As we think about how Science and its methods work, we realize, as Nicholas Maxwell has stressed many times, that it contains one more implicit assumption. This second assumption is that human minds can figure out the laws of this difficult, confusing place; that is, that we’re not kidding ourselves about how smart we are. All the evidence of the history of Science, and of humanity more generally, suggests that we can figure those laws out. 

Therefore, I choose to gamble again, this time on the power of human minds, sometimes alone and sometimes in cooperation with other minds, to see through the layers of irrelevant, trivial events and to spot the patterns that underlie their larger movements. Then we can test and revise and gradually arrive at models and natural law statements that really do explain the world, and so we gradually come to master the knowledge that empowers us to design—and engage in—focused, strategic actions that get survival-favouring results.

Again, the majority of the citizens of the West see this choice-gamble as the only rational one to take. The alternative to believing in the power of human minds, individually or in cooperating groups, to figure out the laws underlying reality is to abandon reason in favour of beliefs founded on something other than observable, replicable, material facts. 

Once again, we have the evidence of centuries of human history to look back on. All the evidence we have about what life was like for the superstitious, cowed tribes of the past suggests that their lives were—as Hobbes puts it—nasty, brutish, and short. People who were willing to think, analyze, experiment, and learn made this society that we enjoy today; even the majority of Luddite cynics who claim to despise modernity don’t like to go two days without a shower.

My first point or conscious realization on the road to the theistic view, then, is that these beliefs in the consistency of the laws of the universe and in the power of the human mind to figure them out, when added together, amount to a kind of faith. To atheists and skeptics, this belief system can’t properly be called a “faith” at all. It certainly doesn’t lead them to a belief in God. It simply enables atheists and theists alike to keep doing science and to share ideas about their branch of Science with anyone else who is interested. It does not entail more than that, the atheists say.

But now let’s add some other powerful ideas.

If we truly believe in Science, then we are committed to integrating into our thinking all well-supported theories in any of the branches of Science. In the twenty-first century, what that means is that we must now try to integrate uncertainty, quantum and non-quantum, into our world view. Earlier we saw that extrapolating from the quantum model led us to conclude that the values we call freedom and love are real, that is, that our believing in these values and living under their worldview leads to survival-oriented, real-world, positive consequences.

                                                                         

         

                     

                                             Erwin Schrodinger (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

However, quantum theory, once it’s accepted, also comes with some other startling corollaries and experimental findings. Quantum entanglement implies that the universe feels itself, all over, all at once. The universe is not, as pre-quantum Science pictured it, cool, local, and aloof. It is capable of what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” and in fact, it functions that way all the time.⁵ Our best twenty-first century model of the universe is telling us that all the parts of the universe are in touch, instantly, with all the other parts, all the time. Schrodinger put it this way: “There seems to be no way of stopping [entanglement] until the whole universe is part of a stupendous entanglement state.”⁶

If distant parts of an entity are in touch with one another (in the case of the physical universe, instantly), it is entirely reasonable to postulate that there must be a controller of some kind connecting the stimulus of a spin of one particle and the reverse-spin response of another particle in some distant location.

This way of seeing the universe as having a kind of awareness is my second big idea. It is well known to scientists, theist and atheist alike. They admit it is a way to move a bit closer to saying that a possibility exists of a sort of a God.

                                                             

                                                Albert Michelson (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                              

                                                          Edward Morley (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Clearly, Science is still open to making mistakes. For scientists themselves, a shocking example of such a mistake was the mistake in Physics. Newton’s models of how gravity and acceleration work were excellent, but they weren’t telling the full story of what goes on in the universe. 

After two centuries of taking Newton’s models and equations as gospel, physicists were stunned by the experiment done by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887. In essence, it showed that Newton’s laws were not adequate to explain all of what was really going on. Einstein’s thinking on these new data led him to the Theory of Relativity. But first came Michelson and Morley’s experiment, which showed that the scientific method, and Newton, were not infallible.

Newton was not proved totally wrong, of course, but his laws were shown to be mere approximations, accurate only for smaller masses and at slower speeds. As the masses and speeds tested become larger, Newton’s laws become less useful for predicting what is going to happen next.

