Evolve, Please

“…nothing is more unfair or a greater waste of time than to protest and fight against the increasing leisure towards which the machine is inexorably leading us. Without the very automatic processes whose business it is to make our various bodily organs work “on their own”, none of us, it is obvious, would have any “leisure” to create, to love, to think: the necessity to look after our ”metabolism” would occupy us entirely (p104-105).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

The Noosphere – Ethnic Compression; Economic-Technical Organization; and the Simultaneous Increase of Consciousness, Science and Radius of Activity:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 8 of 8

Particularly since the Neolithic, the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effects of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space (p98).

[--Kevin Kelly, How Technology Evolves--

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evolves.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Technology_Wants

Kelly suggests that technology is the seventh kingdom of life; it evolves, evidences 'genetic' lineage and is distinct from biology in that certain 'species' can be traced to 'parents' that have gone 'extinct'. He calls technology a cosmic force.]

On increased psychic temperature/mental interiority and inventive power, under the law of complexity consciousness: it “increases each human element’s radius of action and power of penetration in relation to all the others” (p98-99) and “today, thanks to the single discovery of electromagnetic waves any man can immediately and simultaneously make contact” (p99, note).

[note: written in 1949, pre-internet]

Towards the Future – The Convergent World and the Limits of Socialization:

On the Teilhard’s “wave” and the “passing of the equator”: “…in earlier days, man’s consciousness could be revolutionized simply by the discovery of a new continent…” (p103).

More brain: collectivized cerebralization, the grey matter of mankind [not man, but mankind] (p100)

Man, taxonomically, is not just a family or genus but represents another planetary biological layer (p112, note).

Everything comes about in the course of cosmic convolution as though the superstructure (the psyche) more gradually replaces the infrastructure (the physical) as the consistent portion of the vitalized particles (p121, final note).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

The Noosphere – Individuation:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 7 of 8

The Collective Co-Consciousness of Primitive Tribes in a natural way facilitates the cohesion and natural functioning of the group (p93).

[--Bicameral Mind Theory--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mind]

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

Civilization and the Noosphere – Effects of Differentiation and Orthogenesis:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 6 of 8

Differentiation:

In man, there occurred an unknown and peculiarly revolutionary type of mutation in the massive cross-fertilization of large ethnic groups (not the rearrangement of germinal particles within certain individuals) (p90).

Orthogenesis:

“Psychogenic” arrangement has replace cerebralization (the brain reaches its limit) (p91).

From one point of view, hominization seems to have slowed to a stop, but considering civilization a part of this evolution, we see only acceleration (p92).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

Civilization and the Noosphere as Zoological/Taxonomical Extension:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 5 of 8

After man, we get mankind (p102)

“Man, who appeared as no more than a species but who, through the operation of ethnico-social unification, has gradually been raised to the position of constituting a specifically new envelope to the earth…He is nothing less than a sphere – the noosphere… (p80).”

With the noosphere, evolution advances only by contracting and concentrating itself (p82), and as a wave starting at the south pole and rising up to the North, over its whole course, during the first half (the equator) it spreads outwards, and beyond that, it contracts (p81).

The third pulsation: the Neolithic Agricultural wave: a simultaneous maturation of the species into a more sedentary and grouped way of life from a diffuse to an organized society (p84).

Civilization is not a “fully realized state of social organization” but the “process that generates the organization”. Its “zoological ‘specialization’ extended to an animal group (man) in which one particular influence (the psychic) that had hitherto been negligible from the point of view of taxonomy suddenly begins to assume a predominant part in the ramification of the phylum (p87)”.

“Psychological species” of human “collective units” produced throughout history as a result of culture and race are just as natural as ‘carnivore’, for example (p87).

“The older chromosomal heredity is now partnered by an “educational”, extra-individual …the psychic suddenly plays a more important role than the physiological and morphological (p87).”

“The formation of tribes, nations, empires, and finally of the modern state, is simply a prolongation…of the mechanism which produced animal species (p87).”

As a result of the intensification of the psychic milieu, a phenomena hitherto unknown in nature has now become possible – the confluence of branches (as opposed to the divergent branches of the tree of life) (p89).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

The Appearance of Man – The Leading Shoot from the Tree of Life:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 4 of 8

A new parameter for evolution: coefficient of complexity and nervous system (p47)

-Cerebralization – complexity of the brain

-Cephalization – absolute manifestation/concentration of the nervous system

See p54 Eddinger’s Development of the Brain in Equidae (it gets bigger)

See p52 Romer’s stages in the cerebralization of vertebrates (from fish-reptile-dog-man, the cerebral hemisphere eventually overcrowds, with the cerebellum growing also)

“In the course of the last 700 million years we can see that countless things disappeared, but not a single new thing, apart from the hominians, has appeared in nature (p73).”

“Hominians upon reaching the sapiens stage change ceregrally more rapidly and profoundly than any other living thing during the same interval (p76).”

Mankind – the last of evolution (p82)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

The Biosphere:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 3 of 8

There must have been an astonishingly rapid invasion of the whole photochemically active surface of our planet. It is as though the surface had then been, in relation to life, in a state of almost super-saturation…” with all capable elements rapidly vitalized to create the biosphere (p39).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966