Closing Human Evolution Life in The Ultimate Age

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Ladislav Kováč
Closing Human
Evolution: Life in
the Ultimate Age
123
SpringerBriefs in Evolutionary Biology
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10207
Ladislav Kováč
Closing Human Evolution:

Life in the Ultimate Age
123
Ladislav Kováč
Faculty of Natural Sciences
Comenius University
Bratislava
Slovakia
ISSN 2192-8134 ISSN 2192-8142 (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Evolutionary Biology
ISBN 978-3-319-20659-2 ISBN 978-3-319-20660-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-20660-8
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About the Author
Ladislav Kováč (1932) was born in a small village in the Tatra Mountains in
Slovakia. He studied biochemistry at Charles University in Prague and became a
teacher and scientist at Comenius University in Bratislava and eventually head
of the Department of Biochemistry. In a political purge that followed the Soviet
invasion into Czechoslovakia in 1968, he was dismissed from the university and
worked as a clinical chemist in a provincial psychiatric hospital, where he learned
psychiatry, and later worked as a researcher in an institute for research on farm
animals, where he learned ethology. After the fall of the communist regime in 1989,
he was engaged in politics as Minister of Education and Science and in diplomacy
as Ambassador of Czechoslovakia to UNESCO, Paris. In 1993, he resumed his
position as head of the Department of Biochemistry at Comenius University and for
two years (1996–1998) was a visiting scientist at Konrad Lorenz Institute for
Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg, Austria. Since 2002 he has been
professor emeritus at Comenius University and works as a cognitive biologist.
Along with more than 200 scientific papers, he has published three books (in
Slovak): The Wheels on an Angel: Of a Country Where Yesterday Means Tomorrow
(1990; a post-samizdat reportage on the Russian communist regime), Sublimity and
Beauty of Teacher Vocation (1991), and Natural History of Communism: Anatomy
of an Utopia (2007).
v
Prelude
One of the most popular pieces of the world’s art is the “Music for the Royal
Fireworks,” which German-born British musician George Friedrich Händel com-
posed in 1749. The work provided a background for the Royal Fireworks, staged to
celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the signing of a peace
treaty. The music was performed on April 21, 1749 in the presence of King
George II of Great Britain and over twelve thousand people assisted at the première.
Another work of music, “Mysterium” by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin,
may be viewed as a counterpoint to Händel’s work. Skriabin started working on the
composition in 1903, but it was incomplete at the time of his death in 1915. It took
28 years of another composer, Alexander Nemtin, to finalize the sketches of
Skriabin and make out of them a 3-h-long work known under the name “Universe”.
Scriabin’s dream was to perform the “Mysterium” in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The spectacle should have lasted for 7 days. Thousands of participants, clad in
white robes, would intone the artist’s songs, accompanied with a majestic orchestra.
He planned that the work would be an orgy of senses, the senses of smell and touch
complementing vision and hearing. The ecstatic performance would culminate in
closing the extant world. In Scriabin’s fancy, human egos would dematerialize and
the human race eventually replaced by “noble beings.”1
At the outset of the third millennium, mankind has entered the ultimate phase of
its evolution as a biological species. In view of biochemist Christian de Duve, life
appears to be a “cosmic imperative,” taking place at any spot of the universe where
appropriate environmental conditions permit it (De Duve 1995). We may conceive
evolution as fumbling in a maze with myriad of blind alleys, gradually laying new
hierarchical levels over the original groundwork. Humans emerged as a unique
biological species with the capacity to experience emotions consciously as feelings,
and subject to emotional, cultural, and techno-scientific evolutions that complement
1
Information on the musical works of Händel, Skriabin and Nemtin is easily accessible on the
Internet. A comprehensive analysis of Skriabin and his mysticism was made by Boris De
Schloezer (1987).
vii
viii Prelude
the biological evolution. The entire evolution from its start has exhibited hyperbolic
dynamics, with doubling times becoming ever shorter. The dynamics of culture,
economy, and technology produce complexity that exceeds the human capacity to
understand and control and is the main cause of the twilight of humanity (to refer to
another musician, Richard Wagner, as a pun on the title of his opera, “Twilight
of the Gods”). On the other hand, vibrant and brilliant exuberance of human feats
that illuminate the twilight may be metaphorically likened to the fireworks.
A novel role of humanists—scientists turned intellectuals—is to analyze the
consequences of the astounding dynamics and, by attaching values to accumulating
pieces of knowledge, make the ultimate phase sublime and passable with minimum
political and social tensions. To achieve this, some fundamental tenets of the
Western thought, on which science has been grounded, should be reconsidered.
Species extinction should be taken as the fact of evolution. Insurmountable barriers
to human comprehension of the world should be highlighted and faith in unlimited
power of human reason and illusions about eternity and immortality abandoned.
Temporariness, which bestows upon human life its value and meaning, should
become the foundation stone of a new supreme and optimistic humanism. However,
short the ultimate phase may be, the perennial dream of achieving universal human
happiness needs rethinking and revaluation.
Accordingly, scientists at a par with artists should participate in creating a
“music for the fireworks.” Humans cannot rule the world dynamics and to per-
ceptibly affect its direction. But intellectuals by their opinions can modulate
behaviors of individuals and consequently collective actions: the vision of a
moderate closing the life path of humanity, if amply disseminated and predomi-
nating over other alternatives, may facilitate living in the ultimate phase. This book
may be seen as an incipient part of this endeavor. It is no science fiction, but a
scientific reflection on the present and future of humanity.
References
De Duve C (1995) Vital dust: life as cosmic imperative. Basic Books, New York
De Schloezer B (1987) Scriabin: artist and mystic. University of California Press, Oakland CA
Contents
Prelude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
First Movement. Life as a Cosmic Imperative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1 The Prime Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2 Macroworld and Microworld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3 Entropy and Probability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4 The Supreme Law: Maximum Entropy Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5 The Ontic Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
6 Frustration: A Hallmark of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7 Darwin and Entropy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
8 Creative Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
9 Evolution of Life Is the Evolution of Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
10 Evolution of the Universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
11 The Epistemic Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Second Movement. Evolutionary Uniqueness of Humans . . . . . . . . . . . 37

1 A Transcending Dung-Beetle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2 The Uniqueness of Humans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3 Animal Artifaciens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4 Animal Symbolicum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
5 Hypersocial Animal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
6 Driving Force: Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
7 Feelings and Meaning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
8 Runaway of Emotional Evolution: Hedonotaxis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
9 Toward Hedonic Fitness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
10 Alterocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
11 Living in Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
ix
x Contents
12 Paravolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
13 Artificial Hedonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
14 Animal Artifactum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Third Movement. The Ultimate Optimism: Finitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

1 Unwearied Dreams of Technooptimists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
2 Technooptimistic Fallacy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
3 Gloomy Doomsayers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
4 The Twilight of Humanity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
5 The Climax of Human Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6 The Uncertainty of the Ultimate Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
7 Silentium Universi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
8 Finitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Finale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
First Movement. Life as a Cosmic
Imperative
1 The Prime Question
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” This is the most general question we
can ask and it has been a central question of philosophy for centuries. We can call it
the first ontological question. We, humans, search for rational understanding of
nature and have invented science to serve it. Following Leibniz’s principle of
sufficient reason, the rationalist explanation of the world presupposes that a thing in
the universe is caused by another thing, and this other thing is caused in turn by
another thing, and so on in a regressing chain. In order not to end with an infinite
causal regression, the only rational answer to the question would be an assumption
that the existence of all things must have its beginning: its prime cause, the
causeless cause. The causeless cause, necessary and inevitable, has been called God
and the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle conceived Him as an “Unmoved
Mover”. Yet, if God need not have any cause, the same logic should apply to the
universe with no God. As David Hume put it in 1779, “Why may not the material
universe be the necessary existent Being, according to this pretended explanation of
necessity?” (Hume 1947).
It doesn’t seem that science, the paragon of rationality, can provide any con-
clusive answer, either. Replacing God with “quantum vacuum,” as attempted by
some scientists, is of no avail.1 We have to give in and accept David Hume’s
assumption that the reason for the existence of anything could not be found by
Reason alone. But if we cannot answer the first ontological question, science gives
us an answer to a question that we may designate as the second ontological
question: “Why does something happen?” Things are constantly moving, and the
laws of this movement were already partly revealed in 1687 by the physicist Isaac
Newton.
1
Some physicists claim that a vacuum has energy and energy is convertible into mass. Krauss
(2012) explicitly states that this answers the question of why there is something rather than
nothing.
© The Author(s) 2015 1

L. Kováč, Closing Human Evolution: Life in the Ultimate Age,
SpringerBriefs in Evolutionary Biology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-20660-8_1
2 First Movement. Life as a Cosmic Imperative
But the movements in the world described by Newton had no preferred direc-
tions; Newton’s laws had not captured the “arrow of time.” Still, the movement of
things in the universe has a direction and the first mover of the irreversible chain of
events is expressed by another law, the second law of thermodynamics. In the words
of the physicist A.S. Eddington, “The law that entropy always increases—the second
law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of
Nature” (Eddington 1995). In a recent canonical textbook on thermodynamics, its
authors, Dilip Kondepudi and Ilya Prigogine proclaim: “There is no real system in
nature that can go through a cycle of operations and return to its initial state without
increasing the entropy of the exterior, or more generally the ‘universe’. The increase
of entropy distinguishes the future from the past: there exists an arrow of time”
(Kondepudi and Prigogine 1998).
The law of increase of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, was discov-
ered in 1865 by the physicist Rudolf Clausius. Until this discovery, natural sciences
considered all changes in the physical world to be reversible, running back and forth
with equal probability, but the law introduced history into natural events. From a
statement of the law, “The energy of the universe is constant, the entropy of the
universe tends towards a maximum,” Clausius concluded that the world is pro-
gressing toward a state of maximum entropy, which would mean its end, the eventual
“heat death” of the universe. Ever since, the law has been expressed by a number of
mathematical formulas (each of them containing the symbol S for its principal notion,
the entropy) and also verbally stated in diverse phrasing.2
The second law implicitly carries answers to many other fundamental ontolog-
ical questions. The main intention of this book is to show that the perennial
questions of philosophy—what is this unidirectional movement heading toward;
what is the meaning of all the rush; what is the place of humans in the universe; will
humanity last forever—can be naturalized.
The implications of the second law have been successfully applied in techno-
logical practice; engineers have used it in calculation of efficiencies of
energy-transforming engines, in the construction of heat turbines, and in evaluating
yields of chemical syntheses. However, at the theoretical level, for almost a century
after its discovery the second law has been subject to an amazing misinterpretation.
2 Macroworld and Microworld
What was the reason for the misinterpretation? We have to take into account that
we, humans, as are all the other organisms, are beings of the “macroworld,” which
consists of huge numbers of molecules and atoms. We cannot directly experience
the world of individual atoms and molecules, the “microworld.” When considering
2
Clausius’ thesis, as well as many more recent variations of his original formulation, may now be
found time in standard books on thermodynamics.
2 Macroworld and Microworld 3
an event, we experience a “macrostate” of the macroworld and can only speculate

about “microstates” that belong to the microworld. Accordingly, our knowledge of
the world can never be complete; knowledge is represented by hypotheses we have
about the properties of the world. Science started by studying and describing the
macroworld, and so also did thermodynamics, one of the branches of science,
which emerged in the nineteenth century and gave birth to the second law. We
observe and measure a macrostate as part of the universe and call it the “thermo-
dynamic system” and the other parts of the universe the “surroundings” of the
system. Clausius’s concept of “entropy” was derived from the observations and
measurements of properties of the macroworld.
The notion of entropy, a rather abstract mathematical variable, was originally
derived from the analysis of an idealized model engine that uses a gradient of
temperature for doing mechanical work at maximum efficiency. To facilitate the
analysis, a concept of “thermodynamic equilibrium” was introduced, which
assumes that the thermodynamic system is homogeneous with no intrinsic forces
and flows disturbing it and only exposed to the forces and flows of its surroundings.
A system in the state of equilibrium does not change with time. Yet another
concept, that of “thermodynamic process,” enables us to describe the dynamics of
the system interacting with its surroundings as a succession of equilibrium states.
This conception, simplified and abstract, straining the imagination, allows the
derivation of entropy as a state variable: its infinitesimal change is expressed as
dS = dQreversible/T, with dQreversible as a symbol for heat that the system absorbs
from its surroundings and T a symbol for absolute temperature. In contrast to real
processes that we observe in nature, the “equilibrium thermodynamic process” is an
idealized approximation, reversible and “running” infinitely slowly. Thus the tra-
ditional thermodynamics was equilibrium thermodynamics and may have been
better called thermostatics. In addition, the working substance in the idealized
engine was an ideal gas, a set of randomly moving point particles, infinitely small
with no attractive or repulsive forces on each other, that interacted only by
mechanical collisions. In such an idealized world, entropy increase could be
visualized as the spreading of particles, or the distribution of matter in a system
from a more ordered state to a more disordered state. If such reversible processes
are ranged to become part of a cycle and the system running through a succession of
equilibrium states eventually reaches the initial position, disordered states may
again return to ordered ones and the sum of total change of entropy equal zero.
Indeed, claims that any real system in nature, in contrast to the idealized ther-
modynamic system, becomes more disordered with time, and entropy as a measure
of the disorder of a system, have long been used in verbal statements of the second
law, even by prominent physicists. Erwin Schrödinger wrote in his famous book,
What Is Life:
We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things
to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of
papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) until we obviate it. (The analogue of
irregular heat motion, in the case, in our handling those objects now and again without
troubling to put them back in their proper places.) (Schrödinger 1962)
Peter Corning (2002) cited similar claims of other physicists: Stephen Hawking
spoke of “a physical quantity called entropy, which measures the degree of disorder
of a system. It is a matter of common experience that disorder will tend to increase
if things are left to themselves. (One has only to stop making repairs around the
house to see that!)” Similarly, Roger Penrose informed us that “The entropy of a
system is a measure of its manifest disorder. […] Thus, [a] smashed glass and
spilled water on the floor is in a higher entropy state than an assembled and filled
glass on the table; the scrambled egg has a higher entropy than the fresh unbroken
egg; the sweetened coffee has a higher entropy than the undissolved sugar lump in
unsweetened coffee.”3 There is no wonder that such assertions of specialists have
inspired scores of laypersons to come up with similar analogies, even with attempts
to apply the notion of entropy to human personal affairs and to social dynamics.
When in the first decade of the twentieth century Ludwig Boltzmann and
J. Willard Gibbs attempted to substantiate thermodynamics by methods of statistical
physics with atomic and molecular models of the world, thus to account for events
of the macroworld by events of the microworld, they redefined the concept of
entropy. Gibbs called his statistical formalizations “entropy analogues,” pointing
out that they were mathematical approximations only (Denbigh 1981).
In equilibrium thermodynamics, time has not been considered as a variable—
despite the fact that the second law has been generally depicted as the “time arrow”
of real natural processes—but has been explicitly introduced as a variable in
nonequilibrium thermodynamics, pioneered in the twentieth century by Lars
Onsager and Ilya Prigogine.4 In fact, every real process in nature is a nonequilib-
rium process, directed by a thermodynamic force F (such as a difference in tem-
perature or a concentration difference between two adjacent parts of a system)
which causes a definite thermodynamic flow J (the change of X, heat or of matter, in
a time dt). When a thermodynamic system is out of equilibrium, it produces
entropy. The entropy production in such a system is a product of the corresponding
thermodynamic force and the flow dX/dt:
dS=dt ¼ F dX=dt:
When the thermodynamic force is weak, the system is near equilibrium and the
flow J is a linear function of the force F. When the relation of J and F ceases to be
linear, the system is said to be “far from equilibrium.”
Prigogine made a distinction between changes of entropy of a thermodynamic
system due to entropy exchange with the surroundings deS, which can be either
positive or negative, and “entropy production” within the system itself diS, which
always needs to be positive, or, if all processes in the system are running under
3
Corning (2002) cited from the papers of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose.
4
Ilya Prigogine wrote a number of books on nonequilibrium thermodynamics. The essential ideas
on dissipative structure were first presented in a joint book with Glansdorff and Prigogine (1971);
in this book, there are also references to the work of Lars Onsager. Prigogine presented a synthetic
view on thermodynamics in a book with Kondepudi and Prigogine (1998).
2 Macroworld and Microworld 5
equilibrium, equal to zero. If, however, some of these processes are irreversible,
entropy is generated within the system and is discarded from it through the
expulsion of heat to the surroundings. There is no real system in nature that can go
through a cycle of operations and return to its initial state without increasing the
entropy of the surroundings, or more generally the “universe.” To satisfy the
postulate of the second law that “the entropy of the universe tends toward a
maximum,” the total change dS of entropy must be positive, hence
dS = deS + diS > 0.
When a system is far from equilibrium it can spontaneously self-organize:
nonequilibrium can be a source of order. The irreversible processes may lead to new
dynamic states of matter which Prigogine has named “dissipative structures” (see
Footnote 4).
Essentially at the same time when Prigogine came up with the concept of dis-
sipative structures, in the middle of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon created
information theory and proposed to use the term “entropy” as a measure of
uncertainty of a receiver before receiving information (Shannon 1948). Shannon’s
entropy is equal to the expected quantity of the information contained in a message.
There have long been discussions and speculations about the relationship
between thermodynamic and information entropy and they have not ceased yet. The
fact that we, human observers, are beings of the macroworld is crucial. There is an
inherent degree of stochastic fluctuation in the microworld, and a human observer
cannot know precisely the initial state of the microworld system and make the
necessary observations. We can only assess probability distributions. According to
the physicist Erwin T. Jaynes, entropy is an anthropomorphic concept; it is an
expression of the extent of human ignorance as to the microworld. In his view,
entropy is a property not of the physical system, but of the particular experiments
human observers choose to perform on it. The statement “entropy of a physical
system” is not meaningful without further qualifications (Jaynes 1963). The rea-
soning that we can only estimate probability of any state allows Jaynes to formulate
the principle of MaxEnt, stating that of all possible probability distributions the one
that leaves a human subject with most uncertainty is best, because it does not imply
more than he or she knows. The principle provided a simple proof of the second law
as a general requirement for any microscopic transition to be experimentally
reproducible.5
Both nonequilibrium thermodynamics and information theory have markedly
contributed to recent changes in the interpretation of the second law of thermo-
dynamics. In fact, these changes may become one of the most remarkable chapters
in the history of science. Their bearing upon our understanding of how the world
evolves, how life emerged, and on the role of cognition and subjectivity in the very
human understanding becomes overwhelming.
5
Jaynes (2003) has published an extensive synthesis of his thinking, including his principle of
maximal entropy (MaxEnt) as a book.
3 Entropy and Probability
In order to give entropy, the abstract variable originally derived from observation of
events in the macroworld, a concrete representation, Ludwig Boltzmann defined
entropy, by using a term belonging to the microworld, as the logarithmic function
of “thermodynamic probability.” Here is the famous Boltzmann’s formula:
S ¼ k ln W, where S is the entropy of a macrostate and k is the universal
Boltzmann constant. The thermodynamic probability W expresses the number of
isoenergetic arrangements of microstates that correspond to a single macrostate.
Real irreversible processes in the macroworld are the consequences of motions of
molecules and are governed by the law of mechanics. The flow of heat is a con-
sequence of collisions of molecules that transfer energy. A collision of two mol-
ecules is reversible, subject to Newton’s law; it can occur in both directions, thus
the question arises as to how can irreversible macroscopic processes result from the
reversible motion of molecules. According to Boltzmann, macrostates with larger
W are more probable. It means that the irreversible increase of entropy corresponds
to evolution of a macrostate to new states of higher thermodynamic probability.
Equilibrium states are those for which W is maximum.
More recently, Arto Annila and collaborators in a series of papers (summarized
in his review with Stanley Salthe (Annila and Salthe 2010)) describe entropy with a
formula superficially similar to Boltzmann’s: S ¼ k ln P. But here, Annila et al.
have redefined the concept of probability, used by Boltzmann. Annila introduced
the concept of “physical probability,” which encompasses isoenergetic configura-
tions of a system but also its dynamic change due to internal transformation of
energy within the system, along with influx and efflux of energy into and out of the
system, respectively.6
Annila based his reasoning on the analysis of a chemical system, which tends to
achieve a state of maximum probability by maximizing its entropy (or, in other
words, minimizing its free energy). The energy difference, a gradient of energy, is
the motive force that drives a chemical reaction. In standard chemical thermody-
namics a difference between chemical potentials (free energy) of products and
substrates has been named the affinity of the reaction (Kondepudi and Prigogine
1998), but Annila`s notion of affinity also includes a portion of energy that influxes
into the system from its surroundings. He applied the term “stationary state” spe-
cifically to the state of a system in which there is an energy balance between the
system and its surroundings, and claimed that an influx of energy turns an
improbable equilibrium state to a probable nonequilibrium state. Similarly, an efflux
of energy from an improbable nonequilibrium state turns it to a probable equilib-
rium state. In standard Annila’s formulation,
6
The papers of Arto Annila and his collaborators are freely available at his web page: http://www.
helsinki.fi/*aannila/arto/.
3 Entropy and Probability 7
!
X X X X
S¼R ln Pj ¼ 1=T Nj lk þ DQjk lj þ RT ¼R Nj Aj =RT þ 1 ;
j¼1 j¼1 k j¼1
where S means entropy, P probability, the products are indexed by j, and substrates
by k together with coproducts that enter in the summation (∑k) with an opposite
sign. Free energy, usually known as the affinity and here marked as Aj, is defined as
the difference in chemical potentials ∑μk + ΔQjk − μj, so that it includes the
surrounding energy gradients ΔQjk that couple to the reaction experienced by j.
It appears obvious that the notion of probability is just as important as are the
notions of “system,” “surroundings,” and “process,” important in thermodynamics,
but also for our interpretation of the world and our human position in it. The
discrepancy between Boltzmann’s and Annila’s conceptions of probability appears
minor when compared with the discrepancy between specialists in statistics and
probability theory. In fact statistics as a discipline remains sharply divided on the
fundamental definition of “probability.” Ín the frequentist definition, probability is
the long-run expected frequency of occurrence. P(A) = n/N, where n is the number
of times event A occurs in N opportunities. In essence, it appears to reflect the
objective property of the world: a frequentist believes that the frequency of events is
real, but unknown, and can only be estimated from the data. On the other hand, the
Bayesian view of probability is subjective, related to degree of belief; it is a
measure of the plausibility of an observed event, given incomplete knowledge. Our
knowledge before the observation is a hypothesis, and a new observation gives us
the possibility of inference, to improve the hypothesis or to replace it by another
hypothesis. The hypothesis before observation has a certain probability, which we
call the “Bayesian prior,” P(H); the observation procures new data as an evidence
E, and it allows us to modify the hypothesis, which now has a conditional prob-
ability P(H|E) and is called the “posterior probability” (i.e., the probability of
H given E). If we denote by P(E|H) the probability of observing E given H, the
famous Bayes’s formula is
PðEjH Þ
PðHjE Þ ¼ PðH Þ;
PðE Þ
where PPðEjH Þ
ðE Þ represents the impact of E on the probability of H.
The posterior probability of a hypothesis is determined by a combination of the
inherent likeliness of a hypothesis (the prior) and the compatibility of the observed
evidence with the hypothesis (the likelihood).
The interpretation of entropy by Erwin T. Jaynes, mentioned earlier, as an
anthropomorphic concept, an expression of the extent of human ignorance as to the
microworld, is strictly Bayesian. It is shown later that evolution of life in general is
the evolution of cognition, a cumulative process of Bayesian inferences in the form
of a “Bayesian ratchet.”
Boltzmann’s probability may be taken as a frequentist, and thus objectivist,

interpretation. On the other hand, there seems to be a subjectivist element in Annila’s
conception, which he characterizes as a holistic view of nature. As he put it,
It is, of course, somewhat of a subjective decision as to how one wishes to label some
entities as being parts of the system and others as being part of the surroundings. However
the choice is of no consequence when using the adopted formalism. Entropy of the system,
just as entropy of its surroundings will increase as mutual differences in energy are levelling
off. […] The vital orderly mechanisms of energy transduction are not low in entropy, i.e.
improbable, when being part of an external energy-powered system.
Annila proposes the name “natural processes” for all processes that direct toward
more probable states by increasing entropy. He published an extensive analysis of
protein folding as a typical natural process
. . . without an ad hoc exemption that entropy of the polypeptide chain would be decreasing
at the expense of increasing entropy in the surroundings . . . There is no need, for example,
to account for the existence of orderly structures, by dividing the total entropy to the
entropy exchanged between the system and its environment, and the entropy produced by
irreversible processes within the system.
Nonequilibrium thermodynamics may receive new impulses from this apparent

divergence between the common concepts of probability and of equilibrium. The
inclusion of external energy into the variable of affinity and the refusal of the
Prigogine’s distinction between Se and Si of a system may blur the important
concept of “far from equilibrium.” In variance with Annila’s description, Prigogine
conceives of the stationary state as a state of nonequilibrium, in which quantities
such as temperature, concentrations, and entropy are time-independent, and so
dS = 0. The total entropy can be constant only when the entropy flowing out of the
system is equal to the entropy entering the system plus the entropy produced in the
system. But because entropy is generated within the system and thus diS > 0, this
entropy generation must be balanced by negative influx of entropy deS, which
means that the system discards the entropy produced by the irreversible processes
(Kondepudi and Prigogine 1998). The problem is treated in more detail in sub-
sequent sections of this work.
In any case, the statements that the second law says that all systems funda-
mentally tend toward disorder and randomness need be abandoned. In the simple
case of the increase of entropy of the ideal gas, in which particles spread in space,
what in substance is being spread, dispersed, dissipated, is energy, not matter.
Energy is distributed in the world unevenly; gradients of energy represent forces
and can be used to do work; and the second law expresses the tendency to abolish
the gradients and dissipate energy. In fact, entropy has been considered by some as
a measure of “inferior” energy that can no longer do work and the rise of entropy in
the universe as an absolute decline of “workability” of energy.
The best-known statement of the second law that “the entropy of the universe
tends to maximum” has an important corollary that has long been unnoticed.
4 The Supreme Law: Maximum Entropy Production 9
4 The Supreme Law: Maximum Entropy Production
In the last decades of the twentieth century several scientists independently reached
a conclusion that entropy not only tends to increase in the world, but it tends to
increase in the fastest possible way. The pioneers of this idea were physicists Hans
Ziegler in 1961 and Garth W. Paltridge in 1975.7 In 1989, Ron Swenson came up
with a vivid nonformal description of the phenomenon and assumed that he had
revealed a new natural law, which he called the “law of maximum entropy pro-
duction”: “A system will select the path or assembly of paths that minimizes the
potential or maximizes the entropy at the fastest rate given the constraints.”8 In his
successive publications he proposed as a manifestation of the principle an example
of a warm mountain cabin in a cold snow-covered wood. Under these circum-
stances there is a temperature gradient between the warm cabin and cold woods. In
conformity with the traditional formulation of the second law, the gradient of
potential will be dissipated through walls or cracks around the windows and door
relatively slowly, until the cabin is as cold as the outside and the system is in
thermal equilibrium. If we open a window or a door a portion of the heat will now
rush out the door or window and not just through the walls or cracks. The energy
differences are reduced most effectively when entropy increases most rapidly, that
is, most voluminous currents direct along the steepest paths. This shows that
whenever we remove a constraint to the flow (such as a closed window) the
cabin/environment system will exploit the new and faster pathway thereby
increasing the rate at which the potential is minimized. According to Swenson, this
is mostly done in nature by structuring matter. So, in the words of Swenson, the
world is an order production business because ordered flow produces entropy faster
than the disordered flow (see Footnote 8).
Formation of Bénard’s convection cells is the simplest example (Kondepudi and
Prigogine 1998; Glansdorff and Prigogine 1971; Swenson 1997). When a liquid in a
container is heated from below, heat rises through the liquid by conduction, that is,
random molecular collisions. If the temperature gradient and heat flux increase too
much, the heated system reaches a critical point of instability and suddenly displays
an emergent coherent organization: heat conduction switches to heat flow by
convection, where liquid columns of hexagonal patterns move up, carrying the heat,
and then, cooled, return to the base. Billions of molecules start moving collectively
together and both spatial and “energetic” order emerge. At first sight we may say
that the molecules, the constituents of the microworld, miraculously organized
themselves to form a structure of the macroworld, but we have to keep in mind that
they could accomplish this only at the expense of energy pumped into the system.
We have here an elementary example of “self-organization,” but the prefix “self-ˮ
7
An excellent review on maximum entropy production, which includes comprehensive references
to all previous works, is that of Martyushev and Seleznev (2006).
8
Rod Swenson has reiterated his main idea in a number of papers. A suitable review is in Swenson
(1997). See also Swenson’s web site: www.entropylaw.com.
does not imply that the process is spontaneous. Swenson illustrated the same
principle on the example of a tornado, which is an organized structure that produces
entropy by moving an air mass from the place of higher pressure to the place of low
pressure much more efficiently than does ordinary wind. Glansdorff and Prigogine
(1971) analyzed Bénard’s hydrodynamic cells as a prototype of dissipative struc-
tures. The structures persist at the expense of dissipating the heat gradient more
intensively and disappear once the steepness of the temperature gradient drops
below the critical point. All self-organizing systems, ranging from “primitive
physical systems to complex living systems,” operate in a similar fashion as con-
vection that built up the Bénard cells or tornados. As Swenson put it, “Once this
principle is grasped, examples are easy to recognize and show in everyday life.
Whenever spontaneous ordering occurs and there is a transition from disorder to
order the rate of the entropy production must increase, and always does, in order to
satisfy the balance equation of the second law” (see Footnote 8).
Thus, in the world, there is not only a general tendency to achieve the state of
maximum entropy but also to achieve it as quickly as possible. In addition to the
statement that an isolated system tends to reach an equilibrium, which is charac-
terized by maximum entropy, we have another statement on the maximization of
the production of entropy during nonequilibrium processes (which is now known as
the “maximum entropy production principle,” MEPP) (see Footnote 7). Most sci-
entists believe that we are not dealing with a new law, but the MEPP may be
considered as a novel formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. We may
call the former tendency the static formulation, and the latter the dynamic formu-
lation of the second law. Dewar and Maritan (2013) maintain that MEPP can be
viewed as a codicil, a supplementary addition, to the second law. Annila (2010)
explicitly states that “The 2nd all of thermodynamics simply says that differences in
energy densities will level off in least time”. Martyushev and Seleznev (2006) in
their review argue that the MEPP may be viewed as the natural generalization of the
second law, “and, in some cases, even as a corollary”. As they observed,
“Publications on this topic were fragmented and different research teams, which
were concerned with this principle, were unaware of studies performed by other
scientists. As a result, the recognition and the use of MEPP by a wider circle of
researchers were considerably delayed.”
In fact, we can find scattered papers on the MEPP in studies on the planetary
energy balance (which includes hurricanes and tornados as dissipative structures),
the global hydrological cycle and the cycling of carbon by the Earth’s biosphere,
turbulent fluids, crystal growth morphology, electrical circuits, and biological
design. An attempt to base the MEPP on Jaynes`s principle of maximal entropy
(MaxEnt), by considering the maximization not of the number of microstates but of
the number of trajectories in phase space, was published by Dewar in 2003 and later
extended and reviewed (Dewar and Maritan 2013). Martyushev and Seleznev
(2006) have offered a simple and intuitively appealing argument that goes as fol-
lows: let us consider an isolated system in some nonequilibrium state. The system
will reach equilibrium with time and, among a great number of possible states, it
will be in a state for which entropy is a maximum. Therefore, the change of entropy
within a given time interval will also be a maximum among possible values and,
because the system is isolated, the entropy production will be the largest.
This reasoning is similar to the explanation by physicist Richard Feynman of the
principle of least action (PLA) of mechanics (Feynman et al. 2013). The PLA was
first stated by physicist Pierre Louis Maupertuis, in 1744, ahead of the laws of
thermodynamics: “Whenever any change takes place in Nature, the amount of
action expended in this change is always the smallest possible.” If a system moves
from a point A to the final point B, the action is minimal. As Maupertuis put it,
“Nature is thrifty in all its actions.” There have been several definitions of “action”
up to the one used today, which equates “action” with the Lagrangian function,
defined as the kinetic energy, T, of a system minus its potential energy, V (Hanč
et al. 2005). Feynman pointed out that if the action should be minimum over a path
from a point A to the final point B, the action in each subsection of the path must
also be a minimum. And this is true no matter how short the subsection. The system
does not “know” the optimal trajectory in advance, the flows explore alternative
paths, and the “victorious” path results from selection from all of them. The integral
statement about the gross property of the whole path becomes a statement of what
happens for a short section of the path, a differential statement. And this differential
statement only involves the derivatives of the potential, that is, the force at a point.
Accordingly, Newton`s differential law of mechanics can be directly derived from
the integral statement, the PLA. This is, indeed, done in some advanced textbooks
of physics.
Physicist Max Planck considers the PLA as the most general principle of
physics, from which even the principle of conservation can be derived, and he
claims that Einstein’s theory of relativity “has shown that it /the PLA/ occupies the
highest position among the physical laws” (Planck 1958). Planck also noticed that
“L. Boltzmann and later R. Clausius had perceived the close relation between the
principle and the second law of thermodynamics.”
Arto Annila with collaborators showed in a series of fundamental papers that
“The second law, when written as a differential equation of motion, describes
evolution along the steepest descents in energy and, when it is given in integral
form, the motion is pictured to take place along the shortest path in energy,” that is,
by the fastest means, on least-time trajectories (see Footnote 6). Again, as Annila
puts it, “The 2nd all of thermodynamics simply says that differences in energy
densities will level off in least time,” and The principle of increasing entropy and
the PLA are equivalent imperatives” (Annila 2010). Thus, all natural processes
tending to more probable states (understood in Annila’s idiosyncratic conception)
direct along the steepest descents of an energy landscape by equalizing the dif-
ferences in energy via various transport and transformation processes, for example,
diffusion, heat flows, electrical currents, and chemical reactions. Annila designates
the PLA as “the supreme law of nature,” the long-sought, albeit noncomputable,
organizing principle.
As already mentioned in the preceding, Annila claims that the orderly structures
are not improbable, that is, low in entropy, when they function to disperse energy
from high-energy sources. He assumes that the dissipative structures, inseparable

