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  1. TopTop #1
    JuliaB's Avatar
    JuliaB
     

    Article: The Real Darwin Debate

    this is a good primer in what's out there on the evolutionary perspectives..
    Julia


    JOIN THE REAL DARWIN DEBATE
    By Douglas Todd
    Vancouver
    February 28, 2009

    Join the real Darwin debate

    North American public schools and media are failing to educate the public
    about evolution -- especially about the 12 major theories explaining how the world evolved into being.

    With all the attention given this month to the 150th anniversary of the
    Charles Darwin's earth-shattering book, On the Origin of Species, you would think evolution would be firmly embedded in the North American psyche. But there is chaos in the public's mind.

    Many conservative Americans, steeped in Christian culture wars over
    abortion, homosexuality and six-day creationism, have become infamous for resisting the general tenets of evolution. And it turns out Canadians are
    almost as much in the dark as Americans.

    An Angus Reid poll recently showed only 58 per cent of Canadians (compared to 42 per cent of Americans) accept the fundamental teaching of evolution; that "human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years."

    It's disturbing that 24 per cent of Canadians (39 per cent of Americans)
    told Angus Reid pollsters they embrace Biblical creationism, or the belief
    that "God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years." Another 20 per cent of Canadians said they weren't sure.

    In other words, one out of four Canadians believe humans once walked with dinosaurs. Maybe I need to say the obvious: Even though this is the belief of B.C.-based Conservative party cabinet minister Stockwell Day, no
    mainstream biologist believes women and men co-existed with Tyrannosaurus Rex.

    Before I get to the 12 different schools of evolutionary theory, I'll spell
    out how evolution is inadequately taught in many Canadian schools (and
    over-simplified by most media outlets.)

    This is not only the case in many religious schools, where many of the
    country's 65,000 independent-school students are taught by taxpayer-funded teachers that creationism deserves more respect than Darwin-based evolutionary theory.

    Most Canadian public school students are also not taught evolutionary theory in mandatory science classes. Retired B.C. high-school teacher Scott Goodman and others justifiably worry only a small sliver of Canadian students --typically those who choose elective biology classes in Grades 11 or 12 -- ever focus on it.

    The education systems' inadequate handling of evolutionary theory is partly based on political correctness.

    Many governments and teachers are afraid of offending conservative
    Christians, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses (often not recognizing
    mainstream Protestants and Catholics, as well as Buddhists and Hindus,
    generally accept evolution.)

    In addition to the piecemeal teaching of evolution in Canadian public
    schools, which are a provincial jurisdiction, most university science
    classes offer students virtually no sense of the wide array of evolutionary
    theories in existence.

    Whatever the cause of the lack of evolutionary education, it explains why
    polls show fewer than three out of five Canadians generally accept
    evolutionary thought, why conservative politicians across the country defend creationism and why the Royal Ontario Museum could not find any corporate sponsors in 2008 for its supposedly "controversial" exhibit on Charles Darwin.

    Most media outlets also fall short on enlightening the public on this
    wide-ranging theory about the origins of life. These media contribute to a
    false-choice debate about evolution, acting as if there only two polarized
    camps -- neo-Darwinism and Biblical creationism.

    A much richer discussion about evolution is occurring behind the scenes. It
    involves 12 current theories.

    Only one of these evolutionary theories is neo-Darwinism, the school based
    on genetic mutation and random selection that is dominant in most
    universities.

    Neo-Darwinism is advanced by high-profile, anti-religious biologists such as
    Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.

    To my mind, some of the other 11 theories of evolution are more complete
    than neo-Darwinism.

    I suspect there's more complexity to the universe's evolutionary process
    than Dawkins's reductionistic conclusion that: "We are survival mechanisms-- robot machines blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."

    Four of the alternative evolutionary theories to neo-Darwinism are
    exclusively scientific, making no reference to spirituality, writes Carter
    Phipps in a readable, comprehensive article on the 12 theories in a journal
    called EnlightenNext (formerly known as What is Enlightenment?)

    For instance, one scientific theory highlights how cooperation is essential
    to the evolutionary process. This school is championed by American
    biologists such as Lynn Margulis, who shared her viewpoint with her late
    husband, noted astronomer Carl Sagan.

