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THE PLACE OF MAN IN EVOLUTION AND ITS FUTURE

Jacques Sverin Abbatucci

Index
The evolution laws Biology of development The adjustments of the Universe Teilhardian conception The Future of Man Conclusion

The man forms a part of a whole and this whole is in evolution Here is the fact which emerges from now on in our consciousness. But a great question arises with more and more acuity: does the river of theevolution in which we are immersed goes somewhere or does it get lost in the nothingness ? This question commands our attitude in front of life i.e. it is essential to direct our choices and to define our ethics. Jung said very well " We are not of today nor of yesterday, we are of an immense age ". Our present being also depends on all that preceded us. Raising as Jung proposes the " historical periscope " out of the flood of the evolution, let us see what we see.

The evolution laws

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The world participate in the cosmogenesis. To the concept of a static world, left like a scenery planted to be used for the history of man, succeeded that of a world in evolution, within a vast universal moveme

Evolution of the matter

The big-bang model makes sense to what occurred since the beginning of time. This model is generally admitted by the qualified scientific circles. There was a beginning. The equivalent of the whole mass of the universe appeared in a point, approximately fifteen billion years ago as an extreme concentration of energy appearing in the form of light and other radiations. As Provenzano stressed : "There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the universe except energy, in one form or another". In the space time lately appeared, energy distributed in a homogeneous way. Then a sort of grumbling occurred involving its condensation in fundamental particles, which will combine to form the neutrons and the protons then the atoms and the molecules. Thereafter the natural laws induced the formation of the elements, stars, planets, galaxies and all that is offered to our perception. The whole thing is expanding according to the first observations of Lematre in the twenties, which have always been checked index since then, in particular by the measurement of the fossil radiation arriving to us. The irruption of time creates the history. Since all thus began, all will have necessarily an end. This one, according to the astrophysicists, will occur either in a continuation of the expansion of the universe and the dissipation of the whole energy in a total cooling, or in a collapse and a final implosion.

Evolution of life
A gradually increasing complexity thus characterizes the history of the universe in its physical aspects. It has been going on with the crossing of a new threshold : the emergence of life. Indeed, under the physicochemical conditions specific to the first ages of our earth, the chemical reactions intensified, syntheses took place, new links were created between the molecules leading to large-sized chains of which some were going to acquire some properties of life : they are breakable but in their expansion, they " will learn how " to replicate themselves and to multiply, to develop new properties, new functions in the synergy of the components, to build complexes of complexes, to acquire finally the characters of living beings, initially made index in unicellular entities. This phenomenon occurred rather early in the history of our earth. The first fossils of cells should be as old as three billion years. From there, always under the impulse of the same energy directed " towards the fullest growth " - which one can discuss the meaning but not the reality &endash; the building of the various forms of the life went going on. The primary cell had no nucleus. Later on it differentiated into nucleate cell, it "learned " the sexual reproduction and it joined others of its similar to form multicellular beings. Thereafter the complex living bodies differentiated in various branches in two complementary fields, the plants and the animals which adapt themselves to their environments. One of the branches, formed by the mammals, leads finally to the man whose brain, formed of myriads of inter-connected cells, is the apex of this " pyramid of complexity ".

The man within the evolution

Psychic interiority as a result of the hyper complexity is probably present to differing degree in all the

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living. But with mankind it becomes as a new evolutionary force. By the crossing of a new step, that of the reflection, the man reaches the conscience. He knows that he knows. He acquires the sense of time and of the history, the aptitude of planning and of choosing, the freedom to act, the notion of Good and Evil. In fact, the intelligence is an extraordinary force which intervenes from now on in the evolution. The face of the earth will be changed. After the discovery of fire, founding path, then from the breeding and agriculture, his various inventions will give gradually to the man the control of the planet and will ensure its supremacy. The same instinct of growth pushes him to constitute with his similar increasingly complex and interdependent social assemblies, covering little by little the whole globe. index