from their surroundings, maintain not low but high entropy by dissipation of free
energy. Annila also postulates that the driving force makes no difference between
abiotic and biotic mechanisms of energy transduction but favors all those that are
dispersing energy more and more effectively. As he puts it, “The large global
system is, in the language of thermodynamics, an energy manifold in myriad
motional modes, most of which are referred to as life” (see Footnote 6). These flows
of energy, as they channel down along various paths, propel evolution. The flows
are viewed to explore diverse evolutionary paths, for example, by random variation,
and those that lead to a faster entropy increase, equivalent to a more rapid decrease
in the free energy, become naturally selected. It follows that life can be viewed as
one of many natural processes, particularly efficient in abolishing energy gradients
in the universe.
“An entity, e.g. an atom, molecule, cell, organism, ecosystem, economy etc. is
regarded merely as an energy transduction system,” and they are all organized as
nested hierarchy entities, tending to dissipate energy gradients ever more inten-
sively (Annila and Kuismanen 2009).
In conceiving of life in this way, Annila and the group of his collaborators are
not alone. In the last few years, a number of scientists have reached a similar
conclusion. Trefil et al. compared life to lightning, which appears to be the Earth’s
solution to the problem of regulating electrical energy as it builds up in the
atmosphere and to hurricanes which solve the problem of releasing heat energy that
builds up in warm tropical oceans (Trefil et al. 2009). They picture the emergence
of life as a sort of chemical bootstrapping process from abiotic precursors in steady
state, so that life may be the Earth’s most efficient solution to the problem of
dissipating the energy constantly generated inside it. Schneider and Kay, inter-
preting the dynamic formulation of the second law somehow poetically by the
phrase “Nature abhors a gradient,” list as examples “tornados (the result of baro-
metric pressure differences), hurricanes, convection cells, chemical autocatalytic
reactions and life itself” (Schneider and Kay 1994). As they see it, “living systems
are sophisticated ‘mini-tornados’, with a memory (its DNA), whose Aristotelian
‘final cause’ may be the second law of thermodynamics.” Astronomer and astro-
biologist Charles Lineweaver refers to a category of objects that he calls “far from
equilibrium dissipative systems,” which include all systems that dissipate energy in
the process of maintaining themselves in an ordered, nonequilibrium state,
“including galaxies and hurricanes, as well as plants and animals” (Linewaver
2006). In his view, “There’s a continuum between life and non-life, and the black
and white distinction between the two has to be minimized.” And, in fact,
Whitfield, who attempted to sum up all these concurrent views on life expresses a
conclusion which he put it in the very title of his paper, albeit with a question mark:
“Survival of the Likeliest?” (Whitfield 2007).
This view would re-establish the conception of medieval naturalists, who placed
the living world on an ascending scale called the great chain of beings, or scala
naturae (ladder of nature), with humans and the work of human culture at the top
(Lovejoy 1936). The chain was believed to begin with the minerals, merging into
plant life, then on into animal life, thence to man, and then, logically, on into
angelic forms, and up to God Himself. There were no missing links. Today, we see
the great chain of beings differently: biological evolution, and also, at the level of
humans, cultural evolution, are manifestations of the second law of
thermodynamics.
5 The Ontic Principle
Is it really true that living systems are nothing more than are galaxies, tornados,
hurricanes, or the Bénard hydrodynamic cells, with the only difference that life is
the most efficient arrangement for dissipation of energy on our planet and, possibly,
in the universe as a whole?
No. Such a claim would ignore the fact that scala naturae, as we understand it
today, is not an accomplished feat of an Unmoved Mover, but a work of evolution
of dissipation mechanisms, successively creating a hierarchy of layers over layers.
All structures, built up in the process of dissipation of energy gradients, transport
matter and energy along restricted degrees of freedom, thus doing work. But none
of them, with a single exception of life, use the work purposely to serve their
self-preservation, to ensure their permanence, onticity. In the inanimate Bénard
hydrodynamic cells, just as in hurricanes, steep energy gradients are used to create
and preserve their structure, to maintain their onticity. But once the energy gradient
sinks below a critical point, the self-organized structures disintegrate and cease to
exist. Living structures are able not only to maintain their onticity, but also to grow
in size, to break up to give rise to self-similar structures (eventually, the source of
reproduction in living systems), to survive if the energy gradient becomes weaker
and even, transiently, nil, and to spread to new localities to find new gradients of
energy to be dissipated. The work used for maintaining permanence of a system, its
onticity, corresponds to the “ontic work.” In fact living systems are self-sustained
and can be named ontotelic systems, as maintaining their onticity is the ultimate
purpose of their activities, their ultimate utility. Kauffman (2000) used the name
“autonomous agents” to characterize the capacity of an entity to act in its own
interests. Swenson (1997) called such entities “autokatakinetic systems”.
Philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) used the term “conatus” as a general
property of all things, stating that “each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to
persevere in its being;” each thing, therefore, “is opposed to everything which can
take its existence away.” In order to resist destruction, things strive to continue to
exist, and conatus is the word that describes this striving. In the words of Spinoza,
conatus is “nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” Indeed, we can envisage all
things in the word as subject to the “ontic principle”: Everything that is, is, and it is
as long as it keeps its identity, that is, its onticity. It is important, however, to
understand Spinoza’s term “striving,” applied to inanimate things, as a metaphor.
Such things as clouds or sea waves last for a short time, in contrast to stone or
diamonds, which long remain unchanged. They all, but along with them inanimate
dissipative structures as well, such as the Bénard cells or hurricanes, are nomic,
determined by natural laws (Ernst Mayr called them “teleomatic” and Jorge
Wagensberg ascribed to them “fundamental persistence”) and differ substantially
from stability of ontotelic systems. There are only living “things” that maintain their
onticity actively, and by all means, but even in their case the word “striving”
remains largely an anthropomorphic metaphor. It is the capacity to do the ontic
work that sets living beings apart from the inanimate world and makes them
self-sustained.
We may label the ontotelic systems the “subjects” and the propensity of the
world to create subjects, ensuing from the second law of thermodynamics, “sub-
jectibility”. Subjectibility may be seen as a third “substance” of the world, along
with matter and energy. An ontotelic system that has the ability to survive and
reproduce in an environment can be designated as “fit”. The term “fitness” is related
to “utility” and to maximize fitness means to maximize utility. Increasing utility and
fitness is called “adaptation,” and a trait that increases utility and fitness is con-
sidered to be “adaptive.” A specific and narrower term, “Darwinian fitness,” which
is often referred to in this book, is related to the ultimate utility of life: it expresses
the augmentation in quantity of the system, which, in the case of a human indi-
vidual, is given by the number of identical descendants in the subsequent genera-
tion. The term “hedonic fitness,” also used in this book, applies to a situation where
a human individual primarily values “hedonic utility,” which, according to Jerome
Bentham, is the net sum of positive emotions minus the negative ones (Bentham
1823).
From the dynamic formulation of the second law, the assumption of Annila and
coworkers that all entities that depend on a single energy gradient must compete
with each other for the speed of dissipation of the gradient, leads to a logical
inference that the one of them which dissipates the gradient faster than the others
will be naturally selected (Annila and Salthe 2010). Under such conditions it must
be obviously advantageous for an entity with the ontotelic faculty, a subject, to be
able to detect the source of the energy gradient and to gauge its capacity, thus doing
work of recognition or, in other words, to do the “epistemic work” along with the
“ontic work.” When approaching the exhaustion of a free energy source, the subject
should do its best to survive, to preserve its permanence. Accordingly, there is not
only the speed of dissipation of an energy gradient but also the ability to adapt to its
successive diminution and the need actively to seek new sources of energy that
determines the Darwinian fitness of a living subject. This applies to all levels of
hierarchies of life, from cells to individual organisms, groups, and species up to life
as a whole. Life consists of nested hierarchies of subjects; each subject at any level
of hierarchy—we may dub it the “Darwinian individual”—strives to maintain its
onticity. Evolution of life is a drama in which all actors compete for the availability
of energy gradients and of other scarce resources.
In a spatially homogeneous liquid, Bénard’s convection cells are the only spe-
cific dissipative structures that form once the gradient of temperature exceeds a
certain threshold. Thus, they originate by necessity; they are nomic (lawful)
5 The Ontic Principle 15
structures. The same applies to a hurricane: its form is less regular than are the
hexagonal prisms in the former case, inasmuch as formations of hurricanes start in
heterogeneous environments, but, in principle, the hurricanes are just as inevitable
and necessary nomic structures as are the Bénard hydrodynamic cells. This is also
the case of the famous structures that originate in a chemical system, named the
Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, under conditions far from thermodynamic equi-
librium, which have their own specific form, and for many other similar chemical
systems (Glansdorff and Prigogine 1971).
The second law reveals that, along with the existence of natural laws, the world
has another characteristic: formability. The number of all nomic forms is not known
yet, but is certainly limited, as is also the number of natural laws, and is surely
much less than is the number of all structures that we encounter in the world. In
addition to the nomic structures, there may be an unlimited number of nonnomic
(contingent) ones, which are being formed by the interplay of both necessity and
chance. Although dynamic nomic structures are generally dissipative structures that
persist thanks to continuous dissipation of energy gradients, nonnomic structures
are conservative structures, or constructions: they do not continuously dissipate
energy gradients, but maintain their stability and a distance from equilibrium
because high kinetic barriers prevent or retard their falling apart and destruction.
Many constructions function as machines and, indeed, each living cell contains
millions of molecular machines.
6 Frustration: A Hallmark of Life
Up to our time, we have no thermodynamic theory of constructions. Constructions

have been studied as part of mechanics and entirely neglected by thermodynamics.
But even an elementary model of classical thermodynamics, a cylinder filled with
gas and equipped with a piston, thanks to which all basic laws have been discov-
ered, is a construction. The walls of the cylinder, which separate the system from its
surroundings, have been taken as infinitely firm and thus “infinitely far” from
equilibrium, and omitted from the analysis. Also, thermodynamics and kinetics
have been largely considered as separate and distinct branches of science, even
though the notion of activation energy of kinetic processes has its thermodynamic
foundation. “Kinetic barriers,” mentioned above, that govern the stability of con-
structions, are in fact, thermodynamical in guise.
In this respect, the famous book of Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life, remains a
memorable exception (Schrödinger 1962). He pondered over what gives life sta-
bility in a world dominated by thermal disorder. In the early 1940s, a decade before
the elucidation of the structure of DNA as a double-helix molecule, the prominent
theoretical physicist ingeniously inferred that the stability originates from a heri-
tability carrier, a four-dimensional “code-script” in the form of aperiodic crystal,
which, somehow miraculously, is largely “withdrawn from the disorder of heat
motion.” It is a solid, and by this property it resembles a clock. A clock is also built
of solids, “kept in shape by London–Heitler forces, strong enough to elude the

disorderly tendency of heat motion at ordinary temperature.” The pendulum clock is
virtually at zero absolute temperature, and, by implication, so is also the “aperiodic
crystal” upon which an organism hinges. This analogy of a genome and a clock has
been largely overlooked by many ardent readers of Schrödinger’s opus.
The structures of which ontotelic systems consist are aggregations of nomic and
nonnomic forms. In order to arise they need appropriate energy gradients that
enforce the generation of their nomic parts. The nonnomic parts, constructions, had
originally come into existence by chance, but consecutively the memory of the
particular chance has been retained to stay ready for repetitions. In extant living
systems the memory of the chance events represents the heritome, which consists of
genes and possibly of elementary heritable cores of membranes, cytoskeleton and
nucleosome proteins (so that the genome may only be a part of a heritome), as well
as of neural memories carried in specific connections of brain neurons, and, as
shown later, in the case of the human species, of artifacts of cultural evolution. The
resemblance between Schrödinger’s “aperiodic crystal” and the clock may be
interpreted to mean that the prime reason why DNA is present in a cell in the form
of double-helix molecules may be the stabilization of the molecular memory by
molecular redundancy rather than the mechanism of “information replication” as is
commonly asserted.
It seems appropriate to mention that the world “far from equilibrium,” the
subject of today’s nonequilibrium thermodynamics, has also been examined by a
science of synergetics, pioneered by Hermann Haken. In a closing remark of his
book on synergetics (p. 314) he pointed out that although one is tempted to treat
biological systems in complete analogy to physical or chemical systems far from
equilibrium, there is an important difference: whereas the latter lose their structure
when the flux of energy is switched off, much of the structure of biological systems
persists (Haken 1977). “Thus biological systems seem rather to combine nondis-
sipative and dissipative structures.” In his mind, future research will have to
develop adequate methods to cope with such structures.
Self-sustaining systems are subject to two opposite, in fact conflicting, tenden-
cies: to consume energy gradients in their environment as soon as possible and to
maintain their onticity as long as possible. In psychology, “frustration” is the
designation of a state of a continual or unresolved motivational conflict. In a close
analogy, in physics and biology frustration characterizes a state of competing
interactions. This restricted definition differs from the common parlance in which
the word “frustration” is vaguely used in the sense of “deprivation.”
We may assume that frustration is an immanent characteristic of all living
systems at any level of their organization and is, in fact, the ultimate cause of their
incessant dynamics. Complex living systems are assembled from modules, which
may be bound together tightly, loosely, or in any intermediate manner. These
varying modes of module binding make living systems more or less consistent. But
the full consistency should be considered as an ideal state, never achieved. P.-M.
Binder illustrated frustration as an example of a system of three spins, pointing up
6 Frustration: A Hallmark of Life 17
or down (Binder 2008). When placed at the vertices of a triangle, with the demand
that all three be antialigned with each other, this is not possible, and we call such an
arrangement “frustrated.” The dynamics is also frustrated; any spin flip will fix
some of the unsatisfied demands while ruining others. The formation of the native
state of protein follows the principle of minimum frustration. In general, optimi-
zation in life may consist of the pursuit of minimization of frustrations. The failure
to accomplish it may be one of the causes of aging of individual organisms, wearing
out of cultures, and extinction of species.
The unidirectional movement of the world, dictated (or reflected?) by the second
law of thermodynamics and its counterpart, the PLA, represents cosmic evolution.
Biological evolution is an inevitable part of cosmic evolution. The products of
biological evolution are not predictable, as Annila et al. convincingly argued (see
Footnote 6), but, contrary to their assumptions, they are not probable. Quite the
opposite: the more biological evolution advances, the more improbable are their
products (Chaitin 2004). Evolutionary theory, originally outlined by Charles
Darwin, gets new impulses from the dynamic reformulation of the second law of
thermodynamics.
7 Darwin and Entropy
The history of human thought can be divided into two periods: before Darwin (B.D.)
and after Darwin (A.D.). The dividing line is the year 1859 of the current era (C.E.),
in which Darwin’s pathbreaking book, On the Origin of Species, was published. The
former period covers 150,000 years of the existence of modern humans; the latter
just 150 years, thousands of times less.9 Before Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
published his theory of evolution, humans explained the existence, order, and pur-
pose of all things in nature by either natural or supernatural design. The medieval
notion of scala naturae, mentioned in the previous section, assumed that all the
constituents of the ascending chain of being, from minerals, plants, animals, humans,
and angelical forms up to God himself, were constant, unchanging in time.
The fundamental tenet of Darwin’s theory, evolution by variation and selection,
ran counter to traditional thinking in Western culture. W.H. Calvin cited the opinion
of evolutionist Ernst Mayr expressed in 1994 (Calvin 1996):
One might think that among the many hundreds of philosophers who had developed ideas
about change, beginning with the Ionians, Plato and Aristotle, the scholastics, the philos-
ophers of the Enlightenment, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, and the numerous
philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century, that there would have been at least
9
By a spectacular historic coincidence, in parallel with Charles Darwin another British naturalist,
Alfred Russel Wallace formulated very similar views on life evolution. As a modest man he did
not insist upon his codiscovery, but in 1889 published a book entitled “Darwinism”. It is fair to
keep in mind, but also to teach students, that the term “Darwinism” is a short-hand expression for a
concept brought forward by both Darwin and Wallace.
one or two to have seen the enormous heuristic power of that combination of variation and
selection. But the answer is no. To a modern, who sees the manifestations of variation and
selection wherever he looks, this seems quite unbelievable, but it is a historical fact.
However, this was not precisely so. Already in ancient Greece, philosopher
Empedocles (ca. 495–435 B.C.E.) may have anticipated Darwin’s view. He spec-
ulated that originally four ultimate elements, fire, air, water, and earth, which make
all the structures of the world, entered into various combinations, with strange
results in animals, heads without necks, arms without shoulders, eyes without
foreheads. But only those complex forms that were adapted to each other survived.
A somewhat similar idea may have occurred to another Greek philosopher,
Epicurus (ca. 340–270 B.C.E.). However, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E), convinced of
the inherent rationality and purposefulness of nature, rejected such speculations. In
the eighteenth century C.E., Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) also considered the
possibility of evolution by trials and failures and selection, but refused on the same
ground as Aristotle:
All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.
Observation of both the outward form and inward structure of all animals confirms this of
them. An organ that is of no use, an arrangement that does not achieve its purpose, are
contradictions in the teleological theory of nature. If we give up this fundamental principle,
we no longer have a lawful but an aimless course of nature, and blind chance takes the place
of the guiding thread of reason (Kant 1784).
In our time, evolutionary theory seems to be universally accepted, even by the

Catholic Church. Yet, its Darwinian basis may not always be adequately appraised,
not even by expert evolutionary biologists, in particular neo-Enlighteners among
them, as becomes evident in this book. In addition, evolutionary theory itself is
undergoing evolution: we have the “evolution of evolutionary theory.” In particular,
as already suggested in previous sections, the recent changes in the interpretation of
the second law of thermodynamics provide opportunities for rethinking, comple-
menting, enlarging, and modifying some of the original intuitions of Darwin.
Thermodynamics has been called “the queen of chemistry.” As natural life is
based on chemistry, thermodynamics should be considered to be also the queen, the
real ruler, of life on Earth. Yet, Charles Darwin could not be aware of the
importance of thermodynamics for his doctrine. He realized that “our ignorance of
the laws of variation is profound,” but, obviously, could not see the second law of
thermodynamics behind the uncorrelated variations. Rudolf Clausius formulated the
second law of thermodynamics in 1865, six years after Darwin’s theory had been
made public. When biologists later, much under the impression of the book of
physicist Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, recognized this fact, the second law
was largely interpreted as the feature of the universe to tend to achieve states of
increased disorder (measured as entropy), meaning, at the same time, the flow of
energy “downhill,” its dissipation, “devaluation.” Life was considered to be subject
to the second law, but arranged in such a way as to oppose or slow down this
universal tendency. In 1970, biologist and Nobel Prize laureate Jacques Monod in
his influential book, Chance and Necessity, pictured life as organized systems
7 Darwin and Entropy 19
tending to preserve their organization against the destructive effect of the second
law (Monod 1970). As he put it,
For modern theory, evolution is not a property of living beings, since it stems from the very
imperfections of the conservative mechanism which indeed constitutes their unique privi-
lege. And so one may say that the same source of fortuitous perturbations, of “noise”, which
in a nonliving (i.e. nonreplicative) system would lead little by little to the disintegration of
all structure, is the progenitor of evolution in the biosphere and accounts for its unrestricted
liberty of creation, thanks to the replicative structure of DNA: that registry of chance, that
tone-deaf conservatory where the noise is preserved along with the music.
The impressive artistic depiction of life by Jacques Monod may be taken as a

succinct summary of the conception of the so-called neo-Darwinism (also known as
“synthetic theory of evolution”), which was developed by a handful of evolutionary
biologists in the first half of the twentieth century. Its core is a mathematical theory
of natural selection elaborated mainly by mathematician Ronald A. Fisher and
expounded in his 1930 book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Fisher
1930). Darwin had focused his interest on the individual organism as a main actor
of the evolutionary game, but for Fisher the main actor was the gene and its
alternative alleles as a hereditary unit that can be passed on unaltered for many
generations. Fisher worked out a mathematical theory of gene interactions in
evolution and may be seen as the founding father of genocentrism. He did not
undertake to formalize a mathematical model of the organism. He based his
mathematical reasoning on several assumptions: that any trait of an organism can be
accounted for by genes; that each gene in a population of individual organisms is
constantly tending to create genetic situations favorable to its own survival; that the
populations are very large and well mixed; and that interactions among genes and
among individuals are linear and can be averaged. Evolution can then be under-
stood as a change over time in the gene pool, that is, the set of all genes of a
population. Genocentrism reached its peak in the simple and elegant doctrine of the
“selfish gene,” popularized by Richard Dawkins by his 1976 book carrying the
same title.10 For Dawkins, genes are central to life, are molecular replicators, and
those that get passed on are the ones whose evolutionary consequences serve their
ultimate interest to continue being replicated. “An effective replicator will be a very
large chunk of DNA.” An individual organism is but a transient and short-lived
vehicle of the selfish genes, the persistence of which is incomparably longer. It is
not far-fetched to call genocentrism by an alternative name, “genic Platonism”: just
as in the philosophy of Plato (ca. 427–347 B.C.E.) the only “real” existence had
ideas, which were unmovable and eternal, and all material things were only
changeable and passing “appearances;” genes are the very “substances” of life and
organisms merely trifling ephemerality.
Genocentrism is an example of a logical fallacy: correct reasoning from incorrect
premises. By this feature it resembles Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy.
10
Richard Dawkins is a prolific author. His writings can be found on his web page: https://
richarddawkins.net/.
Canonical gene-centrism of molecular biology may await a similar fate as befell geo-
centrism four hundred years ago. Adding new and new epicycles did not save the Ptolemaic
theory: it was becoming too complicated and the new paradigm, heliocentrism, has
re-established simplicity. In this respect, however, the current replacement process in
biology will not repeat the previous one in astronomy. The concept of genetic networks,
which seems to be substituting “bean bag genetics”, “genes as beads on strings”, “gangs of
selfish genes”, does not exhibit Copernican-Keplerian simplicity—relations between enti-
ties are nonlinear and simulation of them requires massive computation (Kováč 2009).
Current research on complex genetic interactions and complex regulations of

gene activities, but also heated discussions about the involvement of genes in
altruism, ontogenesis, evolution of multicellularity and multilevel selection, char-
acterized as “unended knights’ tournaments”, may indicate the end “of a period in
biology marked by the quest for simplicity” (Gannon 2007). To be fair, genocetrism
should be appreciated as a scientific theory that was adequate to the time of its
origin, just as had been Ptolemaic geocentrism before Copernicus or the flogiston
theory in the eighteenth century before Lavoisier came up with his theory of
combustion.
As already shown in the previous sections, Monod’s contemporary, chemist and
physicist Ilya Prigogine, also a Nobel prize laureate, was one of the first who
stressed that the sword of the second law of thermodynamics is double-edged, and
made headway to its reformulation (see Footnote 4). The dynamic interpretation of
the second law corroborates the idea that has been implicit in Prigogine’s work:
matter far from thermodynamic equilibrium is creative. In his Nobel lecture,
Prigogine confessed his sympathy with the notion of philosopher Henry Bergson:
creative evolution. The amendments that follow neo-Darwinism are commonly
called post-neo-Darwinism. By recognizing the contribution of Prigogine to evo-
lutionary theory an alternative designation might be “Prigoginian Darwinism.” But
other scientists have also had their share on reformulation of Darwinism, so that the
most appropriate term would be simply “contemporary Darwinism.”
8 Creative Evolution
Here are tentatively formulated principles of contemporary Darwinism: evolution is

not a consequence of imperfection of stabilizing mechanisms, as Monod hypoth-
esized, but is a dynamic process of generation of structures and of massive
self-organization. Creation of structure in the field of energy gradients is a natural
process just as in another natural process, Darwinian selection. Natural selection
stabilizes the achieved status quo, and when selection is relaxed, evolution becomes
a truly creative process. Evolution as a whole is advancing, creating ever more
complex structures. In this sense, there is continual progress of evolution. The
structures are either dissipative, persisting by dissipation energy gradients or con-
servative (construction), stabilized kinetically. Life is a specific kind of structuring.
On our planet Earth life is based on chemistry, which consists of molecular
8 Creative Evolution 21
association, and generates molecular, supramolecular, social, and abstract (sym-

bolic) structures, arranging them in nested hierarchies. Evolution proceeds at all
levels of the hierarchy, at the level of cells, organisms, social groups, biological
species, and the products of evolution are at each level of hierarchy level-specific
Darwinian individuals. In the next section it is argued that, at the species level, the
biological species is an important Darwinian individual.
It should be recognized that the science of chemistry abounds in emergencies,
probably more than other sciences; as a matter of fact, chemistry is a science of
qualities and may be called a “science of emergence.” Rearranging electrons in
atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to produce a molecule of water creates a novelty
that, at least in a description available to human subjects, has not been inscribed in
the precursor atoms. Just because life is a chemical system, emergent phenomena at
various hierarchical levels are as natural, but also as unpredictable, as inevitable,
and as unequivocal, as is the emergence of water from hydrogen and oxygen.
Perceptional and emotional qualia, and even consciousness, including
self-consciousness, which later are the subject of analysis in this book, lose much of
their mystery if we conceive of them as emergencies in complex chemical systems.
Contrary to repeated claims that Darwin never accepted the idea that evolution
was progressive, we can find in his writings distinctions between “lower” and
“higher” organisms, and arguments that evolution was perfecting its products.
Among neo-Darwinists, the views on progression differed, with an extreme insis-
tence that evolution is absolutely not progressive to a moderate agnostic position
that there is nothing in the theory of natural selection that would support pro-
gression. Stephen Gould maintained that our judgment of progress in evolution is
purely subjective and compared the progress of evolution to a drunkard’s groping
ahead on a narrow path along which a movement to his left is restricted by a wall
and is free to his right, where he would inevitably end up in a gutter and perish
(Gould 1996). In contrast, Richard Dawkins often presented arguments in favor of
progress (see Footnote 10).
Contemporary Darwinism provides two challenges for biologists. First, there is
an urge for new hypotheses. The imposing progress in understanding of extant life
on Earth and in manipulating it has not been matched by comparable progress in
understanding the origins of life. The idea of the RNA world notwithstanding,
Oparin’s theory, formulated in 1924, may still dominate the thinking about origins.
No wonder that there persist efforts to account for the advent of life by special
(divine) creation in the sense of traditional religions and mythologies. It is most
symptomatic that one of the former leading proponents of the “naturalistic”
explanation of the origin of life, Dean H. Kenyon, is now speaking of “the impasse
in current laboratory and theoretical research” in this field, expressing his “growing
doubts that life on earth could have begun spontaneously by purely chemical and
physical means,” and favoring the conclusion that “it is fundamentally implausible
that unassisted matter and energy organized themselves into living systems” (in
Foreword to Reference (Thaxton et al. 1992)).
It is conceivable that placing “self-replicating” nucleic acids at the center of life
has been misleading. Nucleic acid is not a “replicator” by itself; it needs protein(s)
as a “replicant.”11 The simplest Darwinian individual endowed with the capacity to

double itself, to reproduce, is the cell. It has been stated that “the genome is neither
a tape nor a recipe, but a hierarchical network of interacting and context-dependent
determinants. Life might not have originated in the form of ‘selfish replicators’:
genes might have evolved later, primarily as the ‘bookkeepers’ of an interwoven
network (see Footnote 11).” Recall what has been suggested in the section on the
ontic principle: the main reason why DNA present in the cell has the double-helix
structure is to assure an almost perfect stabilization of cellular memory, rather than
to enable the “replication of information,” as conventional wisdom has it. In
addition, besides being repositories of cell memory and transmitters of it to prog-
eny, genes function as conductors and rectifiers of self-organization, promptly
responding to signals coming from the interior of the cells and from their sur-
roundings. Most genes may carry conditional commands, “if…then, else default.”
Genes in the cell are active agents not only in building an organism, but also in its
continual operation. We should keep in mind that for instance in the neuronal cells,
which do not double in a working brain, genes are permanently busy, responding by
transcription of DNA to inputs they receive.
In Fisher’s accounting, the survival of a gene in a gene pool was an outcome of
evolution, but Dawkins inverted it: gene survival was the very cause of evolution.
Humans have only 19,000 genes (Ezkurdia et al. 2014), just four times more than a
typical bacterium, and Jacques Monod estimated that a genome of a higher
organism, such as a mammal, must contain a thousand times more genes than a
bacterium (Monod 1970). If an organism were “constructed” step-by-step as an
artifact, being assembled from a Lego brick-box, Monod would be right. But if we
assume that self-organization is a major “constructor” of living structures, just a few
genes may function as “traffic policemen.” Imagine that a wave on a quiet surface of
water would need a record in only two “genes:” one corresponding to a stone to be
thrown and another as an instruction, “Throw!”: a structure will emerge.
Second, we are in need of new experimental approaches to study evolution. The
progress of science up to our time has been entirely conditioned by the progress of
artifaction, and, in particular, by specific kinds of artifacts, scientific instruments.
From the time of Gallileo’s inclined plane up to computers, particle colliders, and
DNA sequencers there have been scientific instruments that exclusively circum-
scribed the epistemic horizon of scientific inquiry, delimiting the nature of questions
that can be posed meaningfully by science. Humans continue to ask the most various
questions about the nature of the universe, life, human mind, and social dynamics.
But only those questions that can be tackled by scientific instruments belong to
science. There is a recursive feedback between scientific instruments and evolving
research, a tight coupling between the character of the instruments and the character
of scientific hypotheses. There are the available techniques that are promoting
imaginative speculations to the status of scientific hypotheses. Peter Medawar, in a
11
The list of publications by the author that are relevant to this book is available at the author’s
web page: http://www.biocenter.sk/lk.html.
8 Creative Evolution 23
famous epigram, described science as “the art of soluble” (Medawar 1967).

Instruments may condition the trajectory. In contemporary biology, there is gene
analysis that is in vogue, corroborating the claim of Richard Levins and Richard
Lewontin that science advances in those directions where success is the greatest and
the resistance to attain it the least (Levins and Lewontin 1985). The progress in
developing new principles and techniques of DNA sequencing has been so rapid in
the last decade that it overreaches the imaginations of the most audacious writers of
science fiction. In combination with massive computing they are verging on a
miracle. Human experimentalists are slowly but consistently being replaced by
robots; scientists are sitting at computers and may soon become redundant, too. Yet,
in the field of research of life origins—which in the words of Max Delbrück from
1978, “is a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental question of biology” (Delbrück
1978)—the famous Miller’s experiment from 1953 that amino acids can arise from a
mixture of simple gases still appears to be the major landmark of presumed labo-
ratory simulation of the first steps leading to life on Earth, there is almost no funding
of such research and no instruments comparable to DNA sequencers available.
The essential questions on biological evolution, already posed by Charles
Darwin, concerning the very nature of variation, the rise of complexity, the roles of
chance and necessity, await answers by experimentalists. The generation time of the
human species is approximately 30 years, whereas that of a bacterial species can be
as low as 20 min, thus bacteria appear to be exquisite organisms for an experimental
approach to evolution. It sounds unbelievable that such approaches have been
undertaken only in the last few decades and have been met with moderate financial
funding and with only slight attention, even though their importance is undoubtedly
paramount. Let us re-emphasize: terrestrial life is chemistry, chemistry is emer-
gences: only experiments with living stuff and its evolution can provide solutions;
mathematical approaches or computer modeling with abstract “living beings” are
doomed to failure.
Chemistry gives also substance to a thesis that is elaborated in the next section:
the evolution of life is the evolution of cognition.
9 Evolution of Life Is the Evolution of Cognition
To persist, living systems must incessantly do ontic work. To do work they need
energy. But they must also do work of cognition or, in other words, do epistemic
work in addition to ontic work.
It has been pointed out that any ontotelic system functions in its environment as
a subject and that subjectibility may be considered as a third “substance” of the
world, along with matter and energy. There is the virtue of being a subject that
bestows upon life and its constituents at all levels of the hierarchy the capacity to do
epistemic work. By dissipating energy gradients in its surroundings, a subject is at
the same time building up an epistemic gradient that drives cognition.
According to the basic tenet of evolutionary epistemology, life is cognition and

its evolution is the evolution of cognition. One of the founders of this approach to
cognition, Karl Popper, famously stated that “From the amoeba to Einstein, the
growth of knowledge is always the same” (Popper 1972). Another approach to
cognition, orthogonal to the former, is cognitive biology, ascribing cognition to the
universe as a whole, but also, descending through the scale of complexity, to
individual molecules (Kováč 2000). Jacques Monod was probably the first to
propose that cognition can take place at the level of single molecules, specifically
proteins, as their ability to discriminate between substrates or ligand might represent
a form of cognition (Monod 1970). Figure 1 depicts the two approaches to describe
life as a cognitive process.
Conceiving cognition at the level of molecules allows realizing that cognition is
an active process: it starts with recognition of some aspect of the environment,
continues with its evaluation, and ends with an action done on the environment. The
entire apparatus for cognition must already be present in advance, ready to function;
it represents embodied knowledge that had been acquired beforehand in evolution.
It corresponds to the Bayesian prior in the formula given in Entropy and proba-
bility. The apparatus, exhibiting an uncertainty about the properties of the envi-
ronment, quantifiable as its information entropy, poses to the environment
well-formulated questions and the data received from the environment become
information that reduces the information entropy. The operation is unambiguous; it
is deterministic. The magnitude of information received is specific to the cognitive
apparatus that functions as a subject (see Footnote 11).
The analysis implies that the embodied knowledge of a subject is a product of
the past; it accumulated in previous evolution. A completely new knowledge can be
Fig. 1 Two approaches to life as a cognitive process at various levels. The horizontal axis
represents the levels described by evolutionary epistemology and the vertical axis the levels
described by cognitive biology. Cognitive biology is an approach to understanding cognition that
is orthogonal to evolutionary biology (With permission from EMBO Reports 7: 562–566, 2006)
9 Evolution of Life Is the Evolution of Cognition 25
gained only in the subsequent evolution by the nondeterministic process of trial and
failure. This process is different from cognition and may be called epistemogenesis.
For classical Darwinism the principal actor of evolution, or, in the terminology
proposed here, the principal Darwinian individual was an individual organism. It
transmitted its properties, and therefore its knowledge acquired in evolution,
compressed in the form of a program in its genes, to its progeny. However,
empirical data, as well as Fisher’s mathematical models, indicated that in sexually
reproducing organisms the progeny was not a copy of an individual, but a result of
recombination of genes stochastically inherited from two individuals, the parents.
Accordingly, each individual of a species has a unique ephemeral existence and
will never appear again. The ultimate meaning of its existence is to share with other
individuals of its species the common gene pool. It is the species as a whole that
carries a species-specific apparatus for cognition; it contains a fixed set of
well-formulated questions. The knowledge represented by the common gene pool
of the species is its epistemic complexity (Kováč 2000). To measure complexity of
organisms, Seth Lloyd and Hans Pagels introduced the term “thermodynamic
depth” (Lloyd and Pagels 1988). They identified the complexity of a thing with the
amount of informational and thermodynamic effort involved in putting it together.
The measure of complexity of a macroscopic state, d, of a system that has arrived at
that state by the ith possible trajectory is –k · ln pi, where pi is the probability that
the system has arrived at d by the ith trajectory and k is an arbitrary positive
constant. They defined the depth of the state to be
Dðd Þ ¼ k ln pi
The arbitrary multiplication constant has been chosen to be the Boltzmann

constant for systems whose successive configurations can be described in the
physical space of statistical mechanics. In this case the complexity, now called the
thermodynamic depth, becomes the entropy passed on, during the evolution, to
degrees of freedom other than those needed in the specification of the final state. Or,
in other words, the thermodynamic depth may be equated to the quantity of energy
dissipated in the past as the system evolved through its specific trajectory up to the
present state.
Individual organisms are just more or less accurate copies of this species-specific
knowledge (Kuhn 1988). As Lloyd and Pagels argued with substance, the com-
plexity of an object does not increase much with the number of its copies: “Seven
bulls need not be much more complex than one bull. It took billions of years for the
earth to evolve one bull; but one bull and a few compliant cows will produce seven
bulls relatively speedily” (Lloyd and Pagels 1988).
We may thus conclude that biological species are the main bookkeepers of
knowledge acquired in evolution. Individual organisms may just be seen as
“groping fingers” of a particular species. Fumbling in the dark, but also exploiting
the potentials of self-organization, they may randomly, from time to time, capture a
new piece of knowledge. But entirely new possibilities for knowledge acquisition,
epistemogenesis, open at the moment of speciation, when a novel species starts its
existence. Biological species seem to be the main units of cognitive evolution. To

what extent, and whether at all, are they also units of Darwinian natural selection is
a question that was asked by Gould and Lloyd (1999) and will re-emerge after the
demise of the doctrine that genes are the only units of selection in evolution. From
the epistemological point of view the idea that the major players of the evolutionary
game are species, makes sense, even though this idea, propounded by biologists of
the “pre-genocentric era,” for instance by Konrad Lorenz, was later rejected, and
even ridiculed.
Cognition was speeding up biological evolution. The evolution of cognition, and
with it the accumulation of knowledge, appear to have a “time arrow,” just as has the
second law of thermodynamics. As mentioned above, the unidirectional increase of
knowledge may be designated as the “Bayesian ratchet.” The idea of a ratchet was
introduced into science by Feynman, who used it to illustrate some implications of
the second law of thermodynamics, in particular, that useful work cannot be extracted
from equilibrium fluctuations (Feynman et al. 2013). As shown in Fig. 2, a simple
mechanical ratchet is represented by a wheel with asymmetrically skewed teeth and a
spring-loaded pawl, which allows it to spin in one direction only and prevents
backward motion. In evolution, both biological and cultural, steady increase in
complexity can be accounted for by the mechanism of ratcheting. Trials and errors
and selection are creating ever more complex constructions and the reversion to the
previous simpler states is being prevented by all kinds of evolutionary ratchets.
The wheel of the Bayesian ratchet has turned forward in biological evolution, but
continues to turn faster in cultural evolution, a new recent type of evolution. Cultural
evolution has become several orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. It
may be nowadays complemented by still much faster technoscientific evolution. It
has been in this way that complex institutions of law, morals, culture, and political
organization have evolved, being selected for stability and prevented from
descending backwards by appropriate ratcheting arrangements. Evolutionary wis-
dom is being accumulated in the ratchets. Ratcheting in evolution, in development,
Fig. 2 A simple mechanical ratchet is represented by a wheel with asymmetrically skewed teeth
and a spring-loaded pawl, which allows it to spin in one direction only and prevents backward
motion. In evolution, trials and errors and selection are creating ever more complex constructions
and the reversion to the previous simpler states is being prevented by all kinds of evolutionary
ratchets
9 Evolution of Life Is the Evolution of Cognition 27
and in cognition fulfills the same essential function: it allows stepwise accumulation
and meaningful application of knowledge and prevents its futile diminution or
degradation by running the process backwards. Ratchets operate at many hierar-
chical levels, from molecules up to megasocieties (Kováč 2000). All this has a
bearing on our understanding the universe, its evolution, its fate, and the place of
humans in it. It is analyzed in the next two sections.
10 Evolution of the Universe
The reason why cognition has become the most accelerating factor of evolution is
straightforward: the growth of knowledge, epistemogenesis, has a character of
snowballing; it is getting larger at an accelerating rate. The kinetics of epistemo-
genesis is exponential or even hyperbolic. In the simplest case, an increase of
knowledge is linearly dependent on already existing knowledge, dK/dt = c · K, with
the solution: K = ect. However, existing pieces of knowledge can mutually interact
and support each other; in such a case, knowledge increase follows a hyperbolic
curve: dK/dt = c · K2, and the solution is K = 1/c(tm − t). Although the doubling
time during exponential growth is a constant, hyperbolic growth is characterized by
the fact that every doubling of a variable halves the doubling time (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3 Different time course of exponential and hyperbolic dynamics. a The doubling time in
exponential growth is constant. b In hyperbolic growth, the doubling time halves at every doubling
of a variable, until, at the singularity (tm), the doubling time becomes zero and the variable infinite
(With permission from EMBO Reports 9: 703–708, 2008)
Hyperbolic growth is linked to the notion of Mathematical Singularity: a point at