Nevertheless, it was a scientist, Einstein, doing science, who found the limitations of the laws and models specified by an earlier scientist. Newton was not amended by a reading from an ancient text or by a clergyman's pronouncements. Thus, from the personal standpoint, I have always believed, I still believe, and I’m confident I always will believe that the universe is consistent, that it runs by laws that will be the same in 2525 as they are now, even though we don’t understand all of them very well yet. Relativity theory describes how the stars moved in the year 1,000,000 BC exactly as accurately as it describes the stars’ movements now. In that era, living things reproduced and changed by the process that we call evolution just as reliably as living things do now. I believe that, for living things, genetic variation and natural selection are constants.

But I can’t prove beyond any doubt that the universe runs by one consistent set of laws; I can only choose to take a Bayesian kind of gamble on the foundational belief that this is so. I prefer this belief as a starting point over any alternative beliefs that portray the universe as being run under laws that are capricious and unpredictable. Science has had so many successes that, even if I can’t be certain that its findings and theories are infallible, I choose to heed what scientists have to say. That choice, for me, is just a smart Bayesian gamble, preferable to any of the superstitious alternatives. Or as Robert Frost said: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I …I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

   

                       I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

There is even evidence that tribes of the past knew of the inductive method and gained knowledge by it.^2,3,4 More and more as millennia passed, they turned to their gods only when they couldn’t figure out on their own how some natural process worked. One of the big effects of Science has been to steadily dispel superstitions as better insights into the workings of physical reality are acquired. In fact, most people today, at least in the West, concede almost automatically that superstitions need to be dispelled. Plagues aren’t caused by evil spirits or God’s punishment, and they don’t go away if we burn incense or chant for days at a time. But if we control rats, we can control bubonic plague. If we selectively breed our livestock, then our chickens, cows, sheep, and pigs keep giving more eggs, milk, wool, and pork. In short, all humans and all human societies keep gradually becoming more rational because survival demands it.

My model of cultural evolution also showed me why some superstitious beliefs hang on for generations before they are dispelled. But in the end, as old thinkers are replaced by more enlightened ones, the method of human learning, whether it is individual or tribal, is an inductive one. We get ideas about the material world and we test them. We sometimes test world views or moral systems over generations, and what we learn is absorbed by the tribe over generations rather than cognized by any one individual. But our knowledge keeps growing, as it must if we are to survive. We are the only concept-driven species that we have encountered so far. The knowledge-accumulating, social way of surviving is the human way. Our genetically-acquired assets (speed, strength, etc.) are trivial by comparison. We live by learning or we die.

Chapter 17 – The Theistic Bottom Line

The three large principles summed up in the previous chapter are enough. Having established them, we have enough to conclude that a higher power or consciousness exists in our material universe. Or rather, as was promised in the introduction, we have enough to conclude that belief in God is a rational choice for a thinking, informed, modern human being to make.

And that is the point. Belief in God is a choice. It is simply a more rational choice than its alternatives.

It is also worth reiterating three other points here: first, we must have a moral program in our heads to function at all; second, the one we’ve inherited from the past is dangerously out-of-date; and third, whatever new one we devise, it will have to be turned from a cerebral code into a personal one. A moral code must be felt and lived as personal or else it isn’t really a moral code at all. It will not guide us when a moral crisis comes.

This final chapter gives a more informal explanation and interpretation of the pieces assembled so far and adds some other, better-known pieces whose significance in this discussion will now be explained as we go along. It will also try to answer some of the most likely reactions to the ideas in this book. My promise was that by the end of this book, we would be able to assemble a strong case for theism—that is, belief in God. We’re almost there. We shall begin this last chapter by revisiting, in a more personal way, a vexing problem in Philosophy mentioned in Chapter 4, a problem that is three hundred years old. The solution to this problem drives home our first main point on the final stretch of the thinking process that leads to theism.

   

                                                       

                       Movie actor playing a “mad” scientist (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Many scientists claim that their branch of human knowledge, unlike all of the ones that came before the rise of Science, does not have any basic assumptions at its foundation and that it is instead built from the ground up on merely observing reality, hypothesizing, designing and doing research, checking the results against one’s hypothesis, and then doing more hypothesizing, research, and so on. Under this view, science has no need of foundational assumptions in the way that, say, philosophy or Euclidean geometry do. Science is founded only on hard fact, they claim. But in this claim, as has been pointed out by thinkers like Nicholas Maxwell, those scientists are wrong.¹

Over the last four centuries, the scientific way of thinking, Bacon’s “new instrument,” has made possible the amazing progress in human knowledge and technology that today we associate with Science. But in the meantime, at least for philosophers, it has come in for some tougher analysis.

