CHAPTER 6: Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science
Any truth creates a scandal.
— MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, The Memoirs of Hadrian
Our discoveries about the startling nature of reality are a major force for change, undermining commonsense ideas and old institutional philosophies. “The 1980s will be a revolutionary time," said physicist Fritjof Capra, “because the whole structure of our society does not correspond with the world-view of emerging scientific thought."
The agenda of the coming decade is to act on this new scientific knowledge — discoveries that revise the very data base on which we have built our assumptions, our institutions, our lives. It promises far more than the old reductionist view. It reveals a rich, creative, dynamic, interconnected reality. Nature, we are learning, is not a force over which we must triumph but the medium of our transformation.
The mysteries we will explore in this chapter are not remote from us, like black holes in outer space, but ourselves. Our brains and bodies. The genetic code. The nature of change. The widening and shrinking of conscious experience. The power of imagination and intention. The plastic nature of intelligence and perception.
We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically. On the other hand, if we know that we are part of an open universe, and that our minds are a matrix of reality, we will live more creatively and powerfully.
If we imagine that we are isolated beings, so many inner tubes afloat on an ocean of indifference, we will lead different lives than if we know a universe of unbroken wholeness. Believing in a world of fixity, we will fight change; knowing a world of fluidity, we will cooperate with change.
As Abraham Maslow said, a fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing, because of the responsibility inherent in new knowledge. These new discoveries reveal aspects of nature too rich for analysis, yet we can understand them. On some level — call it heart, right brain, gut, collective unconscious — we recognize the rightness, even the simplicity of the principles involved. They fit with deeply buried knowledge within us.
Science is only confirming paradoxes and intuitions humankind has come across many times but stubbornly disregarded. It is telling us that our social institutions and our very ways of existence violate nature. We fragment and freeze that which should be moving and dynamic. We construct unnatural hierarchies of power. We compete when we might cooperate.
If we read the handwriting on the wall of science, we see the critical need to change — to live with nature, not against it.
Discoveries from many realms of science — brain research, physics, molecular biology, research on learning and consciousness, anthropology, psychophysiology — have come together in revolutionary ways, yet the emergent picture is by no means well known. Word from the scientific frontier usually leaks back only through highly specialized channels, sometimes garbled. But it concerns us all; it is news to be broken, not a diary to be classified.
Before we look at the discoveries, we'll consider briefly the reasons we have heard the news only in bits, if at all. Certainly no one censors it. Part of the communication problem, as we shall see, is the strangeness of what is being found; part results from the extreme specialization of the researchers and their own lack of an overview. Very few people are synthesizing the information being gathered in far-flung places. It is as if military scouts were continually returning from reconnaissance missions with observations and there were no generals to put it all together.
Once upon a time, everybody "did" science. Long before science was a career, people tried to understand nature for their own amusement and excitement. They collected specimens, experimented, built microscopes and telescopes. Although some of these hobby scientists became famous, it hardly occurs to us that they were untrained in the formal sense; they wrote no dissertations for graduate schools.
And we were all scientists, too — curious children, testing substances on our tongues, discovering gravity, peering under rocks, seeing patterns in the stars, wondering what makes the night scary and the sky blue.
Partly because the educational system has taught science only in a reductionist, left-brain style and partly because of the society's demands for practical applications of technology, the romance of science fades quickly for most youngsters. Those who love nature but dislike dissecting small animals soon learn to avoid high-school biology. Students who enroll in psychology courses, hoping to learn something about how people think and feel, find themselves learning more about rats and statistics than they ever wanted to know.
In higher education, science narrows further. The humanities-oriented sheep and the science- oriented goats are herded into their respective pens; at many universities, the science and humanities centers are blocks apart. Most students sidestep any science beyond the minimum required hours; the science majors are funnelled into their specialties, subspecialties, and microspecialties. By graduate school, they can scarcely communicate with each other.
Most of us end up feeling that science is something special, separate, outside our ken, like Greek or archeology. A minority pursue it narrowly, and we have C. P. Snow's Two Cultures, Science and Art, each a little superior, a little envious, and tragically incomplete.
Each scientific discipline is an island, as well. Specialization has kept most scientists from trespassing into "fields" other than their own, both from fear of looking foolish and from the difficulty of communication. Synthesis is left to the hardy few, the irrepressibly creative researchers whose breakthroughs make work for the whole industry.
At a recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (founded to foster interdisciplinary exchange), anthropologists reportedly met in one Philadelphia hotel to hear reports about the probable causes for the extinction of tribes. At the same hour, hundreds of biologists convened in a nearby hotel to discuss the reason for the extinction of species. The two groups — in their separate hotels — came up with the same answer: over-specialization.
Specialization has spawned another problem: technical and mathematical languages — a Tower of Babel.