Biology of development
In the biological evolution, various mechanisms are at work. Being added to the vertical transmission of the characters of the species following the laws of heredity discovered by Mendel, in which sexuality ensures genetic enrichment, mutations in coding reveal new characters. The whole process of differentiation of the species is directed, according to Darwin, by the natural selection which promotes the best adapted to the environment. This concept is generally accepted. It explains the selection and the development of particularly efficient characters in "the struggle for life", in a given phyletic branch. But there are macro-mutations from one species to another, evolutionary discontinuities. They cannot be explained only by the natural selection. The chance, in the form of random mutations, fails to explain a progress continued all along the time in an increasing neguentropy i.e. by building increasingly improbable complexes integrating more and more informations. Perhaps in the mechanisms of the evolution, it is necessary to also make place to the inventive spirit i.e. the interior force which animates each alive being on which insisted Lamarck and which Bergson called vital dash. At all events, the origin of the spirit of invention remains a mystery. It seems that the life wants all to test. The role of education in the transmission of the acquired culture and accomplished progress should not be under estimated. At the level of man, the cultural evolution is an additive factor of most signification. Great civilizations which followed one another transmitted each one a part of their progress -intellectual, moral, artistic - to the following generations, even if a significant waste was the result of the collapse of each one in the course of time. " We are of an immense age "....

A programation ?
The problem of the organization of the living matter deserves to be raised. All the biosphere is subjected to a normative constraint which appears to follow the same laws. In fact the matter is only a representation of energy. Both are equivalent and transformable one in the other. The quantum mechanics require to consider the atomic elements as grains of energy as well as waves, which localizations in space and trajectories are defined only by probabilistic laws. How can we imagine the construction made of energy and of information which constitutes our body, our private part of the universe? The body organization cannot be the fact of the physical elements which, as they are gathered constitute our tissues and organs. Indeed, these elements are unstable and in perpetual renewal during the lifespan of the whole organism. The cells themselves are renewed unceasingly, except for the cerebral and some seminal cells. But the whole of the tissues constituting our body maintains harmoniously during the life, respecting all the cycles carried out from embryo to old age, from birth to

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death. Our body is, in fact, the result of an organizational structure which, on an atomic scale, rests on molecular interactions, between elements separated by very large distances on their scale. These interactions are primarily electromagnetic. This organizational structure rules on genes and on genetic regulation. One can strongly doubt, indeed, that this informative structure is generated by the material elements which it groindexs. What is called the genoma cannot be the fruit of the purely hazardous union of initially independent elements unaware of each other. Let us note that the initial adjustments necessary to make life occurs are of an extremeprecision. For Trinh Xuan Thuan they are about 1/1060 i.e. that the probability they are reached by chance is practically nil. If this message, registered in our genes but still more coordinating the expression of the entire genoma, different in each type of cell, is a predetermined reality, what is its nature, its physical substrate and under what control ? Does it rest on preexisting forces anticipating their association ? One can only be struck of admiration in front of the complexity and the precision of the embryonic development directed by a definite zone of the blastula which rules all the various tissues and organs. In the same way, aren't they marvellous the subtle mechanisms regulating the harmonious growth of the individual and the maintenance of a precise homeostasis ensuring the stability of the internal milieu in a changing environment ? Currently the physicists who study the chaos laws, which has the aspect of chance without being it really, refer to a "strange attractor" which in the final analysis directs a multiplicity appearing to escape from the general determinism. For Anne Dambricourt-Malass, vanguard paleontologist, it is such an attractor that she describes as harmonic which drive during the evolution, the contraction of the skull base and the rotation of it, responsible for the differentiation of homo sapiens and his adoption of the indexright station, independently for the essential of an environmental change. index

The adjustments of the Universe

We are thus an assembly of information and, for this reason, Edgar Morin could speak about a "computing" state of the matter. The number is present everywhere behind the reality of the world. One could say that mathematics was the language of the universe. All the natural laws which the man discovers can be expressed in mathematical formulas. We know the omnipresent world of the fractals that nature adopts to solve an infinity of problems, specially in biology (i.e. structures of the vegetal arborisations, of the lungs, of the intestinal mucosa, etc). A recent work (Laurent Notale and coll. 1999) would suggest that all the tree of the evolution is governed by an equation of the fractal type. A "necessity ", stronger than the "chance" would thus rule on the differentiation of the species. Moreover, some authors as Xavier Sallantin, have recently insisted on the arithmetic meta-rules subjacent to reality. It has been evoked an innate software-system common to all the alive beings, a virtual world doubling "reality".

And the thought?