which the rate of change becomes infinite and the quantity itself becomes infinite at
a finite time tm.
In 1977 astronomer Carl Sagan in a book, The Dragons of Eden, attempted to
visualize the entire evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to our present by
condensing its 15 billion years down into a single year (Sagan 1977). At this scale,
one day represents 41 million years, one minute 28,500 years, and one second
475 years. The longest human individual life is but a blink of an eye (about 0.16 s).
Sagan plotted events he considered important onto his scheme. Figure 4 shows a
simplified sketch of the Sagan Cosmic Calendar. What immediately leaps to the eye is
the accumulation of events in the last day of the year and particularly in the last second
of the last day. Our Earth condensed out of interstellar matter pretty late, in early
September: life first appeared on September 26 as simple prokaryotes, on November
1 as complex eukaryotes, and on December 14 as simple animals. Mammals arose on
December 26 and primates on December 29. The whole evolution of the human
species occupied only the afternoon of the last day, December 31, with first humans at
22:30, domestication of fire at 23:46, and agriculture at 23:59:20. Only the last
half-minute of the Cosmic Calendar represents all of written human history. And only
little more than the last second encompasses modern science and technology, with all
their discoveries and inventions, including the acquisition of the means of
self-destruction of the human species, but also (let us suppose) its serene demise.
The distribution of events is extremely nonlinear. If we plot the data on a
two-dimensional log–log graph, in which both the horizontal and vertical axes have
logarithmic scale, the relation between events and time appears as a straight line:
this is a proof that the kinetics of the frequency of events was hyperbolic. The
Cosmic Calendar is undoubtedly anthropocentric: we plot the major events of
cosmic evolutions as if we, humans, were the crown of evolution and our present
had a pivotal position in our assessments. Even the choice of what we consider the
major evolutionary events appears to be arbitrary. A “bacteriocentric” or “rato-
centric” plot, “done” by bacteria or rats, respectively, would look different, but the
tendency to accelerate changes may be the same. In any case, the plot indicates that
the major evolutionary changes were very rare in the early phases of cosmic evo-
lution, with a tentative “doubling time” of many million years, but the doubling
time became ever shorter, so that, at the coarse graining of Sagan’s one-year plot,
the present is close to the Mathematic Singularity.
For our mind, this course of events appears anti-intuitive. It is shown later in this
book that the human brain and its ability were formed in evolution under conditions
much different from those we live under today. Our ancestors were unlikely to
encounter any accelerating process in their individual lifetimes, and so the human
mind has been shaped to be successful by making linear extrapolations. Humans
may find it difficult to admit that simple one-to-one relationships between two
events are exceedingly rare and the real relationships, with the extremes
many-to-one and one-to-many, result in complicated dynamics with ceaseless
emergence of new qualities. Even an expert biologist, who inoculates a culture with
Escherichia coli, which has a very short doubling time of 20 min, and harvests a
10 Evolution of the Universe 29
Fig. 4 The Cosmic Calendar. The entire evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to our
present is plotted by condensing its 15 billion years down into a single year
few grams of bacterial biomass after growth overnight, might find it hard to con-
ceive that, if the exponential proliferation of the bacterial culture continued
unfettered for another 36 h, its mass would amount to the mass of the Earth. Adults
no less than children, upon listening to a story on lily population that doubles the
size of their leaves floating on the surface of a pond every day and in 30 days will
entirely cover the pond, would experience difficulty in answering the question at
what day half-coverage will occur. The answer is: on the 29th day.
In our era, which in the Sagan Cosmic Calendar appears to be close to
Mathematical Singularity, a human individual must confront new technical inno-
vations and inventions many times during his or her lifetime. It is only in our time
that we have become aware that the world is changing very fast.
It should be made clear that the word “singularity” is often used in vague,
inaccurate, or poorly defined manners. The noun should always be used with an
adjective. In this book, the term “Epistemic Singularity” denotes a finite time point
at which the magnitude of knowledge converges to infinity. Recently, the term
“Technological Singularity” has come into vogue. The Technological Singularity,
as envisaged by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, is no longer a phantasm, but a
real attractor of the contemporary dynamics of human civilization (Kurzweil 2005).
The pioneer of modern technologies, Bill Gates, has called Kurzweil, “the best
person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” Kurzweil adopted
the term Technological Singularity from the American mathematician and computer
scientist Vernor Vinge, who had taken it from the mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam
(1909–1984) and John von Neumann (1903–1957). Vinge conceived the
Singularity as a threshold after which cultural evolution, owing to the progress of
computer technology, would produce a superhuman intelligence (Vinge 1993). He
borrowed the term from the physics of black holes: just as our model of physics
breaks down when it tries to model a black hole, our model of the world breaks
down when it tries to model a future dominated by entities more intelligent than
humans. Our present intelligence simply does not have the capacity to grasp a world
with an intelligence that would transcend us. It is shown in this book that such an
attempt would be similar to the attempt of a dung-beetle to understand the world of
humans. Yet, this reservation notwithstanding, Kurzweil has tried to depict the
world behind the Technological Singularity and offers a radical view of the future
course of human evolution. His book, The Singularity Is Near, from 2005 may
be regarded as a manifesto of techno-optimism (Kurzweil 2005). Nowadays,
techno-optimistic “singularitanians” proliferate as a new brand of utopists. It is
shown later in this book that, from the anthropocentric point of view, their optimism
is misplaced and false.
The Technological Singularity on the planet Earth will be, at the same time, the
Civilization Singularity. At a finite time point, the rate of changes, and hence their
unpredictability and uncontrollability, will converge to infinity.
The message conveyed by the Sagan calendar is far-reaching and, surprisingly,
hitherto almost commonly overlooked: the steady acceleration of the speed of living
and the densification of events are not exclusive to our times; they have been with
us for all the existence of our species on Earth and they characterize the evolution of
10 Evolution of the Universe 31
life from its inception. They are embedded in the very evolution of the cosmos as a
whole. There is not only the steadily increasing rate of energy dissipation, but also
the continual growth of knowledge in the way of the Bayes ratchet that drives
evolution in the universe. This statement has been called the epistemic principle. It
implies that the Epistemic Singularity is the ultimate attractor of the evolution of the
universe. Its nature is a subject of the next section.
11 The Epistemic Principle
Along with the ontic principle, the epistemic principle helps us to describe the
universe and the place of life and, specifically, of human life in its unfolding.
Continuing in the tradition of the ancient Greek Ionian philosophers, who specu-
lated about the basic elements of the world 2500 years ago, we can today, on the
basis of current scientific knowledge, propose energy, matter, and subjectibility as
three formative substances of the world. The universe is rich in energy gradients
and life is an effective arrangement of how to dissipate the gradients as quickly as
possible. It is also an arrangement that uses the energy gradients to create ever more
complex chemical and morphological structures and also to build up epistemic
gradients that enable living subjects to reflect the properties of their environment
and, eventually, the properties of the subjects themselves. In the course of the
evolution of life, knowledge continuously accumulates and allows subjects to
construct ever more detailed models of the universe. At the same time knowledge
enables the subjects to do work on the environment in their own interest.
We may assume that just as energy and matter are ubiquitous in the universe, so
is subjectibility, and hence, life. Wherever in the universe thermodynamic condi-
tions of temperature, pressure, and chemical composition allow chemical processes,
structuring sets in. In analogy with the term “black holes” we may call those areas
in the universe where life is getting on, “white holes”. Our Earth is probably just
one of the cosmic white holes, at which local dissipations of energy are running at
ever-increasing speed.
As already pointed out, the acquisition of new knowledge is not deterministic.
A piece of knowledge of the future is nonknowledge of the present, and it is a
tautology to say that nonknowledge cannot be known. Only by blindly fumbling in
all directions can a novel knowledge eventually be reached. In the course of evo-
lution, living subjects are moving forward along trajectories in a maze, in which
there are countless blind alleys and only a single way out. On our Earth, the human
species has advanced most in the maze of all the species (Fig. 5).
The structures formed in the course of evolution, either dissipative or conser-
vative (i.e., stabilized kinetically), of which the living subjects consist, have placed
the subjects ever farther from equilibrium with their environment. Accordingly, the
distance between the objective universe and its subjective model has been
increasing in the evolution. Inasmuch as the dynamics of the evolution is hyper-
bolic, as analyzed in the previous section, the system as a whole—the universe and
Fig. 5 Life is a process of

blind progression in a maze.
There are countless blind
alleys and only a single way
out
its image in the subjects—tends to reach singularity, a point at which some vari-
ables converge to infinity at a finite time. The attractor of the dynamics is the
Epistemic Singularity.
In our time, the human species may be close to a particular kind of singularity that
is commonly called the Technological Singularity. It was treated in the previous
section. From the extrapolation of progress of artificial intelligence, Ray Kurzweil
has set the date for the Technological Singularity as 2045 (Kurzweil 2005). The
majority of other singularitanians also place the date approximately in the middle of
the twenty-first century. It should be made clear that the Technological Singularity
does not equal the Epistemic Singularity. The former concerns specifically the human
species on Earth whereas the latter applies to life in the entire universe. There are two
variables that should converge to infinity at the Epistemic Singularity: knowledge;
and the distance between the objective world and its mirror image in a cognizant
subject, the one that victoriously traversed the entire maze of epistemogenesis.
Maximum knowledge would equal omniscience. Recalling the saying,
“Knowledge is power,” we may infer that maximum knowledge also equals
almightiness. There is zero knowledge at the beginning and omniscience and
almightiness at the end. Sheer trial and error and random walk, through zigzag
trajectories, groping upwards, using the accumulated knowledge ever less stag-
gering and rambling, until a twisting curve becomes a straight line with least-time
connection between start and target—a paragon of reason and rationality (Kováč
2000). Creation as pictured by traditional religions, but in reverse. “In the begin-
ning” (to use the first three words of the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible and
the Christian Old Testament): matter, dull and fumbling by trial and error. Great
silence of the universe. Then life arose. Slow, continual growth of knowledge;
matter ever farther from equilibrium becoming creative. The process of continual
creation. At the origin, no superior intelligence existing in order to create life and
human culture. No Absolute Spirit of Georg Friedrich Hegel, no Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin’s God-Creator, who created humans in his image and made them his
cocreators. If we adopted the metaphors of the philosophers, we might draw a
poetic picture of epistemogenesis: from the primordial Chaos, from the Cosmic
Emptiness, God slowly and continuously arising, enriching matter with form,
11 The Epistemic Principle 33
consciousness, and mind; the distance between Object and Subject increasing
hyperbolically, to become eventually undefined, and thus infinite. At the Epistemic
Singularity, the Cosmos, facing the complete knowledge faithfully mirrored by the
Subject, will recognize oneself. What a spectacle!
It has been argued previously that that frustration—the permanent exposure to
two or more opposite, in fact conflicting, tendencies—is an immanent characteristic
of life at any level of its organization and is, in fact, the ultimate cause of life’s
incessant dynamics. The living systems tend to consume energy gradients in their
environment as soon as possible and to maintain their onticity as long as possible.
Because we have assumed that life is as ubiquitous in the universe as are matter and
energy, we can now generalize this statement: because of life, frustration is an
immanent characteristic of the universe itself. Life, obeying the second law of
thermodynamics, voraciously dissipates all the available energy gradients, uses
them to increase its knowledge, and uses the knowledge to search for new gradi-
ents. At the very moment of maximum knowledge and maximum distance from
equilibrium all the energy gradients will be exhausted and universal thermodynamic
equilibrium, the state of indifference, will set in (Salthe 2009). Life will cease to
exist. Cosmic evolution and time itself will stop running. Accordingly, at the
Epistemic Singularity, the self-recognition of the Cosmos will occur for an infini-
tesimally short instant and then vanish.
What is the meaning of all that? We do not know; we are just actors in the
middle of the drama. Alfred Lotka, a biological visionary, wrote in 1925:
The picture we must keep before us, then, is of a great world engine or energy transformer
composed of a multitude of subsidiary units, each separately, and all together as a whole,
working in a cycle. It seems, in a way, a singular futile engine, which, with seriousness
strangely out of keeping with the absurdity of performance, carefully and thoroughly churns
up all the energy gathered from the source. It spends all its work feeding itself and keeping
itself in repair, so that no balance is left over for any imaginable residual purpose. Still, it
accomplishes one very remarkable thing; it improves itself as is goes along, if we may
employ this term to describe those progressive changes in its composition and construction
which constitute the evolution of the system. (Lotka 1925)
Will the Epistemic Singularity, which functions as an attractor of universal

evolution, ever be attained? By whom? Again, we don’t know. But the arguments
presented later in this book indicate that the human species, even though it has
advanced in the epistemic maze farther than any other species, may have now
reached its limits and will end in a deadlock. Would other forms of life in the
universe have a better chance?
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Second Movement. Evolutionary
Uniqueness of Humans
1 A Transcending Dung-Beetle1
In 1996 two French biologists, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, produced a
film entitled Microcosmos. The film starred not human actors but much smaller
creatures, mostly insects. Thanks to magnifying cameras, a human layperson could
see the world of these organisms and follow their ways of living. A biologist may
take the film not as an ordinary naturalistic documentary, but as a profound med-
itation about life and its meaning.
In a sequence of the film a viewer can observe a dung beetle—to which Carl
Linnaeus gave the generic name Sisyphus, inspired by the hero of an ancient Greek
myth—rolling a ball of horse manure twice its size. The ball became stuck on a twig
and the creature was struggling to free it. As biologists know, the ball represents a
most valuable treasure for the beetle: it will lay its eggs in the manure that will later
serve as feed for its offspring. The behavior of the beetle is biologically meaningful
and rational: the struggle of the observed animal to loosen the stuck ball was the
struggle for survival; it served its Darwinian fitness and ensured the continuation of
onticity of the species.
Yet the dung beetle has no knowledge of the function of manure, nor of the
horse that dropped the excrement, nor of the human who owned the horse. Sisyphus
lives in a world that is circumscribed by its somatic sensors, a species-specific
world that the German biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexkühll would have
called the dung-beetle’s Umwelt. The horse, too, has its own Umwelt, as does the
human. Yet, the world of the horse, just like the world of the man, does not exist for
the beetle.
If a “scholar” among dung beetles attempted to visualize the world “out there,”
what would be the dung-beetles’ metaphysics, their image of a part of the world of
1
This text is inspired by an essay published under a similar title in EMBO Reports 11: 410, 2010,
and is a modification of it. See Footnote 3.

38 Second Movement. Evolutionary Uniqueness of Humans
which their sensors furnish no data? What would be their truths, or even the Truth,
revealed, and thus indisputable?
One animal in every four on Earth is a beetle. The biologist J.B.S. Haldane
quipped that the Creator must have “had an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Apparently, beetles are very successful animals. Are we, humans, so very different
from dung beetles?
As to the number, we are a successful biological species, too: the total number of
humans has newly surpassed 7 billion individuals. Just as do beetles, we occupy
most diverse territories on Earth. By birth we are similar: inter faeces et urinas
nascimur (we are born between feces and urine) as theologian Aurelius Augustine
sighted 1600 years ago. Humans also have a species-specific Umwelt that has been
shaped by biological evolution. A richer one than is the Umwelt of beetles, because
we have more sensors than they have. Relative to body size, we also possess a
much larger brain. The larger brain and the greater number of sensors allow human
metaphysics to be more extensive and impressive than would be the metaphysics of
the dung beetle.
In contrast to beetles, our species has evolved at a much higher rate than they
have. Beetles originated about 300 million years ago and the oldest fossils of
beetles indicate that they may not have been much different from the beetles living
now. The oldest fossils of the genus Homo are only 2.3–2.4 million years old. Our
species Homo sapiens appears to be the only surviving species of the genus and
may have evolved in the last 500,000 years, although fossil data, supported by data
from sequencing of mitochondrial DNA, suggest that anatomically modern humans
originated in Africa within the last 200,000 years from a single group of ancestors.
Modern humans continued to evolve in Africa and had spread to the Middle East by
100,000 years ago and possibly as early as 160,000 years ago. Modern humans only
became well established elsewhere in the last 50,000 years (Wood and Richmond
2000). In our days, we can find humans in Antarctica, in artificial towns built on
seas, in space vehicles orbiting the Earth, and possibly soon humans will be present
on the planet Mars.
Yet, until quite recently, we continued to share the common fate of our fellow
dung beetles. We strived for survival. Just as in their case, there is undeniably a
world outside the confinements of our species-specific Umwelt. But if the world of
humans is too complex for the neural ganglia of beetles, we now have evidence that
we live in a world that similarly exceeds the seizing capacity of the human brain.
From where does this evidence come? It comes from science, an activity specific
to our species and invented by it. Science is one of those activities by which we
transcend our biology. In many of these activities, including science, humans roll
their balls, no less worried and obstinate than the beetles. But in contrast to the
latter, humans often act even if the action is biologically meaningless, at the
expense of their Darwinian fitness and thus, seen by the lenses of biology, irrational
(Fig. 1).
Applying the biological gauge on the two animals, the humans are—even in
science, the paragon of rationality—less rational than are the beetles.
2 The Uniqueness of Humans 39
Fig. 1 From the biological point of view, the behavior of a dung-beetle appears to be rational,
whereas the behavior of a human individual to be irrational
2 The Uniqueness of Humans
The capacity to transcend one’s own biology makes the human species different
from all other biological species. In the Darwinian era (A.D.), this statement may
sound strange. Before Darwin, human uniqueness posed no doubt to all theologians
in the West and also appeared obvious to the majority of philosophers. Biologist
Carl Linnaeus, the founder of biological taxonomy, who preceded Darwin by one
century, created in 1735 a hierarchical classification of the natural world, dividing it
into the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the mineral kingdom. Linnaeus
conceived of all members of the kingdoms as God-given (and therefore “natural”)
and unchanging since their creation. He classified humans, because of their con-
spicuous anatomical resemblance to apes, among the primates, and thus placed man
and monkeys under the same category, Anthropomorpha, meaning “manlike.” But
he also defined six aspects in which humans were unique mammals: theological,
moral, natural, physiological, dietetic, and pathological.
For Darwin, humans were products of evolution by natural selection just as all
other living organisms. Yet, many devoted Darwinists insisted that humans are
special. Julian Huxley, a cocreator of modern “synthetic theory of evolution,” in a
book entitled Man in the Modern World, has an introductory chapter called, “The
Uniqueness of Man,” probably written in the 1920s (Huxley 1947). He pointed out
that for the first followers of Darwin, “man was an animal like any other,” but later
the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction: humans are different. Some other
biologists published books or essays carrying a similar title. Huxley made a list of
eight characteristics he believed to be unique to the human species. Other biologists
presented similar lists, with up to 21 distinct features specific to humans.
In 1996, biologist George G. Simpson published a memorable paper, “The
Biological Nature of Man” (Simpson 1966). He enumerated 10 distinct anatomical
traits of humans, and also listed 10 psychological traits, which according to him
Charles Darwin had already considered as most distinctive for humans. They
included the capacity to use and make tools in great variety, self-consciousness,
language, in some humans a sense of beauty, and in most of them a religious sense,
which includes awe, superstition, belief in the animistic, supernatural, or spiritual.
Simpson noted that according to Darwin normal humans have a moral sense,
“they ethicize.” But, as Simpson emphasized explicitly, Darwin’s purpose was to

show that the characteristics which made humans unique are nevertheless “fore-
shadowed” in other animals.
Indeed, Darwin concluded in 1871 in his book, The Descent of Man, that the
differences between humans and animals are “one of degree and not of kind.” In
2008, psychologist Derek Penn in a paper with two coauthors argued that Darwin
was mistaken: “The profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman
animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman
minds” (Penn et al. 2008).
The apparent gulf between humans and other animals (including humans’ closest
evolutionary relatives, the great apes) may appear most intriguing in view of the
fact that molecular analysis indicated that there is 99.4 % nonsynonymous DNA
identity between humans and their nearest relatives, chimpanzees (Wildman et al.
2003), and that the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees
diverged only 4–8 million years ago (Wood and Richmond 2000), which is, at the
evolutionary scale, a very short period. The spectacular similarity in DNA
sequences between humans and chimpanzees, which not long ago fascinated evo-
lutionists and the general public alike, may now be taken merely as a proof of the
very short evolutionary distance between the two species, and of nothing more. In
fact, the number of genes in the two species may be identical.
The number of human genes has recently been updated by Ezkurdia nd
coworkers and reduced to 19,000; 1700 fewer than the genes in a previous annota-
tion. This new estimate is not much different from the number of the genes in
nematode worms, Caenorhabditis elegans. It has been concluded that “more than
90 % of human genes produce proteins that originated in metazoans or multicellular
organisms of the animal kingdom hundreds of millions of years ago; the figure is over
99 % for those genes whose origin predates the emergence of primates 50 mil-
lion years ago,” with the corollary that the number of new genes that separate humans
from mice may even be fewer than 10 (Ezkurdia et al. 2014). These figures support
the general idea which is in fashion nowadays that the physiological and develop-
mental differences between animals are caused by gene regulation rather than by
differences in the basic functions of their proteins. It does not exclude a possibility
that humans differ by some alleles of the genes that they shared with the apes or that
regulation of some pivotal genes in the latest evolutionary phase of human evolution
may have become a starter of some revolutionary innovations; but it apparently
implies that the “bookkeepers” of the innovations may have no longer been the genes.
Two recent books by prominent neuroscientists tackle the question of human
uniqueness. Michael Gazzaniga considered a long list of traits, tried to find a single
theme that tied all them together, and concluded, “Just like other animals, we are
constrained by our biology. […] But the ability to wish or imagine that we can be
better is notable. No other species aspires to more than it is. Perhaps we can be”
(Gazzaniga 2009). This aspect of human abilities and behaviors is considered later
in this book. Vilayanur Ramachandran in his book, which carries the subtitle, A
Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, claims, as do many of his
predecessors, that “We are […] something unique, something unprecedented,
2 The Uniqueness of Humans 41
something transcendent. We are something truly new under the sun, with uncharted
and perhaps limitless potential […]. Any ape can reach for banana, but only humans
can reach for the stars. Apes live contend, breed, and die in forest—end of story.
Humans write, investigate, create, and quest” (Ramachandran 2011).
The crucial Ramachandran’s statement seems to be this one: “We are the first
and only species whose fate has rested in its own hands, and not just in the hands of
chemistry and instinct.” The recurrent theme of the present work is the assertion
that humans do not have their fate in their hands and the claim that this assertion
should be abandoned as a neo-Enlightenment illusion. But taking the word “hand”
not as a metaphor but as a real object, an organ of the human body, we can posit:
the gulf that separates humans from other animals and makes humans unique has its
origin and its basis in the uniqueness of the human hand.
3 Animal Artifaciens
The hand is an anatomical organ that can be found in no animal on Earth, with the
single exception of humans. Charles Darwin in his opus on the descent of man
stated that “Man could not have attained his present dominant position in the world
without the use of his hands, which are so admirably adapted to the act of obedience
of his will.”
Minor anatomical changes between humans and their closest relatives, the great
apes, had made humans bipedal mammals. As already mentioned, human lineage
diverged from the last common ancestor with its closest living relative, the chim-
panzee (Pan genus), some 4–8 million years ago, evolving into the australopithe-
cines and eventually, about 2.3–2.4 million years ago, the genus Homo. At least five
different species belonged to the genus. The line leading to the modern humans may
have started with Homo habilis and continued with Homo ergaster around
1.9 million years ago, followed by Homo erectus. From this species several other
species may have evolved, among them Homo neanderthalis and eventually, some
500,000 years ago, Homo sapiens. The most remarkable feature of the evolution of
the genus Homo was a continual increase in the brain mass from a cranial capacity
of about 500 ml up to about 1300 ml, so that the brain of humans is about three
times the size of that of chimpanzees or gorillas (Bradbury 2005) (Fig. 2).
Interestingly, the size of the brain of modern humans appears to be a little smaller
than was that of the Neanderthals.
Bipedalism evolved well before the brain size started to expand conspicuously.
Australopithecines were probably already bipedal, as has been inferred from their
fossils from 4.2 to 3.9 years ago. There are at least 30 different hypotheses of the
origins of bipedalism (Niemitz 2010). Possible reasons for the evolution of human
bipedalism include freeing the hands for tool use, sexual dimorphism in food
provisioning (male as hunters, females as gatherers; or the carrying of meat “over
considerable distances” as a key factor), changes in climate and habitat (from jungle
to savannah: hominines descended from the trees and adapted to life on the
Fig. 2 Evolution of the brain

size of primates up to modern
humans
savannah by walking on two feet) that favored a more elevated eye position, and to
reduce the amount of skin exposed to the tropical sun. The postural feeding
hypothesis asserts that chimpanzees were only bipedal when they ate. While on the
ground, they would reach up for fruit hanging from small trees and while in trees,
bipedalism was utilized by grabbing for an overhead branch. These bipedal
movements may have evolved into regular habits because they were so convenient
in obtaining food. Alternatively, human ancestors, even with their original arboretal
habits, may have lived not far from a shore, and wading in shallow water they may
have found rich food with little investment; and wading behavior may have trig-
gered upright posture. Bipedalism may have been one of the central elements of the
general defense strategy of early hominids, allowing warning display and intimi-
dation of potential predators and competitors with exaggerated visual and audio
signals and also male phallic display.
Whatever the reasons, walking on two legs freed the front limbs from their role
in locomotion (Wilson 1998b). Evolution got an opportunity for unbounded
experimenting and complexification. Bipedality engendered, as an evolutionary
starter, a number of successive innovations that culminated in a qualitative break
that highlights human uniqueness.
The hand became the organ of grasping. Grasping presupposes coordination of
fingers and the thumb and motor coordination became the first driver of encepha-
lization, increase of the brain mass and particularly of motor neurons. It also
engendered increasing the number of sensory neurons and the hand became at the
same time the “sensory hand” (Mountcastle 2005).
Grasping and sensing a material enabled early humans’ crafting of tools, to
become “toolmakers.” The paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey originally argued that
the origin of Homo related directly to the evolution of toolmaking (Leaky 1996).
Indeed, the species name Homo habilis (meaning “handy man”) refers directly to the
making and use of tools and Homo ergaster (“working man”) to work. A first tool
may have been a simple coarse-chipped flint. A stone tool dated 2.5 million years ago
3 Animal Artifaciens 43
was recently uncovered. As indicated above, the genus Homo may have evolved later,
so the question remains whether its predecessors, australopithecines, which were
already bipedal, may have already been able to rough-work stones. According to Alba
and coworkers, Australopithecus afarensis, the fossilized remnants of which have
become famous under the name Lucy, which lived in East Africa about 3.5 mil-
lion years ago, had hands as deft as ours, and the hand proportions were “fully
human” (Alba et al. 2003). They claim that the finding throws into doubt the idea that
human-like hands evolved as an adaptation for toolmaking. But there is no evidence
that Lucy made stone tools. Thus, bipedalism may have preceded the toolmaking and
also the conspicuous expansion of the brain size (Lucy’s brain was probably about the
size of a modern chimpanzee’s, about 450 ml). The hands may have been only later
coopted for making tools. However, quite recently, Skinner et al. argue that there is
also archaeological evidence for stone tool use in australopiths (Skinner et al. 2015).
In early bipedal human predecessors, the hand as a novel organ may have played
an important role in social grooming. In some social animals, and particularly in
primates, mutual grooming helps in forming social bonds; some primatologists have
called grooming the social cement of the primate world. It facilitates creating and
maintaining alliances, coalitions, and dominance hierarchies, as well as reconcili-
ation after conflicts. Apparently, in human predecessors, the hand became an
important social organ even before its main role shifted to artifaction. Grooming
involved touching the body of another person and the sensory experience of
touching was associated with emotional experience. The hand also became the
“emotional hand,” and played, as analyzed later, a constitutive role in intensifying
and qualitative reshaping of human emotional evolution and in transforming
humans into hypersocial and, in fact, eusocial species (Radman 2013).
If the refinement of the hand had been conditioned by increase in brain size, and
vice versa, and the increase was adaptive, why had the process essentially halted
some 200,000 years ago and no longer continued? Walking on two feet shifted the
position of the pelvis and this had constrained the width of the birth canal in women.
Eventually, the size of the fetus’ head became a limiting factor for the birth process
and has been till now a reason for a prolonged and painful labor. The adaptive
advantages of increased cranial capacity reached their ceiling. As Dunbar made out,
widening the pelvis would have seriously disadvantaged women’s maneuverability
(Dunbar 2004). Evolution found a solution to the dilemma: the length of pregnancy
was reduced and the birth of the human child is naturally premature. Gould summed
up the contentions of several biologists that humans are essentially extrauterine
fetuses for the first year of life (Gould 1977). If they were to follow their ape
relatives, human actual gestation should be 21 months. Human babies do not achieve
the same state of brain and body development as an ape baby at its birth until they are
about a year old. During early postnatal development, human brains have a similar
rate of growth as do apes’ brains before birth. The human infant is powerless and
needs the constant care of its parents; but at the same time its brain continues
developing upon receiving stimuli from its environment of touches, smells, sounds,
and sights. This peculiarity of human development is an outstanding characteristic of
the human species. It makes human youth exceedingly docile and ardent to learn. It
enables strong imprinting on customs and values of the group in which a child is
born and lives, which apparently cannot be later easily effaced and replaced.2
Once artifaction had been fully established in humans, an entirely singular
evolutionary trajectory set in: a cumulative cultural evolution. In contrast to natural
objects, both inanimate and living, artifacts are things that would not be present in
the universe without humans. Whereas genomes are “bookkeepers” of knowledge
accumulated in biological evolution, artifacts embody knowledge gathered by
humans and deposited in the artifacts themselves. Artifacts became the third cate-
gory of memory carriers, in addition to the genome and the brain. From a sharpened
stone up to contemporary complicated machines, artifacts evolved step by step, in a
ratchet-like manner: at each step humans were just adding a tiny improvement to
the previously achieved state. But this does not mean that most artifacts arose by
human intention, or even planning. The evolution of artifacts had, from its very
beginning, its autonomous dynamics, driven mostly by their mutual interdepen-
dence and self-organization, only assisted by humans, and this fully applies to the
evolution of artifacts in our days.
The beginning of artifaction marked the inception of culture and the evolution of
artifaction became the basis of cultural evolution. Culture means artifaction and the
evolution of artifacts equals cultural evolution. Artifacts are pieces of embodied
knowledge; each novel artifact is generally more complex and represents a
Bayesian outgrowth of preceding ones. Cultural evolution has been continuously
creating new artificial environments, different from the environment under which
the human species had been molded by biological evolution. By implication, cul-
tural evolution has its own autonomous dynamics, largely independent of human
individuals. Gradually, the world of artifacts became enriched with qualitatively
novel objects: material artifacts got kin, symbolic artifacts. Humans, biologically
selected to live in small nonanonymous groups of cooperating individuals, have
been forced to live in ever larger groups. To enable a smooth coexistence of
genetically diverse, nonkin individuals, specific kinds of artifacts, social institu-
tions, such as religion, morals, customs, political organizations, schools, art, and
science, have emerged, and with them norms, rules, laws, social rewards, and
punishments. Humans, animals’ artifaciens, have turned into symbolizing animals.
4 Animal Symbolicum
In a remarkably far-sighted book, The Human Animal, Weston La Barre wrote that
“Anaxagoras claimed that man had brains because he had hands, but Aristotle
argued that man had hands because he had brains. When the implications of these
2
In humans, there are two different developmental stages, critical for strong imprinting. They may
constitute a basis of human biopedagogy and their loosening in our time may have serious
consequences for society.
4 Animal Symbolicum 45
statements are better understood and the dust of battle has settled a bit, modern
anthropologists are inclined to give the decision to Anaxagoras rather than to
Aristotle” (La Barre 1954).
But La Barre wisely noted that this is a case of “hens-and-eggs” causality and
that in all primate evolution hand and brain influenced each other mutually and
evolved progressively together. We may add that, in addition, the changes in each
of the two, the hand and the brain, were driven by a number of mutually inde-
pendent causes as well. Apart from the need to ensure a fine-tuned coordination of
hand movements and the accompanying sensing, the enlargement of the human
brain was connected with the increasing complexity and versatility of social life.
Social life was changing much more rapidly than physical and chemical properties
of the environment and the adaptation to these social changes required more
sophisticated brains. According to the concept of “Machiavellian intelligence,”
along with technical skill required for manufacturing material artifacts, social skills
were becoming ever more important to understand actions and intentions of social
partners, as well as to manipulate and deceive them (Humphrey 1976; Byrne and
Whiten 1988). The “social brain hypothesis” posits that human intelligence did not
evolve primarily as a means to solve ecological problems, but rather intelligence
evolved as a means of surviving and reproducing in large and complex social
groups (Dunbar 1998). The number of people living in a single group was con-
tinuously increasing, exceeding the size of groups of a family and of kin and also
the size of small bands of hunters and gatherers. Not only higher intelligence
became needed, but brain parts underpinning social emotions to function as a social
glue must have evolved. When the size of a social group was increasing, the
number of different relationships in the group grew up by orders of magnitude.
It appears useful to mention the old and well-known concept of the triune
brain, a model of vertebrate brain evolution originally formulated in the 1960s and
propounded at length in 1990 by the neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean (MacLean
1990). As shown schematically in Fig. 3, the triune brain consists of the reptilian
Fig. 3 The concept of a triune brain. It assumes that three complexes, the reptilian (roughly
corresponding to the brain stem), the paleomammalian (limbic system), and the neomammalian
(neocortex) complex were sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution
complex, roughly corresponding to the brain stem, the paleomammalian complex