In brain science alone, half a million papers are published annually. Neuroscience has become such an esoteric discipline, so narrowly subspecialized, that the researchers have extraordinary difficulty in communicating even among themselves. Only a handful of researchers are trying to make sense of the whole.
The second reason for the communications gap is the utter strangeness of the new worldview. We are required to make paradigm shift after paradigm shift, to drastically alter our old beliefs and to see from a new perspective.
It has been said that science replaces common sense with knowledge. Indeed, our most advanced intellectual adventures carry us into wonderlands beyond the boundaries of logical, linear understanding. There is a much-quoted observation of the great biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, that reality is not only stranger than we conceive but stranger than we can conceive.
There is no bottom line in nature. There is no deepest place where it all makes tidy sense. This can be frightening. It can make us feel as if we are regressing to childhood, when nature seemed immense, mysterious, potent. Later we learned to sort facts from fancy, and mystery was reduced to “explanations." “Facts" about lightning or magnetism or radio waves, for example, led us to think that nature was understood or about to be understood. This mistaken view, held by most scientists in the late-nineteenth century, carried over into popular misunderstanding of the powers of science.
Now, when our most advanced science begins to sound mythic and symbolic — when it relinquishes hope of achieving ultimate certainty — we are disbelieving. It is as if we are being asked to re-create the awe and credulity of early childhood, before we knew what a rainbow “really" was.
As we shall see, the new science goes beyond cool, clinical observations to a realm of shimmering paradox, where our very reason seems endangered. Yet, just as we can take advantage of great technological developments of our civilization, like the transistor, our lives can be liberated by the new worldview of radical science, whether we understand the technicalities or not.
Many of the vital insights of modem science are expressed in mathematics, a "language" most of us neither speak nor understand. Ordinary language is inadequate to deal with the nonordinary. Words and sentences have given us a false sense of understanding, blinding us to the complexity and dynamics of nature.
Life is not constructed like a sentence, subject acting on object. In reality many events affect each other simultaneously. Take, for example, the impossibility of sorting out who-did-what-first or who-caused-what-behavior in a family. We construct all of our explanations on a linear model that exists only as an ideal.
Semanticists like Alfred Korzybski and Benjamin Whorf warned that Indo-European languages trap us in a fragmented model of life. They disregard relationship. By their subject-predicate structure, they mold our thought, forcing us to think of everything in terms of simple cause and effect. For this reason it is hard for us to talk about — or even think about — quantum physics, a fourth dimension, or any other notion without clearcut beginnings and endings, up and down, then and now.
Events in nature have simultaneous multiple causes. Some languages, notably Hopi and Chinese, are structured differently and can express nonlinear ideas with less strain. They can, in effect, "speak physics." Like the ancient Greeks, whose philosophy strongly influenced the left-brained West, we say, "The light flashed." But the light and the flash were one. A Hopi would more accurately say, "Reh-pi!" — "Flash!"
Korzybski warned that we will not grasp the nature of reality until we realize the limitation of words. Language frames our thought, thereby setting up barriers. The map is not the territory. A rose is not a rose is a rose; the apple of August 1 is not the apple of September 10 or the wizened fruit of October 2. Change and complexity always outrun our powers of description.
Ironically, even most scientists do not relate scientific knowledge to everyday life. Peer pressure discourages them from searching for wider meaning or significance "outside their field." They keep what they know compartmentalized and irrelevant, like a religion practiced only on holy days. Only a few have the intellectual rigor and personal courage to try to integrate their science into their lives. Capra remarked that most physicists go home from the laboratory and live their lives as if Newton, not Einstein, were right — as if the world were fragmented and mechanical. "They don't seem to realize the philosophical, cultural, and spiritual implications of their theories."
Our quantifying instruments — electron microscopes, computers, telescopes, random-number generators, EEGs, statistics, test tubes, integral calculus, cyclotrons — have finally given us passage to a realm beyond numbers. What we find is not nonsense but a kind of meta-sense — not illogical, but transcending logic as we once defined it.
Creating a new theory, Einstein once said, is not like erecting a skyscraper in the place of an old barn. "It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting point and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view. ..."
SEEING THE NEW WORLD
Like the Flatlanders, we have been at least one dimension short. This dimension, however strange it may seem at first, in a very real sense is the genesis of our world— our real home.
This chapter will take us through several scientific doorways into that other dimension. Technical terms have been kept to a minimum so that the "story line" can better be followed. Those who want to pursue the data will find technical references at the back of the book.
The left brain is a useful companion on a voyage of discovery — up to a point. Its measuring genius has brought us to our present respect for, and intellectual belief in, the larger dimension. But in many ways it is like Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy. Virgil could escort the poet through Hell and Purgatory, where everything was reasonable, where, for example, the punishment fit the crime.
But when Dante came to the perimeters of Paradise, Virgil had to stay behind. He could confront the mystery but he could not penetrate it. Beatrice, the poet's muse, accompanied him into the place of transcendence.
