical, like a new coat of paint.
What’s astonishing is, we’re not aware how much has to go on, for this communication to
occur. We don’t have to learn how. You think, I’ll lean forward and grab my coffee cup and
take another sip, and that conscious thought sets off cascades of nerve impulses in your
brain, which in turn sets hundreds and thousands of nerves and muscles working together in
harmony to get it done. Think of dancers trying out some new steps. Just by imagining a
movement, they can make their bodies perform it, perfectly. Interfaces between brains and
minds can be enormously complex. That’s just an obvious fact about the natural world.
With these assumptions stated, let’s go back to wonder what kind of an agent can act over a
distance of up to 100 foot to control the growth in a whale, and make the selfs of identical
twins so similar.
Each human being begins as a single fertilised egg. The growth of everything else comes
from our genetic makeup. Our brains for example. We don’t make our own brains. Our
brains die with us when we die. New brains come from growth of an adult from a single
fertilized egg cell. So the wisdom for growing a brain lies not in us but in our genetic
makeup.
And consciousness? Almost all of us develop the capacity for developing consciousness. It
comes with a growing brain. So the wisdom for developing that capacity must also lie, not in
us, but in our genetic makeup. What I know about it so far is, it can act to control growth
over a distance of up to 100 feet, it can create human beings with intelligence and
consciousness, it can create conscious selfs as similar as those of identical twins.
And it’s alive. It’s made up of living tissue.
A living creature that’s able to create other living creatures with brains, intelligence and
consciousness, I think you’ve got to call intelligent. I can’t prove that by logic. On the other
hand, I don’t think you can logically deny it. If we have capabilities, it’s likely this agent had
them first. If it can make us, it’s likely to be at least as intelligent as we are. I’ve no other
word than “intelligent” to describe such a living creature. How can I say I’m intelligent, and
it isn’t?
For all these reasons, I’m going to assume my agent is intelligent, even conscious, as we are.
What do you have to have to be intelligent? Based on what we know of other intelligent
creatures, I’d say one thing you need is a brain. Can our genetic makeup function as a brain?
It doesn’t consist of just the genome alone. It consists also of most of the nucleus, and much
of the remainder of the cell. So it is more than the chromosomes, it is a complete complex
tissue. It can’t logically be denied the potential of being a brain.
Just the possibility is exciting. When you have two of something, you can learn much more
about it. What you discover is true of one, you can expect is true of the other. So if the
genetic tissue is a brain supporting an intelligence, we can explore it knowing how our own
brain and intelligence work together. And when I do that, I stumble on an amazing new
theory of evolution. This agent, responsible for development, is also responsible for
evolution.
Here’s how it goes.
Imagine the genetic tissue thinking. Those thoughts will drive changes in its brain. But its
brain consists mainly of genes. So just by thinking, the genetic tissues will make changes to
some genes. But changes to genes are what distinguish one species from another. So just by
thinking, the genome can create new species. The genome can literally dream up new
species.
And here we have an explanation for why individual characteristics in a living creature may
be coded in many genes. The interface between the genetic tissue’s mind and its brain, the
genome, could be as complicated as the interface between our minds and our brains. Just by
thinking up simple changes, it could make changes that ripple throughout the entire genome.
To see how these ideas could act as the foundation for a new humanism, join me in the next
installment,
4. A New Humanism
Let’s take stock, let’s look back at how we got here. First, in my own hands I observed the
operation of an amazing power, From my experience with a pair of identical twins I
identified this power with our genetic tissues. I found no limit to the powers these tissues
could have. From its ability to direct the growth of brains and consciousness I supposed that
the genetic tissue is intelligent as we are, even conscious. From how thinking works in us,
able to write itself as physical changes in our brains, I supposed the genetic intelligence able
to write changes in its own brain. Since that consists primarily of genes, that meant the
genetic tissue’s thinking would drive changes in the genome, This means that, just by
thinking, the genetic tissue can write into its genetic makeup all the genes you’d need to
define a new species. Which is the hallmark of evolution.