(limbic system), and the neomammalian complex (neocortex), viewed as struc-
tures sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution. Even though
this hypothesis may be an oversimplification and appears to be no longer pro-
fessed by several neuroscientists, Panksepp in his book, Affective Neuroscience,
writes:
This three-layered conceptualization helps us grasp the overall function of higher brain
areas better than any other scheme yet devised. Of course, exceptions can be found to all
generalizations, and it must be kept in mind that the brain is a massively interconnected
organ whose every part can find an access pathway to any other part. Even though many
specialists have criticized the overall accuracy of the image of a “triune brain”, the con-
ceptualization provides a useful overview of mammalian brain organization above the
lower brain stem (Panksepp 1998).
The fact that cognitive abilities of other smart animals, such as of some birds,
may be linked to different structures than they are in the mammals, is not relevant to
this reasoning.
Psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the early 1930s ingeniously accorded “symbolic
activity a specific organizing function that penetrates the process of tool use and
produces fundamentally new forms of behaviour” (Vygotsky 1978). At the same
time, he was aware that humans continue to carry a primate brain, shared with our
nonhuman relatives. We can ask: how, then, could this primordial brain, not much
changed except for being three times larger than the brain of great apes, have
“absorbed” all the quick changes and novelties brought forth by cultural evolution
and accommodate to them? According to Dehaene such inventions are too recent
for natural selection to have dedicated specific brain mechanisms to them (Dehaene
2009). Dehaene admits that new cultural inventions can only be acquired insofar as
they fit the constraints of our brain architecture; he sees the brain is highly struc-
tured, but insists that it is also extremely flexible. He suggests that in order to
accommodate, the novelties coopt or “recycle” evolutionary older circuits with a
related function and thus enrich, without necessarily replacing, their domain of use.
Learning to read recruits a brain area originally engaged in object recognition. In
the case of mathematics, analogies between number and space play a crucial role in
the expansion of mathematical concepts. In accord with these considerations, Haidt
and Morris also assumed that our “higher” more cognitively complex and uniquely
human emotional abilities, such as elevation and admiration, are implemented by
reusing older systems, particularly systems involved in representing and managing
the body itself (Haidt and Morris 2009). And in a paper entitled “Neural Re-Use as
a Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain” Anderson reviewed the neural
reuse theories and stated that “neural circuits established for one purpose may be
exapted (exploited, recycled, redeployed) during evolution or normal development,
and put to different uses, often without losing their original functions” (Anderson
2010).
In this connection it seems appropriate to mention the famous parable of Simon’s
ant from Herbert Simon’s book, The Science of the Artificial (Simon 1996). An ant is
walking on the beach; its little brain motivates it to preserve its onticity by searching
for food. The ant tries to go in a straight line, but it can’t; the surface of the beach is
irregular, complex, full of obstacles. The ant zigs and zags to avoid rocks and twigs.
The point here is that the motivation of the animal, and its behavior, hard-wired in its
little brain, is not complex and might be accounted for by a few algorithms, but it was
the environment that was complex. Trying to simulate the path itself would be
difficult, but simulating behavior of the ant is easy. Applying the metaphor of the ant
to the human brain and to the human environment—which is ever less natural and
ever more artificial, a product of culture, consisting of ever more complex material
and abstract, symbolic human-made artifacts—we may say that the human brain
continues to be ruled by a limited number of conditional algorithms, “if… then”, just
as is the brain of other animals, and its evolutionary enlargement has mainly
increased its flexibility, its computing capacity, and the range of repertory of con-
ditions to which it can meaningfully respond.
In the preceding section, it was stated that culture means artifaction. However, a
complete definition of culture does render its dual character3: “Culture represents a
set of material and symbolic artifacts as they have evolved by a ratchet-like process.
But culture also stands out as a consistent and exhaustive set of specific cultural
significances that a human group attributes to the items of the world, in particular to
all the products of artifaction, in addition to the significances which are common to
all humans and imposed by their biology.” The character of significances, which
reflect beliefs, prejudices, and convictions, determines behavior of the individuals
and of the whole group. Each group has its own culture, which functions as an
intragroup glue and as a badge discriminating the group from alien groups.
And, once more, it is the capacity for culture, but not the product of culture, that
belongs to human biology. In common parlance, only symbolic artifacts are con-
sidered as part of culture, and the term “culture” is erroneously equated with the
term “art,” without enclosing all human-made artifacts into “culture.” In contem-
porary consumer societies, the number of material commodities is countless, and
may even surpass the number of all symbolic data that overflows the world. The
disastrous consequence of this error is the omission of science from the conception
of culture, although it is, in our days, its most essential one: science, independent
of art and philosophy, has progressed thanks to the evolutionary advancement of
artifacts and introduction of measurements and experimentation. The data of
measurement instruments enforced abandonment of beliefs and theories that had
been experimentally refuted. In this way, vague and deceptive beliefs could have
been replaced by justified convictions, which we commonly denote as pieces of
knowledge. It has been proposed to call the ratio between justified convictions and
other beliefs the epistemic quotient of culture (see Footnote 3). In this way, science
is an intercultural enterprise, vaulting over the group-specific differences and
favoring trends toward a global culture common to all humankind.
3
The list of publications by the author that are relevant to this book is available at the author’s web
page: http://www.biocenter.sk/lk.html.
To make the products of culture acceptable, and compatible with human biology,
predetermined gene interactions form specific configurations of the human central
nervous system, which are filled by data coming from the artificial environment of
culture. There are these specific configurations that transform the raw data into
information and assign meaning to them. In analogy to gene loci, these configu-
rations may be dubbed “cultural loci”. Just as a gene may have several alleles, of
which only one is active at a given time, a cultural locus may be occupied by one of
several alterative “cultural alleles” (Fig. 4). The term “meme”—a matter of
unceasing debates—would therefore describe such a cultural allele. The number of
cultural loci is limited and may be even smaller than the number of human genes.
But the number of cultural alleles that can alternatively occupy a cultural locus is
many orders of magnitude greater than is the number of gene alleles of a particular
gene locus. There is this arrangement that makes human culture universal (we all
share the same cultural loci) but at the same time specific to any human
groups: alternative cultural alleles (memes) confer the arrangement its uniqueness.
Because of the abstract nature of human genes—recall the indications in the section
on creative evolution that most genes may carry conditional commands, “if … then,
else default”—and also of the abstract nature of “cultural loci,” there are signals
coming from the environment of culture that determine the scope of human
“enculturation:” a contemporary human individual may behave as a brute equiva-
lent to our predecessors from the savannah or exhibit refined behavior imparted by
culture.
Exploiting the same primordial foundations, newcoming symbols have imposed
upon the human brain the “second signaling system” (as I.P. Pavlov called it) in
which symbols serve as “secondary reinforcers.” According to Montague, the
transition from a primary to a secondary reinforcer, from apple to click (and we may
Fig. 4 “Cultural loci” and alternative memes that could occupy them. A cultural locus may be
visualized as a predetermined mental state, a “symbolic slot,” which becomes concrete by being
filled in with a fitting “allele” from a given meme pool (With permission from EMBO Reports 7:
128–132, 2006)
add, referring to Pavlov, “to word”), goes in humans very far indeed, so that
“abstract ideas can come to provide more powerful reinforcement than do the things
that are needed for basic survival. A human can become, quite literally, a martyr for
an idea” (Montague 2006). But can also, as is amply argued in this book, become an
addict of one’s own craving for lust. What is called in psychology the “uncondi-
tioned stimulus” is a default, dictated by our biology. The “conditioned” one comes
from culture and may redirect the unconditional stimulus to induce response which
runs in conformity with the culture.
But the complexity of the environment in which humans have to live and thrive
does not consist only of the versatility of the material and symbolic artifacts it
comprises. The principal constituents of the complex environment in which a single
human person has to live, are other humans.
5 Hypersocial Animal
As has been pointed out, the coevolution of hand and brain equipped humans with
the capacity of thinking, that is, of moving things and oneself in imagination here
and there and back and forth. In contrast to other animals, whose life appears to be
the “eternal present,” humans live in time. Living in time means to record the
succession of events and to appreciate causal connections between them. Lewis
Wolpert supposed that causal beliefs emerged from tool use: the manufacture of
complex tools requires creating a mental image of an object that does not exist
naturally before actually making the artifact. Use of tools composed of more than
one component, such as hand axes, implies an ability to understand cause and
effect. Thinking enabled seeing causes of one’s own behavior but also to anticipate
causality in actions of other people in one´s surroundings (Wolpert 2006).
Thus, to think also equals to reason. Recall the ontic principle, “Everything that
is, is, and it is as long as it keeps its identity, that is, its onticity,” as well as
Spinoza’s metaphoric statement that “Each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to
persevere in its being,” and the argument from biology that living beings strive to
maintain their onticity actively and by all means. Self-preservation, onticity, is the
ultimate utility and main self-interest of an organism, its main goal. In the specific
case of humans, reasoning should serve this goal most effectively. Accordingly,
individual humans should be most self-centered animals. In 1975, biologist E.O.
Wilson in his monumental book, Sociobiology, in which he lay down the foun-
dations of this new discipline, defined selfishness as “behaviour that benefits the
individual in terms of genetic fitness at the expense of the genetic fitness of other
members of the same species” (Wilson 1975). Wilson contrasted selfishness with
altruism, which, according to his definition, is “self-destructive behaviour per-
formed for the benefit of others.” (It is shown later that the term “selfishness”
should also be distinguished from a different and independent term: “self-interest”.)
In this classical book, Wilson took pains to show that individuals that exhibit
self-destructive behavior, such as bee workers protecting their hive, are not
altruistic, but in fact selfish, serving the interest of the genes they got from their
common mother and share with the brood. He referred to the “inclusive fitness
theory” of Williams D. Hamilton and defined biological species that exhibit such
seeming altruism as eusocial. Wilson founded a new branch of science, sociobi-
ology, on the inclusive fitness theory and, albeit with some caution, applied it to the
human species as well.
As time progressed, there have been endless discussions on the validity of the
“inclusive fitness theory” and on the relationships between selfishness and altruism.
The contentions have been characterized as “unended knights’ tournaments” and
compared to the tournaments of medieval knights: fierce, but fair (see Footnote 3).
In addition to philosophical speculations and mathematical theorizing, much
empirical data accumulated, in particular in molecular biology and microbiology.
E. O. Wilson himself concluded that the data shattered the very foundation of his
original sociobiology. In his latest book from 2013, The Social Conquest of Earth,
he presented arguments that not only bees, ants, termites, or naked mole rats, but
also humans may be considered as an eusocial species (Wilson 2013). Not in the
traditional meaning of the word, as “forming societies in which sterile castes of
workers defend one or a few reproductive individuals,” but rather in a broader one,
of which Wilson wrote in his original 1975 book (Wilson 1975): ‘Eusocial’ is the
formal equivalent of the expressions ‘truly social’ or ‘higher social’, which are
commonly used with less exact meaning in the study of social insects. Eusocial
animals must live in multigenerational communities, practice division of labour and
behave altruistically, ready to sacrifice at least some of their personal interests to
that of the group.”
Before Wilson, Foster and Ratnieks applied the term “eusocial vertebrate” to
humans, but with a question mark (Foster and Ratnieks 2005) and other scholars
called humans “hyper-” or “ultra-social” (Campbell 1983). How and why did art-
ifaction make us hypersocial? Even manufacturing a simple tool, such as a stone
axe, people may have needed to cooperate. A person may seek for the stone,
another one to work it, and still another to show how to use the product most
effectively. In addition, a producer of a stone axe may exchange it for a stone knife
made by another person. And, most important, the use of artifacts, such as for
protecting from predators and for provision of food, has also been a collective affair.
In creating artifacts and using them, people were in daily contact with each other.
The behavior of an individual was determined by his or her inner impulses, by
intricacies of the environment, including the artifacts themselves, but most
important, by behaviors of other human partners which all were linked in mutual
relationships. For a human actor, other humans represented incessantly moving
targets. This, obviously, amplified the need of causal reasoning and thus placed
growing exigencies on efficiency of the brain. In an imposing book, I, Pencil,
Leonardo E. Read showed how such a simple artifact of our time as a pencil, “a
complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on,” arose
from collaborative efforts of “millions of human beings” who “have had a hand” in
its creation, “no one whom even knows than a very few of others” (Read 1958).
Continual interactions, full anonymity, no kinship, and no sharing genes are
5 Hypersocial Animal 51
involved. Selfishness, selflessness, altruism, symbiosis, mutual benefit,

self-assertion, self-sacrifice? All and none. A result of different causes, different
motivations, different intentions, linked in a complex network, cooperation of
millions of subjects, a truly collective accomplishment.
Jumping from prehistoric to modern times, how was it between? The early
cooperation took place in small groups. First, obviously, within the nuclear family.
A single family would have little chance to survive, and so families associated to
form groups of hunters and gatherers. They all were of “biological dimensions,” or
simply “naturfacts.” Perfecting of the hand and conjoint enlargement of the brain
enabled construction of ever more complicated material artifacts and smooth
transition to symbolic artifacts.
Paradoxically, we can infer the origin of symbolic artifacts from the traces they
left in material artifacts. Living in time must have engendered the idea of the mind
as a soul, an entity separable from the body, and as the body appeared perishable,
the essential biological urge for self-preservation naturally induced the belief in
preservation of the self as soul. Accordingly, religion, and all behaviors associated
with it, may be considered as a first manifestation of the emergence of symboli-
zation. Incidentally, Wolpert has applied his assumption that causal reasoning was
important for manufacturing complex tools to the explanation of the origin of
religion (Wolpert 2006).
Nonhuman animals, including our closest relatives, chimpanzees, display only a
casual interest in the dead of their own species. The ritual treatment of the dead may
be taken as the earliest evidence of religion. Graves as material artifacts, and other
things, natural as well as artificial, found near the dead, provide testimony about the
existence of religion. The earliest known burial of human remains has been dated to
100,000 years ago. We may place in the same period the origin of art, in particular
of painting. There seems to be a general agreement that painted natural objects on
the paintings found in old caves should have been symbols for supernatural
immaterial beings and paintings themselves may have been part of religious rituals.
We should keep in mind that 98 % of the “age of human artifaction” has
occupied the era called the Paleolithic, the Stone Age: the period of human pre-
history during which the only material from which humans made artifacts were
stones. It roughly corresponds to the geological Pleistocene epoch (it lasted from
2.6 million years ago to about 12,000 years ago). The transition out of the Stone
Age occurred only between the fifth and the sixth millennium B.C.E. According to
the doctrine of evolutionary psychology, our brains were molded by natural
selection essentially in the Pleistocene to solve problems that our ancestors faced as
hunters and gatherers (Cosmides and Tooby 1997). The doctrine supposes that the
human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational
modules, such as for spatial perception, face recognition, tool use, mate attraction
and retention, parental care, language, and a variety of social relations (Minsky
1986). These psychological adaptations constitute a “universal human nature.”
Cosmides and Tooby posited that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind”
(Cosmides and Tooby 1997). However, as was argued in the previous section, the
exigencies of modern times must have been continuously enforcing rewiring of the
circuits, which had been assembled during the Stone Age, to allow adaptation to
brand-new situations.
It seems that the size of human groups has not changed in the course of the long
Pleistocene period. The number of individuals in bands of hunters and gatherers
may have been 10–100 persons. It was during this long time of ten thousand to
hundreds of thousands of years that humans evolved as eusocial animals living in
relatively small groups and the human mind became a “groupish mind” compelling
an individual to collaborate with members of his own group to avoid, be afraid of,
or aggressively attack members of alien groups. Only when the way of living
started to change after the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years B.C.E. ago,
new types of social organization set in, tribes, consisting of 100–1000 individuals.
(It is, therefore, erroneous to use the term “the tribal mind” instead of “the groupish
mind” and assign to humans a specific trait of “tribalism”.) In 5000–3000 years
tribes became chiefdoms with 1000–10,000 members, followed by in 3000–
1000 years by states with 10,000–100,000 members and eventually, in 2000 years
B.C.E. up to the present with empires consisting of more than 100,000 members
(Diamond 1997). Cultures in the ancient Near East (often called “the cradle of
civilization”) practiced intensive year-round agriculture, developed a writing sys-
tem, invented the potter’s wheel, created a centralized government, law codes, and
introduced social stratification, slavery and organized warfare.
Symbolization enabled transition from biological kinship that must have been
instrumental in groups of hunters and gatherers to “symbolic kinship” encom-
passing, along with people who may have been biologically related, anonymous
people with no consanguinity. Symbols, in the form of shared religions and ide-
ologies became social glues that held the large organizations as tightly coherent
groups united by common fate, values, and goals. The original religion in bands and
tribes did not serve to justify a central authority, and to give substance to transfer
wealth or to maintain peace between unrelated individuals. But later, organized
religion emerged as a means of providing social and economic stability through
justifying the central authority, which in turn possessed the right to collect taxes in
return for providing social and security services. Religions revolved around mor-
alizing gods facilitated the rise of large cooperative groups of unrelated individuals
(Rossano 2006).
Collaborating groups, “over-biological”, extended beyond the original natural
size, can be conceived as a special kind of artifact, at first, just a type of material
artifact, but later assuming also, in combination with other social institutions, such
as law, religion, moral, art, and politics, symbolic character. Conceptual knowledge,
technical skills, and works of science and art represented collective benefit and their
production and dissemination have been shared. Institutions are collective enter-
prises and serve to foster cooperation. They are also the main instruments for
transferring knowledge, skill, and experience from one generation to a following
one. Not only the material artifacts themselves, but ever more symbolic artifacts
stored evolutionary acquired knowledge. Until very recently, institutions also had
an important function to prevent, punish, and eliminate defectors or free riders,
people who benefit from work of cooperation of others, but do not contribute
5 Hypersocial Animal 53
themselves. Shared symbols, values, and goals also favored selective assortments of
similar individuals, which has been recently considered as a universal mechanism
that promoted the evolution of cooperation and altruism (Jeffrey et al. 2009).
E.O. Wilson, who originally, as a founder of sociobiology, used the inclusive
fitness theory as an explanation of biological altruism, in his 2013 book, The Social
Conquest of Earth, presented his new view of how altruism evolved (Wilson 2013).
He based his reasoning on “multilevel selection theory.” He seems to leave unno-
ticed artifaction as a formative force. When human ancestors began establishing
home-bases at which they raised their young and near which they hunted and
gathered food, environmental pressures selected for traits that drew group members
into cooperation within their group but also to compete with other groups for
resources. The true altruism within the group contrasted with hostility toward other
groups and the “struggle for life” at this higher level of selection. We can replace
Wilson’s original term “tribalism” with the term “groupishness” to characterize deep
solidarity and cohesion inside a group, and mistrust, contempt, and hate for members
of out-groups. “Inclusive fitness” played a role in the primordial groups but was
largely diluted or absent in larger groups. In Wilson’s understanding, intergroup
selection was responsible for the evolution of all human virtues, such as honor, duty,
industry, and altruism toward members of one’s own group, whereas intragroup
selection made individuals vicious: selfish, cowardly, jealous, hypocritical,
deceiving, and self-deceiving. According to Wilson, a human individual is torn
between selfishness and selflessness, virtue and vice, subjected to two impulses,
which originated in selection at different levels of evolutionary hierarchy, but acted
on the same individuals and largely in opposition to each other: one pushing toward
“good”, and the other toward “evil”. This inner tension seems to be the main source
of human frustration and inconsistency. Philosophers, fiction writers, and artists in
general have accumulated a wealth of examples to illustrate that human beings are
contradictory animals that lack inner consistency. E.O. Wilson is one of those
scholars who give scientific backing to these testimonies.
Wilson rightly highlighted self-deceiving as an imposing human trait. His point
has been elaborated in detail by Robert Trivers who even more stressed the fact that
if we want to deceive somebody else the best way would be to deceive oneself first
(Trivers 2011). Yet, no less effective is another function of self-deception: to
smooth the difference between the coexistence of “angel” and “demon” in oneself
and to comfort oneself with an illusion of self-consistency and integrity.
Wilson in his book on the social conquest of earth also characterized, concurring
with the above-mentioned expression of psychologists Cosmides and Tooby, con-
temporary humanity as a “Star Wars civilization with stone-age emotions, medieval
institutions and god-like technology” (Cosmides and Tooby 1997). He is aware that
the two antagonistic impulses that drive humans have strong emotional underpin-
ning. Yet he continues to declare his allegiance to the Enlightenment tradition. His
rejection of the fundamental tenets of his original sociobiology notwithstanding—
and, incidentally, his revision should be praised as an example of intellectual honesty
of a scientist—he continues to proclaim his adherence to the Enlightenment heritage
of trust in the unlimited evolutionary potential of human reason. The book ends with
a prediction typical of all his previous writings: “Earth, by the twenty-second cen-
tury, can be turned, if we so wish, into a permanent paradise for human beings, or at
least the strong beginnings of one. […] out of an ethic of simple decency to one
another, the unrelenting application of reason, and acceptance of what we truly are,
our dreams will finally come home to stay” (Wilson 2013).
The absolutely central position of emotions in human evolution, in human hy-
persociality, and in human fate may have escaped E.O. Wilson and the majority of
other scientists.
6 Driving Force: Emotions
Emotions are the driving force of life. Charles Darwin complemented his book on
the descent of man from 1871 with another one, issued in 1872 and entitled The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and concluded that the similarity
in the expression of emotions among disparate animal species corroborates his
evolutionary theory. He speculated that the emotions must be key to the survival of
the fittest and has little doubt that human reasoning comprises emotions as insep-
arable constituents. This view was disregarded in philosophy and science for
decades and only quite recently an “affective revolution” in cognitive sciences has
changed the perspective. As psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it,
“Cognition refers to a language for describing all the brain operations, including
emotions and reasoning” (Cosmides and Tooby 2000). One of the protagonists of
the “affective revolution,” neurologist Antonio Damasio in one of his books,
symptomatically entitled, Descartes’ Error, did away with the body–soul dualism
of René Descartes (1596–1650) and his claim that, in contrast to all other animals,
only humans have the capacity for pure thought which is an incorporeal entity free
from natural impulses and passions (Damasio 1995).
This view largely persisted in Western philosophy till Darwin and may have
served as a basis for the philosophy of the Enlightenment of continental Europe in
the eighteenth century. Ever since, emotions were typically depicted as disruptive
and hindering, to be mastered by a cool and deliberate reason. It is shown later that
such descriptions continue to contaminate rationalist philosophers and some biol-
ogists alike even 150 years after Darwin. Even today we can encounter claims that
“passions” are troublesome remnants from humanity’s savage past, and the intel-
lectual subjugation of emotion is civilization’s triumph. In contrast to Descartes,
Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), a century after Descartes and a
century before Darwin, put it clearly that “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave
of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them” (Hume 2003).
Emotions are inseparable not only from reason, but generally from life as such.
They have been defined as “the singular normative device that attributes meaning to
things and actions in the world. They serve as a universal dichotomist qualifier;
classifying data, received by sensors, as ‘good’—beneficial, or ‘bad’—noxious.
6 Driving Force: Emotions 55
They induce an organism to actively seek beneficial stimuli as ‘rewards’ or actively

evade noxious stimuli to avoid ‘punishment’” (see Footnote 3). According to
Canadian neurobiologist Peter Shizgal, emotions play a role in the “calculation of
utility;” they set preferences (Shizgal 1997). The term “utility”, as he uses it, has the
same meaning as it has had, until very recently, in contemporary economics and
decision theory: an organism is a rational consumer that will prefer different
“commodities” that ultimately serve its Darwinian fitness. We might call the utility
that serves Darwinian fitness the “Darwinian utility.” Emotions also function as
“commitment devices”; they commit an individual organism to behave consistently
with previous experiences, running counter to speciously attractive immediate
rewards (Frank 1988). Emotions enable learning: the frequency of an appropriate
behavior is increased by positive reinforcement and the frequency of an opposite,
inappropriate behavior is decreased by punishment.
The universality of emotional evaluation gives support to a thesis of philosopher
Marián Váross that at all levels of life, “In order to satisfy vital needs […] eval-
uation is the primary and cognition the secondary phenomenon” (Váross 1970). We
may add that once an organism is able to respond to its environment adaptively by
learning, it needs both sensors to measure the state of its environment and emotions
as more general situation detectors. And this applies to simple organisms without
brains just as well as to animals equipped with brains of whatever complexity. We
have to see the human brain no longer as a computing rational autocrat, plagued by
emotional hindrance to its rational choices, but as a dynamical chemical system that
relays data coming from the phylogenetic memory (the genome), ontogenetic
memory, and from sensors of the actual states of the body and of the external
environment (Freeman 2000). The global dynamics of the brain is subjected to
arbitration by emotions as supreme decision makers. We apply an “emotionary
metric” on the world. A brain creates patterns by commanding actions of the body
on the environment to achieve a consistent interpretation of the world, and modify
the patterns according to the sensory feedback from the environment. In the
description of life functioning, the unidirectional binominal causal chain of the
obsolete standard behaviorism “stimulus–response” should be replaced by a
reversible trinominal causal spiral “sensing–evaluating–acting.”
It is essential to recognize that simple organisms are not aware of their own
emotions. We do not know yet whether this may be said of emotions in higher
animals. As Joe LeDoux emphasized, “Caution should be exercised when
attempting to discuss other aspects of emotion, namely subjective feelings, in
animals since there are no scientific ways of verifying and measuring such states
except in humans” (LeDoux 2012). As yet, we simply lack appropriate techniques
that would allow us to answer the famous question posed by philosopher Thomas
Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” (Nagel 1974). In the meantime, we may
speculate that as the evolution of animals was progressing, some of them may have
started to be dimly conscious that “This is red” or “This is painful,” but without a
personal consciousness of “I see red” and “I feel pain.” Qualities such as “redness”
and “painfullness” have been designated by psychologists as “qualia” (or “quale” in
the singular). We can define consciousness as the ability to experience sensory and
emotional qualia. A very important quale, if not the most important, is the expe-
rience of one’s own body, mediated by interoceptors. As theologian and anthro-
pologist Pierre Theilhard de Chardin put it, “No doubt, an animal knows. But it
certainly does not know that it knows. […] A gulf—or a threshold—insurmount-
able for it divides us” (Theilhard de Chardin 1955).
A human individual is not only conscious; she is conscious of her own con-
sciousness. Humans are apparently the only living species endowed with self-
consciousness (Rochat 2003). According to Gazzaniga, “The ability to step outside
of ourselves—to view the world and us in it from arbitrarily abstract perspectives—
does indeed seem to be uniquely human” (Gazzaniga 2009). Human
self-consciousness changes a considerable part of emotions into feelings, that is,
self-conscious emotions.
A human individual feels a “bad” or negative emotion as his own pain and a
“good” or positive emotion as his own pleasure. Thus, the awareness that a par-
ticular emotion is “my own emotion” is an important, and possibly constituent, part
of self-consciousness. “Human conscious experience of pleasure is different not
only quantitatively but also qualitatively from other animals, depending on the
uniqueness of human cortical mechanisms involved in the conversion into con-
sciousness” (Kringelbach and Berridge 2009). The same apparently applies to pain
(Craig 2004).
In humans, as in other animals, the two kinds of emotion—positive and
negative—have specific locations in the brain. Positive emotions, marking the
“good,” are associated with the “centers of reward” and negative emotions, marking
the “bad,” with the “centers of punishment.” Olds and Milner first identified sites in
the rat brain in which direct electrical stimulation triggered positive reinforcement
and reward (Olds and Milner 1954). However, it would be misleading to call the
reward centers of nonhuman brains the “pleasure centers” or to claim that animals
“seek pleasure” or that pleasure functions as a “common currency.”
Many of these sites were subsequently linked through a common neural pathway
in the limbic system, the medial forebrain bundle, as it courses to the ventral
tegmentum area and the nucleus accumbens (Bozarth 1994) (Fig. 5). Other brain
reward spots, in particular those comprised of the cortical regions and subcortical
nuclei, might eventually converge at this limbic core site (Shizgal 1997;
Kringelbach and Berridge 2009). The brain “punishment” centers might have
evolved from a primitive brain system responsible for body health, in particular
physical damage (Craig 2004). But with respect to emotions, the brain should be
seen as an integral whole.
Contemporary neuroscientists still refer to old philosophers, such as Aristotle,
Spinoza, Descartes, and Bentham, who hypothesized that pleasure and pain are part
of a continuum. Many neuroscientists compare or even define pleasure as a form of
alleviation of pain: human beings will move toward something that causes pleasure
and will move away from something that causes pain. Kringelbach and Berridge
suggested that this relationship between pain and pleasure would be evolutionarily
efficient, because it was necessary to know whether to avoid or approach something
for survival and therefore there is a continuous transition between pleasure and
6 Driving Force: Emotions 57
Fig. 5 Pleasure and pain in the brain. The main sites involved in experiencing pleasure are located
in the limbic system and include the nucleus accumbens, the striatum, the ventral tegmentum area,
and the medial forebrain bundle. Other brain reward spots, in particular those comprised of the
cortical regions and subcortical nuclei, might eventually converge at this limbic core site. Separate
parts of the same regions of the brain may be involved in processing both pleasure and pain. The
question whether pain and pleasure are two extremities of the same continuum or separate and
independent entities still awaits a definite answer
pain: an increase in pain should bring about a decrease in pleasure (Kringelbach and
Berridge 2009; Berridge and Kringelbach 2008). Leknes and Tracey concluded that
pain and reward processing involve many of the same regions of the brain (Leknes
and Tracey 2008).
It is amazing that the question, which is already implicit in writings of Aristotle
2300 years ago, whether pain and pleasure are two extremities of the same con-
tinuum or separate and independent entities, so essential for the concept of human
well-being, still awaits a definite reply from contemporary neuroscience.
7 Feelings and Meaning
Self-consciousness should be understood as the culmination of the enlargement of

the brain in the course of human evolution, and in particular the disproportional
increase of its youngest part, the neocortex, as a response to the demands of the ever
“handier” hand and to versatility of social interactions. The neocortex is involved in
higher functions such as sensory perception; generation of motor commands;
thinking as virtual motor manipulation with the inner and external environments;
spatial reasoning; and partial voluntary control of expression of emotions and
anticipatory evading, delaying, or virtualizing their commands (Lui et al. 2011). The
human brain, with the dominating neocortex perched on top of the older strata of our
central nervous system, is the supreme example of life’s tinkering, “a sort of
installation of a jet engine on an ancient horse cart” (Jacob 1977). There are the
incessant flows of data between the evolutionarily older parts of the brain, common to
all vertebrates and the human neocortex that enables the conscious feeling of “bad”
emotions as pain and of “good” emotions as pleasure. The neocortex is more
involved in the “calculation of utility” as a sort of computer, whereas the “older parts”
are more chemical and with their products, which we may call “emotones” (with
hormones as a subset of the set), adjust not only the brain but the body as a whole.
We get a picture of the human brain as the organ by which we experience the
world; that is, we feel pain and pleasure, we yearn, and in order to find out how to
minimize pain and maximize pleasure, we think. In the words of neurobiologist Eric
Kandel: “The first step in generation of emotions in humans is represented by
unconscious, implicit evaluation of a stimulus, followed by physiological responses,
and the second step is a conscious experience that may or may not persist…” (Kandel
2006).
As already mentioned, psychologist Lev Vygotsky surmised that symbolizing
activity erected fundamentally new forms of behavior on ancient foundations
(Vygotsky 1978). Humans had collaborated in manufacturing material artifacts and
started to collaborate even more under the pressure of symbolic artifacts, such as
religion and institutions. Language is an utter social organ and it could hardly
evolve by selection at the individual level. Language does not fossilize like bones
and we have no “fossils” that would help us to reconstruct the phylogeny of
language. Instead, tentatively assuming that ontogenesis of mind may be a chro-
nologically condensed mind’s phylogenesis, Vygotsky used the ontogeny of the
contemporaneous child’s mind to trace a possible evolutionary origin of language
and thought. Language starts as a tool external to the newborn child and is used for
social interaction. The child guides its personal behavior by using this tool in a kind
of self-talk or “thinking out loud.” Gradually, self-talk is used more as a tool for
self-directed and self-regulating behavior. In the end, it becomes inner speech.
Hence, Vygotsky concluded that thinking itself evolved socially (Vygotsky 1978).
By implication, self-consciousness, which is not a collective trait but a private
experience of a single human being, must also have a social origin.
Vygotsky’s scenario from the early 1930s may have earned support by the
discovery of mirror neurons in the late 1990s by Giacommo Rizzolatii and his
colleagues. Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that modulate their activity both
when an individual executes a specific motor act and when they observe the same or
similar act performed by another individual. As Kilner and Lemon wrote in a recent
review on the subject,
The discovery of mirror neurons was exciting because it has led to a new way of thinking
about how we generate our own actions and how we monitor and interpret the actions of
others. This discovery prompted the notion that, from a functional viewpoint, action exe-
cution and observation are closely-related processes, and indeed that our ability to interpret
the actions of others requires the involvement of our own motor system (Kilner and Lemon
2013).
It would mean that we are putting ourselves in another’s shoes as we observe an

action.
7 Feelings and Meaning 59
The discovery has inspired neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran to claim that

