We accept now that the history of life and especially of human life does not proceed by cause-and-effect steps as they are pictured under the Enlightenment world view. Instead, life proceeds forward through time like a river, with many branches and tributaries connecting to the main channel. The difference is that life flows uphill. It flows against the gradient of entropy, opportunistically searching for new habitats in which some new species or new ways of life may take root, adapt, and flourish and some die out. This is a better metaphor for describing how life moves across time.

Whether a given species will still be around further on in the natural history of the world is dependent on many factors such as changing climates and mutation rates of other species (especially those that are its food, its competition, and its predators). But the entire system keeps expanding relentlessly, as is shown by the way the amount of biomass on our planet has been increasing since life began here about three billion years ago.

While the model of human cultural evolution presented in the rest of this book will not satisfy Popper’s most rigorous early demands, it will do what we need it to do. It will give us categories and guidelines that will lead us toward lifestyles with better odds of our surviving over the long term. The cutting edge of the physical sciences, the deep principles of the life sciences, and a new model of human culture, I will try to show, contain between them the pieces that we need to build a new model of society and a new code of right and wrong, one that all of the human race can subscribe to. That creative process alone – which will combine the best insights of Science with the best of our human traits of reason, imagination, and compassion – may yet save us from the planet-wide bloom of mushroom clouds that lies before us.

Notes

1. Karl Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations,” in Martin Curd and J.A. Cover, Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998).

2. Mark Isaak, ed., Index to Creationist Claims, The Talk Origins Archive, 2005. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html.