                                                              

                                      

                               Cover of early copy of Novum Organum (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The heart of the matter, then, is the inductive method normally associated with science. The way in which scientists can come upon a phenomenon they cannot explain with any of their current models, devise a new theory that tries to explain the phenomenon, test the theory by doing experiments in the material world, and keep going back and forth from theory to experiment, adjusting and refining—this is the way of gaining knowledge called the scientific method. It has led us to so many powerful new insights and technologies. It really was an amazing breakthrough when Francis Bacon—whether we credit him with originating it or merely expressing what many in his era were already thinking—saw and explained what he called his “new instrument” (novum organum).

But as David Hume famously proved, the logic this method is built on is not perfect. Any natural law that we try to state as a way of describing our observations of reality is a gamble, one that may seem to summarize and bring order to entire files of experiences, but a gamble nonetheless. A natural law is a scientist’s claim about what he thinks is going to happen in specific future circumstances. But every natural law proposed is taking for granted a deep first assumption about the real world. That assumption is that events in the future will continue to steadily follow the patterns we have been able to spot in the flows of events in the past. But we simply can’t ever know whether this assumption is true. At any time, we may come on new data that stymie our best theories.

The third big idea in this analysis of our background assumptions is one that this book has laboured long to establish. It is the assumption that says there is a kind of moral order in this universe, a moral order that is “real” in the sense that scientists mean—observably, empirically real.

The universe runs by laws that produce patterns in the flows of events, and our culturally acquired moral values guide us, as tribes, to navigate through those patterns. These values were learned through trial and error by millions of people over thousands of years. People learned that certain general ideas called values—large ideas like courage, wisdom, freedom, and love—work. In theory, many varied cultures can evolve that incorporate these values into a viable way of life. But across all of these cultures, large general patterns are discernible. If we go, as whole societies, in the direction toward which our most basic values point, we get useful results. The people who live by these values survive. Those who don’t, don’t.

Values have physically observable effects as real as gravity and magnetism. Gravity and magnetism are seen by how they affect the movements of clusters of particles. Values are seen by how they affect the movements of tribes of people.

Again we can ask about our third idea in this line of thinking: “As opposed to what?” The usual opposing idea to moral realism in modern times is moral relativism, under which moral values are mere tastes, and right and wrong depend on where you are. What was right in Rome in the first century of the modern era is not morally right today, relativists say; what is right in Africa is not right in Western Europe. Under the moral relativists’ thinking, there is no peaceful way to resolve disputes between different cultures because there is no common ground on which to even begin the negotiations.

There are lots of forms of moral relativism being espoused in the twenty-first century. Some even claim, in convoluted arguments, that they do offer us ways to establish common definitions of “good” and to resolve disputes peacefully. But for the purposes of this book, moral relativism as just defined will suffice. In the end, moral relativism takes the position that moral values can’t be grounded in any specifiable, physically observable phenomena.⁷ I claim that we won’t survive thinking like that, and we don’t have to think like that.

The view of moral realism I offer in this book says of the relativists’ position that nothing could be further from the truth. Material reality is the common ground, and if we grasp what our species’ history is telling us about values, we can infer that values are based on reality, then debate how to interpret that reality, and then test our various models against the evidence of history. Finally, we are driven logically to conclude that all of our disputes can be settled peacefully. The things stopping us from creating and maintaining world peace are the anti-morals: cowardice, cupidity, laziness, and bigotry.

So let us now close in on our long-anticipated main point.

If, as a modern human being in touch with the basics of Science in all its forms, I believe the universe is one coherent thing—even if all its laws are not yet understood—and I further believe it is conscious—even if its consciousness is so vast that it can’t yet be comprehended by humans—and I further believe it is morally responsive—even if its moral quality is only discernible in the flows of millions of people over thousands of years—if I believe these three claims, then in my personal way I do believe in God.

What? That’s it?