Nonlinear understanding is more like "tuning in" than traveling from point to point. The scientific discoveries discussed in this chapter take us into a country whose cartography is felt rather than traced.
When the left brain confronts the nonlinear dimension, it keeps circling around, breaking wholes into parts, retracing its data, and asking inappropriate questions, like a reporter at a funeral. Where, when, how, why? We have to inhibit its questions for the moment, suspend its judgment, or we cannot "get" the other dimension, any more than you can see both perspectives of the optical-illusion staircase at the same time — or be swept away by a symphony while analyzing the composition.
A world without space and time is not completely foreign to our experience. It is a little like our dreams, where past and future seem to run together, where locations shift mysteriously.
Recall the model of the paradigm shift introduced by Thomas Kuhn: Every important new idea in science sounds strange at first. As the physicist Niels Bohr put it, great innovations inevitably appear muddled, confusing, and incomplete, only half-understood even by their discoverers, and a mystery to everyone else. There is no hope, Bohr said, for any speculation that does not look absurd at first glance. Bohr once remarked of an idea advanced by his famous colleague Werner Heisenberg, "It isn't crazy enough to be true." (As it turned out, it wasn't. [1])
If we stubbornly refuse to look at that which seems magical or incredible, we are in distinguished company. The French Academy announced at one point that it would not accept any further reports of meteorites, since it was clearly impossible for rocks to fall out of the sky. Shortly thereafter a rain of meteorites came close to breaking the windows of the Academy.
If scientists are slow to accept new information, the public is usually even slower. Erwin Schrodinger, the great physicist, once said that it takes at least fifty years before a major scientific discovery penetrates the public consciousness — half a century before people realize what truly surprising beliefs are held by leading scientists. The human species can no longer afford the luxury of such long double-takes or the leisurely changes of heart of entrenched scientists. The cost is too great: in our ecology, our relationships, our health, our conflict, our threatened collective future. We are duty-bound to search, question, open our minds.
A major task of the Aquarian Conspiracy is to foster paradigm shifts by pointing out the flaws in the old paradigm and showing how the new context explains more — makes more sense. As we will see, the most powerful transformative ideas from modern science connect like parts of a puzzle. They support each other; together they form the scaffolding for a wider worldview.
Each of these major ideas is a whole in itself, a system for understanding a spectrum of phenomena in our lives and in society. Each also has uncanny parallels to ancient poetic and mystical descriptions of nature. Science is only now verifying what humankind has known intuitively since the dawn of history.
In The Morning of the Magicians Pauwels and Bergier speculated that an open conspiracy exists among scientists who have discovered these metaphysical realities. Many of the Aquarian Conspirators are scientists, a fraternity of paradigm breakers who cross into each other's territory for new insights. Many more have an intense lay interest in the frontiers of research. They draw their models for social change from scientific insights about how nature really, radically works. Other conspirators have become interested in science because they want to understand the physical basis for experiences they have had through the psychotechnologies. [2]
By supporting programs where scientists from many disciplines can discuss the implications of their work for society and for personal change, the Aquarian Conspiracy plays an important educational role. For example, a fairly typical program staged in New York in late 1978 featured two physicists, Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and Fritjof Capra; psychologist Jean Houston, a researcher in altered states of consciousness; brain scientist Karl Pribram; and Swami Rama, a yogi who became famous in the early 1970s when the Menninger Foundation and other laboratories verified his remarkable ability to control physiological processes (including virtually stopping his heart). Their topic: "New Dimensions of Consciousness."
The brochure for the conference, also typical, characterized the convergence of science and intuition:
Today we are on the brink of a new synthesis. In the past four centuries western science has experienced a continuous shattering and reforming of its basic concepts. Now the scientific community has begun to recognize striking correlations between their findings and those expressed abstrusely by ancient mystics. This is a convocation of visionary men and women pioneering this new synthesis.
Similar programs have been presented all around the country — at universities and science museums, in the inner chambers of establishment science — with titles like On the Ultimate Nature of Reality, The Physics of Consciousness, Consciousness and Cosmos, Consciousness and Cultural Change.
BRAIN AND CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH
Until the 1960s there were relatively few scientists studying the brain and even fewer researching the interaction between the brain and conscious experience. Since then brain and consciousness research has become a thriving industry. The more we know in this field, the more radical our questions become. "There will be no end to this enterprise," said John Eccles, a Nobel-laureate neuroscientist, "not for centuries."
Beginning in the sixties biofeedback research demonstrated that human subjects can control delicate, complex, internal processes long believed to be involuntary. In the laboratory, people were trained to speed up and slow down their heart rate, alter the electrical activity on the surface of the skin, shift from rapid beta-rhythm brainwaves to slower alpha-rhythm. Human subjects learned to "fire" (cause a bioelectrical action in) a single motor nerve cell. A pioneer researcher in biofeedback, Barbara Brown, has remarked that this deep biological awareness reflects the mind's ability to alter every physiological system, every cell in the body.