“Mirror neurons […] lie at the heart of our ability to adopt each other’s point of
view and empathize with one another. Human mirror neurons achieve a level of
sophistication that far surpasses that of any lower primate, and appear to be the
evolutionary key of our attainment of full-fledged culture” (Ramachandran 2011).
In his book he named the chapter describing the mirror neurons “The Neurons That
Shaped Civilization.” Ramachandran speculated that mirror neurons may provide
the neurological basis of human self-consciousness: mirror neurons can not only
help simulate other people’s behavior but can be turned inward to create
second-order representations or meta-representations of earlier brain processes of an
individual subject. He supposed that this “could be the neural basis of introspection,
and of the reciprocity of self awareness and other awareness” (Ramachandran
2011). Accordingly, self-consciousness and consciousness of others coevolved.
Self-consciousness may, in fact, mean seeing oneself from another person’s
viewpoint. These two-way views make us able to impute motives, intentions,
culpability, and the like not only to humans but also to nonhuman beings, and even
to inanimate objects or situations, and was, in fact, at the origins of religion.
An extreme view of the role of society in creating consciousness was provided in
1976 by psychologist Julian Jaynes in his book, The Origins of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: consciousness was invented by the ancient
Greeks between 1400 and 600 B.C.E. (Jaynes 1976). He argued that there was a
dramatic appearance of introspection in large parts of The Odyssey, as compared
with large parts of The Iliad, which he claimed were composed at least a hundred
years earlier.
At variance with the notion of the social origin of self-consciousness and of the
self, neurologist Antonio Damasio in his book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing
the Conscious Brain, wrote: “Even single-celled organisms such as bacteria or
amoebae have a minimal sense of self, working to preserve their internal integrity
against foreign incursion” (Damasio 2010). They also show primitive emotions,
moving away from noxious stimuli and toward food sources. In a human individual,
emotions—mere bodily responses and expressions—are “felt” by personal con-
sciousness and become feelings. The self is a center around which societies,
technologies, art, and literature arise.
The problem of consciousness is closely related to the concept of panpsychism,
which according to the description by Christof Koch is the belief that everything is
“enminded”: whether it is a brain, a tree, a rock, or an electron. Koch as a neu-
robiologist defends a narrowed, more nuanced view of panpsychism: any complex
system, defined in some universal mathematical manner has the basic attributes of
mind and has a minimal amount of consciousness in the sense that it feels like
something to be that system (Koch 2012). He refers to the conceptual framework of
the integrated information theory (IIT) of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi: conscious
experience is a fundamental aspect of reality and is identical to a particular type of
information: integrated information. Consciousness is a quantity and can be
expressed in bits; it depends on a physical substrate but is not reducible to it. “My
experience of seeing an aquamarine blue is inexorably linked to my brain but is
different from my brain.” Not all physical objects have a consciousness, only
integrated systems do. A bunch of disconnected neurons in a dish, a heap of sand, a
galaxy of stars or a black hole, none of them are integrated. They have no con-
sciousness. They do not have mental properties. But, on the other hand, computers
have elementary consciousness and may soon exhibit full-fledged consciousness
(Koch 2012).
A biological panpsychism has also been defended by plant biologists Trewavas
and Baluška who cited with agreement the claim of the late biologist Lynn
Margulis: “Not just animals are conscious but every organized being is conscious.
In the simplest sense, consciousness is an awareness (has knowledge) of the outside
world.” They argued: “Plant behaviour is active, purpose-driven and intentional. In
its capability for self-recognition and problem-solving, similarly to the other
organisms described in this article, it is thus adaptive, intelligent and cognitive”
(Trewavas and Baluška 2011).
Panpsychism may have some aesthetic appeal but its heuristic value, that is, to
promote the progress of neuroscientific knowledge, appears dubious. Another
matter is its ethical implications: if animals, and for that matter, plants and bacteria
(and pretty soon our computers) were conscious of their pain and suffering, would
they not deserve our compassion and respect and should they not aspire to their
rights commensurable with human rights? Furthermore, as life is cognition and
evolution is the evolution of knowledge, if we assign to humans 100 % of con-
sciousness, have chimpanzees 80 %, mice 2 %, fruit flies 0.01 %, and yeast
0.000001 % of consciousness? (Kováč 2000). To eschew a labyrinth of contro-
versies we have to take into account the fact that in the case of life we are dealing
with chemical systems that abound in emergencies and admit that consciousness is
one of such emergencies.
And again, we lack so far any means to find out whether the nature of con-
sciousness is “all or none” or whether it evolved in a step-by-step manner. In the
situation of uncertainty, a reasonable attitude appears to be a pragmatic one: if an
animal runs away from an object that damages its body, it reacts precisely as we
would do; if we are not sure whether the animal is aware of the pain that accom-
panies the damage as we would do, it is reasonable to assume that the animal feels
pain. We should observe Erwin Jaynes’ “honesty of inference”: we should not
claim more than we know (Jaynes 2003). We embrace the precautionary principle:
we would take care not to expose the animal to the damaging environment. Our
dilemma resembles the well-known Pascal’s wager: suppose we bet for the exis-
tence of God, assuming that the probability of God’s existence is one-half. If you
win the wager, you gain all; if you lose it, you lose nothing.
As Bernard Baars wisely commented, “If we can literally see the pain we inflict
upon animals on babies and perhaps foetuses and each other, the dilemma can no
longer be rationalized or evaded. That may not make life easier, but it makes it more
honest, Ultimately, consciousness is a piece of reality, and by and large, we are
better trying to understand it than to evade it” (Baars 2003).
Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, an expert in the empirical study of con-
sciousness, developed computational models of consciousness, based on Baars’s
7 Feelings and Meaning 61
global workspace theory, which suggests that only one piece of information can
gain access to a “global neuronal workspace.” According to Dehaene and
Naccache, consciousness is required for some specific cognitive tasks, such as
novel combinations of operations, or the spontaneous generation of intentional
behavior (Dehaene and Naccache 2001). From millions of mental representations
that constantly crisscross our brains in an unconscious manner, one is selected
because of its relevance to the present, dictated by a corresponding emotion.
Attention is a prerequisite of consciousness. The framework of the global neuronal
workspace postulates that at any given time many modular cerebral networks are
active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. Information
becomes conscious, however,
… if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down attentional ampli-
fication into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed
throughout the brain. The long-distance connectivity of these “workspace neurons” can,
when they are active for a minimal duration, make the information available to a variety of
processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and
intentional action (Dehaene and Naccache 2001).
It is this global availability of information through the workspace that we sub-

jectively experience as a conscious state.
Dehaene with coworkers found by brain scanning that information which
reaches “conscious awareness” (their term!) is associated with an increase in
activity at the sensory level, the specific involvement of a frontoparietal network,
and an increase in long-distance functional connectivity and synchrony within a
broad network of areas (Dehaene 2009). The global neuronal workspace model
proposes that the neural basis of conscious access is a sudden self-amplifying
process leading to a global brain-scale pattern of activity. In contradiction to several
theories which assume that there is a continuum of perception, associated with a
gradual change in the intensity of brain activation, the model predicts a sharp
nonlinear transition between nonconscious and conscious processing.
It appears crucial to highlight the difference between the notions of conscious-
ness and awareness. Some neuroscientists take the two words as synonyms and use
them casually as alternatives. Consciousness should be understood quite generally
as a capacity to experience qualia, whereas awareness applies to a concrete situ-
ation, here and now. It is “awareness” that corresponds to Dehaene’s and Baars’
notion of “consciousness.” Even in the human brain, the great majority of data
processing proceeds unconsciously. Human consciousness is but a “monomolecular
layer” of the immense ocean of the unconscious. Also, a main part of all human
emotions may never enter consciousness. Unconscious emotions influence people’s
preferences and can influence behavior, despite the absence of subjective feelings
(Winkielman and Berridge 2004). Indeed, the “immense ocean” of our unconscious
emotions might substantially determine why we are champions of self-deception
(Trivers 2011) and why, as ethologist Konrad Lorenz used to say, “to believe in a
sheer nonsense is a privilege of man” (as related by Riedl 1981).
It is shown later that it is the availability of energy that allows the conscious
process to run only as a linear sequence of mental instances. Conscious processing
is sequential, whereas unconscious processing is massively parallel. We may use a
metaphor: consciousness functions in the brain as a searchlight incessantly scanning
the dark of the unconscious to find a target designated by emotions. Once the target
is spotted, the searchlight stops and subsequently, to apply another metaphor, the
mind projects one image after another on the screen of awareness, making a
coherent story of them. Past memories and future plans function as targets just as
well as stimuli coming from the actual environment. The plot projected on the
screen is reality, a model of the world carrying meaning and consistency.
Reality as a model is much simpler than the real world. Consciousness, by virtue
of being a searchlight, cuts out at any moment but a small slice of the world. It has
been argued that human causal reasoning is limited by the “magical number three”:
the average number of causes a conscious human individual can offer to account for
an event may be just three: the human mind is not able to see a full causal net in
which any concrete event is embedded (see Footnote 3).
The emergence of self-consciousness and with it the capacity to experience
emotions consciously as feelings brought humankind to an evolutionary crossroad:
the evolution of emotions got independence from the other forms and became
emotional evolution.
8 Runaway of Emotional Evolution: Hedonotaxis
If consciousness emerged as an unavoidable phase transition in evolution, does it

have any survival value at all? It is a long-held notion of evolutionary theory that
every aspect of behavior has an adaptive purpose, making the organism that
exhibits it more fit for survival. Philosophers have discussed the possibility of the
existence of the philosophical “zombie,” a hypothetical being that behaves in a
manner indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious
experience, qualia. A philosophical zombie exposed to a “bad” stimulus that would
cause pain in a conscious human recoils from the stimulus and tells us that it feels
pain and we would not be able to see a difference between the zombie and a
conscious human. As philosopher David Chalmer argued in 1996, one can coher-
ently conceive of an entire zombie world, a world physically indistinguishable from
this world but entirely lacking conscious experience (Chalmers 1996). We can add
now to this argument that this may apply to two systems that are physically
indistinguishable from each other. But life is a chemical system and we should
assume that a system chemically indistinguishable from the human brain, embodied
in a human body and embedded in a human social environment, cannot function as
a zombie. This also implies that a model of the human brain, implemented on an
electronic computer, even if as complex as the brain itself, may indeed exist and
work as a zombie. In 1874 Darwin’s contemporary Thomas Henry Huxley pre-
sented a theory according to which consciousness is a causally inert effect of neural
8 Runaway of Emotional Evolution: Hedonotaxis 63
activity, an epiphenomenon, similar to the “the steam-whistle which accompanies

the work of a locomotive engine” without having any “influence upon its
machinery.”
From the neuroscientists discussed in the previous section, Dehaene and
Naccache proposed that the evolutionary advantages of consciousness afford an
increased independence, freeing the organism from its immediate environment:
“The more an organism can rely on mental simulation and internal evaluation to
select a course of action, instead of acting out in the open world, the lower are the
risks and the expenditure of energy” (Dehaene and Naccache 2001). And for
Damasio,
The drama of the human condition comes solely from consciousness. Of course, con-
sciousness and its revelations allow us to create a better life […] but the price we pay for
that better life is high. It is not just the price of risk and danger and pain. It is the price of
knowing risk, danger, and pain. Worse even: it is the price of knowing what pleasure is and
knowing when it is missing or unattainable (Damasio 1999).
The main adaptive value of consciousness, once it emerged, must have been in
allowing a subject to simulate actions and their consequences mentally, particularly
in an uncertain or dangerous environment, without necessarily being exposed to
threats and attacks of the environment itself. Simulation enables humans to “live in
time,” recalling the past and imagining the future. Without consciousness there
would be no thinking, no symbolization, no metaphors; and, most important, no
conscious experience of emotions in the form of feelings. Emotions served
Darwinian fitness and so must have served feelings at the dawn of consciousness.
Experiencing feeling as conscious emotions started to amplify the urge to escape
“bad” emotions. Avoiding damage became the prime concern of our ancestors; and
“pain” along with “fear” were possibly two first constituting feelings.
Consciousness, driven by these “negative” feelings to expand and intensify, took
over and amplified the urge to experience “good” emotions: a joy upon escaping
attack and damage and a pleasurable overshoot that follows negative sensations.
Eventually, “pleasure” became the feeling to be sought for and longed after.
Evolutionary evolution started to run away at a rate that has not ceased to accelerate
up to our time. On top of all human uniqueness, analyzed in the previous sections,
runaway of emotional evolution made humans a unique hedonotactic species, one
that seeks to amplify sensations experienced as pleasant and minimize and even-
tually nullify sensations experienced as painful.
Probably Philip Darlington Jr. was the first evolutionist who in 1975 came up
with the idea that emotions in humans function as an important evolutionary factor
(Darlington 1975). He introduced the term “evolutionary reinforcement”: selec-
tively advantageous behaviors may have been continually reinforced by emotions
during human evolution, sometimes by making alternatives unpleasant, but often by
adding satisfaction and rewards that are not themselves advantageous but which
increase the force of selection of the advantageous behaviors. As he noticed,
behaviorists recognized pleasure as reinforcement in personal learning, but not as a
factor of evolution.
Hedonotaxis has eventually become the main driver of human cultural evolution.
The spectacular “explosion” of artifaction that occurred in the last 100,000 years is
the testimony of it. Cultural evolution is many orders of magnitude faster than
biological evolution. Richerson and Boyd conceived of culture as a pervasive
human-specific adaptation, but they also stressed that culture may be maladaptive:
much human maladaptation is an unavoidable by-product of cumulative cultural
adaptation, as adaptation always involves tradeoffs (Richerson and Boyd 2005). As
they put it, “Much of modern human behaviour is a big mistake from the genes’
point of view.” They also used the term “runaway process” to indicate that many
products of cultural evolution are like the one that gave rise to exaggerated char-
acters such as peacock tails. We have to assume that cultural evolution, in particular
in our times, must have substantially divorced the role of emotions in promoting
Darwinian fitness and allowing their functioning by themselves, as a sort of evo-
lutionary l’art pour l’art. The emotional “good” has become detached from the
Darwinian “good” such that experiencing pleasure and avoiding suffering has
become an end in itself. Darwinian utility has been displaced by hedonic utility. In
analogy with Darwinian fitness we can say that an individual striving to maximize
his own hedonic utility attempts to achieve a high hedonic fitness relative to
individuals who enjoy less pleasure and are afflicted by more suffering.
Artifaction and hedonotaxis have substantially changed the environment in
which the human species has to survive. They also have changed the character of
human evolution. In 1979, biologists Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin coined the
term “spandrels” to describe a specific constraint on adaptive evolution: spandrels
are characteristics that did not originate by the direct action of natural selection and
that were later coopted for a current use (Gould and Lewontin 1979). They applied
the metaphor “the spandrels of San Marco,” curved areas of masonry between
arches supporting a dome, which had arisen as a consequence of decisions about the
shape of the arches and the base of the dome, rather than being designed for the
artistic purposes for which they were later employed. We can take over another
feature from the Renaissance architecture of Venice and use it as a metaphor for
another constraint imposed on a species’ evolutionary path: the “piles of Rialto.”
The stone bridge of the Rialto in Venice rests on closely spaced wooden piles. Most
of these piles are still intact after centuries of submersion in water. The wooden
foundation delimits the maximum weight of the stone bridge; if the weight were
surpassed, the entire construction would break down (Fig. 6). The piles of Rialto of
a biological species determine the evolutionary potential of the species. The
exhaustion of the evolutionary potential may be one of the causes of species
extinction.
The piles of Rialto of the human species are those constant parts of the species
that together constitute human nature. Human nature encompasses such
species-specific characteristics as the ability of self-consciousness, emotions
experienced as feelings, and the capacity for artifaction that entails the inevitability
of cumulative cultural evolution. But human nature also imposes constraints on
human cognition. The conceptual confines that the human mind cannot get over
have been called the Kant barriers (Kováč 2000). On these piles, the Rialto bridge
8 Runaway of Emotional Evolution: Hedonotaxis 65
Fig. 6 Two constraints on adaptive evolution. a “Spandrels of San Marco,” curved areas of
masonry between arches supporting a dome. b “Piles of Rialto,” the stone bridge of the Rialto in
Venice rests on closely spaced wooden piles. The “piles of Rialto” of the human species are those
constant parts of the species that together constitute human nature
of human action had been laid down. Artifaction and hedonotaxis have consecu-
tively erected a huge superstructure that weighs heavily upon the piles. Will the
piles hold out?
9 Toward Hedonic Fitness
There were apparently transient stages in evolution from Darwinian to hedonic

fitness. Emotions are omnipresent in the life of any human individual. In the early
phase of evolution of the human species emotions were an obligatory part of
cognition and fostered Darwinian fitness of an individual, just as in other animal
species.
As human ancestors, upon the evolutionary split from the rest of their primate
relatives, were forced to quit the safe environmental niche in the branches of
dwindling tropical forests and to start living in the savannah plain full of dangers,
their emotions of uncertainty, signals of menace, and the urge to escape became
most intense. As mentioned above, they must have been felt as fear upon the
emergence of self-consciousness, and fear, along with artifaction, became the main
asset in the effort to survive. But self-consciousness brought forth not only the fear
of predators but also the much stronger and more generalized fear that we may call
“existential anxiety.” To survive, all humans need to have a consistent, total,
indubitable, all-encompassing explanation of the world in which they are born as
aliens and can only exist upon its familiarization. Such an explanation we define
here as “myth.” E.O. Wilson gave this need the name “mythopoeic drive” (Wilson
1979). In the situation where people knew too little of the environment and ignored
causes of events, the only means to have an exhaustive explanation was to create a
myth and to share it with members of one’s own group.4 It is feasible that the effort
of sharing a myth may have been one of the main drivers of the evolution toward
spoken language. The adherence to a myth has been the single manner of how to
reduce the negative feeling of existential anxiety and to counterbalance it with
positive feelings, such as allegiance, enthusiasm, ardor, and zeal, or, in rarer cases,
joy of understanding everything and a “peace of mind.” As such, myths have been
the main fuel to foster humans’ faculty of self-deception. It is this faculty that
allows a human person to sacrifice one’s own life for an idea. Every human being is
an “animal mythophilum.”
We can propose for measuring the magnitude (and “quality”) of self-deception
the “quotient of self-deception,” with a scale ranging between 0 and 1, just as we
assess probability. A person with a quotient of self-deception close to zero is aware
that he deceives himself. At a quotient of self-deception = 1 a person is not aware,
and would refuse to admit, that he is a subject of self-deception. The greatest
strength of culture is that it can impose on a human individual, and even on a group,
self-deception of the magnitude equal one. Self-deception may have played an
important role in human advancement from “homination” to “humanization.” Does
it mean that culture can suppress or eliminate human biological determinants?
No. It only shows how abstract and flexible are these biological determinants, as has
been already detailed in the section on humans as symbolizing animals. It is shown
later in this book that under conditions of prolonged social stress the cultural layers
can be peeled off, humans denuded to their biological core, and the complex edifice
of society endangered.
Mythophilia was selected as an important adaptive trait of human ancestors in
the African savannah. The environment in which human main mental dispositions
have been shaped by selection did not favor Darwinian fitness of individuals who
were hesitant, tolerant, stunned by the complexity of the world, and susceptible to
cognitive chaos and not protected against existential anxiety. Runaway of emotional
evolution has not removed mythophilia but rather amplified it. However, mytho-
philia, by virtue of culture, and thus creation of artifacts and attributing significance
to them, was dissociated from its original adaptive role for an individual, became a
source of positive emotions, and, as such, it continued to be adaptive for groups by
promoting human hypersociality. Passionate activity of a creative individual, sci-
entist, artist, teacher, may have unfolded at the expense of her personal Darwinian
fitness, but the work benefited the other people around. At the same time, hedonic
fitness of the creator was on the rise. Up to our time, human creative works
originated from existential anxiety and mythophilia. But however selfish may be the
motives of action of human individuals in their essence, humans objectively tran-
scend their own biological selfishness by their work, by artifacts that result from the
work. It should be emphasized that, accustomed to ascribe creativity to artists and
4
In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, one of several definition of a myth is the following one: “A
popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone; especially one
embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society.”
9 Toward Hedonic Fitness 67
scientists, we usually overlook the most important fact that entrepreneurs and
generally actors on the market constitute a specific brand of creators, too. Devotion
to science, art, and creative work in general may even attain a self-destructive
character. However, also in the case that creative work brings advantages for a
creative individual, for instance, fame or pecuniary profit, and thus likely a gain in
Darwinian fitness, its beneficial effect for other people may be much more extensive
and far-reaching. By transcending personal identification and motivation of an
individual, artifaction constitutes a substantial part of human altruism.
The sexual drive underwent a similar transformation as did artifaction. The
human individual started to relocate much available energy into the search of
pleasure and the intensive “hedonic effort” may have become a threat to the
“reproduction effort,” so evolution compensated the incipient disequilibrium by
making human sexual intercourse exceedingly pleasurable. But even in the next
evolutionary phase, when hedonic effort may have inflated at the expense of
reproduction effort of some individuals, the fitness advantage shifted from the level
of individual selection to the higher level of group selection: the Darwinian fitness
of a group may have been higher than the Darwinian fitness of some members of
the group. For instance, the fictions of artists, who did not procreate their own
children, may have aroused sexual phantasms of others and stimulated their
reproduction.
In our days, we witness the final stage of the runaway process: human popu-
lations are inevitably, sooner or later, losing Darwinian fitness and gaining hedonic
fitness. This is reflected by demographic transitions, from high birth and death rates
to low birth and death rates as a country develops from a pre-industrial to an
industrialized economic system. Some countries have subreplacement fertility (i.e.,
below 2.1 children per woman).
Humans have become a uniquely hyperemotional animal species and the human
body has turned into a hedonic machine. All our actions are accompanied by
emotions. Not just that: our thinking, even the “coolest” one such as mathematical
reasoning, is not emotionally neutral and carries a “hedonic gloss.” Anticipation
matters, too: anticipating future pain is itself painful, and anticipating pleasure is
itself pleasant. And our daydreaming, which is the subject of the next section, is
stuffed with emotions and functions as a powerful reinforcing mechanism. Konrad
Lorenz referred to Karl Bühler who first noticed “Funktionslust,” pleasure in the
function (Lorenz 1981). Lorenz concluded: “It is my belief that this mechanism has
become liberated from its original teleonomic functiom in humans, and this ‘run-
ning free’ has become the root of all human arts, the oldest of which is dancing.”
10 Alterocentrism
Hedonotaxis is the main explanation of why humans, hyperemotional animals, are

also hypersocial. It has been analyzed in a previous section how rational calcula-
tions of human actors may have substantially contributed to human hypersociality
and, hence, the ability to cooperate with one another. In fact, until now, all theories
of biological cooperation and altruism, and in particular their mathematical
underpinning, have assumed that an individual cooperator acts as a rational player
aiming at maximizing personal payoff. It has been commonly assumed that human
cooperation and altruism have the same sources as they have in all other living
creatures. Martin Nowak listed five mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation,
all derived from models of game theory (Nowak and Highfield 2011). However, he
stated insightfully that in no case has the evolutionary influence of cooperation been
more profoundly felt than in humans: humans are the most cooperative species. In
his book on cooperation he designated humans as “super-cooperators.” And, in fact,
in his poetical figure that life is not just a struggle for survival, but also a snuggle for
survival and in his observation that humans more than any other creature offer
assistance based on reputation, one may feel a hint of the role of emotions in human
altruism. We may await that the world-renowned theoretician of altruism will soon
come up with an elaborated formal theory of the emotional basis of human-specific
altruism.
Incidentally, the prevailing interpretation of the teaching of British philosopher
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) on the natural inclination of humans to behave as a
wolf toward other humans (homo homini lupus) and that only rational calculations
prompted humans to fix a “social contract” is one-sided. It fails to take into account
Hobbes’s conviction that in addition to our reason there are our “passions” (e.g.,
emotions) which push us, as egoists by nature and thus in our emotional
self-interest, to seek social peace, trust, and cooperation.
At first sight, one might expect that an individual human being, consciously
experiencing pain and pleasure, would be an extremely self-centered and egotistical
creature. But, in fact, other people have become the main source, and also the main
target, for emotions. Keltner and coworkers pointed out that the fact that humans
are hypersocial (ultrasocial) but their relatives, the chimpanzees, are not, may lar-
gely be accounted for by the fact that the expanded neocortex in humans, which is
heavily implicated in mental representation, also enabled a large expansion of the
human emotional repertoire, enriching it particularly with social and moral emo-
tions (Keltner et al. 2006). The human neocotex allows emotional expression to
coordinate social interactions: sending messages has coevolved with behaviors
involved in receiving them (Schaller et al. 2013). By communicating about the
individual’s emotional state they convey critical information about the individual’s
social intentions: whether to strike or flee, offer comfort, or play. In addition,
language allows for the transmission of emotion in narrative processes such as
story-telling and gossip. In this way, emotions are exploited for group- and
cultural-level social functions, as when narratives about cultural heroes are crafted
to trigger feelings of admiration, gratitude, and pride, thereby strengthening group
loyalties and teaching core cultural values (Keltner et al. 2006). As Ramachandran
noticed, “Almost all of our emotions make sense only in relation to other people:
pride, arrogance, vanity, love, fear, mercy, jealousy, anger etc. would have no
meaning in a social vacuum” (Ramachandran 2011).
10 Alterocentrism 69
It has already been pointed out in the previous section that humans are able to
experience and understand not only their own emotions, but also the emotions of
others. Mirror neurons may largely be involved in this faculty. Anthropologist
Weston LaBarre wrote that a human being shows “a tender concern for the source
of one’s organic pleasure,” and traced its origins to the prototypal “infant–mother”
relationship (La Barre 1954). In adults, this concern is associated with evolutionary
new social emotions, in the first place, with human erotic love. But probably also
with such social emotions as shame and guilt of which Richerson and Boyd wrote:
“These new social instincts were superimposed onto human psychology without
eliminating those that favour friends and kin,” and “eventually embrace group
abstract symbolic marking, such as language, totem, group myth and ideology”
(Richerson and Boyd 2005).
The human animal is therefore not egocentric, as usually claimed. Primarily, we
are “ipsocentric”; our self is the center of coordinates around which our entire
reality, the model of our world, revolves. We follow our personal interests. And yet,
most of the time, nay incessantly, other people are present in our awareness; each of
us is continually caring about the emotions of others and even seeing himself or
herself through the eyes of others. We also experience a Funktionswunder by
observing cleverness of other people: we are anxious to receive similar admiration
from those who observe us. Humans, ipsocentric beings, are at the same time
“alterocentric” (Braten 1998; Voland 2007). Our nervous systems are not
self-contained, but attuned to those around us and those close to us. Cortical mirror
neurons along with components of the limbic system may be responsive for the
“limbic resonance” that we mutually experience (Lewis et al. 2000). Surprisingly, a
recent report presented evidence of a hyperaltruistic” valuation of others’ pain:
most people sacrifice more money to reduce a stranger’s pain than their own pain
(Crockett et al. 2014). Each of us wants to import for other people; we want to be
noticed and regarded, to be loved or hated; our life gets meaning only in social
context.
In the words of Robert Frank, “Concern about relative positions is a deep-rooted
and ineradicable element of human nature” (Frank 1999). We struggle for social
prestige, for high positions on the social ladder, not only in the interest of our
Darwinian fitness, as did our ancestors, but ever more to get recognition, admira-
tion, fame, wealth: the sources of positive emotions. An extreme example of
“ipsocentric alterocentrism,” combined probably with a stubborn self-deception,
may provide ascetic monks of early Christianism, so-called “stylites” who spent
years on top of a high column and attracted crowds of spectators and admirers. An
impressive portrait of one of them has been sketched by Anatole France in his
novel, Thais.
Other people are also principal sources of social alarm and thus of psychological
stress. It is here that the great advantage of the neocortex becomes apparent: it
functions as an arbitrator to attribute quality and strength to social factors. The
thoughts and actions of a particular individual can render us excited or leave us
indifferent. Envy, which British philosopher Bertrand Russell thought was “one of
the most potent causes of unhappiness” (Russell 1930), can be tempered or
neutralized by mobilizing the neocortex. But the main source of stress for the
human primate is probably fear and the subjective sense of uncertainty, so the
satisfaction of the need for security is a precondition for the unfolding of all other
needs.
We can possibly discern in the majority of human social emotions, if not in all of
them, their “primitive” animal counterparts, from which they arose upon the
emergence of symbolization. Social insecurity can be felt equally as threats by
predators; social failure is the source of a similar pain as physical damage of the
body; disgust that originally evolved to prevent people from eating contaminated
foodstuffs and to get rid of any they have ingested may in social settings concern
revulsion to transgression of aesthetic or moral norms. Physical and social pains are
identical to the human brain. The same apply to sensory and psychological plea-
sures: intense feelings of romantic love affect the brain in the same way drugs such
as cocaine or powerful pain relievers do (Lewis et al. 2000). Neurobiologists Moll
et al. found by functional magnetic resonance imaging that when people made the
decision to donate to what they felt was a worthy organization, parts of their
midbrain lit up, the same region that controls cravings for food and sex, and the
same region that became active when the subjects added money to their personal
reward accounts (Moll et al. 2006). James Jones compared self-sacrificing heroism
in the service of abstract values, such as one’s own nation and religion of one’s
group, to “almost sexual enjoyment” (Jones 1976). Psychologist Alison Gopnik,
supposing that there exists a drive for causal understanding, used the term
“explanation as orgasm” (Gopnik 2000). Economist William Harbaugh with col-
laborators found that people are motivated to pay taxes and contribute to charity by
“hedonic consequences of financial transfers to the public good” (Harbaugh et al.
2007). According to psychologist Pat Barclay, reputational benefits provide a strong
selective pressure for generosity because generous people may receive reciprocal
aid when they are in need, higher rates of rewards and lower punishment, prefer-
ential access to groups and social partners, or they may benefit from signaling
important traits about themselves (Barclay 2010). People do not act generously by
calculating to receive such benefits, but, as Darlington and Lorenz supposed, such
behavior is reinforced by these benefits.
We may even tentatively conceive of “consumer anxiety” (which a modern
consumer experiences when he needs to decide which of the 20 toothpastes
available in a shop to choose) as a modern outgrowth of “existential anxiety.”
We can also refer to what has been said previously about the range of human
symbolization and posit, as a generalized tenet, that the most exquisite and admi-
rable human feats, including the creative works of scientists and artists, are rooted
in the fertile soil of human primordial disposition. We continue to be fearful,
superstitious, and all-too-human creatures. This does not denigrate the import and
grandeur of human accomplishments.
There is a well-known argument of advocates of the theory of the “selfish gene”
that a mother, who cares for her offspring and even sacrifices her own life for life of
that, is selfish and only seemingly altruistic, as she is actually acting in the interest
of preservation of her own genes. This can hardly be applied to actions of a person
10 Alterocentrism 71
that benefits people with no genetic kinship. But still, the question may arise: is not
a human person who is altruistic and does something for the good of others, such as
a creative scientist or artist, in fact selfish, as such actions bring her personal
pleasure? It would apparently create semantic confusion to call the escape from
one’s own suffering and searching for one’s own pleasure selfish if it, at the same
time, helps others to reduce their suffering and increase their welfare.
We can avoid a lot of confusion if we make a clear-cut distinction between two
notions: first, selfishness,the satisfaction of one’s desires at the expense of someone
else; and second, self-interest, instinctive urges in individuals for self-preservation,
food, clothing, shelter, sex, companionship, social recognition, creative activity,
positive emotions. Cooperation is not free from self-interest. A selfish cooperator is
not an altruist, conceived in the narrow sense of the world used in Fisherian
calculation: a genetic unit sacrificing one’s own fitness in favor of fitness of another
unit. But the principal beneficiary of cooperation of units at a certain level of
onticity is a unit at a higher level of onticity, and in the case of “total” cooperation
at the lower level, it is the higher level that becomes a new unit of onticity. Any
cooperation of selfish units automatically creates a new ontic unit of a higher level
of hierarchy.
The present of the self-conscious self in a human individual embraces the selves
of other humans. But it also embraces the past and the future of the self and enables
a specific way of human living: the living in time. It is the structural complexity of
the human brain that makes it possible.
11 Living in Time
The human brain appears to be the most complex compact construction in the
universe. It has been estimated that it comprises about 80–100 billion neurons and
the same number of nonneuronal glial cells. The number of interconnections
between neurons exceeds these figures by several orders of magnitude.
The energy output of the resting adult human body is equal to power of a 100 W
electrical light bulb. With a hard physical load, it could be up to seven times larger.
As discussed in the First Movement, biological systems combine nondissipative
and dissipative structures. Under resting conditions, the energy is used to maintain
the dissipative part and also to build up and preserve the nondissipative part. The
latter consists mainly of molecular machines. Other than macroscopic machines,
which we encounter in our daily life, the molecular machines constantly jiggle
owing to the disorganizing Brownian motion, so they frequently break down and
must be continually repaired and restored. The basal energy demand is used for
maintenance, repair, and renewal.
Remarkably, the brain of human adults alone consumes 20 % of the body’s
chemical energy, even though it accounts for only 2 % of the body’s mass.
Metaphorically speaking, we all have a 20 W light bulb burning in our head, even
when we lie still in complete darkness physically doing nothing. In children, in the
first year of life, the share of the brain on total body energy consumption is as high
as 60 %. In contrast, it is only 8 % in adult apes. The brain uses chemical energy to
create and maintain patterns of chemicals and patterns of synaptic connections.
These patterns are, at the material level, ordered, complex chemical states, and,
being tautologically translated from the material level to the mental one, correspond
to emotions, thoughts, and consciousness.
Accordingly, one might expect that mental exercise, such as solving a complex
mathematical problem, would increase the energy demand of the brain. Yet, the
brain as a whole shows no differences in the energy budget between “resting” and
“busy” states, an observation that has long puzzled scientists. This puzzle was
eventually solved when new imaging techniques allowed the measurement of local
energy fluxes in specific brain areas: when some brain areas work intensively, the
energy flux in other areas decreases (Raichle and Gusnard 2005). On the basis of
this principle, noninvasive brain scanning, such as functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI), allows localizing those brain areas that are involved when a
subject is performing specific mental actions.
The brain seems to be constantly working at maximum power. It is akin to a car
with the engine always running at full speed, whether the car itself is moving or not.
The brain guzzles (per unit weight) as much energy as the heart muscle, about 16
times more energy than the skeletal muscle at rest, or as much as the leg muscle
during a marathon race. The bloodstream copiously supplies it with fuel and oxygen,
but it also functions as a coolant: the high power of the brain needs efficient cooling.
The continual running of the brain, even when it is receiving no signals from the
environment, had been previously mostly accounted for as an expression of noise,
in analogy with membrane channels which, when closed, undergo molecular noise.
However, it has turned out that the activities are correlated between neurons within
large areas of the cortex (Kenet et al. 2003).
Marcus Raichle and collaborators designated the intrinsic activity as a “default
mode.” In analogy with the “dark energy” of the universe, of which we know little
so far, Raichle called the energy, which does not serve in the brain to process input
from the environment but is used for intensive intrabrain (and intramental) activity,
the “brain’s dark energy” (Raichle 2006). It has been interpreted by assuming that,
in the absence of external stimuli, cortical neurons are “wandering” across diverse
brain states (Tsodyks et al. 1999). At the mental level, it apparently functions as
daydreaming: the searchlight of awareness, mentioned previously, scanning the
interior of the mind and then dwelling on a coherent story, one of many possible.
According to Klinger, the human mind may be spending as much as a half of its
wakeful time in daydreaming (Klinger 1990). This comprises not only the creation
of fanciful stories similar to those we dream during the night, but also the rehashing
of all possible and impossible alternatives of the past, present, and future activities.
This interior universe of daydreaming creates a continuous series of fictional
rewards and punishments, by which the unique and idiosyncratic personality of
every human individual is being steadily built up by conditioning. This may explain
our capability to work for years on our career, tenaciously, with self-restraint and
self-denial, as if motivated by a mirage of the ultimate reward. Apparently, it is not
11 Living in Time 73
the latter in the remote future, but our present fancies of it that provide immediate,
right now, positive rewards and function as reinforcers of our deeds.
Incidentally, Terence Sejnowski has stressed that the explication of the high
endogenous activity of the brain can be a way for understanding the nature of
consciousness and of the first-person experience (Sejnowski 2003).
Each of us is an “inner human being,” largely set up by self-reinforcement. Such
a being has been categorically refuted by Burghus Skinner, because he was con-
vinced that humans, just as other animals, can be formed by reinforcement through
rewards and punishments stemming from a single source: the external natural and
social environment (Skinner 1972). Yet, the inner environment seems to be no less
important in human life than is the external one. We live in a dual world. We move
and act in this world as somnambulistic rope-walkers, lured by the spell of the full
moon of our personal desires and dreams fueled by our nonconscious emotions and
by our feelings. An individual human person, the ipsocentric being, moves in this
world either physically or symbolically, in time at present but also back and forth,
and in space incessantly interacting with other human individuals.
The human brain as a macroscopic construction does compute but it is not a
computer. The computer model of the brain appears mistaken, even as a metaphor.
Computers are universal syntactic machines (in the sense of Turing), destined to
accomplish arbitrary computations, using programs and data input by a human
subject. They are human exosomatic organs (Lotka 1925). A computer processes
inputs and, after ending the program, stops; what a diametrical contrast to the brain,
which incessantly, day and night, is running at full speed! A hypercomplex network
of myriad tiny electromotors, immersed in a complicated solution of emotones: this
would be a more appropriate metaphor of the brain. It is the organ by which we
experience the world; that is, we feel pain and pleasure, we yearn, and in order to
find out how to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, we think.
Minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure—or, in short, hedonic minimax—
must have been adaptive in the human evolutionary past but, upon the emergence of
self-consciousness, has become an independent evolutionary tendency. Along with
other evolutionary forces, hedonic minimax has taken part in shaping human civ-
ilization and determining its trajectory. Where does it aim?
12 Paravolution
In 1981, ethologist Kornad Lorenz characterized the present situation of humanity

by these words: “Pleasure-accentuated actions and activities soar to the heights of
becoming ends in themselves. […] All value judgments are based on emotional
processes. The free play of emotion is a prerequisite for all truly creative processes;
those of human culture as well as those of evolution” (Lorenz 1981). Lorenz’s
understanding goes further than the original view of Darlington, mentioned in a
previous section, for whom emotions function as an “evolutionary reinforcement”
to assure Darwinian fitness, but are not the “ends in themselves.”
Hyperemotionality and hypersociality have considerably enlarged the repertoire

of human emotions and correspondingly of human values. Positive values represent
utilities and determine human needs. Both Konrad Lorenz and Edward O. Wilson
distinguished primary and secondary values (and corresponding needs). They both
were aware that the primary values, the majority of which humans share with other
animals, are in direct service to Darwinian fitness, whereas the secondary values are
determined by cultures and, as Wilson expressed it, they “go beyond the utilitarian
calculus of genetic fitness” (Wilson 1979). As Wilson observed,
Although natural selection has been the prime mover, it works through a cascade of
decisions based on secondary values that have historically served as the enabling mecha-
nisms for survival and reproductive success. These values are defined to a large extent by
our most intensive emotions: enthusiasm and a sharpening of the senses from exploration;
exaltation from discovery; triumph in battle and in competitive sports; the restful satis-
faction from altruistic act well and truly placed; the stirring of ethnic and national pride; the
strength from family ties; and the secure biophilic pleasure from the nearness of animal and
growing plants (Wilson 1998a).
For those needs that may be specific for the human species, psychologist
Abraham Maslow coined the name “metaneeds” and used the term “metamotiva-
tion” to describe the motivation of people who go beyond the scope of basic needs
and strive for constant betterment. He proposed his conception first in 1943 and
later in several of his books (Maslow 1954, 1971). He came out with an extensive
classification of human needs. He ranged them into a hierarchy, which is often
portrayed as a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental level of needs at the
bottom and the highest at the peak. The most basic four layers of the pyramid
contain “deficiency needs”: physiological needs, esteem, friendship and love, and
security. Physiological needs, such as air, water, food, shelter, sex—in common
with other animals—must be met before a human individual will aspire after the
secondary or higher level needs. Apparently, the utility of deficiency needs is
evaluated by the scarcity of items necessary for their satisfaction.
The deficiency needs are followed by “growth needs.” The third level of human
needs is interpersonal and represents belongingness, family, friendship, and inti-
macy. Self-esteem is cemented by social success, prestige, fame, or glory. The apex
of the needs is “self-actualization” and “self-transcendence.” This latter refer to the
full realization of a person´s potential: to become the most that one can be.
Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein or
Eleanor Roosevelt, rather than mentally ill or neurotic people and claimed that “the
study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a
cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy” (Maslow 1954). So, his hierarchy of
needs may appear selective and elitist. He noted that the metaneeds, directed toward
metavalues enable spiritual or transcending life which is “clearly rooted in the
biological nature of the species. It is a kind of ‘higher’ animality whose pre-
condition is a healthy ‘lower’ animality, that is, they are hierarchically integrated
rather than mutually exclusive” (Maslow 1971). However, what Maslow described
as metaneeds and metavalues, including his characterization of self-actualizing
people, who are “involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside
12 Paravolution 75
of themselves […], are devoted, working on something which is very precious to

them—some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense” applies well to
a true intellectual elite, such as artists, scientists, Aristotelian “magnanimous”
people, but just as well to such prototypical “self-transcending” individuals as were
Japanese suicidal kamikaze pilots in the past, and religious fundamentalist terrorists
in our day. Common people of modern consumer society, upon having saturated
their physiological needs, fulfill their “growth needs” by consuming products of the
entertainment industry.
The difference between Einstein, suicidal fundamentalists, and consumers is due
to their respective cultural settings. In accord with the assumption of Lorenz and
Wilson, there is culture that specifies the “higher” needs, deposited on the layer of
the basic biological needs. The latter, as mentioned previously, encompasses in
humans the needs shared with other animals, but also species-specific needs for
artifaction and for culture.
The arbitrariness of human “cultural” needs notwithstanding, it seems important
to stress a distinction between fanatics and suicidal fighters on the one hand and
people aiming at hedonic minimax: the former harm others by causing suffering and
death of conspecifics, whereas the latter pursue their own self-interest with no
detriment to others; they strive to minimize suffering and maximize well-being of
themselves, or of their neighbors and even of humanity as a whole. The “mini-
mization of suffering” continues to function as “a reasonable and practical ethical
system” (Pauling 1970), based on science (Kováč 2000).
The intensity of needs is determined by emotions that elaborate data furnished
by sensors. Biological sensing systems respond to a very large range of stimuli and
to achieve this they are designed to record relative changes in incoming stimuli
rather than the absolute magnitude of a stimulus. If a signal’s intensity is low, a
biological sensor will respond to even the tiniest changes of it. If the intensity
remains unchanged, the sensor stops responding to the signal. This faculty has been
called “sensory adaptation,” but it should be given the less ambiguous name of
“sensory accommodation.” Human vision, for example, operates over a 1011-fold
range of light levels, from about 1 × 10−6 candela per m2 in darkness to 1 × 105 in
full sunlight. Sensory accommodation has been described in virtually all sensory
modalities of animals. Even chemotactic E. coli exhibit a similar sensory accom-
modation: they sense and adapt to ligand concentrations that range over five orders
of magnitude.
Sensory accommodation has its counterpart in hedonic accommodation. We
know from our daily experience that if a stimulus that we have appreciated as
pleasant repeats with no change in intensity, we gradually cease to feel it as a source
of pleasure and want it to be present at a higher intensity, or, once a demand is
entirely satisfied, another one, of a different kind, sets in. The large increases of
real-term income in the developed world during the past 50 years have yielded no
accompanying change in reported life satisfaction (Frank 1999; Easterlin 1995).
Studies of consumers’ happiness show that new things delight us, but only for a
short time: the pleasure of acquiring something new quickly loses its effect as it
becomes familiar (Wexler 2006). This observation, that improved life
Fig. 7 The hedonic treadmill

