(Note: All previous parts in the Complexity Explained series by Dr. Vinod Wadhawan can be accessed through the ‘Related Posts’ listed below the article.)

In any evolutionary process, what evolves is complexity. Chemical complexity evolved till some of it became indistinguishable from biological complexity. Evolution of biological complexity is determined by two main factors: natural selection (made famous by Charles Darwin), and self-organization. I focus on the natural-selection aspect of biological evolution in this article.

13.1 Darwinian Evolution

The greatest single contribution to the subject of complexity was made (unwittingly, perhaps) by Charles Darwin. The year 2009 marked the second birth centenary of Darwin, as also 150 years of the publication of his celebrated book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Living organisms are open systems, i.e. they are constantly exchanging matter and energy with the environment. There is a fair amount of dynamic equilibrium between a living organism and its surroundings. The organism cannot survive if this equilibrium is disturbed too much, or for too long. The fact that an organism survives implies that, in its present form, it has been able to adapt itself to the environment. If the environment changes slowly enough, living entities can evolve (over a long enough time period) a new set of capabilities or features which enable them to survive even under the changed conditions. Over long periods of such evolutionary change, creatures may even develop into new species. This was the message of Charles Darwin’s (1859) bold theory of evolution through cumulative natural selection. He demonstrated that adaptation to the environment was a necessary outcome of the exchange processes going on between organisms and their surroundings. A consequence of his theory was that all living organisms are the descendants of one or a few simple ancestral forms. Read the full story

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“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.”

-Steven Weinberg

“You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are.”

-Eckhart Tolle

1. Introduction

The impulse to see human life as central to the existence of the universe is manifested in the mystical traditions of practically all cultures. It is so fundamental to the way pre-scientific people viewed reality that it may be, to a certain extent, ingrained in the way our psyche has evolved, like the need for meaning and the idea of a supernatural God. As science and reason dismantle the idea of the centrality of human life in the functioning of the objective universe, the emotional impulse has been to resort to finer and finer misinterpretations of the science involved. Mystical thinkers use these misrepresentations of science to paint over the gaps in our scientific understanding of the universe, belittling, in the process, science and its greatest heroes.

In their recent article in The Huffington Post, biologist Robert Lanza and mystic Deepak Chopra put forward their idea that the universe is itself a product of our consciousness, and not the other way around as scientists have been telling us. In essence, these authors are re-inventing idealism, an ancient philosophical concept that fell out of favour with the advent of the scientific revolution. According to the idealists, the mind creates all of reality. Many ancient Eastern and Western philosophical schools subscribe to this idealistic notion of the nature of reality. In the modern context, idealism has been supplemented with a brand of quantum mysticism and relabeled as biocentrism. According to Chopra and Lanza, this idea makes Darwin’s theory of the biological evolution and diversification of life insignificant. Both these men, although they come from different backgrounds, have independently expressed these ideas before with some popular success. In the article under discussion their different styles converge to present a uniquely mystical and bizarre worldview, which we wish to debunk here. Read the full story

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The Glapagos

On this day in 1835, Charles Darwin sailed into an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Ecuador, called the Galapagos Islands. In his diary, the 26-years-old Darwin wrote about the geography of the volcanic islands, describing their numerous craters and unique weather patterns. But over the days that…. Read the full story

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