Although biofeedback subjects knew how these shifts felt, they were helpless to explain how they were achieved. On one level biofeedback seems like a straightforward phenomenon; monitoring bodily information by machine readout, tone cues, or lights one can identify the sensations associated with fluctuations in feedback. But there is a mysterious gap between intention and physiological action. How can one's will select a single cell out of billions and cause it to discharge? Or release a specific chemical? Or limit the flow of gastric juices? Or alter the rhythmic behavior of populations of brain cells? Or dilate capillaries to increase hand temperature?
Awareness is wider and deeper than anyone had guessed; intention, more powerful. Clearly, human beings have not begun to exploit their potential for change.
Biofeedback phenomena sent researchers scurrying back to the handful of scientific reports on yogis reported to have such control — without feedback. Until the phenomenon was verified in biofeedback laboratories, it had been widely assumed that the yogis had somehow tricked the few investigators willing to look at their feats.
Emerging at the same time were laboratory studies of meditation and other altered states of consciousness. Distinctive physiological changes in EEG, respiration, and electrical activity on the skin surface were found in meditators. The higher-amplitude, more rhythmic, slower brainwave patterns confirmed the claims of the psychotechnologies that practitioners achieve greater internal harmony.
During that same period, split-brain research (discussed in Chapter 3) demonstrated that human beings are indeed "of two minds" and that such centers of consciousness can function independently from each other in a single skull. The importance of this research, which opened a related field studying brain-hemisphere specialization, cannot be overstated. It helped us understand the distinctive nature of "holistic" processes; the mysterious knowing that had been insisted upon, disputed, and doubted over the centuries. The phenomenon of "intuition" was now vaguely situated on the neuroanatomical map.
The quantifying brain confirmed the reality of its qualitatively different "minor" hemisphere — an equal, if repressed, partner. Its powers were evident in the amazing performances of biofeedback subjects, the altered physiological processes measured in mediators, the strange double awareness in split-brain patients. More subtle techniques soon revealed the presence of the "other mind" in general perception. Researchers demonstrated that our attention is exquisitely selective, biased by belief and emotion; we can process information in parallel channels at the same time; we have extraordinary capacities for memory (if not always easy access to our data banks).
In the mid-seventies a series of breakthroughs opened an exciting new research field that is radicalizing what we know about how the brain works. Best known is the discovery of the class of brain substances known as endorphins or enkephalins, sometimes referred to as "the brain's own morphine" because they were first identified by their action at the brain sites where morphine has its effect. Like morphine, the endorphins are also analgesic.
The endorphins and the other brain substances of the class known as peptides added a new principle to brain function. The known chemical transmitters in the brain had been tracked; they work in a linear way, from cell to cell. But the new substances are more simultaneous in their action; they seem to modulate the activity of brain cells much as one tunes a radio and adjusts for volume. Some of them "broadcast” messages as well, which led Roger Guillemin, a Nobel-laureate researcher in the field, to suggest the existence of a "new" nervous system comprised of these substances.
Because the peptides are general and powerful in their action, their effects on the body and behavior are often dramatic. The endorphins, for example, have been shown to affect sexuality, appetite, social bonding, pain perception, alertness, learning, reward, seizures, and psychosis. Experiments have implicated the endorphins in the mysterious placebo effect, in which an inactive substance like a sugar pill produces relief because the patient expects it. Patients experiencing placebo relief from postoperative dental discomfort reported a recurrence of pain after they were given a chemical that interferes with the endorphins. Faith, inspired by the placebo, apparently releases endorphins. How it happens is as big a mystery as how intention works in biofeedback.
The endorphins may also be the system that enables us to push from our minds whatever we do not want to feel or think about — the chemistry of denial. Also, they are clearly involved in states of mental well-being. Infant animals distressed by separation from their mothers show a drop in endorphin levels. There is evidence that eating releases endorphins in the digestive system, which may explain the comfort some people obtain from food.
There are many different substances in the endorphin family and they produce different effects. Chemically, endorphins are molecules broken down from a very large molecule — itself recently found to be stored within an enormous molecule. The brain seems to take these chemicals out of "cold storage" as needed.
Mental states such as loneliness, compulsion, anguish, attachment, pain, and faith are not just "all in the head" but in the brain as well. Brain, mind, and body are a continuum.
Our thoughts — intention, fear, images, suggestion, expectation — alter the brain's chemistry. And it works both ways; thoughts can be altered by changing the brain's chemistry with drugs, nutrients, oxygen.
The brain is hopelessly complex. Biologist Lyall Watson spoke of the Catch-22 of brain research: "If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't!"