    Another scientific-mathematical approach to evolution is "complexity
    theory," in which physicists such as Ervin Laszlo postulate that organisms
    have a "self-organizing" ability.

    A group of evolutionary psychologists also strongly oppose Dawkins's view
    that selfish genes can explain everything. These social scientists are known
    as "directionalists" because they see elements of purpose in life.

    At the other end of the theoretical pole are those who emphasize spiritual
    explanations for evolution.

    One school is called Intelligent Design. It's typically proposed by
    evangelical Christians who find "young earth" creationism too crude.

    Another spiritual explanation for evolution is associated with the New Age
    movement. It supports the esoteric form of evolution promoted in 1877 by
    Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy.

    The final cohort of evolutionary theories creatively melds elements of both
    science and spirituality.

    The schools of thought in this category embrace both science and metaphysics in the name of developing a new synthesis on evolution. I'm drawn to how they discern both chance and purpose in the universe.

    One of these evolutionary theories, "conscious evolution," is based on the
    work of rebel Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It proposes
    that humans are called to evolve in self-awareness. It has inspired everyone from Al Gore and Marshall McLuhan to Brian Swimme and Barbara Max Hubbard.

    "Process philosophy" is another member of this group blending science and
    spirituality. Biologists such as Charles Birch and progressive Christian
    theologians such as John Cobb maintain the divine is "the creative advance
    into novelty," the source of the universe's process of change.

    A final group profiled in the helpful series on the 12 theories of evolution
    is called "the integrationalists."

    These thinkers follow the lead of philosopher Ken Wilber. They attempt to
    thoroughly integrate science, developmental psychology and mysticism into a comprehensive form of evolutionary understanding.

    It's my hope this fascinating array of evolutionary theories will soon
    receive more media attention. But when will they be widely taught in
    Canadian or American public schools and universities? Not likely soon.

    The North American education system is not yet that evolved.
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  2. TopTop #2
    Zeno Swijtink's Avatar
    Zeno Swijtink
     

    Re: Article: The Real Darwin Debate

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by JuliaB: View Post
    this is a good primer in what's out there on the evolutionary perspectives..
    Julia
    Thanks for posting this. A link to Carter Phipps's article in EnlightenNext is https://www.enlightennext.org/magazi...ebate.asp?pf=1

    I think the article from the Vancouver Sun misses what I consider essential for the "scientific perspective":

    A careful discussion of the "data base": the fossil record, timelines, dating issues, geographic distribution, DNA, co-evolution of species and their parasites, experimental data from evolution in 100+ generations of short-lived species, and such.

    This is what is lacking in K-12 education. The "12 theories" can be introduced as various ways to make sense of, to explain the phenomena.

    The article also misses what is most interesting in scientific evolutionary theory today, epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer.

    Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life - life - 21 January 2009 - New Scientist

    Seed: Extending Darwinism

    These are truly progressive research programs since they are guided by innovative research and pose themselves new and challenging research questions.

    The EnlightenNext article refers to the impact of epigenetics on the evolutionary debate (under "The Progressive Darwinists," although in fact this introduces elements of Lamarckism), but not horizontal gene transfer.


    "Evolution through the Lens of Science and Spirit - Between the Neo-Darwinists on one side and the Intelligent Designers on the other are at least ten more "schools" of evolutionary thought. Here, we've spread them out along a spectrum from science to spirit, with scientific materialism on the far left and religious determinism on the far right. Generally speaking, the closer a group of scientific thinkers appear to the center of the chart, for example, the closer its view of evolution comes to integrating the dimension of spirit, and vice-versa—an integration that manifests most fully in the three groups in the middle." From EnlightenNext

    What Carter Phipps's article fails to address is whether the non-scientific (non-blue) theories can still be progressive research programs, pose themselves new and challenging research questions.

    My fear is that they are merely interpretative schemes, some giving a more detailed explanation of the data record, other being little more than hand-waving, to put it politely.
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  3. TopTop #3
    JuliaB's Avatar
    JuliaB
     

    Re: Article: The Real Darwin Debate

    thanks for your thoughtful response to the article, Zeno. I do think you are asking too much of a simple article reviewing the interpretations.

    The article chronicles the interpretations of evolutionary theory and is not setting out to summerize the "scientific perspective". These are two different things, and would at the least require a much longer article!

