INTRODUCTION

This book starts from the premise that consciousness is a fact of nature, since it is a universal human experience. Consciousness of some kind must presumably be extended to other natural orders as well, since no sharp line of demarcation is anywhere evident.

The ordered complexity of living things certainly suggests intelligent design. Indeed, the entire universe gives eloquent testimony of being a product of mind and intelligence, as some scientists have maintained. Yet most of them believe that creative intelligence is the last thing to emerge, as the culmination of a long series of lucky accidents of evolution. Let us reverse this hypothesis and suppose instead that intelligence is primal, that the Cosmos is pervaded by intelligence. Not only does the idea make sense, but we come to realize that we have known it all the time. Such notions are by no means alien to us; they can be derived from our own experience, by analysis of our intimate modes of perception and thought. This is not some woolly hypothesis invented to comfort us. It is a matter of experience, as true as the beauty of a sunrise over the sea, though we may not all recognize our intimations or accept their implications. The aim of this book is to foster that recognition and to explain the implications; also to show that they can be supported by the writings of numerous scientists and philosophers.

These ideas have the further merit of being in line with the tenets of the great religions. The mystic does not need to be convinced by such arguments; he experiences for himself, if only momentarily, total immersion in the universal consciousness, the One Life. He is possessed by understanding deeper than words can convey. The scientist who allows intuition to guide his work is also under its sway, though he may not acknowledge it even to himself.

The first section of the book expounds these ideas and reviews in simple terms the old philosophical problem of what exactly we mean when we claim to know something. The relations between perception, thought, and intuition are considered, and the ways these are handled by the brain and its instrumental extension, the computer. The second section represents a fresh start at a logical beginning with the appearance of life on earth, while the third continues with genetics and evolution. The book seeks to demonstrate the untenability of some current ideas on biogenesis via random aggregation of molecules, and evolution via chance variations and mutations controlled only by natural selection. Those who have propounded such mechanistic hypotheses have usually expressed them only in general terms and have seldom pursued them in detail to their logical conclusions; when this is attempted, the hypotheses just do not stand up to unbiased analysis but can be demolished by reductio ad absurdum arguments. Some leading scientists realize that this is so, but most of them still cling to the materialistic theories they were originally taught, because they perceive no alternative.

It is here submitted that nothing less than the total inversion of orthodox ideas will serve. Innumerable mindboggling difficulties are removed at a stroke if life and intelligence are accepted as the prime causes of the evolutionary process and not its product. The postulate of a primal cosmic intelligence provides a logical coherent framework for all we know about the creation of the universe and the emergence and evolution of biological life. Random chance is displaced by a nonphysical information matrix.

What has evolved is not intelligence itself but the means to express this intelligence through the brain and a body of flesh and blood. Primal intelligence became imprisoned in the mineral, stirred a little in the plant, unfolded in the animal, and became released in man. Intelligence reached its finest expression in self-aware man, with his capacity for creative thinking operating through his “new brain.” But in man there is conflict between this new brain and the old or animal brain with its associated irrational instincts and fears. Thus handicapped, man has to face the awesome responsibility of planning his own future. For with the development of language and culture there came a dramatic change in the character and pace of evolution. Man now transcends his heredity and shapes his own destiny. No longer limited by slow genetic changes, civilized man now leaps ahead by what Julian Huxley calls psychosocial evolution.

Man has misused his powers in so many ways that he may soon face disaster on several fronts--overpopulation and undernutrition, exhaustion of natural resources, pollution of the environment, and threat of atomic war. If he heeds the writing on the wall there is just about time to avoid the impending doom. But there are some who prophesy that if he persists in ignoring the warnings, civilization may not survive long beyond the end of the century. With so much already achieved, it seems unthinkable that humanity should carelessly allow itself to become extinct. The final chapter attempts a synthesis of all the foregoing material, and concludes with an optimistic forecast of man’s future. (Introduction, xiii-xv)

….

It is clear that living things are structured with extreme precision at every order of magnitude. With the naked eye we can perceive, for example, the architecture of the feathers on a bird’s wings, and may appreciate the elaborately coordinated arrangement of muscles and nerves that move them in precisely controlled flight Under the microscope we can see a similar system, scaled down perhaps a hundred-fold, to serve the needs of a barely visible gnat. The microscope also reveals highly regular dispositions of cells of various types within both plants and animals. The cells in turn are not filled with amorphous “protoplasm” but contain numerous organized structures such as the organelles mentioned above, revealed by the electron microscope. Finally molecular biology shows that the nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, etc., in these cells are composed of precisely ordered sequences of their respective chemical subunits; every molecule of the enzyme pepsin, for instance, contains exactly the same amino acids in the same order. All these facts give point to the contention that human ingenuity is unlikely to succeed in reconstructing a complete living organism; furthermore it is even less likely that one could ever have evolved by itself without intelligent guidance.

Integration of Cell Function

The most unsatisfactory feature of molecular biology so far has been its piecemeal character. There is some understanding about how various bits of the mechanism work, but none about the entity as a whole. Yet clearly the unicellular organism does function as a dimly conscious entity, integrating all the mechanisms to serve its overall purpose. Each cell in a higher plant or animal has a similar measure of autonomy and should also be accorded some measure of consciousness, but here it serves the overriding purpose of the limb, organ, or gland of which it forms a part, and these in turn are integrated by the bodily consciousness of the creature as a whole. Latterly there have been attempts to view molecular biology from these wider angles. The key problem is control and how it is exercised. Every cell in an animal body carries in its nucleus the organism’s entire informational complement of genes, but at any time only a few of them are functional. If they all operated, then disorganized undifferentiated growth would occur--and the name for this is cancer. So it has been clear for some time that besides operator genes there must be either activator genes that switch them on, or regulator genes that turn them off; these in turn must somehow be sensitive to commands from the organism, or must respond automatically when the concentration of any particular enzyme becomes too low or too high… (pp. 120-122)

It is emphasized that all this elaboration could not conceivably have arisen without intelligent guidance and that molecular biology describes a mechanism and does not reveal the secret of life, as has sometimes been suggested. It has become clear that the genes represent the repertoire of the cell: at any instant only a proportion of them are actively performing, while the rest lie dormant until called into action by a need, which may be local at the cellular level, or may be dictated by an organ or by the body as a whole. It is not widely recognized that revelation of this hierarchy of intricate interlocking control systems does not resolve the ultimate mystery, but on the contrary deepens it. The more complex the mechanisms are shown to be, the more need there is to postulate intelligent programming. (p.123)

Darwin’s theory has been altered greatly by according new meanings to its original terms: it is arguable that its new form is merely tautologous, arguing in circles.

The reductionist view that life is in principle explicable solely by the laws of chemistry and physics has become untenable. Life does not transgress these laws but it does transcend them. The amount of information manifestly increases enormously as evolution proceeds, and nonphysical intelligence seems to be its only conceivable source. (p. 163)