HOLISM AND SYSTEMS THEORY
Ironically, scientific insights into the brain's holistic talents — its right-hemisphere capacity to comprehend wholes — raise serious questions about the scientific method itself. Science has always tried to understand nature by breaking things into their parts. Now it is overwhelmingly clear that wholes cannot be understood by analysis. This is one of those logical boomerangs, like the mathematical proof that no mathematical system can be truly coherent in itself.
The Greek prefix syn ("together with"), as in synthesis, synergy, syntropy, becomes increasingly meaningful. When things come together something new happens. In relationship there is novelty, creativity, richer complexity. Whether we are talking about chemical reactions or human societies, molecules or international treaties, there are qualities that cannot be predicted by looking at the components.
Half a century ago in Holism and Evolution Jan Smuts tried to synthesize Darwin's evolutionary theory, Einstein's physics, and his own insights to account for the evolution of mind as well as matter.
Wholeness, Smuts said, is a fundamental characteristic of the universe — the product of nature's drive to synthesize. "Holism is self-creative, and its final structures are more holistic than its initial structures." These wholes — in effect, these unions — are dynamic, evolutionary, creative. They thrust toward ever-higher orders of complexity and integration. "Evolution," Smuts said, "has an ever deepening, inward spiritual character."
As we'll see shortly, modem science has verified the quality of whole-making, the characteristic of nature to put things together in an ever-more synergistic, meaningful pattern.
General Systems Theory, a related modern concept, says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A single variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, or a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy said that General Systems Theory aims to understand the principles of wholeness and self- organization at all levels:
Its applications range from the biophysics of cellular processes to the dynamics of populations, from the problems of physics to those of psychiatry and those of political and cultural units ....
General Systems Theory is symptomatic of a change in our worldview. No longer do we see the world in a blind play of atoms, but rather a great organization.
This theory says that history, while interesting and instructive, may not predict the future at all. Who can say what the dance of variables will produce tomorrow. . . next month . . . next year? Surprise is inherent in nature.
EVOLUTION: THE NEW PARADIGM
In Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, the mysterious extraterrestrial Overlords, who have controlled Earth for a hundred years, explain that they are only interim protectors of humankind. Despite their greater intellectual powers, the Overlords are in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, whereas humanity has the capability of infinite evolution.
Above us is the Overmind, using us as the potter uses his wheel. And your race is the clay that is being shaped on that wheel.
We believe — it is only a theory — that the Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now, it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind — It sent us here to do its bidding, to prepare you for the transformation that is now at hand ....
As to the nature of the change, we can tell you very little ... it spreads explosively, like the formation of crystals round the first nucleus in a saturated solution.
What Clarke described in literary metaphor, many serious scientists have expressed in academic terms. They suspect that we may be playing upon our own evolution, as on a musical instrument.
Darwin's theory of evolution by chance mutation and survival of the fittest has proven hopelessly inadequate to account for a great many observations in biology. Just as inadequacies in Newton's physics led Einstein to formulate a shocking new theory, so a larger paradigm is emerging to broaden our understanding of evolution.
Darwin insisted that evolution happened very gradually. Steven Jay Gould, a Harvard biologist and geologist, notes that on the eve of the publication of The Origin of Species, T. H. Huxley wrote Darwin, promising to battle on his behalf but warning that he had burdened his argument unnecessarily by this insistence. Darwin's portrayal of glacially slow evolution reflected in part his admiration of Charles Lyell, who promoted the idea of gradualism in geology. Evolution was a stately and orderly process in Darwin's view, Gould noted, ''working at a speed so slow that no person could hope to observe it in his lifetime."
And just as Lyell rejected the evidence for cataclysm in geology, Darwin ignored problems in his own evidence. True, there seemed to be great gaps, missing rungs in the ladder of evolution, but he believed these were just imperfections in the geological record. Change only seemed abrupt.
But to this day fossil evidence has not turned up the necessary missing links. Gould called the extreme rarity in the fossil record of transitional forms of life "the trade secret of paleontology." Younger scientists, confronted by the continuing absence of such missing links, are increasingly skeptical of the old theory. "The old explanation that the fossil record was inadequate is in itself an inadequate explanation," said Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History.
Gould and Eldredge independently proposed a resolution of this problem, a theory that is consistent with the geological record. Soviet paleontologists have proposed a similar theory. Punctuationalism or punctuated equilibrium suggests that the equilibrium of life is "punctuated" from time to time by severe stress. If a small segment of the ancestral population is isolated at the periphery of its accustomed range, it may give way to a new species. Also, the population is stressed intensely because it is living at the edge of its tolerance. “Favorable variations spread quickly," Gould said. “Small peripheral isolates are the laboratory of evolutionary change."
Most species do not change direction during their tenure on earth. "They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear," Gould said. A new species arises suddenly in the geological evidence. It does not evolve gradually by the steady change of its ancestors, but all at once and fully formed.