Now we’re ready for something very wonderful. Two entirely separate traditions of the self
come together. One is the human self, explored by the humanities, the other is this new
genetic self. By combining the terms we use for these separately, we can create a single set of
terms for accounting for creative selfs in general.
Take our own thinking. We’ve no idea what our own thinking is. Can we borrow a concept
from the genetic self? I deduced that when the genetic tissues think, they drive the evolution
of genes, or species. In a genetic self, thinking and evolution are associated. Perhaps thinking
in us also happens through something evolving. Isn’t that what you’d expect-- how could the
genetic tissues create a thinking process in us except by extending to us what they’d learned
was true for them, that thinking involves evolving? If they wanted to embed thinking in us,
they would look for how to embed in us a process of evolution. What evolves in us would
be thoughts. In us, thinking is our thoughts evolving.
Now let’s go the other way. Let’s take our concept of mind? What is mind? For me it’s a
hypothesis I use to make things work out OK, like minus numbers in mathematics.
Thoughts don’t have any particular location, they don’t weigh anything, so they’re not some
kind of matter you can study with physical science. For me, mind is simply where my
thinking goes on, as opposed to space. I’m used to the concept. I’m happy with it.
If, like me, you’ve retained the concept of mind, it’s natural to then say, maybe the genome’s
thinking goes on in mind, too. But the genome’s thinking is equivalent to evolving. Let’s try
this out-- the mind is where any process of evolving takes place. Then evolution isn’t a
material process, it’s a mental process, it’s taking place in mind, both in us and in the genetic
self. The source of creativity both in nature and in us would be evolutionary processes
operating in mind.
This gives us a much simpler view of the world. Everything is due to either physical forces
acting on matter, or evolutionary processes going on in mind. There is nothing else. The
evolution of living creatures, and our thoughts, operate according to the same principles, in
mind, whatever that is.
This new world view provides me with new basis for reason, to supplement what physics
tells us. But what does it say about free will?
What I set out to defend wasn’t really free will, as opposed to determinism. Those are logical
terms, I don’t really know what they mean, in practice. What I wanted to defend was being
able to think creatively, consciously, and consciously express that creativity in myself and in
the world around me. What I needed was to identify the source of my experience of being
able to think creatively. And in the creative powers of evolution I find it. Evolution is
abundantly, enormously, creative. Once there were no elephants, now there are elephants.
It’s creativity is there, for us all to see, and nothing science says can alter that. We can more
surely put our faith in the evident creativity of evolution than in logic—and, because we’re
evolved, in our own conscious creative experience. In both cases, the way I see it, the
process involves evolutionary processes taking place in mind, out of the reach of today’s
physics. We know it’s possible for us be creative, because we evolved, and evolution is
hugely creative.
For me, recognizing our genetic tissues as the drivers of evolution restores harmony between
reason and free will.
Where is all this heading? Are I speculating myself into a dead end? Actually, no, we’re
joining up with one of the two main currents in evolutionary thinking, the main alternative
to Darwinism, Lamarckism. I’m a Lamarckian. Why did I choose that? That’s what I’ll be
talking about in the next installment.
5. A new Lamarckism
All my life, up until my mid sixties, I was an orthodox Darwinian. But subjecting
evolutionary theory to fiction was like putting it into an etching bath. The acid in creative
writing began to chew into the logic behind Darwinism, and, about six years ago, it just fell
apart. For a few years I floundered, looking for conclusive arguments through writing.
Finally, about a year ago, I committed myself to Lamarckism.
Darwinism and Lamarckism are the two main theories of evolution. You might not think
choosing between them matters. But evolution is our new creation story. Which theory we
choose will have a powerful impact on what we think about our selves. As a humanist, I
have to care how our beliefs about evolution affects our sense of self.
I’ll summarize the two theories, and then tell you how I chose between them.
Darwinism says evolution is driven by the demands of the environment. The demands of the
environment act on members of a living species as a filter, letting through into each new
generation creatures with the characteristics that best cope with those demands. As these
best characteristics become more concentrated, that results in the evolution of new species.