(with permission from EMBO
Reports 13: 297–302, 2012)
circumstances quickly cease to provide increased satisfaction, has been called the
hedonic treadmill (Brickman and Campbell 1971) (Fig. 7). Repeating delights must
be furnished in ever-larger doses in order to experience pleasure at all: the hedonic
thresholds are steadily increasing.
As mentioned previously, Karl Bühler recognized that a mere “normal” func-
tioning is for humans a source of pleasure and called it in German “Funktionslust”.
Konrad Lorenz, reporting on this notion of Bühler’s, warned: “Funktionslust in its
original form is a blessing for mankind but that, within the circumstances and
conditions of an over-organized mass society, can become a curse” (Lorenz 1981).
Behaviorist Burrhus Frederic Skinner vividly depicts this curse in an essay that,
although it deals with the western world, applies universally:
The West is especially rich in the things we call interesting, beautiful, delicious, enter-
taining, and exiting. They make daily life more reinforcing, but they reinforce little more
than the behaviour that brings one into contact with them. […] Although we look at a nude
statue in part because a tendency to look at similar forms has played a part in survival of the
species, looking does not have that effect in this instance. […] What is wrong with life in
the West is not that it has too many reinforcers, but that they are not contingent on the kinds
of behaviour that sustain the individual or promote the survival of the culture or
species (Skinner 1986).
This is the situation that has been created by the capitalistic economy. The
attempt to replace it by a communist alternative based on Marxist doctrine ended up
in colossal disaster. The failure notwithstanding, incessant criticisms, mostly rhe-
torical rather than theoretical, continue to highlight many flaws of capitalism, but
contemporary humankind apparently does not have any other viable economic
system as a choice. Economics has its own autonomous dynamics, but some of the
contradictions of capitalism faithfully reflect the contradictions and inconsistency
inherent to human nature in specific cultural environments.
Capitalism can be seen as the culmination of the evolution of economics. The
core of economics is the production and exchange of artifacts to satisfy human
needs. In early groups of hunters and gatherers artifacts were satisfying primary
12 Paravolution 77
needs of food, shelter, and safety, essentially Maslow’s deficiency needs. Only later
were they employed for easing human life. Easing meant first to reduce pain and
suffering, but later also to provide enjoyment and pleasure. Gradually, novel arti-
facts enabled comfort, which can be defined as self-conscious well-being, both
material and symbolic. In parallel with the evolution of economics, the hierarchy of
human needs, the same hierarchy as defined by Maslow, established itself
(Mollerup 2007). Producers and consumers exchanged their positions in the pro-
cess, so that eventually the consumers became masters and decisive agents in the
production and market success of artifacts, enforcing on producers ever fiercer
competition and struggle for survival.
The easy access for consumers to all commercially available sources of pleasure
and opportunities to satisfy immediately all their needs continuously diminishes the
utility of commodities for consumers. To keep the process running, a new kind of
symbolic artifacts must be raised and fostered in the consumers, exploiting the fact
of hedonic accommodation: artificial needs and wants. It seems that achieving zero
pain and maximum pleasure has driven the late phase of the evolution of the
modern economy at all levels. A simple equation defines these enterprises:
pleasure = happiness.
It is conceivable that contemporary economists might give up their canonical
conception of utility, as defined in a previous section and return to the original
concept of utility introduced by the founder of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who
considered utility as the net sum of the positive emotions, minus the negative ones
(Bentham 1823). Indeed, the title of a recent paper by the psychologist and econ-
omist Daniel Kahneman and his coworkers poses a question: “Back to Bentham?”
(Kahneman et al. 1997). Utilitarianism is the promulgator of sheer hedonia.
Equating happiness with pleasure abounds in commercials.
The irresistible search for pleasure coupled with the hedonic accommodation has
been a cause of steadily accelerating growth of the economy, which runs hand in
hand with accelerating technological innovation. Human hedonotaxis is, concom-
itantly with the law of profit maximization, the main driving force of the economy.
But in the era of “too much change in too short a time,” as futurist Alving Toffler
has characterized our times, evolution has changed and become paravolution:
random drifts and explosions in multivariable space, a process too fast to permit
natural selection, with a struggle for speed and the “survival of the fastest,”
uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Not only are the hedonic thresholds steadily
increasing, but also the number and kinds of events and of enjoyments is growing.
The character of the extant “consumer society” has diverged from the character of
the early “subsistence society.” In the subsistence society, positive emotions,
including sporadic pleasures, function as a lure to engage in certain behaviors. They
cease once the need or want driving them has been satisfied, but the memory of the
pleasant moment remains and an individual wants to experience it again: the
“normal” state was to be sensitive to pain and to yearn for pleasure.
13 Artificial Hedonia
Emotional evolution and its concomitant, cultural evolution, have directed humans
on a disparate course. Knowing that we have a pleasure center in our brain, we are
tempted to exploit it to procure pleasure as a “free lunch;” and knowing that we
have the technical means to eradicate suffering, we are ready to use them. Recall the
discovery of the reward centers by Olds and Milner (Olds and Milner 1954). In their
experiments rats who were electrically stimulated in the septal areas of their limbic
system would prefer stimulation to food and water. Female rats would even
abandon their unweaned pups to self-stimulate until they died from exhaustion. In
contrast to the natural hedonic treadmill, direct stimulation results in no saturation,
and hence no hedonic accommodation (Shizgal 1997). Natural selection has pro-
vided animals with brain reward centers, but not with a means to enable
self-stimulation. “The brain mechanisms that make animals susceptible to brain
stimulation reward evolved long before the human inventions that make intracranial
self-stimulation or drug addiction possible” (Wise 1996).
Artificial brain stimulation by electrical currents or by drugs replaces the
meaningful natural activities of observing the environment and acting appropri-
ately; in this way, stimulation functions as an unusual reward, as a single response
that suffices both to procure and “consume” it. It is, in fact, a short-circuiting of the
natural mechanisms. Still, there have been many utopians who envision that drugs
will help us to achieve a perfect happiness. A recent book, The Road to Happiness,
for example, predicts that the universal use of electrical brain stimulation will allow
“direct access to intensive pleasure” (Ng and Ng 2001).
It can be argued that this would only be a refinement and ultimate perfection of
what a human individual is trying to achieve by imagination and daydreaming and
what has been the ambition of art from time immemorial. However, genuine art has
always provided complex emotions, including both ecstasy and sorrow, and it has
been part of traditional “normative culture,” whereas the products of the modern
entertainment business are designed on purpose to satisfy personal demands for fun
and amusement. Their effects might soon become indistinguishable from the effects
of drug and electrical brain stimulation. This applies to various gadgets used for
playing, games offered on the Internet (including such an addictive game as “The
World of Warcraft,” played by 12 million customers worldwide), most products
supplied by mass media, and the indomitable attractions of imminent virtual reality.
Science is certainly getting involved in the business of pleasure. Brain-enhancing
drugs are being studied and “brain Viagra” might soon be available for consumers to
reinvigorate mental activity. Philosopher David Pearce believes that no pain,
physical or emotional, is necessary, and that we should strive to “eradicate suffering
in all sentient life” (Pearce 2003). He describes this project as “technically feasible”
thanks to genetic engineering and nanotechnology and as “ethically mandatory” on
utilitarian grounds. Extrapolation from the ceaseless expansion of the entertainment
industry gives credence to Neil Postman’s prediction, which he expressed dryly in
the title of his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman 1985).
13 Artificial Hedonia 79
Easy access to too many means for gratification of all needs and wants and the
dizzy pace of living has made time the prime scarce resource of contemporary
humans in consumer society. Chasing instantaneous gratification is a process of
continuous “de-cortication” of humans, obnubilation (dimming out) of intellects,
and abolition of “living in time,” mindless of both the future rewards and deterrents.
Fleeting sensations and emotions and short flashes of feelings seem to mark
regression into a pre-conscious stage of human evolution. It appears appropriate to
apply to this phenomenon of obnubilation and abolition of “living in time” the term
“dehumanization” (which, obviously, does not equal “dehominization:” “dehu-
manized” people will remain “hominized”). The term will be useful in further
analysis of the human condition. As a final product of the evolution of artifaction,
humanity as a whole may soon turn into a gigantic artifact.
14 Animal Artifactum
In contradistinction of the common assumptions made by nonbiologists, culture is

not arbitrary: its edifice could only be erected on the firm foundations laid down by
biology. The relationship between emotions, which are anchored in human biology
and culture (i.e., artifacts plus signifaction) can be pictured in a complementary
manner: artifacts as parasites on emotions and artifacts as superior masters com-
manding and enslaving emotions.
Culture uses the predispositions, which evolved in response to selection pres-
sures acting in ancestral natural conditions (in the terminology of evolutionary
psychology, in an “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”), to serve human
purposes in novel, steadily changing artificial environments. Three paradigmal
examples illustrate this: granny’s hen (humans use a clucking hen to incubate the
eggs of geese or ducks and brood the ensuing offspring of no genetic relationship),
horse’s drill (to train a horse, applying conditioning by sugar rewards, for artificial
performances in circuses), and human suicidal bombers (by taking advantage of
human inherent mythophilia and drive for prestige in one’s group).
Hand in hand with runaway of emotional evolution, culture was evolving in a
similar runaway manner and artifaction was running on, step by step, by a
ratchet-like process. At each step, humans have just added a tiny improvement to
the previously achieved state. Hedonic accommodation with rising hedonic
thresholds, along with the logic of acceleration of knowledge accumulation, has
driven the incessant progression of artifaction. The evolution of artifacts, which had
been originally constructed on purpose and under control of their constructors, was
becoming ever more autonomous, independent of intrinsic human needs and of the
intentions of their producers. As mentioned in the previous section, artifacts, in their
early evolutionary phase, were strengthening human fitness by satisfying human
primary needs, easing human life and providing enjoyment and pleasure. But later
they diverged from the natural human needs and, in an unstoppable progression,
gradually produced new, in fact artificial, needs and wants. It seems probable that
artifacts will soon assume an independent existence as novel autonomous agents,

exploiting their artificial intelligence no longer in the interest of humans, but to
pursue their own permanence by self-maintaining, self-improving, and
self-reproducing. As a new kind of autonomous agents, they will pursue their own
onticity by learning and adapting to their environment.
As we, for the time being, are not able to say whether these new autonomous
agents will exhibit consciousness and human-like feelings, it would be too spec-
ulative to consider their splitting off as a specific form of speciation similar to the
speciation that gave birth to the human species from a common ancestor of humans
and chimpanzees. However, it is naive to expect that they will keep serving humans
obediently, as our “mind children” or “devoted servants” as some enthusiastic
specialists in artificial intelligence have assumed it. As a sceptical observer noted, if
we are lucky, our new mind children will treat us as pets; if we are very unlucky,
they will treat us as food.
The new autonomous agents may, of course, continue to wander in the epistemic
maze described in the section on epistemic principle. If the human species had been
the most successful epistemic explorer from all the species of the Earth, the artificial
beings, as human successors, may advance further ahead.
Even before reaching the ultimate status of autonomous agents, artifacts have
reinforced their domination in human affairs, making humans craving for and
addicted to artifacts and eventually themselves becoming artifacts. Humans, “sur-
natured animals,” lifted out of nature and placed into the artificial environment of
culture and its technology, lose control over artifacts and are becoming more and
more their subordinates, nay slaves.
This also applies to a specific kind of artifact, scientific instruments. They are so
efficient that, thanks to them, contemporary science is reaching out behind the Kant
barriers. The instruments, fumbling in the unknown, supply reliable and repro-
ducible data, such that their message must be true. But their truth seems to be
beyond our conceptual grasp. Conceptually, our mind confines us to our
species-specific world.
The culmination of evolution of artifaction will be the construction of a
full-fledged virtual world or, to use a more common but less appropriate term, of
virtual reality.5 A virtual world has been constituted by symbolic artifacts ever since
humans became symbolizing animals, but we have always been able to distinguish
between a real world and a virtual world. The division line between the two worlds
will soon become less perceptible and humanity will start to immerse itself into the
virtual world of a new quality. We may dare to guess that the second half of the
second decade of our century will mark an aggressive intrusion of this novel virtual
world.
5
Recall that in the section on feelings and meaning, reality has been described as “a model of the
world carrying meaning and consistency”, with the proviso that “reality as a model is much
simpler than in the real world”.
14 Animal Artifactum 81
People reading fiction or watching TV pictures, however carried away by the

plot, can always interrupt reading or watching and return to their mundane present.
Those indulging in long distance sex, Internet romance, or techniques of cybersex
and “teledildonics,” even in the case where they are achieving orgasm are aware of
the artificial and substitutional character of the practices. But these may soon be
replaced by “fully immersive erotic encounters” in which an “immersant” will
perceive the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste) in an artificial
environment, digital or robotic, as being physically real, with partial or complete
suspension of disbelief. Virtual sex, supplied by a new technology, may be the first
domain of human enjoyment to become commercialized, but fully immersive vir-
tual pleasures of all kinds will probably soon follow suit.
There is a well-known saying of a woman hero of Max Frisch’s novel, Homo
Faber, Hanna, who characterized technology as “the knack of so arranging the
world that we don’t have to experience it.” This may well apply to technology we
have known in our time, when we still live in a “pre-virtual world” in which, in the
expression of futurologist Toffler, there is “too much change in too short a period of
time” and our reflections and experiences are superficial and short-lived. But
technology of the virtual world will also be a technology of inexhaustible and
intensive “virtual experiences.” Ray Kurzweil anticipates:
By the 2020s, full-immersion virtual reality will be a vast playground of compelling
environments and experiences. Although the environment will not be completely con-
vincing at first, by the late 2020s they will be indistinguishable from real reality and will
involve all of the senses, as well as neurological correlations of our emotions. As we enter
the 2030s there won’t be clear distinctions between human and machine, between real and
virtual reality, or between work and play (Kurzweil 2005).
It is conceivable that human subjects in the third and the fourth decades of this
century will alternate their existence in the “real world” with living in the “virtual
world,” but that their life satisfaction will shift more and more to receive rewards
from the former to rewards from the latter. The virtual world will be peopled by
virtual humans and the “fully immersed” subjects will share emotions with their
virtual partners. Concomitantly, social bonds between subjects in the real world will
be getting looser and slightly die away. Even the human drive for social recognition
and prestige, so swollen up in our times, when almost everybody aspires to be a
writer of fame and esteem, may find its climax in the virtual world. Recall the
science fiction film, Her, of Spike Jonze, in which a hero from the real world (if we
admit that a film pictures us a real world) takes an operation system of his computer
with a female voice for a real woman, and falls in love with her (it?). She introduced
herself under the name of Samantha and quickly functions as an ideal partner,
discusses with him about life and love, admires and praises him, appreciates his
jokes and receives them with a hearty laugh, never tired, always disposable,
equilibrated and in a good mood, full of empathy with him, supportive, anticipating
his need for reassurance, and ready to attune to his caprice.
This is how an author of science fiction has seen it. The rich imagination of the
art of science fiction notwithstanding, human fantasy is not strong enough to permit
to us to grasp fully the potential of contemporary technology. Personal digital

assistants are now in use and some of them are able to analyze users’ online
behavior and anticipate their needs. There is a software program available under the
name of Siri, which functions as a personal assistant and knowledge navigator. It
uses natural language, either female or male, to answer questions and perform
actions by delegating requests to a set of Web services and accept instructions in the
corresponding natural language. The assistant makes recommendations concerning
reminders, weather, stocks, messaging, e-mail, clocks and calendar, movie times,
contacts, notes, and music. New versions also offer numerous pre-programmed
responses to conversational and amusing questions and give Siri human-like
qualities. A journalist characterized Siri’s personality to be “unpleasantly servile.”
Companies may soon sell upgraded personal secretaries under an advertising slogan
“Samantha for every man.”
The question is whether the quality of virtual social bonds would be equivalent
to those of the real world, but we have no precedent that would allow us to answer.
However, a much more important problem is looming. We may apply to life in the
virtual world the same reservation as has been done in the analysis of consequences
of the ceaseless expansion of the entertainment industry and of attempts to provide
“synthetic happiness” by means of intoxication by drugs or direct brain stimulation
of pleasure centers. Experiencing in the virtual world might bring forth obnubila-
tion, obliteration of emotional memories, and deletion of daydreaming. Even
though a grandiose evolutionary novelty, it may be in fact evolutionary regression
and dehumanization. It does not mean that it would also be de-naturation.
Psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel argued in his 1989 book, Intoxication: Life in
Pursuit of Artificial Paradise, that we humans share with other mammals the
“fourth drive,” a desire for intoxication, which is “as much a part of the human
condition as sex, hunger, and thirst. It is not just motivating people to feel good or
bad—it is a desire to feel different, to alter our perceptions of reality. […] We share
with animals the same motivation to light up our lives with chemical glimpses of
another world” (Siegel 1989). He expressed his conviction that humanity cannot
suppress this drive; our pursuit of intoxication is inevitable, irrepressible, and
universal and society would be best served if it accepted the inevitability of
intoxication and launched an all-out effort to invent drugs perfectly safe and
unabusable.
Can humankind evade the “intoxication” of the real world by the satisfactions
offered by the virtual world? No. There may be a small minority of people who
would advise avoiding the trap and would point to the deficiency and inferiority of
living in the virtual world. Ever since Aristotle, who designated such rare people as
“magnanimous men,” this minority have been considered to be the real originators
of culture, an elite of society, contrasted with the masses, common people, crowd,
mob. There have been endless discussions whether there have been exceptional
individuals or anonymous masses who have been creating history (Ortega y Gasset
1932; Endre Száva-Kováts 2004; Frank et al. 2014). In modern welfare societies,
there is an average consumer, and accordingly a large majority, who is a sovereign
ruler on the market of goods, and who, in democracy as a voter, decides the
14 Animal Artifactum 83
direction of political affairs. The entertainment industry follows his taste and whim
and the voting majority by means of peoplemeters have become arbiters of elegance
in media and art. Human hedonotaxis has driven the market in the direction of
hedonic minimax. Accordingly, there will be no escape from the dominance of the
virtual world for a large majority of the population. This book is a treatise on
general trends and does not focus on exceptions. Yet, the exceptional “magnani-
mous” individuals have their important role in the closing act of the human species.
By their intellectual missions in providing analysis and conceptualization of the
ultimate age and in striving to make it passable and dignified, they themselves, a
small minority, may evade the trap of the virtual world.
Philosopher Robert Nozick in a chapter, “The Experience Machine,” in his book,
Anarchy, State and Utopia, asked the question of how a person would decide if she
had a choice to be plugged into a machine that electrically stimulated her brain and
enabled her to think and feel writing a great novel, or making a friend, or enjoying
any other pleasant experience, and all the time just floating in a tank (Nozick 1974).
While in the tank, the person would not know the “real” reality and would think that
this was actually happening. Nozick was convinced that people will refuse to be
plugged in, because “perhaps what we desire is to live (an active web) ourselves, in
contact with reality;” we want to do certain things and not have the experience of
having done them. Incidentally, a similar arrangement was also described by the
science fiction writer, Stanislav Lem.
Obviously, such an arrangement could not be experimentally tested thus far and
questionnaires addressed to our contemporaries would not settle the problem.
Human free will is an illusion; our choices are determined by the contingencies of
reinforcements coming from our actual environment and we cannot foresee what
the environment would be once the gadgets of virtual reality are available. All we
know is that rats exposed to conditions similar to Nozick’s experience machine
preferred brain stimulation to food or water and female rats would even abandon
their unweaned pups to self-stimulate their brain until they died from exhaustion
(Wise 1996).
Incidentally, similar questions were already anticipated in times when the virtual
world was just a subject of the science fiction art. In a 1999 science fiction film, The
Matrix, written and directed by the Wlachowskis, reality as perceived by most
humans is actually a simulated reality called “the Matrix,” created by machines to
subdue the human population. First intended as a perfect world without suffering
and with total happiness, the machine was eventually “amended” by framing the
Matrix in the image of the 1999 world, far from a utopia, but more credible to
humans and so acceptable more easily over the suffering-less utopia. Apparently,
the market may soon “free” humans from the choice.
The most conspicuous feature of the virtual world will probably be the asym-
metry between negative and positive emotions: the former almost absent, with fear,
suffering, and aggression only serving to stir up into action, to intensify ensuring
catharsis, and to multiply the intensity of subsequent delights. In the virtual world,
any of our desires and dreams, even the most exorbitant and unattainable, may find
their fulfillment.
And yet, gratifications of some human needs cannot be provided by actors and
events in the virtual world. As William Shakespeare observed five centuries ago,
“You cannot cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast.” No
virtual food and drink will be able to appease hunger and thirst. How sure can we be
that this reservation does not apply to some of the social needs of the hypersocial
animal? On the other hand, the sexual drive of humans can apparently be satisfied in
the form of virtual sex. It may do away with all those tensions, disharmonies,
vexations, boredoms, and pathologies of a couple who have been the perennial
focus of interest of artists and therapists. This is not a minor point. It may become
the essential determinant of the fate of humanity. Immersed in perfect bliss, the
biological species will cease to reproduce.
In retrospect, the runaway of emotional evolution has brought about a hyper-
trophy of human emotions. The human capacity to reason has not undergone a
parallel runaway path; on the contrary, its evolution was arrested, as already
mentioned, 200,000 years ago. It was first exploited for the construction of artifacts
to support emotions. But there have been the artifacts themselves that eventually set
up their runaway path, successively acquiring artificial intelligence and eventually
heading toward their superior rationality that will exceed, but also apparently
dominate, the inherent rationality of humans. The tension between hypertrophy of
human emotions and superior rationality of artifacts is one of the many causes of
human inconsistency and substantiates the statement in a previous section that
humans are “less rational than are beetles.” Is the confinement of human reason,
imposed by the constraint of woman’s birth canal as the decisive bottleneck in the
evolution of the human species a telling example of evolutionary contingency, or a
cosmic evolutionary irony?
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Third Movement. The Ultimate Optimism:
Finitics
1 Unwearied Dreams of Technooptimists
The main message of the previous analysis in this book is that the prodigious
success of human civilization has had its origin in the versatility of the human hand,
which enabled artifaction, and the corresponding refinement of the human brain.
After the process of perfection of hand and brain had halted about 200,000 years
ago because of the constraints imposed by the female birth canal, essentially all the
achievements of the species Homo sapiens have been due to artifaction and, con-
sequently, to the cumulative evolution of artifacts, at first material but soon also
symbolic ones. We should keep in mind that humans, by their biology and their
capacity of reasoning, have remained at the stage of small groups of hunters and
gatherers of the African savannah and that only culture has been converting a
savage into a civilized human being. A specific kind of artifact, institutions, have
become a groundwork on which large over-biological groups have been erected.
Hominization was followed by humanization. Cultural evolution sped up human
evolution by several orders of magnitude. Knowledge, accumulated in the course of
evolution, has been deposited no longer in the body of a human individual and its
somatic memory carriers, but in artifacts, and shared collectively. The accumulation
of knowledge became very fast when science, as part of culture, had been insti-
tutionalized and is apparently the main reason why human evolution has reached its
climax so soon, when compared to other species.
According to Derek Price de Solla, science has been increasing exponentially
since about 1750 (Price de Solla 1963). Although some scientific disciplines might
have slowed down or even ceased growing, new ones join the fray while others
continue to grow exponentially or even transit to hyperbolic expansion. The same
observation pertains to some advanced technologies. Science has been advancing
by a ratchet-like process of inventing ever more sophisticated scientific instruments.
The rate of usable energy consumption and thus energy dissipation, which has been
increasing since the early days of the industrial revolution, might slow down—as is

90 Third Movement. The Ultimate Optimism: Finitics
already the case in some developed countries—halt or even decrease without

affecting cultural evolution. In fact, it is not the absolute quantity of energy dissi-
pation that will change exponentially or even hyperbolically, but its specific values,
the density of energy fluxes.
Astrophysicist Eric Chaisson argues that a variable, which he called the free
energy rate density (which might be expressed as J s−1 kg−1) has been increasing in
a nonlinear manner not only in biological evolution, but also in the entire universe
(Chaisson 2001). Chaisson, who uses this variable to characterize the complexity of
a system, biological or otherwise, argues that evolution has led to ever more
complex systems, organisms, organs, and regulatory networks. We can also see this
trend, for example, in the evolution of present-day computers: the greater the
number of transistors per chip, which, according to Moore’s famous law, doubles
every 18 months, the greater the free energy rate density.
The nonlinear rise in energy flow density is just one specific example of the trend
of universal densification. As already shown in the section on evolution of the
universe, densification has become the most conspicuous feature of our time. The
density of news on television, the Internet, and in newspapers; of data from sci-
entific research; of goods on the market; and, generally, of events to which an
individual is exposed every day—and with it the density of emotional experiences
—is increasing. This densification is accompanied by ephemerization: everything
lasts just a short time; banalization: everything becomes commonplace; and trivi-
alization: anything, or any person, becomes insignificant and cursory. Cultural
evolution is becoming similar to the early phase of biological evolution, when
nearly the only measure of fitness was growth rate and when selection meant the
“survival of the fastest” (Kacser and Beeby 1984). “Time-based competition”, the
drive behind innovations, is the main feature of today’s market economy
(Blackburn 1991). The “struggle for life” is assuming a “struggle for attention”: in
an abundance of goods, data, and toys, the “evolutionary fitness” of any of these
items is determined by the publicity it enjoys, which one might also describe as
“survival of the loudest.”
Evolution has turned into full-fledged paravolution. In many areas the expo-
nential expansion has been displaced by the hyperbolic expansion. As modeling by
Eigen and Winkler showed, during exponential growth, different variants can
coexist and compete with each other, but when growth becomes hyperbolic, only a
single variant thrives, it displaces all the others, and any new variant, however its
selective advantage may be, has no chance to survive (Eigen and Winkler 1975).
The ongoing acceleration of science and technology has prompted Ray Kurzweil
to formulate the “law of accelerating returns,” which describes “the acceleration of
the pace of and the exponential growth of the products of an evolutionary process”
(Kurzweil 2005). As mentioned in the section on the evolution of the universe,
Kurzweil introduced the term “Technological Singularity” and in his book, The
Singularity Is Near, has attempted to depict the world behind the Technological
Singularity (Kurzweil 2005). Humanity will merge with computational technology;
the world will soon be populated by computational hybrids having at their core the
minds and, poetically, the “hearts and souls” of humans. The hybrid intelligence
1 Unwearied Dreams of Technooptimists 91
will become trillions of times more powerful than that of contemporary humans.
The new species would do away with human frailties and live forever. Within the
next few centuries, the entire universe will be taken over by an omniscient
superintelligence. Various brands of transhumanists, extropians, and singularitari-
ans believe that the technological singularity will be achieved thanks not only to the
unrestrained progress of computer technology, but also to similar progress in
genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR).
These are no longer the fantasies of science-fiction writers, but assessments by
serious scientists, mostly physicists and computer scientists. A biologist might be
amazed when reading an essay by the American physicist Freeman Dyson, on “our
biotech future” (Dyson 2007). In his view, the tools of genetic engineering will
soon become accessible to ordinary people; domesticated biotechnology in the
hands of housewives and children will furnish an explosion of diversity of new
living creatures; designing genomes will become a new art form as creative as
painting or sculpture. The final step will be biotech games, designed in a manner
similar to computer games for children down to kindergarten age, but played with
real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. “Playing such games, kids
will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing.” According
to Dyson, bit by bit the borders between species are disappearing. Soon only one
species will remain, namely the genetically modified human, and just as we freely
exchange software in computers, we will exchange genes. The evolution of life will
return soon to a state of agreeable unity, as it existed in pre-Darwinian times (recall
that this was a period of the “survival of the fastest”). Dyson hopes that ethical
progress will keep pace with science, making possible a future of universal pros-
perity and cooperation. Others are not so optimistic: As Pearson put it, “We will
almost certainly gain the required technology many years before we reach the level
of cultural sophistication that would ensure the power is wielded with appropriate
wisdom; it is going to be like giving a powerful chemistry set to a child for its third
birthday” (Pearson 2008).
Dyson’s speculations actually reflect ambitions that had previously been
expressed by competent biologists. Long before the era of genetic engineering,
biologists considered the possibility of changing heredity not by slow and blind
breeding, but by quick and premeditated interventions. The only thing that they got
wrong was assessing when such technologies would be available (Hughes 2008).
Biochemist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964) pointed out in 1963 in a
speech about, “Biological possibilities for the human species in the next ten
thousand years”: “It may take a thousand years or so before we have a knowledge
of human genetics even as full as our present very incomplete knowledge of organic
chemistry. Till then we can hardly hope to do much for our evolution” (Haldane
1963). Half a century ago, the assessment was not in thousands, but in millions of
years: French writer Anatole France (1844–1924) wrote in 1895 in his book, The
Garden of Epicurus: “When biology will be constituted, that is in some millions of
years….”.
In the year 2007, the replacement of “wrong” genes with “desirable’” ones, and
the creation of completely novel organisms, was felt as becoming an engineering
program. As geneticist J. Craig Venter, put it: “We now know we can create a
synthetic organism. It’s not a question of ‘if’, or ‘how’, but ‘when’, and in this
regard, think weeks and months, not years.” And, if fact, in 2010 he published with
23 collaborators results of an experiment in which they replaced natural DNA of a
bacterium with a new DNA, completely synthesized by humans, and called their
product “the world’s first synthetic life form” (Venter 2013). The publication
received wild publicity and was extolled as “a defining moment in the history of
biology and biotechnology”. Some critics, including some religious groups, con-
demned the work, warning that synthetic organisms might cause environmental
havoc or be turned into biological weapons, and some exaggerated that Venter was
playing God. In his book published in 2013 Venter admitted that “In the restricted
sense that we had shown with this experiment how God was unnecessary for the
creation of new life, I suppose that we were” (Venter 2013). In the book he said the
achievement heralds the dawn of a new era in which new life is made to benefit
humanity, starting with bacteria that churn out biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere, and even manufacture vaccines. He considered manipulation
of human genes not only possible, but desirable. He speculated that humans may be
able to send a genome across the solar system at the speed of light, and reconstitute
it on the other side. The other way round, if a Rover discovered life on Mars, it
could sequence the life-form’s DNA and beam the code back to Earth, where
scientists could rebuild the organism. Venter looks toward the future with hope and
confidence. With the success of private space flight, the moon and Mars clearly will
be colonized. New life forms for food and energy production or for new medicine
will be sent as digital information to be converted back into life forms in the 4.3–
21 min that it takes a digital wave to go from earth to Mars. He suggested that in
place of sending living humans to distant galaxies we can send digital information
together with the means to boot it up in tiny space vessels. More importantly,
“Synthetic life will enable us to understand all life at this planet and to enable new
industries to produce food, energy, water and medicine.”
Biologist Julian Huxley (1887–1975), who introduced the term “transhuman-
ism” in 1957, envisioned a new philosophy based on the tenet that humans have the
duty and the destiny to take charge of evolution by transcending their biological
limitations (Huxley 1947). The famous last sentence from Richard Dawkins’ book,
The Selfish Gene, already mentioned in this book, reiterates this challenge: “We,
alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (see Footnote
10 in Chap. 1). This conviction dates back to the French philosopher Nicolas de
Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who stated that the perfectibility of
man is unlimited, and seems to resound in countless sermons of contemporary
neo-Enlightenment scientists, including biologists. Edward O. Wilson wrote that we
are “the first truly free species” that is about “to decommission natural selection, the
force that made us […] the legacy of the Enlightenment is the belief that entirely on
our own we can know, and in knowing, understand, and in understanding, choose
wisely” (Wilson 1998).
1 Unwearied Dreams of Technooptimists 93
In his review of Wilson’s book, Robert May commented: “I would like to share
his optimism, but I cannot […] I fear that inflexibility of human institutions, rooted
in the past evolutionary history of our species, will ineluctably continue to put their
emphasis on the interests of individuals and of the short term” (May 1998). But, as
indicated later in this book, the situation is even more dramatic: those institutions
that had evolved with no human intention but by selection to curb narrow
self-interests of human individuals, to promote cooperation, to sustain
self-transcendence, and on which human civilization has been founded, are on the
brink of collapsing. On top of it, the basic flaw of neo-Enlightenment biologists,
staunch adherents of Darwin, is, horribile dictu, their sticking to and perpetuation
of pre-Darwinian thinking.
This is even more evident in Wilson’s latest book, The Meaning of Human
Existence, in which he claims: “We have enough intelligence, goodwill, generosity
and enterprise to turn Earth into a paradise both for ourselves and for the biosphere
that gave us birth. We can plausibly accomplish that goal, at least be well on the
way, by the end of the century” (Wilson 2014). Wilson rejects fantasies of scientific
futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, in which humans transform into superhuman
cyborgs and then colonize galactic space. He also warns against engineering of
humanity, for instance, by genetics or by using brain implants. Faithful to his
neo-Enlightenment creed, he advocates “existential conservatism, the preservation
of biological human nature as a sacred trust.”
2 Technooptimistic Fallacy
It is high time to wake up.

