The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex [Paperback]

For centuries, Christian Europe was possessed by the notion that the universe was placed with the human-dominated Earth at its centre. Renaissance and later, Enlightenment, scholars emancipated European thinking from that constraining idea. Earth proved to orbit the Sun, and ultimately even the Sun was perceived to be but one object in an immense universe. The new ideas pushed the deity usually held responsible for creating the universe and those thinking about it into a more distant role. Harold Morowitz is having none of that. In this compelling study of how cosmology and life are subjected to a vast form of punctuated equilibrium, he takes us through the journey of 28 Steps, each increasing the complexity of the cosmos.

He explains the phenomenon of "emergence" - through the Steps from the Big Bang to human consciousness. Able to bend with ease mainstream science along the way, he also manages to restore Lamarckian "acquired characteristics" - once thought dismissed by Darwin's natural selection - and restores teleology, the notion that life and the cosmos have a "purpose" by just existing. These are serious challenges to mainstream thinking and should deserve a look except for Morowitz' own self-imposed short-comings.

The Steps are introduced with how investigations of complexity led to probing more deeply to find simpler conditions from which the complexity arose. Today, this is called "reductionism" - which for some is an epithet. "Emergence", Morowitz says, is the opposite of reduction since it portrays how complexity arises. He will, he declares, show how emergence has and will lead to increasingly higher orders of existence. Further, he will demonstrate how to forecast where they might lead. At this point, he drops his bombshell on the reader - the future will bring a new relationship with the deity that has dominated Western European thinking for two millennia.

The Steps are carefully built up from cosmic beginnings. They are logically structured and well explained. Number 1 is "The First Emergence" - the cosmic chaos that initiated this universe. He covers the evidence of what is known from physics in a mere four pages - a testimony to Morowitz' capacity to distil and declaim well. The succeeding Steps are also the result of physical analysis - that of the chemical elements, stars, solar systems and how to fashion a planet. On this planet, divisions arose, some deep in the interior and others on the surface - most notably, the geosphere and the biosphere. When life emerges, Morowitz does a bit of a shift, telling us that his attention will be on those Steps leading to humans and their capacity for reason. One primate species' capacity for language becomes the turning point - it's the prompt for the emergence of "culture". Culture, he says, that evolution from the Darwinian form back to the Lamarckian - traits can be acquired, not just genetically transmitted.

"Matter is informatic", the author declares, and attributes that capacity to the tinkering of the deity's "immanance" throughout the cosmos. The capacity for information is vastly enhanced when humans begin communicating, sharing ideas and proposing new ones. For Morowitz, this ability has been hampered by local, selfish considerations. He believes that if more of us come to understand the string of emergences underlying our existence, we will be able to set aside those short-term considerations. The purpose of that, of course, will be the attainment of a firm linkage with that divine immanance he's been threading through his narrative. The deity of Western religions, he notes, is volitional as well as deterministic. It's up to humanity to learn to be as volitional and enter the immanance as participants. That's a tall order and Morowitz has no illusions about the difficulties involved. In effect, he wants to return to the time when humanity declared itself to be at the centre of the universe because they believed a deity put them there. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

The title of this book made me buy it, despite some misgivings. As emergence has became (emerged?) as a critical interest of mine, and the subject is clearly the point of the book, I had to give it a go. It is a powerful example of how a book can fail, despite being centred on a subject one is fascinated by.

Perhaps I am being slightly unfair because I see the problem of emergence as primarily a philosophical problem whereas Morowitz, for much of the book, is content to describe in detail some 28 instances of emergence at work in nature. Fair enough, to an extent, but no one disputes that emergence has happened. To go into so much detail just seems unnecessary - and a fair bit of it is, if not beyond me, at least not easy for the average scientifically minded reader. I found myself skipping chunks because I just felt I did not need to know about a particular example of emergence in such detail.

Also, it is really rather poorly written - often not clear, and some quite cumbersome prose.

However, there is some philosophical aspect to the book, which is largely based on the Pauli Exclusion Principle. He says: The Pauli exclusion principle means there are discrete associations of nuclei and electrons, so that the universe at lower temperatures operates as a world of ordinary atoms leading to chemistry, structure, and all other rules we are familiar with in working with ordinary material. The sophistication of distributing electrons in energy levels comes from the Pauli principle....Of all the emergence criteria, I find the Pauli principle the most en-couraging in terms of eventually understanding higher levels. At any level there may be a presently unknown selection that will illuminate the hier-archical emergence in some way that we don't understand. That emboldens us to plunge ahead in our search for new laws of emergence that we have not dreamed of. If I were a betting man, I would suggest that emergence of mind will have at its deepest roots some such sort of selection principle.

Well, he states his case pretty clearly here. I think his point is that a rule like the Pauli exclusion principle only gets to work when there is more than one particle involved in a situation. So, it is inherently an emergent principle.

So there it is - his basic philosophical view of emergence rests fundamentally on the Pauli Exclusion principle. This is a book for someone looking for detailed discussions of emergence in the universe. It is of much less interest, I would say, for those wanting to understand emergence and how it relates to the two basic tenets of conventional science: the primacy of the lower level determining what happens, that is, micro determinism; and the assertion of `causal closure'. Basically, the key question of emergence can be very simply put: does downward causation occur? If so, how does it work, in detail? Until someone answers yes to the first and comes up with a powerful response to the second, we will not have made much progress towards the revolution in science that the proof of `strong emergence' (= downward causation) will bring about.

The Emergence of Everything is a valuable contribution to the dialogue between science and religion. It investigates the concept of emergence and considers fresh angles of looking at the world, at increasing complexity and at consciousness. The idea of emergence provides clues as to how novelty occurs.

The author chose 28 topics to consider, 28 moments of emergence in the history of the universe. Amongst the questions and phenomena discussed are the following: Why is there something rather than nothing? The non-uniformity of the universe, the emergence of stars, the periodic table, the solar system, planetary structure, geospheres, metabolism, cells, the neuron, animalness, hominization, toolmaking, language, agriculture, the worldviews of Athens and of Jerusalem, science and religion.

The point is to use history in order to study emergence, which can generate beliefs. Emergence has a divine aspect, the Word (Immanence) that becomes flesh (Transcendence). By looking at the work of Spinoza, Einstein and others, the author concludes that our evolving minds are the transcendence of the immanent God.

The book provides stimulating thoughts and is an engaging read. Although firmly rooted in pantheism his views are very valuable and interesting. To this reviewer, however, pantheism is limiting for a variety of reasons. Further to this I would like to refer the reader to the idea of panentheism as it manifests in the works of Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Krause, Dean Inge and especially Alfred North Whitehead, in particular the last mentioned's magnificent book Process And Reality.