The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

science reveals such a universe. As Richard Dawkins puts it in his pithy, provocative
way:
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic
replication, some people are going to get hurt, others are going to get lucky, and
you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe we observe
has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. 8
The reason we do not like to accept this, we are told, is that human beings
desperately need myth and narrative and, above all, meaning, for reasons that
evolutionary psychology will shortly explain, presumably because the psychological
longing for meaning somehow conferred fitness and reproductive success on us at some
point during the Stone Age. But can we dismiss the alternatives so lightly?
The extremes of both the scientific and the non-scientific approaches would claim
exclusivity of access to truth (or its nearest equivalent), but extremes always tend to be
incapable of adaptation. They are, in a way, like unfruitful specializations that become,
as often as not, evolutionary dead ends. Those at one end of the spectrum simply deny
any alternative to what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls “greedy reductionism” 9
which reduces human behavior to biology, biology to chemistry and chemistry to
physics. It reduces complex organisms to cells, cells to molecules, molecules to atoms,
atoms to subatomic particles, in a cascade of reductionist argument. This approach
ignores the fact that different principles operate at different levels of complex systems
or, put another way, the same principles operate differently. Biology is inherently more
complex than chemistry and chemistry more complex than physics. The human brain
for example is reckoned to be probably the most complex system in the known universe.
Greedy reductionism oversimplifies in the desire to bring everything down to a few basic
principles. Dennett gives an absurdest example of this kind of thinking taken to extremes
by suggesting a scientific paper entitled, “A Comparison of Keats and Shelley from the
Molecular Point of View.”
The non-scientific extremes simply ignore all scientific fact and rely on faith,
handed-down traditions, the word of individuals and hunches. One end of the spectrum
says in effect there is no meaning, the other replies, yes there is. Arguing along these lines
is hardly constructive. What we need is an integrated, holistic, consilient 10 approach to
knowledge that recognizes the reality of both the sense-perceptible world (including the
extension of our senses through instruments) and the psychological reality of human
experience.
No Skyhooks Please
Daniel Dennett uses a metaphor 11 that I would like to adapt as a criterion for
defining whether a worldview or philosophy is valid or not. He describes two kinds of
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8
Dawkins, R., “God’s Utility Function,” in Scientific American, November 1995, p67.
9
Dennett, D., 1995, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, pp80–82.
10
I refer to Edward O. Wilson’s revival of the term “consilience” in his book of the same title
(1998) published by Little Brown. Wilson argues for the need to search for the fundamental unity
of knowledge through reduction to a small number of universal laws.
11
Dennett, D., 1995, p74.
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