Yes, my patient reader. That’s it. I do still believe in God. My view is a pretty lean one, but every instinct in me tells me that such is life. Adults have to get by on leaner fare than children who seek a bearded man in the sky. The best consolation of adult life is the firm belief that the patterns that we see in the flows of events in world – even patterns that only show in the evidence of centuries of human actions – are real. Your deep intuition that “good” and “right” are real is not naïve or crazy. It’s the sanest belief you have.  

And now, in a personal response to the logic presented so far, let me try to show that this case is enough to maintain my theism. And personal is the most honest way to describe my final chapter. It has to be so. Or, to be exact, it has to make the personal universal and the universal personal, as we shall see.

Notes

1. Dennis Overbye, “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown,” New York Times, December 18, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0.

2. Homer, The Illiad (c. 800–725 BC; Project Gutenberg), p. 91. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/6130-h.html#fig120.

3. Nicholas Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (London, UK: Pentire Press, 1984), pp. 107–109.

4. http://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/

5. Joshua Roebke, “The Reality Tests,” Seed magazine, June 4, 2008. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_reality_tests/P1/.

6. Ibid.

7. Chris Gowans, “Moral Relativism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/.

Let’s keep this first implicit assumption of Science in mind. All is connected to all else in a coherent, systematic way. (Nicholas Maxwell discusses this view and its problems at length in his book From Knowledge to Wisdom, pp. 107–109.³)

However, and in the second place, we also now know that this universe is a kind of aware. Changes in one part of the universe produce changes in another, distant part—instantly. Like a school of hundreds of fish or a flock of thousands of birds turning as one, parts of the universe are connected in amazing ways.⁴ How the parts are connected is still a mystery to physicists, but that they are connected is no longer in doubt. And living things may take measurable microseconds of time to react, but a big point about sub-atomic particles is that they don't. Their action-reaction is instant.   

Particles in all corners of the universe are entangled. Quantum experiments have proved that such is the case as surely as Newton’s laws of motion have been shown to be accurate approximations of relativistic mechanics by generations of engineers. (Joshua Roebke describes this research in an article published in 2008.⁵)

Particles found in matched pairs in the subatomic world can be separated and steered apart as they travel. But if the spin of one of the two particles is reversed, its former partner—miles distant and unacted upon in any way—will undergo a complementary, mirror-image change of its own. And the signal by which the first tells the second to reverse its spin travels from one to the other instantly, which is a violation of Einstein’s relativity theory, and thus of all the models that predated the quantum theory. (Roebke summarizes this well.⁶)

Can we then call the coherent system of particles and forces that is the universe “self-aware”?

Here again, we must make a cognitive choice of which model to use as we interpret the most recent data from Physics. It is clear that, in light of all the evidence and reasoning currently available, belief in the quantum model appears to be our most rational choice.

But belief in this model further implies its corollary that the universe is a kind of aware. Or let’s take the leap and say conscious. This view too is a choice. So why would we choose to think, even provisionally, that the universe has awareness? There are at least four good reasons.

First, the evidence says so. If we touch a living entity in one part and we then detect a reaction in another part (a reaction that can be replicated and studied over and over), we describe that entity as being aware. Amoeba move away from strong light. As plant seeds germinate, they send a shoot upward, away from gravity, and a root downward, toward gravity. Higher organisms in which a stimulus occurring at one site produces a response somewhere else are assumed in Biology to have a controller of some sort between the two sites. All of these life forms are said to be, at some level, aware. The entanglement of particles in the universe fits this basic model of awareness.

Second, the choice to view the universe as being aware also makes more scientific sense than choosing the alternative view, that is, to see the universe as an unfeeling machine (as Laplace did). The idea of an aware universe enables us, at least in part, to account for findings in other branches of Science, like the synchronous behaviors found in schools of fish and flocks of birds, and the flashes in swarms of fireflies. 

Presently, how the individual animals in these collectives know what their fellows are about to do has defied explanation by the best modelling and experimentation being done in all branches of both Physics and Biology. But scientists continue to observe this kind of synchronous activity in collectives of many different organisms. It’s real.

   

                                         Synchronous behavior in flock of birds (credit: Wikipedia) 

Third, seeing the universe as an aware entity fosters in us an inclination to engage in a personal way with the moral conclusions that are implicit in our worldview. Everywhere, always, we are choosing. Thus, we must stand up for our values. Always. The universe is watching. Why does this matter? History has shown repeatedly that only a moral code that is heartfelt can handle the kinds of pressures tyrants bring to bear on citizens in their societies. Moral codes that are merely cerebral don’t motivate. Such morals can too easily be rationalized and pushed onto whatever path a tyrant desires. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, doctors, judges, even the scientists were co-opted by the tyrants. 