What these new species are a response to, lies in the environment.
Lamarckism says evolution is driven by a talent in living creatures for coming up with
creative new behaviors. As some creative behaviors help them cope better with the
environment, these behaviors get turned into habits, and over many more generations those
habits get turned into tissues with new capabilities. It’s these new tissues with new
capabilities that results in the evolution of new species. What these new species are a
response to, lies in the life process.
Both these theories have a serious problem, so you have to add something. For Darwinism,
the problem, is, once you’ve nothing but the best characteristics left, you’ve eliminated all
variation, and there’s nothing left for selection to work on, so evolution stops. The most
commonly agreed-on solution is, mutation. Variation is being generated all the time through
mutation, random changes to genes, so selection continues.
Lamarckism’s problem is, once a creature discovers something, how can that get written into
its genes, to get passed on to future generations, as a habit, and how can habits get translated
into new body parts? The solution I’ve come up with is, the intelligence of the genetic tissues
can simply think the needed changes into the genes. That’s one way future generations could
inherit characteristics acquired through creative new behavior.
One of these theories is wrong. For me, though, the issue is much more than just a scientific
theory being wrong. It’s how it could damage humanism. If Darwinism is wrong, I see it
damaging humanism in at least two ways.
The first blow is, the low standard it sets for what it means to be human. All we can expect
of ourselves is to be merely adapted to our environment, that’s all Darwinism claims you can
expect of evolved creatures. That’s a terrible blow to the humanist tradition of human
dignity. How can kids develop any pride in themselves when they’re told they’re nothing
more than the result of selection of mutations? No human rights, no value to life? Are we
ready to give all that up? Is the authority of science so great that we’ll trim our sense of self
to whatever limitations it imposes?
So first, Darwinism gives us no justification for self respect. Second, having to accept today’s
evolutionary theory is a huge blow to reason. Because, to believe it, you have to set reason
aside. The combination of mutation and natural selection just can’t work.
Darwinism has become so taken for granted, you may find it hard to imagine how flimsy it
looks from the point of view of someone who’s first accepted it and then abandoned it. I’ll
try to explain.
Darwinism is simply hypotheses. Remember how, in my two hands being so alike and mirror
images of each other, I saw evidence for a powerful agent in nature. You don’t find that kind
of evidence in nature for natural selection and mutation. They’re just hypotheses made up to
prop up a theory.
Take mutation. Imagine how complex and precise the blueprint for growing human beings
must be, when twins with identical genes come out so similar, even to gesture and tone of
voice, that we experience them as identical. You’re going to make changes in that blueprint
at random? The result will be what happens whenever you make random changes to a
complex blueprint—damage. What’s going to happen as you go on damaging creatures
generation after generation? They’re not going to evolve. They’re going to go extinct, and
fast.
Look at it another way. Consider two species occupying the same niche. We burden only one
of them with mutations. Let a few generations go by. Now select for which one is better
adapted to the environment. Which one will benefit? Not the one burdened with all those
mutations? You can’t make mutations into a benefit. It’s just damage.
Now, natural selection. What’s its role? It simply slows down damage. Think of an
avalanche. Can anything stop it? Friction? Well, friction can slow it down a little, but friction
can’t reverse it. The same is true for natural selection. It can resist the damage caused by
mutation, a little, but it can’t reverse it. The world just isn’t made that way. Suppose there’s a
thousand mutations, and natural selection is 10% efficient at eliminating them. That leaves
900 mutations. Where’s the magic?
And where are all the mutations? Won’t most random changes to a complex blueprint be
lethal? Yet most seeds germinate. Look at a sunflower gone to seed. Each of the spots
allocated for a seed, has a seed. There are seldom any blanks. Where are all the mutations?
We just don’t see them. Mutation is just a hypothesis made up to make natural selection
work.
Why suppose there are mutations? How is that supposed to make natural selection work?
