Future Darwinism

Future Darwinism - Towards a Unified Theory of Evolution

Darwin's year in 2009, celebrating the 200th birthday of perhaps the most profound thinker of the modern era, is also an appropriate time to explore the ramifications of next stage in the Darwinian revolution.

The biological theory of evolution is undoubtedly the most powerful paradigm ever conceived by humans to explain their own existence. Since Darwin's epoch-making treatise, Origin of Species, published a hundred and fifty years ago in 1859, evolution has been centre-stage, universally recognised as the driving force in the emergence of all life, including modern humans, from the genesis of the first cells on this planet, almost 4 billion years ago.

However, despite its ubiquitous brilliance as the jewel in the crown of human intellectual achievement, the notion of Darwinian evolution has never been developed to its full potential. It remains instead largely constrained within its biological cradle, often limited in its everyday connotation to the lowest common denominator of 'survival of the fittest'.

The intention of this and subsequent columns on the Future of Darwinism will be to re-evaluate and explore the future potential of the Darwinian model and to demonstrate that its current scope and application is only the tip of the intellectual iceberg.

By combining its formidable biological principles including the immense field of genetics, with those of systems, network, quantum, complexity and information theory, it emerges as an incalculably deeper and richer model than previously contemplated.

The major thesis currently now being explored by a number of eminent researchers drawn from the spectrum of physical and social sciences, demonstrates that the evolutionary engine that drives biological development also drives all other dynamic adaptive processes at the physical, social, cognitive, economic, political and technological level and is in fact the major dynamic governing the Universe, past present and future.

It is further proposed to explore in future posts the social ramifications of recent developments in artificial intelligence and the immense computational power generated through the Internet, that mark the next crucial stage in human evolution; involving the inevitable symbiosis of vast computational intelligence with the power of the human mind.

These two 21st century conceptual goals - a universal all-encompassing Unified Theory of Evolution based on the original Darwinian model - coupled with the emancipation of human intelligence via the future Web, together provide a vastly more powerful paradigm for exploring the future of Darwinism, life and human potential.