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In a vision of the world in widened prospect, the role of psyche seems a significant factor intervening with the man in the process of the evolution. But what is the thought ? Some authors considers it as the simple result of neuronal interactions (Changeux). But that does not explain its real nature. One must admit that thinking can't be located in any cerebral cell separately (Chauvin). It is not a kind of cellular secretion. For Roger Penrose, famous physicist, it acts as a "strange phenomenon which depends on the matter but which, on the opposite, can act on it". In a recent work, he gives his conviction that a new physics must be born to make us possible to approach certain phenomena, like the conscience, which are an integral part of the universe but that our current physics is unable to apprehend . Teilhard, as for him, considers that "the stuff of the Universe" is dual-sided. There is a part of interiority in each matter grain. It is the complexity, centered on a project, which leads to the conscience by the summation and the arrangement of the elementary grains. The Californian physicist, Provenzano, member of the team which conceived and carried out the mission to Mars, specialist in the artificial intelligence, is a vigorous supporter of the teilhardian law of consciousness-complexity. He thinks that psyche is an elaborate form of energy which he names " conscious energy ".

Place of man
The man fits in the evolutionary axis which is not only that of the alive world but of the entire universe, from the big-bang to us. There is no reason to think that this evolution will not continue. We can only question us on the prospects which open on the future. The two options The interpretation that we have of the place of the human phenomenon is decisive. Is the man a simple epiphenomenon in a global process having no meaning, as a result of chance only ? This is the option of the materialists. Some, such as Gould, exclusive darwinian evolutionist, think that the man cannot be regarded as a successful species; he is a mammal among the others, particularly unimportant, since its species is, by its mass for example, much lower than other species such as the bacteria. Jacques Monod could conclude in his time that, "fruit of chance and necessity, we are alone in an empty and cold cosmos ". A vision diametrically opposite and spiritualist locates the man at the node of the evolution. All contributed to give him its place, to make it possible his intelligence to open up , and this occurred as a single event on the surface of the globe. index

Teilhardian conception
Of course Teilhard belongs to the second category. As a scientist acknowledged by his peers and as a priest of an indomitable fidelity he brought to the debate his remarkable spirit of synthesis. His ambition, to which it devoted his life, was to establish a unified vision, able to gather scientists and religious, task which was worth the sarcastic remarks of the ones, the aggressive mistrust of the others and the adhesion of a great number, believers and unbelievers. His thesis forms an impressive corpus by its coherence, its rigor and its premonitions. It integrates perfectly the phenomenologic data and the concepts of current science. It is expressed essentially in his main work, " The Phenomenon of Man", published in 1955, which is difficult to summarize in a few words. A personal interpretation gives an outline on figure 1:

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The universe is in continuous creation, in cosmogenesis, following a process of increasing complexity. One observes a "multitude in way of organization ". The substance -the stuff - of the universe is made of matter (of energy) and spirit ("the within of the things"). It is dual-sided. The complexity, centered around a project, creates conscience (law of complexity-conscience). The cosmogenesis is a noogenesis (creation of spirit, of conscience). The summit of that evolution on earth is the man, the most complex being presently existing by its brain. Through union, which is not an anonymous fusion, but which gathers the individual differences and uses them, is created a thinking layer, the noosphere, thanks to the increasingly tight networks which connect the men's spirit, doubling the biosphere,. The hominization thus continues in " the societal man ". The success of this new evolutionary stage cannot be acquired by only intellectual convergence but requires the application of a force of cohesion which is the Love ("attraction of the being by the being"). This force can fully act only thanks to the attraction of a higher center of convergence, The multiple is raising, atracted and included in the already One . For the Christian, this focus is the Christ Omega, the Omega Point. "Already coextensive to the space, already coextensive to the duration, Christ is also coextensive to the scale of the values stretched from the summit of the spirit to the deepness of the matter"
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The Future of Man

As one see, the intelligence intervenes strongly in the evolution process with the irruption of the freedom and the human responsibility which basically transformed the data. It is a force added to the evolutionary dynamism directed towards the growth. For Jean-Claude Lonide, "the man substitutes the conscience to the blind power of the instinct". One could say that for this reason, the man has left the age of prehistory. Raoul Giret considers that "the biological evolution is relayed by the cultural

