vol 2: Synopsis
part I: Motivations and possibilities
page 6: Evolution
Site map
Directory
Search this site
Home
1: About
2: Synopsis
3: Development
Next: page 7: Mind
Previous: page 5: Body
... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Evolution
We understand things best through historical narratives. We see the present structure of the universe as a product of ten billion years of evolution. The scientific story tells us the that universe began as a simple initial point and slowly evolved into the huge and immensely complex system that enfolds and sustains us.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water.
God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God divided light from darkness. God called the light 'day' and darkness he called 'night'. Evening came and morning came: the first day. ... Genesis 1:1-5
In this ancient story, which has informed billions of readers, God made the world as we know it in six days. He blessed the seventh day and rested after all his creative work.
God made the universe. But who (or what) made God? The traditional answer is that God is eternal. There never was a time when God did not exist and so the question becomes meaningless.
In our story, we see god creating itself. The visible aspects of god (god's body. if you like) are events in spacetime. These events range in scale from the emission of a photon to the formation of a galaxy, and beyond.
Einstein's general theory of relativity models the large scale structure of spacetime. Hawking and Ellis, Misner, Thorne and Wheeler Theory and observation show us that spacetime is a growing structure whose roots may be traced to an initial point known as the initial singularity.
The structure of spacetime is such that much of the past remains present to us, so we can observe the 'cosmic background radiation' which gives us a picture of the universe when it was about 100 thousand years old.
Astrophysics is able to give a largely consistent account of the origins of matter in the universe, and the formation of galaxies, stars and planets. Although the origins of life are quite obscured by time, physics, chemistry, molecular biology and the theory of evolution by natural selection provide us with a consistent and satisfying picture of the possible origins of life on earth and the evolution of ever more complex creatures.
At the core of our understanding is the mathematical notion of recursion. 'Recursive function theory" the theory of computation lies at the heart of the model of god to be presented in this site. Evolution is a recursive process of structure building upon structure through reproduction and modification.
Evolution is indifferent to complexity, so that there is no limit to the complexity of structures which may evolve. We and our societies are just a step along this way.
As we know for our own experience, life and reproduction are enormously complex and often difficult processes, subject to all sorts of random events, like meeting the right mate, finding suitable food and shelter and so on. For the moment we overlook all these details and say only that fit organisms are those which are able to interact profitably with their environment.
Since the environment of any organism is largely comprised of other organisms, also subject to evolution, we can see that the evolutionary process feeds on itself. This, in turn, accounts for the enormous variety of life, the diversity of organisms that have existed in the past, which exist now, and are to come.
Our species, in its current form, is only about 100 thousand years old. As far as we can see, conditions on earth will be suitable for life as we know it for billions of years to come.
Why do structures become more complex? To answer, we change our perspective. Instead of thinking of the universe as body, let us look at it as mind or soul
Further reading
Books
| Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books 1985 Amazon.com: 'This book is a must-read not only for students (broadly defined) of the social sciences, but also for politicians and bureaucrats, especially those in charge of military and foreign affairs. Axelrod's book is a tour-de-force in multi-method approaches. Although the author is a trifle repetitive and occasionally laborious, I think the profound content of the book far outweighs the minor inadequacies of its form. At the risk of sounding like a logical positivist, I would venture to say that Axelrod's approach offers hope for a bottom-up construction of cooperation in an uncertain world without a central authority.' Reeshad Dalal Amazon back |
| Bergson, Henri, and Arthur Mitchell (translator), Creative Evolution, Rowman & Littlefield 1983 Amazon Book Description: 'Creative Evolution, originally published in 1911 by Henry Holt and Company, is the work which catapulted Bergson from obscurity into world-wide fame. A study of the philosophical implications of biological evolutionary theory, the impact of this book reached far beyond biology and seemed to many to herald a new age in philosophy and the sciences.' Amazon back |
| Darwin, Charles, and Greg Suriano (editor), The Origin of Species, Gramercy 1998 Introduction: 'In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species has not been independently created, but has descended, like varieties, from other species.' (66) Amazon back |
| Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Penguin/Pelican 1996 Preface: '[Darwinism] is, indeed a remarkably simple theory; ... In essence it amounts simply to the idea that non-random reproduction where there is hereditary variation, has consequences that are far reaching if there is time for them to be cumulative ... ' Amazon back |
| Genesis, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water.' (I, 1-2) Amazon back |
| Hawking, Steven W, and G F R Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time , Cambridge UP 1975 Preface: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity ... leads to two remarkable predictions about the universe: first that the final fate of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon to form a 'black hole' which will contain a singularity; and secondly that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to our universe. Our discussion is principally aimed at developing these two results.' Amazon back |