The old paradigm saw evolution as a steady climb up a ladder, whereas Gould and others liken it to a branching out of various limbs of a tree. For instance, anthropologists have discovered in recent years that at one time there were at least three coexisting hominids — creatures that had evolved beyond the ape. Earlier it was believed that these different specimens formed a sequence. Now it is known that one "descendant" was living at the same time as its presumed ancestors. Several different lineages split from the parent stock, the lower primates. Some survived and continued to evolve, while others disappeared. The large-brained Homo appeared quite suddenly.
The new paradigm attributes evolution to periodic leaps by small groups. [3] This changing view is significant for at least two reasons: (1) It requires a mechanism for biological change more powerful than chance mutation, and (2) it opens us up to the possibility of rapid evolution in our own time, when the equilibrium of the species is punctuated by stress. Stress in modern society is experienced at the frontiers of our psychological rather than our geographical limits. Pioneering becomes an increasingly psychospiritual venture since our physical frontiers are all but exhausted, short of space exploration.
Given what we are learning about the nature of profound change, transformation of the human species seems less and less improbable.
Gould pointed out that Europeans in the nineteenth century favored the idea of gradualism, both in geology and evolution; it fit more comfortably with the dominant philosophy, which abhorred revolutions, even in nature. Our philosophies limit what we let ourselves see, he said. [4] We need pluralistic philosophies that free us to see the evidence from many points of view.
If gradualism is more a product of Western thought than a fact of nature, then we should consider alternative philosophies of change to enlarge our realm of constraining prejudices. In the Soviet Union, for example, scientists are trained with a very different philosophy of change. . . . They speak of the "transformation of quantity into quality." This may sound like mumbo jumbo, but it suggests that change occurs in large leaps following a slow accumulation of stresses that a system resists until it reaches the breaking point. Heat water and it eventually reaches a boiling point. Oppress the workers more and more and they suddenly break their chains.
Evolution may be speeded up by certain genetic mechanisms, according to new findings. Genes and segments of DNA have been shown to jump off and onto chromosomes in bacteria and certain other life forms, suggesting that the chromosomes may be modified continuously. Researchers have conjectured that such genetic rewriting may be expected in all forms of life.
Certain segments of the DNA don't appear to contribute to the gene's usual product at all. The discovery of these intervening sequences, which appear as nonsense in the context of the genetic code, was called "horrifying" by one of the researchers, Walter Gilbert of Harvard. As the British journal New Scientist observed, "Our very concept of a gene is now in doubt." DNA might not be the consistent archive biologists had supposed, but rather a flux — "a dynamic system in which clusters of genes expand and contract, roving elements hop in and out." [5]
Biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, discoverer of Vitamin C and a Nobel laureate, proposed that a drive toward greater order may be a fundamental principle of nature. He calls this characteristic syntropy — the opposite of entropy. Living matter has an inherent drive to perfect itself, he believes. Perhaps the cell periphery in a living organism actually feeds information back to the DNA at its core, changing the instructions. “After all," he said, “it was not known until a few years ago how the DNA issues its instructions to the cell in the first place. Some equally elegant process may alter those instructions."
He rejected the idea that random mutations account for the sophistication in living matter. Biological reactions are chain reactions, and the molecules fit together more precisely than the cogwheels of a Swiss watch. How, then, could they have developed by accident?
For if any one of the very specific “cogwheels" in these chains is changed, then the whole system must simply become inoperative. Saying that it can be improved by random mutation of one link sounds to me like saying that you could improve a Swiss watch by dropping it and thus bending one of its wheels or axles. To get a better watch, you must change all the wheels simultaneously to make a good fit again.
Biologists have observed that there are many all-or-nothing "evolved" characteristics, such as the structure of birds for flight, that could not have occurred by random mutation and survival of the fittest. Half a wing would not have given any survival advantage. And wings would not have been of any use if the bone structure had not changed at the same time.
Evolution involves true transformation, re-forming of the basic structure, and not mere adding on.
Even in lower forms of life there are evolutionary achievements so stunning they humble our largest theories. In African Genesis Robert Ardrey recounted an incident in Kenya when Louis Leakey pointed out to him what appeared to be a coral-colored flower made up of many small blossoms, like a hyacinth. On close inspection, each oblong "blossom" turned out to be the wing of an insect. These, said Leakey, were flattid bugs.
Startled, Ardrey remarked that this was certainly a striking instance of protective imitation in nature. Leakey listened, looking amused, then explained that the coral flower "imitated" by the flattid bug does not exist in nature. Furthermore, each batch of eggs laid by the female includes at least one flattid bug with green wings, not coral, and several with wings of in-between shades.
I looked closely. At the tip of the insect flower was a single green bud. Behind it were half a dozen partially matured blossoms showing only strains of coral. Behind these on the twig crouched the full strength of flattid bug society, all with wings of purest coral to complete the colony's creation and deceive the eyes of the hungriest of birds.