The point is, to suppose that, every once in a while, one of these mutations will be beneficial
and natural selection will favor it. But “beneficial mutations” are truly mythical. You can’t
identify them at the time of mutation, Only after there’s been some evolution does one
suppose that there must have been a beneficial mutation. It’s simply something imagined for
mutation to generate that natural selection can select, that could possibly result in an
improvement. But just imagining it doesn’t make it so.
Go back to the avalanche. Suppose it’s occurring on Mount Rushmore, on the presidents’
faces. The faces are crumbling, and a torrent of rocks is tumbling down. But one falling rock
gets stuck somewhere on the way down. Maybe it adds a gleam to one president’s eye, that
wasn’t there before. Could the entire sculpture be improved by the avalanche because one
rock got stuck somewhere? Translate mutation and natural selection into damage and a little
resistance to damage, and the language of Darwinism appears as simply wishful thinking.
You might think my version of Lamarckism is also jus wishful thinking. But bear in mind
that we humans can express ourselves creatively in the world. So clearly living creatures can
do that. And the genetic tissues are alive, and unlike us they have lived continuously without
a break for billions of years, many millions of times longer than any one of us, evolving as
they went, for a thousand times as long as it took us to develop what separates us from
chimpanzees. And in your own hands you see evidence for capabilities in nature requiring a
much more profound conception of nature’s powers than Darwinism. To throw in your lot
with mutation and natural selection is, I think, to turn your back on reason.
For more on the comparison of Darwinism and Lamarkism, flaws in Darwinism, and how
Darwinism threatens the sense of self we’ve inherited, check out “Save Our Selves from
science gone wrong: Physicalism and Natural Selection,” third volume in the Evolved Self
Publishing series
Once I saw how damaging today’s theory of evolution is to reason and the traditional
humanist sense of self, I saw that developing a new self based on a theory of evolution along
humanist lines was more than a mere intellectual exercise. It could make a terrific difference
to how we feel about our selves.
But we won’t get very far using today’s science, Today’s science denies exactly what you
most need to study—creative intelligence. But that’s OK. Except for Lamarck, the original
inventors of evolutionary theory were physicians, collectors, amateurs, not scientists. Samuel
Butler, who attacked Darwin with a theory very similar to mine, was a Bohemian artist living
in a London flat without running water, with mainly other artists as friends. You’d definitely
lump him in with the humanities rather than the sciences. History says, if you’re interested in
evolutionary theory, you’ve more chance of making a contribution if you’re on the
humanities side, than a scientist.
In the next, and last, installment, I suggest how we might go about building a new self on the
foundation of a Lamarckian theory of evolution.
6. An evolved self
To make progress towards a new self, we don’t need any Bunsen burners or test tubes. Just
an open mind and common sense. Maybe an armchair.
I’ll tell you where I start. If evolution and our consciousness are both examples of creativity
in mind, which is the original? Obviously, creativity in evolution. It’s billions of years old, it’s
been evolving for a thousand times as long as we’ve been evolving separately from the
chimpanzees, and it’s grown immensely wise. And it makes us. So to understand mind, and
our own selves, the best object to study would be, not us, but evolution. Once we
understood that, it should be simple to understand something it threw off, such as our own
selfs.
So I’d start by coming to understand the mind of the genetic intelligence, the mind behind
creativity in nature.
Clues to that intelligence could come from studying exceptional talents in children. Take
learning to talk. You can soak up your mother tongue like a sponge only for a few years as
an infant. It’s not a skill you have to learn. Is that a capability of the genetic tissues that they
give us special access to for a few short years? What would that correspond to, that would be
useful to the genome intelligence’s creative mental powers?
What else would you need to run something as complicated as a human body? Mathematics?
Could that account for the astonishing talents in calculation that sometimes appears in
children as young as 7 or 8? Often the talent is lost as the child matures. It’s also not a
learned skill. Where else in the world could such awesome skills come from, but the genetic
tissues?
Any inexplicable talents in infants could be clues to the genetic tissues’ capabilities, that they
give such children direct access to. Studies like this could give us a measure of the genetic
tissues’ mental powers.
Now, what do they know, what do they care about? Could we learn that by studying
dreaming? Could we identify in dreams knowledge that we couldn’t have come by ourselves?