First, who are the “we” that Dawkins and Wilson are talking about? Is it the
scientists who would “rebel against their selfish genes”? If the number of scientists
on Earth were 100 million (the present number is far less) this would still be only
1.6 % of the human population. And, after all, how many of them would represent a
spiritual elite, Aristotelian “magnanimous humans”? How about politicians? The
horizon of the average politician seems to be limited by the next election term.
Would it be the general public who could advance us the next step of evolution?
Polls in the United States, the scientifically and technologically most advanced
nation on Earth, disclosed that less than 50 % of adults know that the Earth orbits
the Sun once a year and only 9 % understand what a molecule is. Various surveys
reveal that 94 % of American adults believe in God, 89 % in Heaven, 73 % in the
Devil and Hell, 36 % in ghosts, 37 % accept astrology, and 23 % believe in
reincarnation. Only 9 % of Americans accept that humans developed over millions
of years without divine participation, 40 % understand evolution as a process
guided by God, and 47 % are convinced that God created humans within the past
10,000 years (Augustine 1998; Taylor 1998; Robinson 2000). Similar surveys in
other countries would probably reveal similar results. It is the most telling dem-
onstration of how traditional forms of mythophilia persist and at most have been
disappearing only little by little. These mythophils, carrying the brains of hunters
and gatherers, have been now equipped by science with computers and on the
Internet they wage tribal wars, or, alternatively, enjoy peeping, eavesdropping, and
gossiping. “The unfortunate, non-democratic truth is that science in the United
States, and other nations, too, prospers in a state of disengagement from public
understanding of the substance of science” (Greenberg 2001). The masses enjoy
artifacts of modern technology and, at the same time, adhere to traditional myths,
quite often contradictory to the ideas that gave birth to the artifacts. The virtual
world may open a new niche for the masses and their satisfaction. But, in the
meantime, deprived mythophils living in the real world will have easy access to the
genetic manipulations described above, with gadgets pretty soon commercialized
and cheap, but equally available to malicious Internet hacking. A more expensive
gadget, fission of atoms, may also soon be within their reach. Why should they shun
using them if this would procure them satisfaction and pleasure?
Second, what does it mean to “choose wisely”? For J. Craig Venter, a “wise
choice” is to engineer a synthetic organism with higher photosynthetic efficiency
than extant plants in order to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuel. A “wise
choice” for a bioterrorist would obviously be something quite different. Would it be
a “wise choice” to “eradicate” schizophrenia by replacing the genes for schizo-
phrenia by their “sound” alleles, even if we know that 28 of the 76 genes that have
been linked to schizophrenia have undergone positive selection during human
evolution and are closely linked to cognitive abilities involved in complex thought?
(Crespi et al. 2007). It is feasible that different “schizophrenic” alleles or variation
in their penetrance determine whether an individual would be mentally ill or a
creative artist or scientist. As the concept of genetic networks is replacing the “one
gene, one disease” doctrine of “genes for …” it becomes clear that making “wise
choices” becomes increasingly difficult.
It is amazing to observe how the technological visionaries, including biologists
among them, ignore that modest and scanty knowledge we have of human behavior
and social dynamics. Cultural (i.e., human and social) sciences have been lagging
behind natural sciences. This reflects the paradoxical situation of contemporary
humanity: we can do much, but we understand too little about who we are and what
we are doing. Our capacity to grasp the world (in the literal meaning of the word: to
grip, to mold, to manipulate) by far exceeds our capacity of understanding it: of
perceiving meaning of things and events in their genuine contexts. We know much
of the inanimate world and of life at the level of molecules, and have a marvelous
command over it, due to the advancement of natural sciences. However, our
knowledge of the forces that direct human individual behavior and social dynamics
is meager.
There is no doubt that the relative backwardness of cultural sciences has been
caused by the lack of appropriate instruments that would allow measurements and
organized experiments. Natural sciences have long abandoned the concepts that
Aristotle had used to explain the physical world, but cultural sciences continue to
use his concepts in their interpretation of humans and society. Virtually the entire
progress of cultural sciences up to now seems to consist of concrete descriptions of
2 Technooptimistic Fallacy 95
those new social changes that have been brought about by the progress of natural
sciences. But the large majority of these descriptions are based on those conceptions
of humans and society that have survived unchanged since their invention by Plato,
Aristotle, and their contemporaries.
On the other hand, the progress of instrumentalization in the natural sciences is
such that it may soon make human actors redundant and displace them from
research. According to Hans Moravec, “We need a lot of engineers working dili-
gently to make little improvements and then test them out in the marketplace” [as
referred to in Walter (2004)]. And Ray Kurzweil maintains: “All that is needed to
solve a surprisingly wide range of intelligent problems is exactly this: simple
methods combined with heavy doses of computation, itself a simple process”
(Kurzweil 1999). Kevin Kelly writes that new tools will enable new structures of
knowledge and new ways of discovery: robotics and computers will permit a brute
force style of science, rapid automated exploration of all imaginable possibilities,
with recurrent preservation of the best outcome, which would serve as an input for
exploration at a new level (Kelly 1994).
Technooptimism may have been a lasting dominating ideology of scientists for
quite a time. In 1957 René Dubos believed that “By using scientific knowledge and
ecological wisdom we can manage the earth so as to create environments which are
ecologically stable, economically profitable, and favourable to the continued
growth of civilization” (Dubos 1957). In 1973 Peter Medawar maintained that
“Science and technology are held responsible for our present predicament but offer
the only means of escaping their consequences.” With appropriate technology, he
will be “completely confident of our ability to put and keep our house in order”
(Medawar 1973). Leonard Read in his famous essay on the pencil appealed: “The
lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Permit these
creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will
respond to the Invisible Hand” (Read 1958). Scores of other examples may be cited,
expressing, explicitly or implicitly, a creed in human endless perfectibility.
This technooptimism has a fatal flaw. It completely ignores the fact that human
animals are biologically constrained in acting, feeling, and reasoning. On the other
hand, the evolution of artifacts, including scientific instruments, has no ceiling, no
limits, and humans apparently have no means of curbing it. “Makeability,” which
may be boundless, does not equal “manageability.” In addition, the problem is that
what is true of benefaction is also true of malefaction. We would wish that science
provide us energy for illumination, heating, and driving our cars, but not for bombs;
and wish that airplanes serve tourists but not terrorists. This, however, is impos-
sible: there is no axiological asymmetry built in science; science is indifferent
toward both good and evil. Not only technooptimism appears to be naive, but also
the lasting sermons of how science is a unique blessing for humanity and how it
will eventually remove all human troubles and bring forth a perfect world. No one
has yet proved that the number of new problems that science has generated is
smaller than the number of problems it had solved.
Bertrand Russell already saw it in 1958: “At present, scientific technique

advances like an army of tanks that have lost their drivers, blindly, ruthlessly,
without goal or purpose” (Russell 1996). If this was the case in the middle of the
twentieth century, how much more it applies to the situation of humankind in the
second decade of the twenty-first century!
3 Gloomy Doomsayers
In contrast to technooptimists, doomsayers offer a gloomy view of the future. One

may argue that from time immemorial pessimists have always complemented ardent
optimists and history was running without paying attention to prognoses from the
both sides. There is no wonder that we can find doomsday pages on the Internet,
including those devoted to “doomsday economy,” “doomsday biology,” or
“doomsday psychology.” Yet, the present situation of humankind seems unique,
with no precedent in history. Astronomer Martin Rees pointed out in his 2003 book
that the twentieth century was the first in which humanity may have realized the real
chance of self-destruction; and the twenty-first century may become a critical
moment in the entire evolutionary lifetime of the human species, in the fate of the
Earth, and maybe even the entire universe (Rees 2003). Rees sees in modern
technology a very serious menace, with problems far greater than is commonly
realized. He estimates that the probability of extinction of our species before 2100 is
around 50 %. The other 50 % alternative of the outcome of the century would be
human expansion through space by minimizing or overcoming these problems. He
considers possibilities of error and environmental disaster, but mainly emphasizes
the risk of intentional destruction. He fears that biotechnology and nanotechnology
will provide greater potential for destruction, and permit ever smaller groups, or
indeed individuals, to make use of them. Rees has newly offered a $1000 wager on
a death toll of a million or more due to a single act of terror (or error) using these
technologies within the next 20 years. He is not as confident in effective techno-
logical countermoves we can contrive as Ray Kurzweil may be: if we were capable
of designing a system to deal with a currently deployed threat, the target has
meanwhile equivalently progressed, but in an unforeseen direction.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists occasionally presents a design called “The
Doomsday Clock” that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization
with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these
are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies,
emerging biotechnologies, and cybertechnology that could inflict irrevocable harm,
whether by intention, miscalculation, or by accident, to our way of life and to the
planet. In 2012, the clock hands were fixed at 11:55 p.m., 5 min to symbolic doom,
midnight; but on January 22, 2015, the clock hands were moved to 11:57 p.m.
Experts on the board said they felt a sense of urgency this year because of the
world’s ongoing addiction to fossil fuels, procrastination with enacting laws to cut
greenhouse gas emissions, and slow efforts to get rid of nuclear weapons. If Earth is
3 Gloomy Doomsayers 97
warmer by a few degree Celsius, it will be enough to “radically transform” the

Earth’s surface in the future. The risk from nuclear weapons is not that someone is
going to press the button, but it is expensive to keep them secure, and there are also
safety problems at nuclear power plants.
In December 2014, physicist Stephen Hawking stated in a broadcast on BBC:
“Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and
re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. […] The development of full artificial
intelligence could spell the end of the human race. […] Humans, who are limited by
slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
Half a century earlier, in the 1960s, astronomer Carl Sagan suspected that
technological civilizations not only on our Earth, but in the universe at large, tend to
self-destruct. He enticed scientists and the general public to identify and publicize
ways that humanity could destroy itself, including a nuclear holocaust, with the
hope of avoiding it and eventually becoming a spacefaring species. In 1966 he
coauthored a book with Russian astronomer Josif Shklovski, in which they spec-
ulated that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a
century of developed interstellar communicative capability or master their
self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales (Shklovski and
Sagan 1966). Sagan seemed to have concurred with Shklovski, who had written that
profound crises lie in wait for a developing civilization, such as self-destruction as a
result of thermonuclear catastrophe or some other discovery with unpredictable and
uncontrollable consequences, genetic manipulations, overproduction of informa-
tion, restricted capacity of the individual’s brain which can lead to excessive spe-
cialization and eventually degeneration, and creation of artificial intelligent beings
—and one of them may well prove fatal.
Environmentalist and futurist James Lovelock is known as the originator in the
1970s of the Gaia principle, according to which living and nonliving parts of the
Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single
organism, named Gaia (Lovelock 1995). The biosphere has a regulatory effect on
the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life. In his 2006 book, The Revenge of
Gaia, Lovelock forecast that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing
global devastation; by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan and part of London
will be under water. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe
is unstoppable (Lovelock 2006). We have inadvertently declared war on Gaia, and
she “now threatens us with the ultimate punishment of extinction.” Human civili-
zation will be hard pressed to survive. By 2100, 80 % of humans will perish, and
this climate change will last 100,000 years (Lovelock 2009).
As there is no sign that the accelerating expansion of technology may be
slackening, the extrapolation toward the middle of the twenty-first century as the
critical point of the Technological Singularity seems appropriate. Let us recall
Ulam’s conviction that beyond it, “human affairs, as we know them, could not
continue” (Ulam 1958). In other words, we live in the ultimate age of human
evolution and are quickly approaching a “phase transition.” The majority of people
born recently will be alive at that date. In developed countries, they have been
imprinted on customs and values of smoothly running societies, which provide
relative security and comfort. Their juniors may be exposed to enfeebled and/or
impaired imprinting but still be expecting a continuation of the past. The enormous
disequilibria in the globalized world stir up feelings of deprivation and envy in
people of underdeveloped countries with repercussions on youth: young people are
being imprinted with strong group ties, hates, and fanaticism. The tremendous
turbulence and fluctuations cannot be avoided. It is a typical symptom of phase
transitions that in the vicinity of the critical point the properties of a system change
dramatically and fluctuations occur at all length scales. The forthcoming instabili-
ties may give substance to the apprehensions of the doomsayers.
4 The Twilight of Humanity
Extrapolation from the past to the future is a most precarious undertaking. It pre-
supposes a continuation of the past trajectory, with no dramatic changes due to
fortuity, bifurcations, emergence, and phase transitions; it anticipates undiscovered
knowledge as the continuation of what we have learned in the past; and it omits a
broader context in which the analyzed system is embedded. Recall that the con-
scious human mind with the causal reasoning limited by the “magical number
three” is not able to grasp the entire causal net behind a concrete event. All attempts
at forecasting, mentioned in the previous three sections, suffer from this deficiency.
Although this book takes pains to be descriptive, its extrapolations should be taken
with this reservation.
The book assumes that we live in a time in which human evolution is close to its
peak. The contemporary situation of humankind, which has to live in an environ-
ment that differs substantially from all the previous ones, may be compared to the
important stage of human evolution in which humans were forced to change their
lifestyles and replace a relatively safe environment in branches of the tropical forest
for a dangerous environment of the savannah plain. According to the so-called
“savannah hypothesis,” formulated in 1925 by Raymond Dart, our most ancient
upright ancestors, the hominins, acquired larger brains and learned to walk on two
feet, in part to peer over tall grass in search of prey and predators. Rather than
simply plucking fruit from trees, they had to become shrewd hunters and move
longer distances in order to survive. [For a recent review see Niemitz (2010)]. The
difference between the two situations is in time scale: the climatic change that
transformed African forests of the Miocene era (some 23 million to 5 million years
ago) into the savannahs of the Pleistocene era (the past 5 million years) provided a
sufficiently long evolutionary time to allow adaptations of human ancestors to new
conditions. In contrast, modern humans have faced changes of their environment
within centuries, later decades, now years, and soon perhaps days and hours. This
inevitably puts humans under growing social stress. Humans themselves are orig-
inators of these fast changes of their environment, but their outfits, biological and
cultural, could not adapt to the rapid external changes. Biological evolution has no
chance to keep up and cultural evolution runs at a stupendous speed, almost crazy.
4 The Twilight of Humanity 99
Evolution is being displaced by paravolution. Human affairs have become too

complex for human understanding and the human species faces the irresistible
attraction of existence (and of ending) in the full-fledged virtual world.
Two major factors are responsible for the complexity of the present human
condition: first, the dazzling rate of changes in the latest phase of the hyperbolic
dynamics; and second, the very hypertrophy of human emotions, which largely
overpower the weakness of human inherent reasoning and amplify this discrepancy,
and, on the other hand, support the expansion of modern artifacts endowed with
rationality which seems to exceed that of individual humans. This is too heavy a
burden on the piles of Rialto of the species Homo sapiens (Fig. 1).
The precarious situation may be illustrated by the present state of Western
society. A single aspect of it, hedonotaxis, has been analyzed in a previous section
dealing with Paravolution. As already stated there, the conclusions from the anal-
ysis of the West may apply universally. The present dynamics of the Western
capitalist economy appears inexplicable in terms of the ruling theories. In the
aftermath of the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2008, a leading US economist,
former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan, confessed at a
congressional hearing in October, 2008 that he had “found a flaw” in his
free-market ideology: “My predictions about self-interest were wrong. I relied for
40 years on self-interest to work its way up, and it was wrong.” In his book from
2013, The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of
Forecasting, he posited that humans act irrationally, rather than behaving like
omnipotent calculating machines (Greenspan 2013). They respond, especially
during periods of economic stress, “to things like fear, greed, euphoria, and
impatience.” The views that the rational man theory of economics has not worked
and that economic life is inherently unpredictable may apparently soon replace
classical economic doctrines.
Fig. 1 Humankind in the twenty-first century. A dazzling trot of society, illusions of leaders about
controlling and managing it, happy-go-lucky amusement of masses, and ivory towers of
intellectuals (With permission from EMBO Reports 9: 703–708, 2008)
It has been pointed out previously that capitalism, its shortcomings notwith-
standing, has proven to be the only viable economic system. More questionable is
its long-term sustainability. Recently, economist Thomas Piketty argued that there
is an intrinsic trend of capitalism that income inequality between owners and
investors of capital and the vast majority of people whose income depends on
wages and salaries must increase inevitably. He reached the conclusion that the only
remedy to control and mitigate the dynamics would be to institutionalize a
worldwide progressive tax on private capital (Piketty 2014). But he described this
global wealth tax idea as more of a “useful utopia” than a practical policy
suggestion.
Yet, it seems that computers may be instrumental in solving hard technical
problems and transforming utopia into working facts, at least in the economy.
Computers, our smartest artifacts, are acquiring the capacity to orient themselves in
the rough territory of economic networks to such an extent that they may soon be
the only actors capable to keep running in the real world a system too complex for
human understanding and managing. We have realized it quite recently: computers
rather than politicians may have functioned as the principal “experts” in spurring on
the US economy after the 2008 financial crisis, as well as in the recent effort of the
European Union to save the common currency of the eurozone.1 Incidentally,
Pikkety arrived at his conclusion from the analysis of the economy of the past. But
it seems clear that the present-day evolution of capitalism, with its incessant
innovations and robots replacing human labor, is bound to augment income
inequality. Mass unemployment and the majority of the population transformed in a
new proletariat, “superfluate,” dispensable, and useless people, on the one hand,
and a handful of wealthy experts keeping the machinery running ahead at full
speed. Can we rely on computers in this case? Possibly. Provided that computers
become sorcerers to carry over humans from the real world into the virtual world.
The globalization of the world and its rapid changes raises the question about the
idiosyncrasy of Western culture or, synonymously, European culture, which has
thus far dominated the global scene, about its values and its prospect to sustain. The
notion of Western culture is not restricted to the continent of Europe but also
applies to countries of the Americas and Australia whose history, immigration, and
lifestyle are tightly bound to Europe. By the first of its dual aspects, artifaction,
culture is common to all humans. By the second aspect, signifaction, culture is
specific to distinct social groups. As such, it functions as intragroup glue and as a
badge distinguishing a particular group from alien groups. Signifaction means to
assign meaning to things and events of the world and, accordingly, it is a principal
sculptor of distinctive world views. Whoever opposes a world view of an individual
1
The power of computers is best illustrated by this passage from an article of Dooling (2008):
“When Treasury Secretary Paulson (looking very much like a frightened primate) came to
Congress seeking an emergency loan, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a Democrat still living on
his family homestead, asked him: ‘I’m a dirt farmer. Why do we have one week to determine that
$700 billion has to be appropriated or this country’s financial system goes down the pipes?’ ‘Well,
sir,’ Mr. Paulson could well have responded, ‘the computers have demanded it.’”
or of his group, is perceived as a threat and treated as an enemy. Having one’s own
world view endangered evokes extremely unpleasant emotions and provokes
aggression. Signifaction is the major manifestation of human mythophilia. In the
period of human prehistory, where people’s knowledge was slight, fear dispro-
portionally great, and the urge to live and survive in a tightly cohesive group strong,
the main form of myth was religion.
We can trace the sources of Western culture by inspecting vestiges of the first
recorded history: Jewish and Christian monotheism on the background of diverse
local polytheisms, with a strong influence of a new kind of myth that cropped out of
the European soil 25 centuries ago: Greek philosophy. The philosophy of ancient
Greece has been pictured as a first step of humanity “from mythos to logos.” Instead
of religions derived from ecstasy and transmitted from generation to generation as
narratives, deductive reasoning was introduced as a method of contemplating the
world. Until the “Greek miracle,” all human cultures, including Western culture,
perfectly fit the mythophilic nature of the human animal living in groups; they
provided a firm, socially binding explanation of the world. In the specific conditions
of ancient Greek urban states, a unique discovery was made at that time: an
appreciation that a human being may afford to doubt the explanation of the world
that she got from her parents and which is shared by her social group and to come
up with her own truth. And that this truth may be found by strict logical reasoning
grounded on the assumption that the world itself is reasonable and accessible to
human reason: logos of the mind is isomorphic with Logos of the world. After the
domestication of fire this has been probably the second greatest invention of
humankind. Many more centuries passed until a person admitted that his truth,
which appeared self-evident, was not a unique one and that other people had
grounds for other explanations and other truths. But the essentials had been
accomplished at this very moment of the birth of philosophy.
This discovery has enabled the coexistence—and more: interactions—of dif-
ferent world views within a single social group. It was just a bit later that Plato
could come up with formulations of the substantial conceptual dichotomies: matter
versus spirit, body versus mind, idealism versus realism, nominalism versus
essentialism, rationalism versus empiricism, causality versus contingence, and
individual versus community. Incidentally, the imprint of Plato and the Greeks has
remained permanently associated with Western culture and may have not been
sufficiently counterbalanced by another heritage from antiquity, Roman philosophy.
It is this very Platonian dichotomy, persisting up to our days, along with the
legitimate plurality of views within a group, that has constituted the essence of
Western culture. It makes it unique among other cultures. It has given birth to
modern science, the third essential feature of Western culture. The fourth feature,
democracy, has been another invention, a logical outgrowth of intracultural
polymorphism.
The virtue of reasoning was grafted onto the Christian religion in the Middle
Ages and continued to be appreciated in the early modern period: God became the
synonym of the ancient Logos, and in doctrines of Saint Augustine, Thomas
Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant we can find an intimate blending of
religion and reasoning. In addition, science became a novel constituent of culture,

independent of philosophy. Thanks to science, the epistemic quotient of Western
culture was quickly rising. Still, progression of Western culture was neither simple
nor inexpensive; it was not exempt from the burden of myopic mythophilia: reli-
gious wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between Christians of dif-
ferent denominations were the heavy price for eventual mutual tolerance and
consensus in the concept of human rights.
The belief in the power of individual reason may have reached its peak in the
Enlightenment of continental Europe in the eighteenth century, when religion
started to be considered a remnant from the dark past. In the nineteenth century Karl
Marx dryly designated religion as the “opium of the people” and came up with his
idea of the “scientific world view,” devoid of any traces of religion. In retrospect,
Marx’s view can easily be accounted for by the Zeitgeist of its origin. The
beginning of the nineteenth century, the years of Marx’s youth, was the start of the
victorious path of technology. If human reason was able to reveal the laws of
Nature and on the basis of it to foresee processes of Nature, for instance, to
calculate the eclipse of the sun with a precision of seconds, and exploit them, why
should it not be able to reveal likewise the “laws” of society and, by using them,
foresee and manage social events? In his masterpiece, The Capital, Marx aimed,
according to his own words, “to lay bare the economic law of motion of society.”
Along with Laplace’s demon of mechanics and Maxwell’s demon of thermody-
namics another demon appeared on the European stage of the nineteenth century,
Marx’s demon.
Under particular contingencies of the first half of the twentieth century,
humankind got the opportunity to test the validity of Marx’s assertion. Communism
became a large-scale experimental checkup of his theses, and its failure—paid
dearly by enormous suffering and by more than 100 million human deaths—has
definitely proved the fallacy of the unconditional belief in the unlimited potential of
human reasoning (Kováč 2002). One of the most devastating theses of Marx has
been the assertion that a revolutionary social upheaval should not take over the
existing institutions but they should be smashed up and replaced by “rational”
institutions. Legislative and executive power should be united in a single organi-
zation; Marxism thus negated all political knowledge that has been accumulating in
Europe by evolutionary learning over centuries. In its faith in the inherent law-
fulness of social motion, orthodox Marxism considered the free market system of
capitalism not as a free system obeying the rules of the game, but as a disordered
interplay of blind forces that enslave humans. In the Marxist view, the individual
human reason is able to discover the underlying laws, to understand them, and to
function as a midwife of historical necessity speeding up the lawful and inevitable
progress of history from capitalism to communism.
The lesson to be drawn from the demise of communism is that the traditional
evolutionary institutions, including morals, religion, political organizations, law,
trade, rites, and customs, which evolved by Darwinian selection, have their intrinsic
rationality. They constitute the very groundwork of human society, and ensure its
stability. Any damage of them, or even menace, carries with it social stress. They
condition the expected collective economic and other benefits, known in economics
under the name “social capital.” The insufficient capacity of the human mind does
not allow us to comprehend and fully describe them, and hence we can call them
the “metaconceptual foundation of society.” This “veil of ignorance” may have
been the reason why human self-deception has been thriving for centuries and may
have been the main motivating factor of human creativity. As ethologist Konrad
Lorenz put it, “The scientific investigation of the structure of human society and its
intellectual processes is a task of mammoth proportions. Society is the most
complex of all living systems on earth, and our knowledge of is has barely scrat-
ched the surface” (Lorenz 1966).
In an analysis of the communist experiment it has been pointed out that
“however large may be the knowledge of social and historical facts, the knowledge
of the principles behind them may still be quite slight. Not much different from the
knowledge of principles of physics in the days of Aristotle. […] The socioworld,
with intricacy of institutions may be compared to an iceberg that is yet almost
entirely submerged in the ocean” (Kováč 2002). Institutions impose restrictions on
the behavior of human individuals, arranging selfish actions to be coupled with
socially useful effects. In addition, they enforce, by conditioning or by legal power,
an individual’s actions that would not occur spontaneously. The autonomous
dynamics of institutions, in parallel with but independently of the dynamics of
material production, and essentially independently of awareness and wishes of
humans, has accomplished an evolutionary feat: it has elevated humankind out of
existence in small nonanonymous groups of hunters and gatherers in the savannah
to existence in large, anonymous, over-biological social groups.
Communism demolished traditional institutions, evolutionary products of
European (but also Confucian, etc.) culture with embodied knowledge that they had
been accumulating for centuries, but did not establish new stable institutions.
By this act, it initiated decay of society and regress of people back to the level of primitive
groups of hunters and gatherers in the savannah. […] The horrors of Communism in their
entirety, the whole immensity of human suffering and senseless deaths, were due to the
monstrosity of its institutions and not to the ‘beast’, as has been sometimes called, quite
erroneously, the fearful, mythophilic, gregarious, self-deceiving creature that is the human
animal. […] Hannah Arendt was right, but only half: there was banality of evil behind
Nazism; and just so behind Communism. Banality of evil, as far as human individuals are
concerned. What she may have not focused at has been evil of institutions (Kováč 2002).
The experience of communism may lend a convincing “experimental” support to

the hypothesis that institutions are largely independent of human intentions and
control, being self-sustaining, self-reinforcing, and self-organizing.
Economist Friedrich Hayek (1988) distinguished two kinds of rationalism,
constructivist and evolutionary. Constructivist rationalism is associated with a
designated or made order as we find in artifacts deliberately designed to achieve
specific, explicitly definable purposes, such as buildings, factories, cars, clocks, or
silicon chips. On the other hand, evolutionary rationalism corresponds, in Hayek’s
conception, to spontaneous order. The systems involved are so complex that it is
inconceivable that any individual could know all the facts relevant to their func-
tioning. An expedient example of an evolved or spontaneous order is the market
economy. In Hayek’s words, “We have never designed our economic system. We
were not intelligent enough for that” (Hayek 1988). Lorenz noticed: “Without
traditional rites and customs representing a common property valued and defended
by all members of the group, human beings would be quite unable to form social
units exceeding in size that of the primal family group which can be held together
by the instinctive bond of personal friendship” (Lorenz 1966).
Recall that the size of human groups increased and the groups changed from
“natural” to “over-biological” only about 10,000 years ago, as described in a pre-
vious section. Religion was already in full bloom, with its dread of nature and fate,
awe for gods or God, strict orders and fear of trespassing commandments and God’s
punishment, all rationalized and embellished by massive self-deception. We can
infer that these have been the metaconceptual foundation on which Western soci-
eties have been erected. The foundation enabled the upsurge of science and tech-
nology, the construction of an effective educational system, advances of the
economy, and eventually the rise of welfare states. The authority of God was being
slowly substituted by the authority of the sovereign and by conformity with the
group’s rule, and fear of heavenly punishment by fear from deterrents of the state
law and of moral condemnation. The feelings of safety and security opened the door
for expanding hedonotaxis.
Hedonotaxis, in combination with the ever-accelerating rate of changes and
growth of complexity, has brought the West into its present situation. To charac-
terize it, some observers write about the “decline of the West,” borrowing it from
the title of the book of philosopher Oswald Spengler from 1922 (Spengler 1962); or
others use the words erosion, fall, bankruptcy, decadence, degeneration, decay, and
end. In 2003 Hunout with coworkers entitled their book The Destruction of Society,
and have indicated in the subtitle of the book what they found as causes: indi-
vidualism, hedonism, and consumerism (Hunout et al. 2003). The three causes are
bringing forth the diminution of social capital and erosion of social links. As a
remedy they have proposed a triad of new economic policies based on solidarity,
ethnic policies respecting cultural identities, and the reinforcement of congeniality
through the adoption of new values and practical behaviors. But who is going to
implement these proposals as well as many others, which all attempt to stop the
course of events and redirect the trajectory straight toward a paradise?
5 The Climax of Human Evolution
It seems that the path of the evolution of Western culture to its present state was
logical and inevitable. As its epistemic quotient was increasing, science and tech-
nology must have furnished means for improving the living standard up to the stage
of the welfare society. The metaconceptual foundation of society is getting looser
and the entire social edifice ever more labile.
5 The Climax of Human Evolution 105
We can only watch with anxiety how science, one of the most important con-
stituents of the metaconceptual foundation, has bifurcated into two disparate
branches: the first is ambitiously reaching into a world behind the Kant barriers that
should have remained forbidden fruit forever, as the piles of Rialto of human
cognition do not permit us to understand it (Horgan 1996). And the second is
science turned into technoscience, furnishing at rocket speed ever new and ever
more refined toys to provoke the never satisfiable human wants for comfort and
pleasure.
It has become clear that, as Christopher Hitchens observed, that religion, “comes
from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to
meet our inescapable demand for knowledge” (Hitchens 2007). Yet, as the analysis
above indicates, religion has constituted a firm part of the metaconceptul foundation
of society. Humans continue to be mythophilic animals and if the old myths are
being eradicated like a “virus” [to borrow a famous metaphor of Richard Dawkins
(see Footnote 10 in Chap. 1)] a mind awaits to be filled with other myths. In the
words of E.O. Wilson, “scientific materialism is itself a mythology defined in the
noble sense” (Wilson 1979). He confessed that as a young scientist he “experienced
the Ionian Enchantment. It means a belief in the unity of the science—a conviction,
far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be
explained by a small number of laws. […] Preferring a search for objective reality
over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger” (Wilson 1998).
Wilson has always seen himself as a staunch adherent of the Enlightenment legacy
and represents a category of contemporary scientists that we have dubbed above as
“neo-Enlighteners”.
But apparently a majority of people prefer a primitive materialism in the form of
cynicism (“all humans are selfish and hypocrites”) backed by a simplex ideology of
paraliberalism (“the greatest social good is achieved when individuals pursue their
own self-interest;” a misinterpretation of the economic theory of Adam Smith).
A most pernicious form of cynicism is ontological pragmatism: a creed that there
exist no objective and permanent human values, that values can be freely adjusted
in one’s own interest, and that pragmatism is not an instrumental strategy in pur-
suing goals and asserting one’s values but an ontology. In a society that changes at
paravolution speed, ontological pragmatism may function as the most successful
mythology in its results, and, at the same time, speed up the destruction of its
metaconceptual foundation. It would be fallacious to argue that, because from a
Darwinian perspective intelligence is the mental ability to adapt, that is to turn
around any situation to one’s own advantage, ontological pragmatists are the most
rational people. No, there are the paragons of mythophils.
Ontological pragmatists are not subject to self-deception; their quotient of
self-deception equals zero. On the other hand they are masters at cheating others. In
a prosperous society cheating is kept in check by institutions; when the metacon-
ceptual foundation of a society becomes labile, cheaters prevail: cheating thrives
and may jeopardize the survival of the society.
No less destructive appears to be a widespread dissemination of simplex evo-
lutionary theory that may be dubbed pop-Darwinism. It satisfies human longing for
understanding, orientation, and consistency. Everything is simple and clear: Darwin

and Wallace solved the mystery of human existence, and what has remained is yet
to add for a while footnotes to their work. Humans act as selfish and independent
units, feeble as puppets, subordinated to ruthlessly selfish molecular “replicators.”
Nature is red in tooth and claw; anything shaped by natural selection is necessary
selfish so that goodness is not natural, but exactly opposite: helping behavior is in
fact selfish and true altruism is impossible. No wonder that such statements have
culminated with posters on buses in London and other world capitals with the
inscription, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
The chase for pleasure is getting its ideology in this new, post-Marxist “scientific
world view.” As two opponents of its prominent protagonist Richard Dawkins
pointed out, it resembles a novel religion, just without a god. Biologist Brian
Goodwin saw in it a transformation of major tenets of Christian fundamentalism:
“we are born in sin, condemned to be selfish, but there is salvation”: In Dawkins’s
words, we “can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (Goodwin 1995).
And philosopher David Stove commented with irony that an antireligious zealot
gives us a new commandment: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism” (Stove
1995). We may add another criticism: a dogma of genocentrism, of a creed that
human behavior is prescribed by the genes, might represent the fourth addition to
the existing three Holy Scriptures, Judaic Torah, Christian Bible, and Muslim
Qur’an: the sequence of DNA in the genomes.
It does not seem that this course of affairs is specific to the West and Western
culture. There are indications that the Japanese may have adopted the Western
lifestyle, with its leniency, indolence, and hedonism, once the material living
standard caught up with the Western one. In China, the economic boom is adorned
by the notion of the “Chinese dream,” which stresses the importance of the
entrepreneurial spirit, glorifies a generation of self-made men and women,
encourages private consumption, and is, in substance, similar to the “American
dream” of the past. It expresses the ardent longing of the common Chinese people
for the American standard of living. Consumer spending is on the rise and,
according to reports of several observers, the ideology of a reckless consumerism is
achieving domination over the ancient notions of solidarity and community.
According to a report of the European Business Journal of November, 2012,
China’s media and entertainment industry continues to experience exponential
growth.
In addition, the newly developed countries have quickly taken over Western
invention, science, and its stepdaughter, technoscience. Science functions globally
as an intercultural enterprise, vaulting over group-specific differences and favors
trends toward a culture, common to all humankind, with a joint epistemic quotient
and global civilization. It is quite possible that vehement Asian critics of the West,
Japanese philosopher Takashi Umehara, as well as scholar and diplomat Kishore
Mahbubani of Singapore will eventually admit that the “great convergence” (the
title of a Mahbubani’s book) means neither a continual domination of the West, nor
a demise of the West, but a common evolutionary climax of the human species as a
whole (Mahbubani 2013).
5 The Climax of Human Evolution 107
Human nature, molded in the distant evolutionary past together with its product,
the metaconceptual foundation of society, constitutes the piles of Rialto of human
evolution. The point is that the discrepancy between the piles of Rialto and the
achieved state of human civilization has become too large. The dismantling of the
metaconceptual foundation is underway, the traditional religions are fading, and no
adequate substitution that would satisfy the majority of the people is forthcoming.
Violent enforcement of outdated traditional religions, even if producing global
commotion, is doomed to failure. Dehumanization, as defined in previous sections,
is underway. As already suggested, the transplacement of humans from the real
world to the virtual world may not stop the dehumanization, but it may neutralize
the consequences of the dismantling of the metaconceptual foundation of society.
Many thinkers of the past have anticipated with apprehension that humanity
would undertake this path. Writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), a contem-
porary of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) sketched out possible scenarios. A paper, in
which contributions to human benefit by Darwin and Dostoyevsky have been
compared, ends with a statement: “Dostoyesky’s legacy may suggest an amend-
ment to the UN Charter. We, united humankind, solemnly declare: No truth has
ever been revealed to us; we respect and tolerate each other in our independent
searching and erring” (Kováč 2010).
Would this piece of knowledge, an unavoidable step in the evolution of cog-
nition, improve the human condition if it became commonplace? We should never
forget the lesson drawn from the experiment of the communist utopia. Recall also
that firm self-deception, imposed by culture, has played an important role in human
advancement from hominization to humanization. The avowal that there has been
no Revelation to humanity would imply at the same time that there is no Salvation
either. It is conceivable that the climax of human evolution will be the cross-point at
which two curves, the ascending one of the explosive growth of knowledge (and
corresponding technology) and the descending one of dehumanization meet. And
what is likely to follow? An ultimate age of short duration, in a form of a spec-
tacular firework, with an intermezzo of the virtual world, as a way of transition to
the extinction of the species Homo sapiens.
6 The Uncertainty of the Ultimate Age
In contemplating how human aggression, representing “the ever-increasing danger

of human society’s becoming completely disintegrated,” Konrad Lorenz closed his
classical book, On Aggression, with a chapter entitled “Avowal of Optimism,”
which starts with a presumptuous confession of the author, “I do not mind admitting
that, unlike Faust, I think I have something to teach mankind that may help it to
change for the better”. He listed four possibilities of discharging aggression as a
human trait from its primal form on substitute objects. He was aware that it would
be a hopeless undertaking to diminish or even eliminate aggression by “shielding
mankind from all stimulus situations eliciting aggressive behaviour” and equally
hopeless to control aggression by putting a moral veto on it. He expressed his

mistrust to attempt to “breed out the aggressive drive” by what we would today call
“genetic engineering.” He placed his hopes on sport as a highly ritualized non-
hostile combat, governed by the strictest of culturally developed rules, commonly
accepted also as international norms. He already extolled space flight, which may
surpass segregation of humans into their particular groups and make of humankind
a single group with a common extraterrestrial “enemy” with whom to wrestle. He
realized, decades before the invention of the Internet, Facebook, and all kinds of
novel social networking services and before the rise of the blogosphere that per-
sonal acquaintances can curb aggressivity, subdue international hatred, and promote
friendships. He confessed his confidence in the great and beneficial force of humor
and with it of laughter. He supposed that laughter probably evolved by ritualization
of a redirected threatening movement. Accordingly, humor just as well as sport
represented for Lorenz two innocuous outlets of aggressivity (Lorenz 1966).
In the ‘60s of the twentieth century, when Lorenz had written his book, “virtual
reality” was just a subject of speculation of writers of science fiction and even the
access to computer competitive or combative games was rather scarce and the
games rather primitive. The imminence of the virtual world, as we appreciate it
today, could not occur to Lorenz. But we are now justified to extend his specula-
tions: humans, living in both developed and backward countries, will find plenty of
space in the virtual world to satisfy their need for aggression, inborn or derived
from deprivation or envy, and choose unlimited numbers of virtual allies and
enemies, to win and enjoy the victory.
There are three components of uncertainty in the face of the inevitable course to
extinction. First, can humanity succeed in maintaining the economy and keeping
technology running, possibly by massively employing robotics, and improving the
economy of developing countries to such an extent that, in parallel, the vast
majority of people would stay and thrive in the virtual world? We cannot be sure,
even in the case that intelligent computers would substitute humans to master the
“insolvability” and “ungovernability” of the complex and rapidly changing world
and ability to surmount Kant’s barriers that circumscribe human comprehension of
the universe. Will we eventually get rid of the actual danger of terrorism by
“immersing” the potential perpetrators in the virtual world?
This is not a minor point; quite the contrary, it is crucial. There is scarcely any
challenge for science that may be more urgent in our days than is this one. However
complex a net of causes terrorism may have, envy, complexes of inferiority, feel-
ings of menace, in short, deprivation aggression, has a heavy weight in the causal
net. On top of it, a similar deprivation aggression might spread among superfluates
in the developed world, stirred by a loss of security and the ensuing anguish. In fact
in societies with impaired metaconceptual foundations violence may occur on the
same footing as hedonotaxis and may be equally immutable.
Incidentally, let us recall the statement in the section on Creative evolution that
science advances in those directions where success is the greatest and the resistance
6 The Uncertainty of the Ultimate Age 109
to attain it the least. This, unfortunately, is not a work on psychology of terrorism.

