Consciousness Driven Evolution

A New Hot Button: Consciousness-Driven Evolution

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

Science is meant to be the opposite of a belief system. No one underlined this point more securely than Charles Darwin, who devised a theory of evolution that defied the strongest belief of his time, the all but universal belief in the bible version of the origins of man. The fossil record supported a notion contrary to the Bible that creation was a process, not a single event dictated by a divine Creator. Despite a century and a half of proof that Darwin was right, taking God out of evolution still sticks in the throat of many people.

Pollsters find, to the dismay of trained scientists, that God remains in play for many when it comes to our origins. For example, a 2013 Pew Research poll found that one-third of respondents believe that human beings have always existed in their present form. When broken down by religion, this anti-Darwin, pro-Bible view is held by 64% of white evangelical Protestants and 50% of black Protestants broken down by political party, only 43% of Republicans believe that human beings evolved over time versus 67% of Democrats and 65% of independents.

With this as background, it’s no wonder that evolution as a public debate causes heated divisions, even though among scientists there has been no serious challenge to Darwinism. But now it seems that a new hot-button issue, actually rooted in science, has caused evolutionists to react as if their own belief system has been attacked. This is the issue of mind and consciousness and the part they played in human evolution. Specifically, did early humans make choices that facilitated our evolution outside the framework of random mutations and natural selection, which are the two pillars of Darwinian theory?

Natural selection, often tagged as “survival of the fittest” (a phrase Darwin himself never used), is about gaining an advantage in the two things that matter for survival: getting enough food and passing on genes through mating rituals. The food part is self-evident, since a species will dwindle and die out if it loses the competition for food. Random mutation is a bit more technical. Species evolve by changing in ways that adapt better or worse to their environment, and such changes occur at the genetic level. Genes mutate at a predictable rate in an apparently random manner. In other words, an early giraffe might exhibit a longer neck, thanks to a random genetic mutation, and if this longer neck allows it to compete more successfully for food and mating rights, the new mutation has a chance, over time, to allow all giraffes to have longer necks.