A worldview that sees the universe as aware reduces our human tendency to rationalize our way into moral laziness. A universe seen as being aware is one that is judging us every second.

We can't just do the expedient. We must try our best to do what is right. 

Finally, taking a larger, more global view, seeing the universe as quantum theory models it rather than as the Newtonian paradigm models it commits us to the concept of free will. If, as we flow into the future, there are many possible paths before us rather than only one that is inescapable, then by wisely chosen actions, we can influence the probabilities of which path we will land on. We have free will.

In other words, the quantum view feels like life the way we live it. I do hold people responsible for their actions. In fact, no one I know lives daily life as if the cars around them in traffic are particles driven by unchangeable forces toward inescapable outcomes. Cars contain drivers who are responsible human beings. If they aren’t, they shouldn’t be driving. If your car’s path crosses my car’s path, and I have to steer sharply left and almost swerve into a lane of oncoming traffic, I’m going to be mad at you, not your car. 

Similarly, I reject any moral code that excuses felons as being not responsible for their actions, and so does every other person I’ve ever met. Quantum theory fits how life feels. We have free will; we can be held responsible, to a fair degree, for the events in which we are involved.

Thus, it is rational to choose to see the universe as coherent and conscious. But are these two choices added together enough to justify a further choice to embark on a path toward a personal theism?

Chapter 16 – A Summing Up of the Case So Far

At this stage of my argument, then, a summing up is needed before I attempt to move on. In order to finish the argument and bring all the threads together, it is necessary to go backward and more carefully review some of the assumptions that are implicit in any argument that is based on Science.

What are we committing to if we agree with the points argued so far and especially with what the entire argument assumes and builds on? Three ideas are essential.

                   

       evening on Mars (photo by NASA's Spirit Rover) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In the first place, a basic assumption—for many modern thinkers, an implicit assumption they are not consciously aware of and do not examine—is that the universe is a single, integrated system. Every one of its parts connects to all of its other parts: one set of laws, each of which is consistent with all the others, rules the universe. We don’t understand the full system of natural laws yet, but in doing Science, we implicitly believe that the laws of Science apply on Mars and Gliese 581g just as precisely as those laws apply here on earth. (Dennis Overbye sums up the debate in a 2007 New York Times article.¹)

To some readers this assumption may seem so self-evident that stating it seems silly. But such a reaction is a hasty, careless one. This basic assumption of Science—along with a few of the other conclusions reached so far in this book—has implications for all that we think and do.

To be even plainer, let’s consider this idea that our universe is all one system compared with the idea’s alternatives. In short, let’s ask, “As opposed to what?”

                               

   

                   Artist’s conception of the Gliese 581 system (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The alternative view of our universe sees it as being made up of areas or dimensions or epochs in which different sets of rules apply or once did apply. This was the view of many of our forebears. They saw the universe as being run by many varied and mutually hostile gods, each with his or her own realm. For example, for the ancient Greeks, Poseidon ruled the sea; he could make storms at will and bring them down on any group of luckless mariners. Hades ruled the underworld, Zeus, the skies. Hades took Persephone down to his realm, and even Zeus could only negotiate to get her back for half the year. 

From this quarrel came the seasons. Two hostile brats, who happened to be supernatural beings, and who could not get along. A universe run by caprice, lust, cruelty, and revenge.

                                                

           

       The Return of Persephone (artist, Frederic Leighton) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The classical Greeks also implicitly accepted that their ancestors had been much stronger than they were. Repeatedly in The Iliad, heroes hoist rocks that “no man today could lift,” and they do it with ease.² In such a universe, certain systems of ideas that were right in one area or era might be quite different from those that were right (in both senses of right) in some other distant land or era.

In the modern view, under Science, we assume that the strong force, the weak force, and the laws of electromagnetism and gravity apply everywhere and always have done so. It is true that we have not yet found a way to translate our model of gravity into the system of ideas and equations that describes the other three, but we are confident that a unified field theory does exist. Ours is a single coherent universe, we assume.

