2020 version

A Philosophical Introduction to Evolutionary Cosmology

Evolution in action

When I first started working on the concept that the principles of evolutionary processes apply to everything around 30 years ago.  I started with the concept of Evolution and human thinking. This led to Philosophy and its relationship to the Christian faith and other religions in general.  The original aim was to develop these to look at human behaviour in relation to fashion and the then relatively new internet.  This led to vague predictions of all sorts of advantages and problems that have now become very familiar.

This thinking about evolutionary processes on general led me eventually right back to my other consuming interest and study, the roots of cosmology and cosmological thinking.  Taking an evolutionary approach had lead to some new physical and philosophical approaches to modern cosmology that may help to unblock the "impasse of generality" that has blighted recent “mathematical synthesis” based cosmological thinking and put it more in line with the way that “physical thinking” has worked in the past.  This may give what I have to say interst to a wider potential technical audience with more skills in following up the concepts .

Let us therefore start with a simple description of the roots of human philosophical thinking remembering that the whole of science was at one time called Natural Philosophy.  

One of the important and possibly unique features of humankind is that they have always tried to understand their environment with a view to gaining some limited control of it.  This goes right back to the most basic animist religions on which all the elements of life plants, creatures, landscape and weather were endowed with a "life force" just like mankind itself and had to be considered and placated when mankind disturbed it to minimise the risk of "reprisals" on the form of bad luck or poor conditions when mankind disturbed it. 

These ideas gradually developed to form more structured religions.  In some cases this led to the concept of God and Gods as prime movers of creation that need to be obeyed and placated by following a "good" life as defined by wisdom literature and authorities that were human representatives and interpreters of the literature  In others religions, where the concept of recycling was dominant over creation, to a personal struggle to improve themselves and life in general in future lives by following a "good" life as defined by wisdom literature.   Approaching this concept of a good life from a different (evolutionary) direction it can be understood that in most circumstances this converts an evolutionary advantage to the species.

The existence and collective adherence to these concepts enabled the development of complex communities far greater than the family groups that existed in the early hominids. These eventually developed into  the countries and empires that characterised the medieaval world.   This approach to early history is well developed in the book "Sapiens a brief history of humankind" (ref).  During the Reformation the development of science and a greater knowledge of the way the world worked eroded the supernatural foundations of the standard religions but they developed into other aspects of society involving human interactions like financial and legal systems.  The final "death blow". Appeared to many have been delivered by the general acceptance of the concepts of the evolution of life by natural selection.

This was simply stated as "the survival of the fittest (to reproduce)" initially. However looking in more detail at the evolution of life showed that the ability to co-operate with others of the same species and also different species (domestication) and even in the organelles that comprise a eukaryotic cell where several simpler cells combined to create a more complex and evolving object can also be seen as an important co-operative step.

Studies into the origins and evolution of life from essentially inanimate materials have now shown us more about how complexity can develop by linking and “co-operation”,  metastability and dynamic structural changes  in complex RNA related reactions and even simple chemical interaction systems involving large numbers of similar elements that are not reproducing living entities can drive evolutionary processes.

Let us now look at the development of cosmological ideas from a different angle.

Humankind’s approach to cosmology

During all of history two concepts have often driven humankind’s approach to cosmology.

Firstly the idea that human beings are in some way special, different from other animals and plants on the earth and favoured by external influences (for example Gods).

Secondly the yearning for perfection, eternity and stasis (as might be created by an ideal God). That is. we live in an eternal planet and life could go on for ever and some sort of perfection in creation exists.

As knowledge gradually grew and knowledge of the earth, our solar system and the universe widened these concepts have always been proved wrong at every stage.  However these primitive ideas have also always "escaped" into the next level of uncertainty.

We can recognise these hopes still exist in our current concepts of the origins and nature of our universe.  That is, we live in a universe where the physical laws are very precisely balanced to enable atoms stars and life to form.  A good explanation of this is in the book "The Goldilocks Enigma"  By Paul Davies (a close contemporary of mine at UCL).  Because of this precise balance, if our physical laws were determined randomly from within the range our universe would be extremely improbable and we mist be in some way "special".  Now every other time this has happened in the past we have been proved wrong.  We should therefor look seriously at any cosmology that might avoid this special place.

The application of an evolutionary concept could change this very greatly. That is, our universe is not rare, but one of the undefined number of types of universe that evolve out of what is usually described as the "bulk" of a dynamic spacetime and creates during its life many substantially similar universes from which it will eventually be disconnected in its final death and return to the bulk.  Our only contact with other universes, not created by our own universe, is via the anonymising bulk. Our only contact with the universes created by our own universe is via a one way "wormhole" so small that only dissociated subatomic particles can pass through it.

Look at

on to  1-2 A Scientific Introduction