    The main point is that variance of perspectives on evolution.

    One thing that this brings to mind is a mistake I think gets made a lot in the science and spirit discussions---that we confuse the science with the interpretation of the science. This article is focusing on just some of the interpretations---because that is of a concern to the layperson and to the spiritual person (we see a similiar thing going on with quantum theory). I don't think our interpretations are "hand-waving"--they are usually genuine attempts to make sense of something from a particular perspective. That's not to say hand waving doesn't go on, and by the way--I saw that in the science camp as well.


    I agree our kids need far better education earlier on. We are in a rather sorry state in regards to science right now...

    very interesting graphic and thanks for the links

    cheers,
    Julia

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Zeno Swijtink: View Post
    Thanks for posting this. A link to Carter Phipps's article in EnlightenNext is The REAL Evolution Debate

    I think the article from the Vancouver Sun misses what I consider essential for the "scientific perspective":

    A careful discussion of the "data base": the fossil record, timelines, dating issues, geographic distribution, DNA, co-evolution of species and their parasites, experimental data from evolution in 100+ generations of short-lived species, and such.


    My fear is that they are merely interpretative schemes, some giving a more detailed explanation of the data record, other being little more than hand-waving, to put it politely.
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  4. TopTop #4
    Zeno Swijtink's Avatar
    Zeno Swijtink
     

    The selfless gene: Rethinking Dawkins's doctrine

    Here is an example of a development in scientific evolutionary theory, with careful designed experiments, critical discussion of data, and judicious comparison of different explanatory frameworks to determine which of these does account best for the data.

    So different from the spiritual and integrative researchers, who do not have a culture of careful data discussion and experimentation, and who cherry pick the scientific literature for what functions more as examples, as illustrations of their speculative constructs.

    Two radically different modes of researching.

    ***
    https://www.newscientist.com/article...doctrine.html?

    The selfless gene: Rethinking Dawkins's doctrine

    04 March 2009 by Bob Holmes
    NewScientist issue 2698.

    Evolutionary success is all about looking out for number one - or so most biologists would tell you. The genes that do the best job of passing themselves along to the next generation, whether by brute selfishness or canny cooperation, are the ones that flourish - a view most memorably championed by Richard Dawkins more than 30 years ago in his bestselling book The Selfish Gene.

    This relentless focus on the gene may not tell the whole story, however. A small but growing coterie of evolutionary biologists argue that it leaves us blind to crucial evolutionary processes at higher scales - among groups, species and even whole ecosystem. If they are right, the popular view of evolution and the biological world needs a radical shake-up.

    Almost everyone agrees that the gene's-eye view works perfectly well most of the time. "It's dominated the field, and dominated for a long time," says Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Indeed, many biologists think the selfish-gene concept can explain all the intricacies thrown up by evolution, and not just the obviously selfish ones.

    Helping relatives

    For example, the gene or genes that make worker ants devote themselves to helping their queen reproduce rather than reproducing themselves might appear altruistic but really these genes are promoting their own survival: helping a close relative is another way of passing on one's own genes. As this example shows, "selfish genes" do not always favour self-centred, uncooperative behaviour, a common misreading of Dawkins's position.

    However, the consensus is that evolution never favours what might be called "selfless" genes - that is, adaptations that benefit a group of organisms or the species as a whole. An example would be a gene that restricts how many offspring a predator has, to avoid wiping out its prey. Such a gene should always lose out to selfish genes that maximise reproduction, the thinking goes, even if reproducing without restraint threatens the survival of the whole species.

    Increasingly, though, this consensus is being challenged, and on several fronts. The least controversial of these is the notion that entire species themselves can have traits that, over geological time, make them more likely than others to escape extinction and branch off new daughter species. This can lead to evolutionary change that could not be predicted from individual adaptations alone.

    Species selection

    For example, David Jablonski of the University of Chicago has shown that, over millions of years, marine snails with small ranges have been more likely to go extinct than more widespread ones. "Even small perturbations can take out a highly localised species, whereas a more widespread species will live to fight another day," says Jablonski. As a result, the geographic range of species in a lineage tends to increase over time, Jablonski has found - though this trend is muddied by periodic mass extinctions, which wipe out widespread species as well as those that occupy a more specialist niche.