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evolution of the human societies and, within this framework, the man is the actor who becomes responsible for the future of the evolution". Jean Vague goes even further. For him "the conscience is the last chance of the evolution". The best and the worst are possible. All the technical progress, generated by man and which replaces anatomical differentiation characterizing the adaptation of the living beings can be regarded as tools of the evolution. They have their advantages and their disadvantages. Thus, the control of energy which is essential for progress and necessary to life in our societies, may involve harmful effects. Research in biology gives place to interrogations of considerable extent. Man becomes able to intervene on the mechanisms of life (assisted procreation, cloning, genetic engineering). He is really puting "the hand on the evolution" as had announced Teilhard de Chardin in the twenties. The pessimists worry and, to many respects, they seem to be right. Around us a great confusion appears giving a feeling of economic, demographic and political chaos. One can add to the picture the moral disorders and the religious obscurantisms. An author as significant as Edgar Morin speaks about a new gospel, the only one remaining possible, the gospel of perdition. And however, it is during the battle of Verdun, in the worst moments of the WW1, in the mud of the trenches kneaded with the remains of his killed comrades, that Teilhard de Chardin had his great vision of hope "... as if any larger order had not raised from the ruins of a smaller order... the universal history shows it to us : after each revolution, after each war, Humanity always appeared a little more coherent, a little more linked, in the better tied connections of its organization, in the strengthened waiting of its common release ". And we are not grains of dust isolated in the cosmos. A complete symbiosis is ours with the other elements of the universe. Joel de Rosnay even speaks about the "symbiotic man". We are completely interdependent of this great movement which involves us, that of the cosmogenesis. Teilhard saw it very well : "The more faithful we are in the analytical invitations of the thought and contemporary science, the more we feel imprisoned in the network of the cosmic connections. By the criticism of knowledge, the subject is identified always more and more with the most remote fields of a universe which he would perceive as being partially the same body with him. By biology, living is put more and more in series with the whole frame of the biosphere, by physics an homogeneity and a solidarity without limits is discovered in the layers of the matter ". But where could we be carried out by this immense gestation ? From now on, Science itself raises the question of the meaning, although such a question is considered to be still prohibited - as not scientific - by many. And yet "Lacking of direction, the individual cannot build himself : he does not even exist " (Tocqueville). "Although the sense is not in the matter and the rationality, it is located at another level to which the man has access " (Raoul Giret). It is not prohibited to us to seek it in the hope of a construction which exceeds our individuals : "Our Greatness - Teilhard said - consists in serving like intelligent atoms the task being under way in the Universe ". What can support ouselves in this vision is the majestic magnitude of the cosmogenesis, accessible to our spirit, coherent and compatible with the structure of thought that science gave to us. Far from the nonsense of the vision of a world considered as a nonsense i.e. as an absurdity, we have a world fulfilling the requirements of our reason. There stays the admirable observation. index

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Conclusion
A new world is appearing in pains and tearing. Wars, catastrophes and crimes are the witnesses of this metamorphosis. With Teilhard, we can hope that "all the question in this crisis of birth, is that promptly emerges the soul which by its apparition will come to organize, relieve, vitalize, this confused cluster of matter. However this soul, if it exists, can only be the result of a "conspiracy" of the individuals joining together to raise of a new stage the building of the life. The resources we have today, the powers which we unchained could not be absorbed by the narrow system of the individual or national frames which served up to now the architects of the human Earth. Our plan was to raise a large house, vaster, but similar for the drawing with the good old residences....The age of the nations has passed away. The question for us, if we do not want to perish, is to shake the old prejudices and to build the Earth ". The spirits progress far from the anathemas pronounced formerly. One could read in a newspaper of great diffusion : "Scientifics and philosophers launch a cry of alarm. They call for a new moral code respectful of the complex links between science, culture and nature ". Is the Religion a help in this search ? The example of this great priest and authentic scientist who was Teilhard is encouraging, since he looked at the future " above and ahead" with the firm hope that "All that rises must converges ". For an agnostic person such as Erika Erdmann, assistant of the Nobel Prize Sperry, "Teilhard is a beacon which can direct us out of the chaos which surrounds us, the chaos of our lost certainty. It exceeds the faith in the science which lacks an ideal to be reached and it exceeds the religious faith which misses basic factual objective. It combines the best of both " And John-Paul II points out "The faith and the reason are as the two wings which make it possible for the human spirit to rise towards the contemplation of the truth ". This Truth that in the final analysis any man must seek ardently. At the end of this effort, humanity would arrive at the completion which the apostle Paul promised to the Ephesians: "Thus you will be able to understand, with all the faithful ones, which is the width, the length, the height, the depth... You will know the love of the Christ who exceeds all that one can know. Then you will be filled in until you return in the plenitude of God ". index

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