| Jones, Steve, Almost like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated, Doubleday 1999 An Historical Sketch: 'The Origin of Species is, without doubt, the book of the millennium. ... [This book] is, as far as is possible, an attempt to rewrite the Origin of Species. I use its plan, developing as it does from farms to fossils, from beehives to islands, as a framework, but my own Grand Facts ... are set firmly in the late twentieth century. Almost Like a Whale tries to read Charles Darwin's mind with the benefit of scientific hindsight and to show how the theory of evolution unites biology as his millenium draws to an end.' (xix) Amazon back |
| Judson, Olivia, Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, Metropolitan Books / Chatto & Windus 2002 Jacket: 'A compilation of sex advice for lovelorn beetles, hyenas and stickleback fish? You hold in your hands what is obviously a unique book. Also quirky, immensely entertaining, and wonderfully informative about the evolutionary biology of sex. A great read, even for someone as biologically mundane as a human.' Richard M Sapolsky Amazon back |
| Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. ... this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity).' Amazon back |
| Nicolis, G , and Ilya Prigogine, Self Organisation in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations, Wiley Interscience 1977 General Introduction: 'The aim of the present monograph can ... be expressed as the studiy of self-organisation in non-equilibrium systems, characterised by the appearance of dissipative structures through the amplification of appropriate fluctuations. ... The natural approach to the problem of the emergence of new patterns is bifurcation theory. The purpose of this theory is to study the possible branching of solutions that may arise under certain conditions. We have tried to present a readable introduction to this rapidly expanding field ... Our main emphasis is in physical examples and simple but representative models, and our aim is to give the reader an idea of the variety of space-time structures that may arise through bifurcation. ... ' Amazon back |
| Silk, Joseph, The Big Bang: The Creation and Evolution of the Universe, Freeman 1988 Jacket: 'Written for the non-specialist, The Big Bang describes the greatest contemporary puzzles and achievements in astronomy, cosmology and astrophysics, clearly recounting the history of the universe and examining current controversies from several points of view. The book concludes with a self contained appendix providing the basic mathematical framework for understanding modern cosmology." http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716719975/tnrp">Amazon back |
| Stewart, Ian, Life's Other Secret: The new mathematics of the living world, Allen Lane 1998 Preface: 'There is more to life than genes. ... Life operates within the rich texture of the physical universe and its deep laws, patterns, forms, structures, processes and systems. ... Genes nudge the physical universe in specific directions ... . The mathematical control of the growing organism is the other secret ... . Without it we will never solve the deeper mysteries of the living world - for life is a partnership between genes and mathematics, and we must take proper account of the role of both partners.' (xi) Amazon back |
Papers
| Hairston Jr, Nelson G and et al, "Rapid evolution revealed by dormant eggs", Nature, 401, 6752 , 30 September 1999, page 446. 'Lake Constance, in central Europe experienced a period of eutrophication (the biological effects of an input of plant nutrients) during the 1960s-70s, which caused an increase in the abundance of nutritionally poor or even toxic cyanobacteria. By hatching long dormant eggs of Daphnia galeata found in lake sediments, we show that the mean resistance of Daphnia genotypes to dietary cyanobacteria increased significantly during the eutrophication". back |
| Lieberman, Erez and Christoph Hauert, Martin A Nowak, "Evolutionary dynamics on graphs", Nature, 433, 7023, 20 January 2005, page 312-316. 'Evolutionary dynamics has been traditionally studies in the context of homogeneous or spatially extended populations. Here we generalize population structure by arranging individuals on a graph. Each vertex represents and individual. The weighed edges of the graph denote the rate which govern how often individuals place offspring into adjacent vertices. ... Evolutionary graph theory has many fascinating applications ranging from ecology to multi-cellular organisms and economics. . back |
| Nowak, Martin A and Joshua B Plotkin and Vincent A A Jansen, "The evolution of syntactic communication", Nature, 404, 6777, 30 March 2000, page 495-498. Letters to Nature: 'Animal communication is typically non-syntactic, which means that signals refer to whole situations. Human language is syntactic, and signals consist of discrete components that have their own meaning. Syntax is requisite for taking advantage of combinatorics, that is 'making infinite use of finite means'. ... Here we present a model for the population dynamics of language evolution, define the basic reproductive ratio of words and calculate the maximum size of a lexicon.'. back |
| Pagel, Mark, "Inferring the historical patterns of biological evolution", Nature, 401, 6756, 28 October 1999, page 877-884. Review: 'Phylogenetic trees describe the pattern of descent amongst groups of species. With the rapid accumulation of DNA sequence data, more and more phylogenies are being constructed based upon sequence comparisons. The combination of these phylogenies with powerful new statistical approaches for the analysis of biological evolution is challenging widely held beliefs about the history and evolution of life on earth. . back |
Links
| Oxford Evolutionary Biology Oxford Evolutionary Biology 'This is a site for various projects in evolutionary biology, molecular evolution and phylogenetic epidemiology being carried out by members of the research group headed by Paul Harvey in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford.' back |
| Princeton University Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University 'We invite you to learn more about our research activities by exploring links to the faculty in each of our core areas--ecology, evolution and behavior.' back |
| Robert Axelrod Evolution of Cooperation Website 'This archive contains materials connected with Robert Axelrod's book The Evolution of Cooperation, published by Basic Books in 1984. You are welcome to read or download any of the materials on these pages for unrestricted use.' back |
| University of California Museum of Paleontology Understanding Evolution Home 'Welcome to Understanding Evolution, an evolution website for teachers.' back |
Click on an "Amazon" link in the booklist at the foot of the page to buy the book, see more details or search for similar items
Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