From that we might learn the kinds of things the genome intelligence knows, and cares
about, that we don’t.
The genetic intelligence expresses itself mainly through nature. Once we’ve some idea of the
genetic tissues’ capabilities and concerns, maybe we’d resume old-fashioned nature study,
and learn to read that intelligence through its works. From that we’d compose some idea
what the genetic intelligence is like, as a person.
That might equip us to read the fossil record in a new way, as a journal written in stone over
billions of years by an intelligent creature, as it dreamed the living kingdoms into existence.
We’d then carry that story forward by following how the genetic intelligence found ways of
embedding some parts of its intelligence in living creatures. By studying dreaming in animals
we might learn how consciousness evolved. When we wake we remember being conscious in
our dreams, of what we felt, what we thought. It’s possible that that’s what consciousness
originally evolved for, to help the genome intelligence communicate with its creatures during
sleep. By studying dreaming in other animals, we might be able to trace the stages through
which our waking consciousness evolved.
This would carry the origin of species up to ourselves. We’d complete the story told from
the point of view of the intelligence behind evolution, by reinterpreting our own
paleontology, archeology, history, and culture, up to the present. We’d have come to
understand human nature in terms of the mental processes of the intelligence behind
evolution.
Finally, to appreciate this kind of intelligence as it can be experienced from the inside, we’d
turn to study the conscious self, through our own literature and religion.
Life on Earth came about through a unique series of events. Usually, that’s the kind of thing
you study, not through science, but through history. History has a technique known as
analytical narrative. It’s like brainstorming. To account for whatever happened, you come
up with as many different narratives as you can, from as many different points of view as
you can imagine. Then you check these narratives, or stories, against your records of what
happened, to see which one fits what happened, best. You take that narrative, and add detail.
When the detail helps explain things, you keep it, if it doesn’t you try something else. In this
way you build a narrative bit by bit, that best fits your data. In effect, you come up with a
story that helps you “understand” what happened, as much as possible. That helps you talk
about it, think about it, suggest what will happen next.
Darwinism is a very poor story. All it tells you about anything is, it must have once been an
adaptation to the environment. Adaptation to the environment through natural selection
doesn’t predict that human beings would evolve out of apes, even that they “could” evolve
out of apes. In most cases it tells you almost nothing you want to know. Instead of helping
us appreciate nature’s creativity it narrows our vision down to only what involves selection-competition, predators, males fighting to mate, the fight for survival. It’s an impoverished
vision of the world. For a century it helped counterbalance the power of the church. Now
it’s time to let it go. We owe that to our self.
Our self today is a rag bag of old selfs. Every so often a new self came along, such as
stoicism, the primary self in the Roman Empire, and Christianity after that. Today they live
on mainly as omens, such as astrology, and slogans such as human rights and human life is
precious. To these we’ve added bits of science and Eastern spiritualism. But there’s no
coherence to the mixture. And I think we’ve given up expecting it. I believe science, by
denying the self, has blinded us to the needs of the self. We’ve no real understanding of it.
We’ve no idea how to maintain it. And there’s no new self in sight. That’s the real promise
of the discovery of evolution, not the abolition of the conscious self, but it’s greatest
flowering ever.
What kind of enterprise is this? Is it science? Is it humanities? I think it is something else,
that transcends both these. I think it’s the work of a revived humanism. I’ve explained this
more fully in the most recent book in the Evolved Self Publishing series, Self Improvement
Through a New Approach to Evolution. It explains how these ideas can be applied to self
help.
My leave-behind message is, evolutionary theory is too important to leave to scientists. The
impact of Darwinism on our sense of self should alert humanities departments to the
importance of studying evolution, through the methods of the humanities. Meanwhile, if
evolutionary theory is to be taught in schools, Darwinism should always be balanced with
Lamarckism.
Please do send me your thoughts, you can email me at shaun@evolvedself.com. My books
are all available through Amazon. You can search by my name, Shaun Johnston. Or visit my
web site, www.evolvedself.com.