Emergent Evolution

...460 EMERGENT EVOLUTION By BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE PROFESSOR Herbert Spencer Jennings, of Johns Hopkins University, recently delivered an after-dinner talk on what he describes as the "fresh unhackneyed subject" of evolution...

...The Professor rejoices that his own special brand of evolution is now in the ascendent, and that is the emergent variety whose harbinger was Bergson, and whose recent exponents have been Alexander, Lloyd Morgan, and General Smuts, whose work on Holism was recently reviewed in The Commonweal...

...These were new things, though not of a striking newness...

...In his first volume, it must be admitted that the hold on God is incomplete, for He is accepted by a "natural piety...

...The other is the arrival of something associated no doubt with complicated groups of atoms made up of these factors but not explicable by them, unless we are to believe that consciousness or life are merely new rhythms in the dances of a number of atoms which come from no one knows where, and were set in motion by no one knows whom...

...Professor Driesch, in his History of the Theory of Vitalism, tells us that "those who regard the thesis of the theory of order as necessary for everything that is or can be, must accept theism, and are not allowed to speak of a 'dieu qui se fait.' " Bergson, as his commentator Professor Wildon Carr compendiously sums him up, declares "that the universe is not a completed system of reality, of which it is only our knowledge that is imperfect...

...and He must be of a very different character from the immanent, ignorant beings which some scientists have postulated...

...There, of course, the scholastic philosopher differs with the Professor, since he is convinced that the existence of God can be proved, and altogether apart from any recourse to revelation...

...What it has done, however, is to cause men to see more clearly the flaws in the old mechanistic theory, which were so well put by Professor Jennings in his address...

...Lloyd Morgan does take this matter into serious consideration in both his volumes of lectures, but especially in his second which was recently published...

...But it is obvious that Morgan's deity is the God of theism, and not of pantheism—a wholly different conception from the deity of the Bergsonian philosophy which is a "dieu qui se fait," as Bergson himself puts it...

...He very definitely pins his faith to God as the cause of the "go...

...Smuts avoids deliberately the topic of theology, though he absolutely refuses to accept the Bergsonian deity...

...We need not quarrel with that statement ¦—but what is causing the "becoming," and what is determining it...

...Professor Jennings would even attach to the idea the appearance of "a particular emergent individual," a Shakespeare, or a Napoleon...

...but that is not to say that the code is closed...

...And there is an end of ethics—for if a man can act but in one way in a given set of conditions, that is in fact the only way he can act, and he is in no way responsible for what he does...

...The emergent evolutionist discards this theory because it does not allow for the perfectly new things which could not have been foreseen...

...that there are laws...

...What is erroneous about this statement is that any less "sufficient intelligence" than the Intelligence which conceived the scheme of creation could have made any such prediction, since no lesser intelligence could possibly have foreseen the emergence of life, not to say consciousness...

...Of which conception it can only be remarked that if it be the true conception, then there is at once an end o{ all science...

...but no one will deny that life was such when it separated the inorganic from the organic world...

...Without these and a belief in the possibility of tracking down truth in its fastnesses, the pursuit of science would be a vain thing, fondly imagined...

...There was a time when there were no vertebrates...

...that some of them have been filled by elements since discovered, and of characters previously predicted...

...In a word, as Professor Lloyd Morgan puts it, where did the system get its "go...

...In 1889, Alfred Russell Wallace pointed out that in the development of the organic world there were at least three stages, "when some new cause or power must necessarily have come into action...

...With this belief, too, even Huxley may be cited as agreeing...

...The laws of nature are no doubt unalterable...

...If that theory be true, then there is an end of biology...

...In the vegetable kingdom, there was a time when there were only nakedseeded plants, like conifers...

...If all afterdinner speeches were equally interesting, there would be fewer weary moments passed around the boards where men gather...

...that a certain cause is followed by a certain effect...

...A blind God plunging forward along a path of which He is ignorant, toward some possible goal as to which He knows nothing whatsoever ? That destroys all possibility of an orderly world, yet the primary postulate of science is that there is order in the world...

...Since this is far afield from my immediate subject, I leave it with the remark that today it is accepted by all thinkers that the evolutionary process, if true, is certainly not self-explanatory...

...But what sort of a God...

...and no doubt such men do exercise a potent effect on the future generations of mankind...

...Professor Jennings is more than a biologist...

...This is very wonderful no doubt, and a triumph of science, but not in pari materia with the other prediction...

...It is true that the author "can form no adequate conception" of Professor Alexander's "emergent quality of deity, supervenient near the summit of the evolutionary pyramid...

...What was that...

...Let us grant their scheme of evolution and the emergence in its course of 461 new things...

...In the second volume, in which we are told that we are led to "the open door of the Cathedral of Christianity," we do not get further than the statement that the idea of God may be held "under acknowledgment," just as "the realist is not deterred from a belief in the real existence of a physical world because that presumption is not susceptible of a rigorous proof...

...For the first is but the prediction of what would occur in a new arrangement of factors already known—protons and electrons...

...It is no new idea...

...With all of that we may well agree, but now the point arises at which we endure disappointment, for most of these philosophers leave off just when they were beginning to be interesting...

...presently things with backbones appeared— new things, though their newness was of a different character than the newness of the major milestones along the path of development...

...for it will be remembered that he declared that, whether it was the hardness of his heart or the softness of his head that led him to adopt the view, he could not but feel that besides matter and motion there was a third thing in the universe—namely, consciousness—which, though it was met with in connection with the other two, did not depend upon them, and could not be explained by them...

...Life, sensation, and reason were the three, and each of these was a new thing of a new kind...

...So far, it must be admitted, the theory has only put into new words what we were very well aware of before...

...This is the position of the emergent evolutionist...

...most of them agree that, as Boodin puts it, the mechanistic philosophy is that which "makes the greatest demands upon man's credulity...

...It is, after all, a matter of definition as to what a "new thing" is...

...Jennings leaves that matter severely alone, as indeed he was quite justified in doing in a brief after-dinner talk...

...It could not have come into being, still less, kept going, without something outside itself—without some kind of cause...

...In a word, a new thing of a quite new kind...

...nor for the new laws which they bring with them...

...he is a philosopher and he sees the impossibilities of the old mechanistic philosophy of evolution which were set forth by Huxley when he said that a "sufficient intelligence" could have foreseen in the materials of the primitive nebula, the fauna and flora of the year in which his address was delivered...

...Of course, there have been many other minor emergences...

...but that the universe is itself becoming...

...There is an end of experiment—for why work in the laboratory when, if you are of "sufficient intelligence," you can sit down in your study and with pencil and paper work out exactly what must happen...

...and physics becomes the only science...

...That is the emergent idea—that in the course of time new things emerge in the history of the cosmos...

...At this point confusion sometimes arises in men's minds, for they urge that under the "periodic" table of Mendeleef, and the "atomic number" scheme, there were—and still are—unfilled gaps...

...what we clamor to be told is, where did this scheme come from, and how did its attendant happenings come to pass...

...The emergent idea is of quite another character, and so far we can agree with it...

...But it, too, must have a Cause, and a Sustainer, as Professor Lloyd Morgan believes...

...then covered seeds appeared, like those of the apple...