Do most people in our modern society truly believe the universe is a single, coherent system? Yes. That is what Science is about. The alternative – superstition – is simply not palatable for most people in the West today. Whatever the flaws in the current scientific world view—and it is not logically airtight, as we have seen—we’ve nevertheless seen it achieve far too many successes to gamble on any of the superstitious alternatives. People today, by and large, do not turn a sick child over to a shaman for treatment. Who today would try to fix his broken down vehicle by casting pennies or lighting incense sticks or chanting? In today’s world, for better or worse, we in the West especially are citizens of the Age of Science. The evidence says that is a smart gamble, a solid Bayesian choice, therefore, a fully rational one.

When it comes to our values, morés, and patterns of behaviour, we tend to change slowly and grudgingly, but we can change. Thus, we could learn a mode of cultural evolution that is vigorous but not militaristic.

Once we accept the view that over generations, a maximally efficient cultural path, which values and mores steer us onto, exists in time itself, we are admitting that values are real. Thus, we must conclude that only certain values, those derived from our best world view—that is, Science—will be rational choices to guide humanity to greater health and vigor in the future. We all must live and survive in this same physical universe.

The courage-wisdom meme complex, along with the behaviour patterns it entails, is the human response to entropy; the love-freedom meme complex is our long-term response to quantum uncertainty. The optimal balance of them all is called virtue or the Tao. It is always subtly shifting its path. Especially in these nuclear-armed, climate-threatened times, we must see those shifts and respond effectively. Or die.

   

                                                   Statue of Lao Tzu (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The Tao Te Ching says: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.” Lao Tsu was telling his disciples never to become confident that they have life figured out and can now become complacent about their capacity to handle life’s events; complacency is the harbinger of disaster. The way of all ways, the Tao, is always evolving. To live - as individuals, but far more importantly as nations—we must stay alert, resourceful, nimble, and sharp.

And values themselves? They are just our best guides to where the survival path, through the present and on into the future, lies.

Notes

1. “Convergent Evolution,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 30, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution.

2. Richard Dawkins, “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” in Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 123–144.

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 78.

                                        

   

                            

            Maori warrior hongi-greeting American soldier   (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

   

                                

                          Traditional Indian Namaste greeting (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

It is true that many deep differences between the meme combinations and morés of different societies can be found. But to say, as some moral relativists do³, that these cultures are therefore incommensurable is to abandon humanity to war for all time. And it simply isn’t true.

   

  American handshake (Pres. Obama greets Pope Francis) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                          

   

                  English poet-musician Sting (Gordon Sumner) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In the first place, though there are differences, there are many similarities in our ways of life. Some of the highest peaks in the meme-scapes of all cultures coincide. Everywhere on earth, people respect and value wisdom, courage, love, and freedom. Different cultures adhere to moral values, and the patterns of behavior that they lead to, in varying degrees and in varying ways and combinations. But the areas of thinking we have in common far outweigh our differences. As Gordon Sumner (Sting) said in the 1980s, “The Russians love their children too.”

In the second place, we can learn. We can learn to fish in four ways instead of just one. We can learn to speak in several languages. We can learn to refrain from giving in to violent impulses that cause men to beat women or children or each other or engage in crime or war. We can learn to imprison rather than execute convicted murderers. We can learn regular exercise and moderate eating as simply habits of all rational adults.

The values discussed in this book—values that derive from and are tailored for the physical universe—are pointing us toward a society that will place ever greater emphasis on imagination, self-discipline, education, citizenship, pluralism, and good will. Courage, wisdom, freedom, and love. We need a rational global society in a state of dynamic equilibrium, capable of responding effectively to an ever greater range of challenges, both short and long term. Then we can spread our species out to our destiny—the stars.

Useful concepts—that is, meme combinations that correspond to peaks on the fitness landscape—are “found” by the people in a culture over generations of that culture’s evolution because through trial and error, the concepts prove effective. They enable people who are capable of thinking with them and using them to design behaviour patterns to survive and flourish. They are almost never the only combinations of ideas or behaviour patterns that could work in that environment. People of other cultures with similar but not identical morés could survive there. Human societies are very capable and versatile, as are the various species in a living ecosystem.