There are moments when one's only response to evolutionary achievement can be a prickling sensation in the scalp. But still my speechlessness had not reached its most vacant, brain-numbed moment. Leakey shook the stick. The startled colony rose from its twig and filled the air with fluttering flattid bugs Then they returned to their twig. They alighted in no particular order and for an instant, the twig was alive with the little creatures climbing over each other's shoulders in what seemed to be random movement. But the movement was not random.
Shortly the twig was still and one beheld again the flower.
How had the flattid bugs evolved so? How do they know their respective places, crawling over one another to get into position, like schoolchildren taking their places for a Christmas pageant?
Colin Wilson suggested that there is not only communal consciousness among the bugs but that their very existence is due to a telepathic genetic connection. The flattid-bug community is, in a sense, a single individual, a single mind, whose genes were influenced by its collective need.
Is it possible that we too are expressing a collective need, preparing for an evolutionary leap? Physicist John Platt has proposed that humankind is now experiencing an evolutionary shockfront and "may emerge very quickly into coordinated forms such as it has never known before . . . implicit in the biological material all along, as surely as the butterfly is implicit in the caterpillar."
THE SCIENCE OF TRANSFORMATION
When the puzzles and paradoxes cry out for resolution, a new paradigm is due. Fortunately, a deep and powerful new explanation for rapid evolution — biological, cultural, personal — is emerging.
The theory of dissipative structures won the 1977 Nobel prize in chemistry for a Belgian physical chemist, Ilya Prigogine. This theory may prove as important a breakthrough to science in general as the theories of Einstein were to physics. It bridges the critical gap between biology and physics — the missing link between living systems and the apparently lifeless universe in which they arose.
It explains "irreversible processes" in nature — the movement toward higher and higher orders of life. Prigogine, whose early interest was in history and the humanities, felt that science essentially ignored time. In Newton's universe time was considered only in regard to motion, the trajectory of a moving object. Yet, as Prigogine keeps saying, there are many aspects of time: decay, history, evolution, the creation of new forms, new ideas. Where in the old universe was there room for becoming?
Prigogine's theory resolves the fundamental riddle of how living things have been running uphill in a universe that is supposed to be running down.
And the theory is immediately relevant to everyday life — to people. It offers a scientific model of transformation at every level. It explains the critical role of stress in transformation — and the impetus toward transformation inherent in nature!
As we shall see, the principles revealed by the theory of dissipative structures are valuable in helping us understand profound change in psychology, learning, health, sociology, even politics and economics. The theory has been used by the United States Department of Transportation to predict traffic flow patterns. Scientists in many disciplines are employing it within their own specialties. The applications are infinite.
The essence of the theory is not difficult to understand once we get past some semantic confusion. In describing nature, physical scientists often use ordinary words in their most literal sense — words for which we also have abstract meanings and strongly loaded emotional values. To understand Prigogine's theory we need to withhold traditional value judgment about words like "complexity," "dissipation," "coherence," "instability," and "equilibrium."
First, let's look again for a moment at the way in which nature is saturated with order and alive with pattern: flowers and insect colonies, cellular interactions, pulsar and quasar stars, the DNA code, biological clocks, the symmetrical exchanges of energy in the collision of subatomic particles, memory patterns in human minds.
Next, remember that at a deep level of nature, nothing is fixed. These patterns are in constant motion. Even a rock is a dance of electrons.
Some forms in nature are open systems, involved in a continuous exchange of energy with the environment. A seed, an ovum, and a living creature are all open systems. There are also human-made open systems. Prigogine gives the example of a town: It takes in energy from the surrounding area (power, raw materials), transforms it in factories, and returns energy to the environment. In closed systems, on the other hand — examples would be a rock, a cup of cold coffee, a log — there is no internal transformation of energy.
Prigogine's term for open systems is dissipative structures. That is, their form or structure is maintained by a continuous dissipation (consumption) of energy. Much as water moves through a whirlpool and creates it at the same time, energy moves through and simultaneously forms the dissipative structure. All living things and some nonliving systems (for instance, certain chemical reactions) are dissipative structures. A dissipative structure might well be described as a flowing wholeness. It is highly organized but always in process.
Now think about the meaning of the word complex: braided together. A complex structure is connected at many points and in many ways. The more complex a dissipative structure, the more energy is needed to maintain all those connections. Therefore it is more vulnerable to internal fluctuations. It is said to be "far from equilibrium." (In the physical sciences, equilibrium does not mean healthy balance. It refers to ultimate random dispersal of energy. This equilibrium is a kind of death.)
Because these connections can only be sustained by a flow of energy, the system is always in flux. Notice the paradox; the more coherent or intricately connected the structure, the more unstable it is. Increased coherence means increased instability! This very instability is the key to transformation. The dissipation of energy, as Prigogine demonstrated by his elegant mathematics, creates the potential for sudden reordering.