    This so-called "species selection" may help explain other puzzling observations. For example, larger individuals often outcompete smaller ones, so selection at the level of individuals would suggest that the average body size of mammals ought to increase over millions of years - yet in many groups it doesn't. A larger-bodied species, however, has a larger requirement for food and space, and so might run a greater risk of extinction. In this case species selection may oppose individual selection and so help keep body size constant, says Jablonski.

    Even Dawkins agrees there is something to the idea of species selection. "What it takes to survive as an individual is different than what it takes to survive as a species," he says. Selection at the species level does not drive the evolution of new traits but it does help determine how such adaptations fare in the broad sweep of evolution, in changing environments over vast stretches of time. "Species selection may not build horns, but it can determine how many species have horns or how long horns persist," says Jablonski.

    What it takes to survive as an individual is different to what it takes to survive as a species

    Just how important is species selection, though? "How frequent is it, and how often does it operate counter to individual selection? We don't have a good sense of that yet, because so few people are testing at multiple levels," says Jablonski.

    Group selection

    This is starting to change. Carl Simpson, a palaeobiologist at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, recently looked at the body shape of fossil crinoids, organisms that resemble upside-down starfish on a stalk. Simpson used a mathematical description of evolution called the Price equation to determine to what extent the complexity of crinoids' armoured plates might be driven by species or individual selection. Species selection does play a role, he found, but its influence was negligible.

    However, species selection could yet turn out to play a stronger role in other situations. We shouldn't expect it to be important all the time, Simpson notes. After all, even gene or individual-level selection - which everyone agrees is a potent force - often produces little net change for long periods of time.

    Even gene's-eye purists like Dawkins find species selection somewhat palatable, because species, like genes, are relatively discrete entities that are stable enough over time for selection to have some effect in shaping their characteristics. In contrast, most evolutionary biologists have difficulty swallowing the idea that natural selection can act at an intermediate level, on loose affiliations of unrelated members of the same species - a phenomenon known as group selection.

    Hyperaggressive plants

    Certainly, group selection can be a powerful force in artificial situations. Indeed, crop breeders rely on it, often without realising they are doing so. Choosing the most vigorous individual plants produces hyperaggressive plants that, when grown together in a field, interfere with each other so much that yields go down. Instead, crop breeders choose plants that get along well, by growing them in test plots and breeding from the plots that yield best - in effect, practising group selection.

    Similarly, a host of lab experiments over the past several decades have shown that group selection can lead to evolutionary change. These experiments are done in controlled situations, though. In the real world of nature, group selection may not have such an easy time, because cooperative groups are vulnerable to takeover by cheaters. These selfish invaders - a fast-growing wheat plant, for example - pay none of the costs of cooperation, yet reap all the benefits of being in a cooperative group. In the lab, or in breeders' test plots, researchers can parry this influx of selfish genes. Since nature lacks such oversight, most biologists doubt group selection can be important. "The interesting question," says Dawkins, "is whether any adaptation of a wild animal or plant is interpretable as group selection. I don't think it is."

    Even the proponents of group selection agree that only a few potential examples have been identified so far, such as the small size of some annual plants that grow together and reduced virulence in some parasites (to keep their hosts alive). "That's a serious problem," says Charles Goodnight, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington. "We don't know how common it is in nature. The reason we don't know is that we haven't looked for it."

    The slime test

    That may be changing, though, as fresh ideas emerge that give group selection some theoretical traction. In particular, David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York state has shown that cheaters will not prosper if groups frequently break up and reform again with new members. With each fresh start, the groups that happen to have the least cheaters thrive while those with lots of cheaters perish.

    Microbial biofilms are one of the best test cases for this hypothesis. Biofilms are colonies of bacteria living within a matrix of slime that they secrete. They enrich the slime with molecules that help them extract nutrients, such as iron, from the environment. "Single bacteria produce these compounds that scavenge the iron, but once this molecule is produced, it's a common good, and you can get cheats arising," says Alexandra Penn, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Southampton in the UK.

    The characteristics of the slime also determine how big the biofilm can get and how long it persists before breaking up. That sets the stage for group selection through the formation and break-up of groups.