   

                                           Stilts fishermen, Sri Lanka (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

   

                                              Ice fishing, Canada (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

   

                                             

                                         Bow fishing, Philippines (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Whichever culture/society/tribe settles in a given ecosystem, it will come to think with memes, concepts, values, and morés that enable the people to survive. People can learn to fish with hooks or nets or spears or gaffs or baskets, depending on what materials are available in the region and what technologies are already familiar to its people. But the chances are very good that if there are lots of fish in a lake, then any tribe that settles next to it will learn to fish, by one method or another.

People in varied cultures in many parts of the world also establish markets in the middle of their towns for commercial activities like the selling of fish, and they hire police to patrol the market to stop thieves. Getting fish out of the water and into human stomachs is healthy for those humans who learn to catch fish and to set up markets. They outrun neighboring tribes who are not quite so resourceful and vigorous. Marketplaces, police officers, and currencies are efficient social constructs because they help societies that invent them to maximize the usefulness of what their citizens produce; they allow capital to flow, in a timely way, to where it can do the most good.

Some meme complexes we call values or principles steer us toward institutions that are advantageous for the tribe and especially for those subgroups that believe in the effective values most devoutly. The values survive because they foster behaviour patterns that work for the people who hold these values. The tribe members who hold these values most passionately then survive to pass the values on to their young.

Courage and wisdom are core values everywhere. These values are so familiar as to be universally seen as perquisites of the human condition, but they aren’t that automatic at all. There is nothing in the genes of the human animal to predict that these values will occur in human societies everywhere, as naturally as walking on two feet does. Bipedal motion arises almost automatically out of our genetic design. But values like respecting elders, for example, don't. Certain values are found in nations all over the world because they work—they enable a human society to survive and flourish. That is convergence in social evolution. Other concepts in the biological sciences also apply in analogous ways.

                            

                          

               2 dimensional graphic of fitness landscape concept (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

          (In the environment which this graphic portrays, "B" is the species most fit to survive.) 

   

                 3 dimensional graphic of fitness landscape concept (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

           (Note: In a "rugged" environment, multitudes of species compete ruthlessly to survive.) 

One of the subtlest of these concepts is modelled in what evolutionary biologists call a fitness landscape, which is the model from which the concept of cultural convergence derives.¹ If we draw a graph showing how two genetic traits, say size and colouring, interact to give a size-colour survival index for a given species in a given environment, we can find the place on the graph where the two traits combine to provide the optimal survival chances for that species in that environment. Next, we can plot a similar graph but in three dimensions, with an x axis, a y axis, and a z axis as we learned to do in high school math class. The resulting picture in three dimensions would show a theoretical landscape with ridges and peaks and valleys. The peaks indicate where the best combination of colouring, size, and, let’s say, coat density lie for that species’ survival in our three-dimensional graph’s environment.

Geneticists speak of fitness landscapes of ten, fifty, and two hundred dimensions as if what they are talking about is completely clear. No graph of any such landscape could be pictured by the human mind, of course, but with the mathematical models we have now and with computers to do the calculations, geneticists can usually predict what niches in an emerging environment will contain which kinds of species and how long it will take for the species in that ecosystem to settle into balance.

The concept of a fitness landscape—one that exists only in imaginary, mathematical space—can then be applied to the combinations of memes in human cultures, combinations that produce morés and patterns of behaviour in the real people living real lives. The concept of a meme—a basic unit of human thinking—is a tenuous one, and it is still considered by some social scientists to be unproven and of uncertain value. (see Richard Dawkins’s “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” chapter 10 in Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I for a basic explanation of the meme concept.²) But for now, if we take it as a given, the results of the thinking enabled by the meme concept support what this book is trying to show.

We can construct, in imaginary, mathematical space, a fitness landscape for memes—in other words, for unit-ideas—that humans use to build up systems of beliefs about what the universe is made of and what forces and fields give direction to the movements of the things in it. Those things include us, the thinking things, and what we can and should be doing in this mix. That fitness landscape, that multi-dimensional graph of human thought patterns, will be very similar for all individuals in a given culture. What I mean by red and round and sweet and tangy is pretty close to what other English speakers mean by these terms. So is what I mean by the terms apple or plum. My idea of beauty roughly coincides with other Canadians’ ideas of beauty. Even our definitions of terms like good, wise, and democracy largely coincide. They enable us to communicate effectively and live in communities most of the time. I am a son of my culture.