The continuous movement of energy through the system results in fluctuations; if they are minor, the system damps them and they do not alter its structural integrity. But if the fluctuations reach a critical size, they "perturb" the system. They increase the number of novel interactions within it. They shake it up. The elements of the old pattern come into contact with each other in new ways and make new connections. The parts reorganize into a new whole. The system escapes into a higher order.
The more complex or coherent a structure, the greater the next level of complexity. Each transformation makes the next one likelier. Each new level is even more integrated and connected than the one before, requiring a greater flow of energy for maintenance, and is therefore still less stable. To put it another way, flexibility begets flexibility. As Prigogine said, at higher levels of complexity, “the nature of the laws of nature changes." Life "eats" entropy. It has the potential to create new forms by allowing a shake-up of old forms.
The elements of a dissipative structure cooperate to bring about this transformation of the whole. In such a shift, even molecules do not just interact with their immediate neighbors, Prigogine noted, "but also exhibit coherent behavior suited to the [needs of] the parent organism." At other levels, insects cooperate within their colonies, human beings within social forms.
One recently reported example of a new dissipative structure occurred when bacteria were placed experimentally in water, a medium in which this strain was unaccustomed to live. They began to interact in a highly organized way that enabled some of their number to survive.
The Zhabotinskii reaction, a dissipative structure in chemistry, caused something of a sensation among chemists in the 1960s. In this dramatic example of nature creating patterns in both space and time, beautiful scroll-like forms unfold in a solution in a laboratory dish while the colors of the solution oscillate, changing from red to blue at regular intervals. Similarly, when certain oils are heated, a complex pattern of hexagons appears on the surface. The higher the heat, the more complex the pattern. These shifts are sudden and nonlinear. Multiple factors act on each other at once. [6]
At first the idea of creating new order by perturbation seems outrageous, like shaking up a box of random words and pouring out a sentence. Yet our traditional wisdom contains parallel ideas. We know that stress often forces sudden new solutions; that crisis often alerts us to opportunity; that the creative process requires chaos before form emerges; that individuals are often strengthened by suffering and conflict; and that societies need a healthy airing of dissent.
Human society offers an example of spontaneous self-organization. In a fairly dense society, as individuals become acquainted with others, each soon has more points of contact throughout the system via friends and friends of friends. The greater the instability and mobility of the society, the more interactions occur. This means greater potential for new connections, new organizations, diversification. Much as certain cells or organs in a body specialize during the course of evolution, people with common interests find one another and refine their specialty by mutual stimulation and exchange of ideas.
The theory of dissipative structures offers a scientific model for the transformation of society by a dissident minority like the Aquarian Conspiracy. Prigogine has pointed out that the theory “violates the law of large numbers."' And yet, historians have long noted that a creative minority can reorder a society. “The historical analogy is so obvious," Prigogine said. “Fluctuations, the behavior of a small group of people, can completely change the behavior of the group as a whole."
Critical perturbations — “a dialectic between mass and minority" — can drive the society to “a new average." Societies have a limited power of integration, he said. Any time a perturbation is greater than the society's ability to "damp" or repress it, the social organization will (a) be destroyed, or (b) give way to a new order.
Cultures are the most coherent and strangest of dissipative structures, Prigogine remarked. A critical number of advocates of change can create “a preferential direction" like the inner ordering of a crystal or magnet that organizes the whole.
Because of their size and density, modern societies are subject to large internal fluctuations. These can trigger shifts to a higher, richer order. In Prigogine's terms, they can become more pluralistic and diversified.
We are transformed through interaction with the environment. Science can now express as beautifully as the humanities the great and final paradox; our need to connect with the world (relationship) and to define our unique position in it (autonomy).
Prigogine acknowledged a strong resemblance between this “science of becoming" and the vision of Eastern philosophies, poets, mystics, and scientist-philosophers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. "A deep collective vision," he called it. He believes that the breakdown between the Two Cultures is not as Snow thought, that those in the humanities are not reading enough science and vice-versa.
"One of the basic aspects of the humanities is time — the way things change. The laws of change. As long as we had only these naive views of time in physics and chemistry, science had little to say to art." Now we move from a world of quantities in science to a world of qualities — a world in which we can recognize ourselves, "a human physics." This worldview goes beyond duality and traditional options into a rich, pluralistic cultural outlook, a recognition that higher-order life is not bound by "laws" but is capable of boundless innovation and alternate realities.
And this point of view has been expressed by many poets and writers, Tagore, Pasternak The fact that we can quote the truth of the scientists and the truth of the poets is in a sense already proof that we can in some sense bridge the problem between the Two Cultures and have come to the possibility of a new dialogue.
We are approaching a new unity — a non-totalitarian science, in which we don't try to reduce one level to another.