Curiously, some governments seem to find it more relevant to invest immense money
in military equipment rather than into research on such an unattractive subject as are
the unexplored metaconceputal foundations of society, even though their commotion
appears to be one of the causes of the contemporary global instability.
Second, would the virtual rewards and pleasures be equivalent to those
humankind had been selected for in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness of
the Pleistocene? It has already been considered that the virtual world as an evo-
lutionary novelty may in fact be an evolutionary regression and living in it may
bring about dehumanization. We apparently experience a pleasure more intensively
if it follows a period of suffering or deprivation; we cannot be sure whether the
instantaneous gratification of all natural and artificial needs in the virtual world can
bring humans satisfaction and well-being. The skewed proportion between too
much pleasure and almost no worry is certainly remote from the norm of mini-
mization of frustration mentioned previously. And how about the curse of the
hedonic treadmill; will technology find the means to overcome it? Will “synthetic
happiness” substitute or surpass “natural happiness,” which has been valued by
many thinkers as the supreme goal of life?
Third, if we subscribe to the estimation of futurist Kurzweil (2005) that the
twenty-first century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of
progress and take into account that only three to four decades separate us from the
Technological Singularity, would this short period be long enough to allow the
necessary consolidation in the ultimate pre-extinction phase?
The vision of a world in which all the problems of humankind would be simply
“solved” by transferring them from the real world into a virtual word, and humans
—rich and poor, intelligent and primitive alike—will be living in the virtual world,
in which they can play out their negative emotions and feel happy with their virtual
rewards, must appear as a naïve utopia, a utopia not much different from the
persistent faith of neo-Enlighteners, who profess “the paradise on Earth” by the end
of the twenty-first century and even from the claim that psychoactive drugs or direct
brain stimulation may soon bring perfect happiness to humanity. The vision pre-
supposes that human society will be running smoothly in the parallel real world,
relieved of the complications we are facing today and seeing no way to resolve
them, with an effective infrastructure backed by computers and robots, just as Ray
Kurzweil and other technooptimists depict our nearest future. However, in contrast
to the technooptimists, the vision does not imply the continuation of humankind
and its expansion over the entire universe, or even human immortality, but rather it
predicts the approaching extinction of the human species. As has been stated in the
section on evolution of the universe, the Technological Singularity on the planet
Earth will also be the Civilization Singularity.
As mentioned in the section on the climax of human evolution, economist
Thomas Piketty used the notion “useful utopia” to characterize his proposal of how
to remove an inconsistency in capitalism and to secure its sustainability. Ending in
virtual bliss may be taken for as another “useful utopia” too. From all the other
alternatives of termination it is an option the most desirable: it complies with the

effort of science to minimize human suffering, and, in fact, it would be a culmi-
nation of this perennial endeavor of science, and the ultimate passing away of
society would be the mildest of all. It is far from the apocalypse of a global nuclear
war, of a technological disaster caused by the breaking down of critical hubs in
global networks, of destructions of littoral megacities by rising oceans, and
worldwide hunger owing to dramatic climate changes, of a violent crushing of
civilization by invasion of the developed countries by mass immigrants from
underdeveloped countries, of establishing of a world dictatorship, of enslaving
humans and eliminating them using intelligent robots, and so on.
The main virtue of the option of the “virtual world” is the fact that, owing to the
short time we have, it does not presuppose that there would be a need to efface all
the strong cultural imprintings to which people have been exposed before. As
already hinted at, the virtual world would provide enough space for unleashing
aggressive impulses and compensate one’s complexes of inferiority, just as for
relishing sheer lust.
In a few decades that separate us from the Technological Singularity, which, as
already suggested, is identical with the Civilization Singularity, will we be able to
learn how other civilizations in the universe managed their passing away?
7 Silentium Universi
It has been argued in the First Movement of this work that life is part of the process
of cosmic evolution ruled by the second law of thermodynamics. Life on our Earth
is no exception to this world order. Indeed, according to the Copernican principle,
the Earth does not have a special position in the universe; its place is mediocre. The
same applies to humans. “It is evident that in the post-Copernican era of human
history, no well-informed and rational person can imagine that the Earth occupies a
unique position in the universe” (Rowan-Robinson 1996). As astronomer Carl
Sagan put it, “Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a
humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in
which there are far more galaxies than people” (Sagan 1980). The fact that life,
humans, and human civilization are no special phenomena implies that the universe
should teem with life and we should be able to detect it. Efforts have been made
since 1960 under the name of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and
several are ongoing nowadays. However intensively we have been searching, we
have failed to find any empirical evidence of it.
We apparently experience the “Silentium Universi”—the term used by the sci-
ence fiction writer Stanislav Lem—or, in the words of other writers, we face the
“Great Silence” or “Eerie Silence,” which suggests that the universe is “dead.” The
apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of
extraterrestrial civilization and humanity’s lack of contact with, or evidence for,
such civilizations has been dubbed the Fermi paradox. “If they are there, where are
7 Silentium Universi 111
they?”, asked physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 during an informal discussion with
some of his physicist collegues.2
How can we estimate the probability? To assess the factors, which determine
how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy,
astronomer Frank Drake devised an equation in 1960, which is now known as the
Drake equation:
N ¼ N fp ne fl fi fc fL
where N is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with which we
might hope to be able to communicate, N* is the number of stars in the galaxy, fp is
the fraction of stars that have planets around them, ne is the number of planets per
star that are capable of sustaining life, fl is the fraction of planets in ne where life
evolves, fi is the fraction in fl where intelligent life evolves, fc is the fraction of fi that
communicates, and fL is the fraction of a planet’s life during which the commu-
nication civilizations live. A quick overview of the Drake equation is provided by
Wikipedia under the heading “The Drake equation.”
The Drake equation has been solved with wildly differing results. Carl Sagan,
putting reasonable estimates into it, expected in 1966 as many as one million
communicating civilizations in the Milky Way, though he later suggested that the
actual number could be far smaller (Sagan 1980). Consistent with the notion that
the first variables of the equation are relatively high, astronomers reported, on
November 4, 2013, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets
orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars and red dwarf stars within the Milky
Way galaxy, based on Kepler space mission data; the nearest such planet may be 12
light-years away (Petigura et al. 2013). The arguments on life evolution, as pre-
sented in this book, seem to justify Sagan’s initial assumptions. Enforced by the
second law of thermodynamics, life appears to be a cosmic imperative, as already
mentioned at the very outset of this book with reference to the notion of Christian
de Duve. Also, as repeatedly stressed in this book, the evolution of life must
necessarily be the evolution of cognition in service of the search for available
energy gradients. Evolving cognition, linked with increasing complexity, appar-
ently needs to culminate in the emergence of consciousness and of self-conscious
emotions, and, eventually, in science and technology, including interstellar
communication.
Many people have speculated on how to solve the puzzle of the Fermi paradox:
the universe should be overfilled with intelligent civilizations, but we have no
evidence of their existence. The puzzle has attracted popular culture, authors of
science fiction, and filmmakers, but also philosophers, visionaries, and “futurists,”
up to serious scientists, mainly astronomers, physicists, and computer scientists.
Physicist Stephen Webb has listed 49 possible explanations and arranged them in
2
David Brin proposed to call the Fermi paradox the “paradox of the Great Silence”. Many writings
on the Fermi paradox, Fermi’s paradox, Fermi’s question, and so on, are available. Here are just
three of them Webb (2002), Jones (1985), Dick (2001).
three categories: the aliens do exist, but do not pay attention to us; they exist, but
have not yet communicated; they do not exist (Webb 2002). Eventually, he offered
his own fiftieth explanation: “…the only resolution of the Fermi paradox that makes
sense to me—is that we are alone.” Simple life (e.g., bacteria) may be common but
we are likely the only advanced intelligent life; evolution was sifting out step by
step, and the only reason why it has not sifted us out is the fact that we actually
exist. According to Webb, we are special. There is no tendency in evolution toward
complexity and intelligence. Webb supported his view by referring to molecular
biologist Jacques Monod, who wrote that the origin of life was a freak accident, and
that “Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the Universe, out
of which he has emerged only by chance” (Monod 1970).
Webb also referred with approval to Stephen Gould’s “delightful analogy,”
which compared the progress of evolution to a drunkard’s groping ahead on a
narrow path, as detailed in the section on Creative evolution. Yet, recall the rea-
soning about the natural, Darwinian “scala naturae” in the First Movement of this
work and the thermodynamic argument that the evolution of life is progressive,
directed toward increasing knowledge, including intelligence. Webb concluded his
analysis with somewhat lofty words that it would be sad
...if the only animals with self-consciousness, the only species that can light up the Universe
with acts of love and humour and compassion, were to extinguish themselves through acts
of stupidity. If we survive, we have a Galaxy to explore and make our own. If we destroy
ourselves, if we ruin Earth before we are ready to leave our home planet […] well, it could
be a long, long time before a creature from another species looks up at its planet’s night sky
and asks: ‘Where is everbody?’ (Webb 2002)
Ray Kurzweil, whose name has occurred in this book in several contexts, also
supposes that SETI failure indicates that we may be alone and there are no other
civilizations with the capacity of SETI. But he feels assured that “we are in the
lead” with our technology (Kurzweil 2005). In Kurzweil’s view, intelligence is the
most important phenomenon in the universe and “saturating its matter and energy
with intelligence is our ultimate fate.”
There have been many speculations that extraterrestrial civilization may simply
not be interested in us. Futurist and technooptimist John Smart proposed the
so-called “transcension scenario,” which appears like an opposite of the expansion
scenario: once civilizations saturate their local region of space with their intelligence,
they need to leave our visible macroscopic universe in order to continue exponential
growth of complexity and intelligence, and thus disappear from this universe. The
system becomes dramatically dense, rapidly approximating blackhole-equivalent
energy densities and will be censored from universal observation (Smart 2002).
However, Kurzweil comments: given the SETI assumption that there are billions of
such highly developed civilizations, it seems unlikely that all of them have made the
same decision to stay out of our way (Kurzweil 2005). Philosopher Nick Bostrom
came out in 2003 with the “simulation hypothesis,” according to which we live in a
world that is in fact a simulation, most likely a computer simulation, but we, sim-
ulants, are totally unaware of it (Bostrom 2003). These kinds of speculations may be
7 Silentium Universi 113
seen as a variation on the old philosophical theme of solipsism, adapted to the

twenty-first-century boom of computer technology. A number of successful films
have been produced, inspired by this idea of simulation and also of “brains in a vat.”
Returning to Gould’s claim that evolution has no inherent drive toward long-
term “progress,” Gould supported the claim with the following argument: “Replay
the tape a million times from [the] beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo
sapiens would ever evolve again” (Gould 1966).
Gould’s view was criticized by paleontologist Conway Morris, who argued that
the appearance of human-like animals is likely (Conway Morris 2003). As he saw
it, there is “the recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same
‘solution’ to a particular ‘need,’” as, for instance, the generation of electrical fields,
olfaction and vision, or eusociality. There is also a “protein hyperspace” that limits
the possibilities of amino acid combination to a few, often repeated (pre-ordained?)
forms. He enumerated many examples of evolutionary convergence, stating that
“convergence occurs because the number of viable ‘solutions’ is constrained by the
limits of physics and chemistry.” This is in line with the postulate of biochemist
Denton and coworkers that in at least one important area of biology, the subcellular
realm, a substantial amount of order is given by physics and not selection. For
instance, the number of forms that result from folding of proteins is not limitless but
the protein folds used by life on Earth represent a set of about 1000 natural and
immutable forms. They arise from the natural self-organizing properties of amino
acid sequences in polypeptides. The rules of folding may be analogous to the laws
of chemistry or rules of crystallography, which determine the form of molecules
and crystals, and also similar to the rules of grammar which determine the form of
meaningful letter and word strings in a language (Denton et al. 2003). Denton also
predicts, in accord with the so-called biological structuralists, that many of the
organic forms used by cells on Earth, including morphological forms, may be
genuine universals and occur in carbon-based cellular life throughout the cosmos.
This prediction may also apply to such complex organic forms as neurons and
even central nervous systems and the brain. According to neurobiologist Leonid
Moroz, neural centralization and formation of brains might have independently
evolved at least seven to eleven times during the 550 million years of animal
evolution (Moroz 2012). Physicist Paul Davies asserted that consciousness neces-
sarily emerges in the universe as a concomitant part of increasing complexity
(Davies 1995). We can extend the assertion to self-consciousness and feelings.
It is a matter of a straightforward extrapolation to use similar reasoning to
account for the evolution of culture, technology, and extraterrestrial communica-
tion. In general, the empirical evidence of biologists seems to be supported by
theoretical analysis of synergetics, indicating that
Although the future is open, and there are many alternative evolutionary paths for complex
systems, not any arbitrary (either conceivable or desirable) evolutionary path is feasible in a
given system. There are discrete spectra of possible evolutionary paths which are deter-
mined exclusively by inner properties of the corresponding systems. […] All the complex
formations are built in the world in an extremely selective way. The evolutionary channel to
the increasing complexity is very narrow. Only restricted sets of pathways of evolution are
“allowed” by the inner properties of a complex system itself (Haken and Knyazeva 2000).
The boundless universe, spread in time over billions of years, may indeed teem
with life. But if we set down to intelligent life durability and fate similar to those of
the human species on Earth and make the variable fL in the Drake equation equal to
a miniscule fraction 1.0 × 102/4.6 × 109, we reach the inevitable conclusion: the
probability that humans, within the time span they dispose, may contact a nearby
civilization by the intermediary of electromagnetic waves is virtually nil. In addi-
tion, we have to assume that the time interval within which a technological civi-
lization could exist is very short. On our Earth, the technological civilization has
existed for 200–300 years, which is nothing when compared with ten billions of
years which may be the age of our galaxy.
Why do technological civilizations last for such a short time? The most plausible
explanation is that they are incapable of solving the problems they have brought
about. It is enough to enumerate the complexity of problems of our present global
society to grasp the essence of this reasoning. There is no reason to insist that all
civilizations end by self-destruction. And also, the option envisaged in this book
may not be the only one. But we have no knowledge of the piles of Rialto on which
their evolution may have been laid, or of the contingencies of their successive
evolution. Also, the weakness of our imagination does not allow us to visualize the
other options. Let us quote biologist J.B.S. Haldane: “My own suspicion is that the
universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”
(Haldane 1932).
8 Finitics
All the present secular prophets of the shining future of humanity appear to be heirs
of the Enlightenment of continental Europe of the eighteenth century and, as
suggested before, they may be called neo-Enlighteners. They express, explicitly or
implicitly, their creed that once clinging superstitions are cleaned away, by progress
of science and spread of knowledge, all human beings would see things as they are
and the way would be opened to permanent human advancement. Sagan himself
insisted that if we want to evade destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, we
have to learn “to live with other groups in mutual respect” by losing “our own
predisposions to territoriality and aggression. […] This adaptation must apply […]
with very high precision, to […] every individual within the civilization,” so that we
become the “least likely to engage in aggressive galactic imperialism” (Sagan and
Newman 1983). Astronomer Michael Papagiannis advised us “to choose intellec-
tual values over materialism, to achieve a high level of ethical and moral devel-
opment, and to be highly evolved spiritually” (Papagiannis 1984). Many scientists
of prominence continue to proclaim that an appropriate education of the masses will
enable them to share with scientists the spell of the scientific description of the
8 Finitics 115
world and the moral of tolerance and mutual respect, and will eradicate fanaticism,
religious fundamentalism, and all kinds of prejudice.
Economist Hanson believes that we could control and bridle the expansion of
technology, when humankind could “free itself of biological imperatives” and, in
order to avoid “the process of selection by trial and error, this process would require
global control […] implying at least a strong world government,” regulating eco-
nomic growth, research and development, and even the spread of ideas (Hanson
1998). Philosopher Bostrom proclaims that “the only way we could avoid long-term
existential disaster is by taking control of our own evolution”. According to him,
we need policies for evolutionary steering. “Doing this […] would require the
development of a ‘singleton’, a world order in which at the highest level of orga-
nization there is only one independent decision-making power (which may be, but
need not be, a world government)” (Bostrom 2004). It appears unbelievable that in
the twenty-first century educated people continue to indulge the delusion of the
“scientific management of society” after the cruel lessons of the twentieth century.
Still, it is a strong proof of human exchangeability.
Returning to physicist Freeman Dyson and his naïve “biotech future,” he
envisaged Darwinian natural selection as just an interlude in biological evolution
and now, after 3 billion years, it is over. In his view, we are moving rapidly into the
post-Darwinian era and entering into a period of a true “intelligent design” (Dyson
2007). However, there is the essence of any evolution that it is not deterministic; by
its very definition, a new evolutionary phenomenon is unpredictable. The
Darwinian principle of uncorrelated variations, of trial and failure, followed by
massive self-organization will continue to hold; it is the only way that evolution can
proceed. The only thing that will change is that there will be not enough time for
selection: already in our time, evolution is turning into paravolution and this will
accelerate.
If the present-day evolution, as we witness it, is heading toward a singularity, it
is, in fact, heading toward the Mathematical Singularity, to a point in time at which
some variables of evolutionary dynamics will become infinite. Still, what does
“infinite” mean? Edwin Jaynes, referring to the nineteenth-century mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), emphasized that an infinite set cannot be said to
have any “existence” and mathematical properties at all; infinite sets only arise as
well-defined and well-behaved limits of finite sets (Jaynes 2003). Infinity is not just
an invention of mathematicians, but also a fundamentally misleading and delusional
concept of human thought, specifically of Western religion and philosophy with its
obvious corollary: immortality. Bertand Russell found its origin in the work of
ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras and wrote that “mathematics […] is the
chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth as well as a super-sensible
intelligent world. […] Mystical doctrines as to the relation of time and eternity are
also reinforced by pure mathematics, for mathematical objects, such as number, if
real at all, are eternal and not in time” (Russell 1946). We may assume that not only
the idea of infinity, but also the idea of Logos as a rational principle of the world
and thus the entire tradition of Western rationalism, have their roots in the work of
Pythagoras. The two ideas may have inspired Plato to unite them in the notion of
the immortal soul of a human individual, which must have been one of the sources
of Western individualism.
The ontic imperative of life to strive for onticity and struggle for survival has had
its symbolic parallel in all religions as a belief in the continuation of a soul after
physical death, either in lives of progeny or by reincarnation. The religious sources
of Western culture, Judaism and Christianity, may have originally not differed from
other religions in this respect, but later they adopted the Platonic notion of indi-
vidual immortality. The concept of immortality and eternity has continued to thrive
in Western thought even in its secular versions and has served up to now as a
powerful force to motivate human creativity. The concept has been much
strengthened by emotions, and even more upon their runaway and replacing
Darwinian fitness by hedonic fitness. As aptly noticed by philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche: “Woe implores: Go! But all joy wants eternity” (Nietzsche 1978).
Philosopher Oswald Spengler saw the essence of Western culture in the Faustian
longing for infinity and boundlessness (Spengler 1962). Time and time again, the
meaning of human life, fulfillment and optimism have been inseparably linked with
the notion of eternity and immortality throughout the B.D. (before Darwin) era.
Without it, life and the universe as a whole would be meaningless, absurd, and
filled with despair. There is this obstinate search for meaning that may have
deflected Western culture from one of its sources, ancient Roman thought, which
was much less obsessed with infinity and immortality than were its other sources.
Let us recall the perspicacious observation of Seneca the Younger, who said that the
difference between the Romans and the Etruscans was that “whereas we believe
lightning to be released as a result of the collision of clouds, they believe that the
clouds collide so as to release lightning: for as they attribute all to deity, they are led
to believe not that things have a meaning insofar as they occur, but rather that they
occur because they must have a meaning.”
Probably most Western philosophers continue to preach the pessimism of
absurdity even in the post-Darwinian (A.D.) era. Philosopher Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970), a sober and atheistic thinker, proclaimed in 1903 that as “all the
labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness
of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system […]
only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of
unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built” (Russell
1976). A recent article by cosmologists, which describes the fate of life in the
expanding universe ends by saying: “The picture we have painted here is not
optimistic […] We can take solace from two facts. The constraints we provide here
are ultimate constraints on eternal life, which may be of more philosophical than
practical interest. The actual time frames of interest, which limit the longevity of
civilization on physical grounds, are extremely long, in excess of 1050–10100 years”
(Krauss and Starkman 2000).
Incidentally, Richard Dawkins, who described his concept of genocentrism in
his 1977 book, The Selfish Gene, in the autobiographic 2013 book, An Appetite for
Wonder, mentions he wishes he had called the book, The Immortal Gene (Dawkins
2013).
8 Finitics 117
It seems that the state of humankind upon the entrance into the twenty-first
century brings us back to the essential questions that humans have been asking for
centuries. To the questions that were the questions of philosophy and may now,
with ever more sophisticated instruments in hand, become the questions of science.
They may represent a novel intellectual challenge par excellence. According to
Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European
philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato” [quoted in
Gardner (1985)]. The time has come to end with footnotes to Plato’s writings. It has
been already argued why traditional European rationalism and humanism should be
replaced by evolutionary rationalism and evolutionary humanism (Kováč 2002). In
the endeavor that may be dubbed “naturalized philosophy,” it may turn out that
some very basic questions of European philosophy were framed in a wrong way,
and some of its fundamental concepts, such as infinity, eternity, immortality, duality
of body and mind, and the trinity of Truth, Good, and Beauty, were meaningless. It
has been said repeatedly that the “theory of everything,” so tenaciously searched for
by the contemporary physicists, may turn out not to be the final theory of the
fundamental elements of the world but the theory of the mind and of its relation to
the universe.
Consequent Darwinian thinking takes species extinction as a fact of evolution.
The traditional faith in eternity, including its secular version of the unrestricted
improvement of human things, has been persevering as a gigantic metaphor of the
ontic imperative of survival. It follows from all the considerations in the First
Movement of this book that immortality is ruled out by thermodynamics. In
addition, in line with the arguments and misgivings presented in the Second
Movement, the religious version of eternal life in continuous bliss constitutes a
logical paradox: eternal pleasure would mean eternal recurrence of everything
across infinite time with no escape, Heaven turned Hell.
For A.D. evolutionists, the life of an individual, group, or species assumes
meaning and dignity from its temporariness. By contrast, immortality as the eternal
return of all possible delights would be a true inferno. The philosophical and
theological eschatology of the pre-Darwinian era was a doctrine of “last things” or
“end times:” death, judgment, heaven, and hell. “Finitics” is the name for a new,
naturalized, Darwinian eschatology.
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Finale
The traditional view of Western philosophy and art, with their illusory longing for
eternity, may have been best summarized by the pessimistic perspective of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who poured out his disgust for life near the end of the
famous drama:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Should scientists join philosophers and artists and produce variations on this
classical theme? Indeed, advocates of pop-Darwinism do it by their concept that we,
humans, just as all other living species, function as puppets subordinated to our
sovereign masters, selfish genes, which, in contrast to us, are “immortal”. The
embellishments of how this simplex and reductionist science is not “unweaving the
rainbow,” but assure us that the world is full of wonders and a source of pleasure,
are of little solace if we must live with the view that we are but lumbering robots,
sealed off from the outside world and manipulated by the genes.1
Opposite in their tone are variations produced by technooptimists who herald
that progress in technology will remove all deficiencies of the human condition and
make humans eventually immortal.
The views of biology, presented in this book, do not see human life as “a tale
told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” Emotional evolution has equipped human
individuals with self-consciousness, transforming part of emotions into conscious
feelings. Pain and pleasure have become the principal navigators of human actions.
Even simple sensual gratification can be perceived not automatically but with the
conscious perception of its hedonic quality. Feelings give value to past experiences
and, through imagination and daydreaming, emotionally charge the future. Feelings
1
The terms used here are taken from famous popular books of Richard Dawkins (see Footnote 10
in Chap 1).

SpringerBriefs in Evolutionary Biology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-20660-8
122 Finale
of an individual can be shared with other people and are the main source of
human-specific altruism.
The human individual is the only animal that knows that his/her individual
life-course will end with death. There is an important mission of contemporary
biology to back with its knowledge the ingenious insight of philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein that “death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If
we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then
eternal life belongs to those who live in the present” (Wittgenstein 1922). It is the
paradox of human finitude that humans become immortal by experiencing with full
consciousness the intense enjoyments of the present. Occasionally, they can esca-
late to reach “peak experiences,” the “single most joyous, happiest, most blissful
moments of life,” as Abraham Maslow named them (Maslow 1971). There is a
collection of these rare peak experiences, filled with Kantian sublimity, that gives
human life meaning and worth. The wisdom of human temporariness may consist in
compressing eternity into an infinitesimal and vice versa As the poem “Gift” of
Czesłav Miłosz has it:
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
References
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Wittgenstein L (1922) Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Kegan Paul, London
Index
A D
Adaptation, 14, 51, 64 Darwinian fitness, 14, 38, 55, 66, 116
Affinity of the reaction, 6 Darwinian individual, 14, 21
Aggression, 107, 108 Daydreaming, 72, 82
Alterocentric, 69 Default mode, 72
Alterocentrism, 67 Dehumanization, 79, 107, 109
Altruism, 49, 67 Demographic transitions, 67
Arrow of time, 2 Densification, 30, 90
Autonomous agent, 13, 80 Deprivation aggression, 108
Awareness, 61 Disorder, 3, 4, 8–10, 15, 16, 18, 102
Dissipative structure, 4, 5, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16,
B 71
Bayesian view of probability, 7 Doomsday, 96
Bénard hydrodynamic cells, 13 Drugs, 70, 78, 82, 109
Bénard’s convection cells, 9 Dung beetle, 37
Bipedalism, 41
Bookkeeper, 22, 25, 44 E
Emotones, 58
C Embodied knowledge, 24, 44, 103
Capitalism, 76, 100, 102 Epistemic complexity, 25
Chemical potentials, 6 Epistemic gradient, 23, 31
Classification of human needs, 74 Epistemic horizon, 22
Clock, 15, 16 Epistemic principle, 31, 80
Cognition, 5, 23, 26, 111 Epistemic quotient of culture, 47
Cognitive biology, 24 Epistemogenesis, 25, 27, 32
Communism, 102, 103 Etaconceptual foundations, 108
Consciousness, 56, 59–63, 80 Eusocial, 43, 50
Consistency, 16, 62 Evolutionary epistemology, 24
Construction, 2, 15, 16, 20, 26, 33, 51, 64, 71, Existential anxiety, 65, 70
73, 80, 84, 105 Extinction, 17, 64, 96, 108, 109
Contemporary Darwinism, 20, 21
Cosmic evolution, 17 F
Cultural evolution, 44, 64, 89 Far from equilibrium, 16
Cultural (i.e., human and social) sciences, 94 Feelings, 56, 59
Cultural loci, 48 Formability, 15
Cultural sciences, 94 Frustration, 15, 16, 53
Culture, 47, 79 Funktionslust, 67, 76

SpringerBriefs in Evolutionary Biology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-20660-8
124 Index
G N
Gaia principle, 97 Natural process, 4, 8, 11, 12, 20
Genic Platonism, 19 Neo-Darwinism, 19, 20
Genocentrism, 19, 106, 116 Neo-Enlighteners, 105, 114
Global workspace theory, 61 Neo-Enlightenment, 93
Great SilenceSee also 32See also 110See also Nested hierarchy, 12
111
O
H Ontic principle, 13, 22, 31, 49
Hand, 41, 42, 44 Ontic work, 13, 14, 23
Happiness, 109 Onticity, 13, 49, 116
Hedonic accommodation, 75, 77, 78, 79 Ontological pragmatism, 105
Hedonic fitness, 14, 64, 65, 116 Ontological pragmatist, 105
Hedonic minimax, 73 Ontotelic system, 13, 14, 16, 23
Hedonic treadmill, 78, 76 Origins of life, 21
Hedonotaxis, 64, 67, 83, 104, 108
Heritom, 16 P
Humanization, 66, 89, 107 Panpsychism, 59
Paraliberalism, 105
I Paravolution, 73, 77, 90, 99, 115
Ideal gas, 3, 8 Phase transitions, 98
Imprinting, 44, 110 Physical probability, 6
Inclusive fitness, 53 Piles of Rialto, 64, 99, 105, 107, 114
Inclusive fitness theory, 50 Pleistocene, 51, 109
Information theory, 5 Pop, 105
Inner human being, 73 Pop-Darwinism, 121
Institution, 52, 102, 103, 105 Principle of least action (PLA), 11, 17
Intoxication, 82 Principle of MaxEnt, 5
Principle of minimum frustration, 17
K
Kant barrier, 105 Q
Qualia, 55
L Quotient of self-deception, 66, 105
Language, 51, 58, 66
Law of entropy, 2, 5, 8, 9 R
Limbic resonance, 69 Ratchet, 7, 26
Rationality, 1, 18, 32
M Reality, 62
Macroworld and microworld, 2 Religion, 51, 52, 101, 102, 105, 107
Magical number three, 98 Replicant, 22
Magnanimous human, 93 Runaway, 62, 64, 67, 79
Magnanimous men, 82
Maximum entropy production principle S
(MEPP), 10 Second signaling system, 48
Meme, 48 Self-consciousness, 21, 39, 56–59, 62, 64, 65,
Metaconceptual foundation, 104 73, 112, 113, 121
Metaconceptul foundation of society, 103–105, Self-deception, 53, 66, 104, 105, 107
107 Selfish, 106
Mirror neuron, 58, 59 Selfishness, 49, 71
Myth, 65 Self-organization, 9, 20, 22, 25, 44, 115
Mythophilia, 66, 79, 93 Self-stimulation, 78
Mythophils, 105 Signifaction, 79, 100, 101
Index 125
Silentium Universi, 110 Triune brain, 45

Simulate, 63
Simulation, 63, 113 U
Social brain hypothesis, 45 Unmoved Mover, 1, 13
Sociobiology, 50 Useful utopia, 100, 109
Soul, 51, 54, 116 Utility, 14, 55, 49, 77
Spandrels, 64
Subjectibility, 14 V
Superfluate, 100 Virtual experience, 81
Symbolic, 46, 51, 52 Virtual sex, 84
Symbolic kinship, 52 Virtual world, 80, 82, 83, 100, 108, 110
Symbolizing animal, 44, 66, 80
Synergetics, 113 W
Western culture, 100, 101, 104, 106, 116
T Western rationalism, 115
Technoscience, 106 Western religion, 115
Technoscientific evolution, 26 Western society, 99
Thermodynamic depth, 25 White hole, 31
Thermodynamic probability, 6
Thermodynamic process, 3 Z
Time arrow, 26 Zombie, 62
Transcendence, 74, 93

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Closing Human Evolution:

ISSN 2192-8134 ISSN 2192-8142 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015942619

Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

Printed on acid-free paper

Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media

First Movement. Life as a Cosmic Imperative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Second Movement. Evolutionary Uniqueness of Humans . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Third Movement. The Ultimate Optimism: Finitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

1 The Prime Question

© The Author(s) 2015 1

2 Macroworld and Microworld

an event, we experience a “macrostate” of the macroworld and can only speculate

3 Entropy and Probability

Boltzmann’s probability may be taken as a frequentist, and thus objectivist,

Nonequilibrium thermodynamics may receive new impulses from this apparent

4 The Supreme Law: Maximum Entropy Production

from high-energy sources. He assumes that the dissipative structures, inseparable

5 The Ontic Principle

6 Frustration: A Hallmark of Life

Up to our time, we have no thermodynamic theory of constructions. Constructions

of solids, “kept in shape by London–Heitler forces, strong enough to elude the

7 Darwin and Entropy

In our time, evolutionary theory seems to be universally accepted, even by the

The impressive artistic depiction of life by Jacques Monod may be taken as a

Current research on complex genetic interactions and complex regulations of

Here are tentatively formulated principles of contemporary Darwinism: evolution is

association, and generates molecular, supramolecular, social, and abstract (sym-

as a “replicant.”11 The simplest Darwinian individual endowed with the capacity to

famous epigram, described science as “the art of soluble” (Medawar 1967).

9 Evolution of Life Is the Evolution of Cognition

According to the basic tenet of evolutionary epistemology, life is cognition and

The arbitrary multiplication constant has been chosen to be the Boltzmann

existence. Biological species seem to be the main units of cognitive evolution. To

10 Evolution of the Universe

Hyperbolic growth is linked to the notion of Mathematical Singularity: a point at

11 The Epistemic Principle

Fig. 5 Life is a process of

Will the Epistemic Singularity, which functions as an attractor of universal

Annila A (2010) All in action. Entropy 12:2333–2358

Annila A, Salthe S (2010) Physical foundations of evolutionary theory. J Non-Equilib Thermodyn

© The Author(s) 2015 37

2 The Uniqueness of Humans

“they ethicize.” But, as Simpson emphasized explicitly, Darwin’s purpose was to

Fig. 2 Evolution of the brain

complex, roughly corresponding to the brain stem, the paleomammalian complex

involved. Selﬁshness, selflessness, altruism, symbiosis, mutual beneﬁt,

6 Driving Force: Emotions

They induce an organism to actively seek beneﬁcial stimuli as ‘rewards’ or actively

7 Feelings and Meaning

Self-consciousness should be understood as the culmination of the enlargement of

It would mean that we are putting ourselves in another’s shoes as we observe an

The discovery has inspired neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran to claim that

It is this global availability of information through the workspace that we sub-