    Ecosystem selection

    Penn's models suggest that not only should there be group selection, but that evolution can make the conditions needed for group selection more likely in the future. In other words, if cooperative biofilms do better than selfish ones, the result will be slime that persists just long enough to favour group selection. Penn is beginning experiments to see whether the bacteria's slime does indeed evolve towards the consistency her work suggests is ideal for group selection.

    To begin, Penn's biofilms will include just one species. Eventually, however, she hopes to include multiple species to study whether selection operates at an even higher level, that of whole ecosystems. The idea is that just as group selection may sometimes favour the interests of a group over any of its constituent individuals, so ecosystem selection might act to shape an entire ecosystem over the interest of its constituent species.

    For example, if "unbalanced" patches of rainforest or coral reefs - dominated by just a few species - were more vulnerable to being wiped out in harsh years, ecosystem-level selection might favour "collegial" species that temper their own growth to maintain a suitable balance. According to this hypothesis, just as the cells within our bodies sometimes sacrifice themselves to ensure the body as a whole remains healthy, so individual species within some ecosystems may on occasion make sacrifices to ensure that the whole ecosystem survives.

    Microcosms

    This idea remains anathema to most mainstream evolutionary biologists. According to the conventional view, individual species in an ecosystem should be the equivalent of cancerous cells in a body, perhaps cooperating with some other species but growing as aggressively as possible heedless of the cost to the whole ecosystem.

    Finding out whether there is ecosystem selection or not isn't easy. A decade ago, for example, Sloan Wilson and his colleagues grew microcosms containing hundreds of species of soil microbes. With each "generation" they tested the microcosms to see which could support the greatest plant biomass, and used the soil from the winning microcosm to found new microcosms. After 16 generations, the selected soil ecosystems could support three times the biomass of similar, unselected soils. Since they were selecting for a property of the whole ecosystem, not of any individual microbial species, what was happening was ecosystem selection, they argued.

    But the experiment had a key shortcoming. "There was no way they could rule out the possibility that they just got an ecosystem that happened to have a good batch of individual species in it," says Hywel Williams, an evolutionary modeller at the University of East Anglia, UK. So Williams set to work to repeat the experiment using a detailed computer simulation instead of actual organisms. In Williams's model, digital organisms take in nutrients, metabolise them and excrete wastes, altering their environment. They grow, reproduce and evolve - with the key difference that, with the click of a computer mouse, Williams can turn off individual selection to see whether a separate, ecosystem-level evolution is also occurring.

    Context is all

    Sure enough, when Williams and his colleague Timothy Lenton simulated the effects of selecting ecosystems that approached some ecosystem-level target (such as acidity levels), they found that ecosystem-level selection best explained their results. "We found that you couldn't decompose the response we observed at the community level to a lower-level response. There was no single species that could do the job on its own," says Williams.

    Penn, too, has seen evidence of ecosystem-level selection in experiments using soil microcosms, and she expects to see something similar within her microbial biofilms, where multiple species may work together to produce an environment that maximises their collective survival and reproduction. "It's meaningless to say you've just got individual selection in that case," she says. "If you looked at each species individually, you couldn't predict what they'd be doing. You have to look at them in the context of the ecosystem."

    If ecosystem-level selection is the norm, it could prompt a major shake-up in our view of the microbial world and, by extension, the macroscopic world, too. "It's only in the last 5 or 10 years that people realised that the majority of bacteria live in multispecies collectives," says Penn. "Bacteria are driving the basic processes of the biosphere, so if their evolution is in this higher-level context, it's going to be very different to the way we've thought about it previously, and their responses to climate change could be very different than we would expect from thinking about them individually."

    It is still too early to know whether group, species and ecosystem-level selection are major evolutionary forces or merely minor curiosities - baroque ornaments on the central edifice of individual or gene-level selection. But the dominance of the "selfish gene" in evolutionary thought is facing its strongest challenge in many years.
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  5. TopTop #5
    JuliaB's Avatar
    JuliaB
     

    Re: The selfless gene: Rethinking Dawkins's doctrine

    Zeno, I assume you are not including in that group those who are both scientists and integrative thinkers/writers. These folks often do understand the careful data discussion.

    A big problem in the science and spirit conversation, and those who try to bridge the gap in whatever capacity, is the disparity of education among the interested audience. If one has not had formal education in science, it does indeed need to be "translated" for the layperson. And as with any translation, some things are lost.

    And the lack of education can be on both sides of the science and spirit discussion. Many times, a scientist will not understand the depth and breadth of a well thought out philosophy or theology in order to gain valuable insight into other perspectives, whether he "believes" them or not. Like you, I am a strong advocate of reading outside our own personal boxes. But realistically, this takes time and energy that many cannot or will not devote.
    We have many reasons why it is so important to have good, honest reflective thinkers on the vast variety of subjects in science.

    Julia

    Quote Posted in reply to the post by Zeno Swijtink: View Post
    Here is an example of a development in scientific evolutionary theory, with careful designed experiments, critical discussion of data, and judicious comparison of different explanatory frameworks to determine which of these does account best for the data.

    So different from the spiritual and integrative researchers, who do not have a culture of careful data discussion and experimentation, and who cherry pick the scientific literature for what functions more as examples, as illustrations of their speculative constructs.

    Two radically different modes of researching.
    Last edited by Barry; 03-09-2009 at 12:49 PM.
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  6. TopTop #6
    Zeno Swijtink's Avatar
    Zeno Swijtink
     

    The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness

    The University of California Press is pleased to announce the publication of:

    The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness

    Joan Roughgarden is Professor of Biology at Stanford University. She is the author of Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (UC Press), Evolution and Christian Faith, and Primer of Ecological Theory.

    The Genial Gene

    Are selfishness and individuality-rather than kindness and cooperation-basic to biological nature? Does a "selfish gene" create universal sexual conflict? In The Genial Gene, Joan Roughgarden forcefully rejects these and other ideas that have come to dominate the study of animal evolution. Building on her brilliant and innovative book Evolution's Rainbow, in which she challenged accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation, Roughgarden upends the notion of the selfish gene and the theory of sexual selection and develops a compelling and controversial alternative theory called social selection. This scientifically rigorous, model-based challenge to an important tenet of neo-Darwinian theory emphasizes cooperation, elucidates the factors that contribute to evolutionary success in a gene pool or animal social system, and vigorously demonstrates that to identify Darwinism with selfishness and individuality misrepresents the facts of life as we now know them.

    Full information about the book is available online: The Genial Gene
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  7. TopTop #7
    Philip Tymon's Avatar
    Philip Tymon
     

    Re: Article: The Real Darwin Debate

    The final part of this article (quoted below) is nonsense. Literally. It is just another attempt to reframe superstition or magical thinking as some sort of science or alternative to science. If you don't know what the scientific method is, you might want to study it a bit. Are any of these "theories" based in any sort of empirical evidence? Or just wishful thinking? Do they have any testable hypotheses? Or they just feel good. Just saying "God did it" or "it's magic" is not science. It is, literally, nonsense. It's like telling me you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Sorry, I know that reality is harsh, but it's real.

    "One school is called Intelligent Design. It's typically proposed by
    evangelical Christians who find "young earth" creationism too crude.

    Another spiritual explanation for evolution is associated with the New Age
    movement. It supports the esoteric form of evolution promoted in 1877 by
    Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy.

    The final cohort of evolutionary theories creatively melds elements of both
    science and spirituality.

    The schools of thought in this category embrace both science and metaphysics in the name of developing a new synthesis on evolution. I'm drawn to how they discern both chance and purpose in the universe.

    One of these evolutionary theories, "conscious evolution," is based on the
    work of rebel Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It proposes
    that humans are called to evolve in self-awareness. It has inspired everyone from Al Gore and Marshall McLuhan to Brian Swimme and Barbara Max Hubbard.

    "Process philosophy" is another member of this group blending science and
    spirituality. Biologists such as Charles Birch and progressive Christian
    theologians such as John Cobb maintain the divine is "the creative advance
    into novelty," the source of the universe's process of change.

    A final group profiled in the helpful series on the 12 theories of evolution
    is called "the integrationalists."

    These thinkers follow the lead of philosopher Ken Wilber. They attempt to
    thoroughly integrate science, developmental psychology and mysticism into a comprehensive form of evolutionary understanding."
    | Login or Register (free) to reply publicly or privately   Email

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