and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches
of evolution [. . .] a Kosmic consciousness that is
Spirit awakened to its own true nature.
(Wilber, 2001, p. 62)Wilber explicitly rejects the evidence accounting for
the evolution of wings and eyes, arguing, as do cre-
ationists, that wings could not have evolved naturally
because half a wing or half an eye would be of no use.
Three other popular examples are the motivational
theory of futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard (1997), who
urges us all to realise the potential of our higher
consciousness and take control of our own future in
‘conscious evolution’; the quantum theory of physicist
Amit Goswami (2008), who argues that consciousness,
rather than matter or energy, is the primary force in the
universe; and the ideas of Deepak Chopra (Chopra and
Tanzi, 2012), a practitioner of integrative medicine who
believes that Darwin was wrong because a supernatu-
ral consciousness directs evolution and allows humans
to escape the forces of natural selection that other ani-
mals are bound by. All three follow Teilhard de Chardin
in believing that evolution is driven from above by a
cosmic or spiritual field. The idea that consciousness
drives evolution forward seems to have timeless
appeal, but so far there is no biological evidence pro-
viding any reason to believe in it.
The reason for rejecting Lamarckism (at least the popular version of it) was first
made clear by August Weismann (1833–1914), who distinguished, in sexual spe-
cies, between the germ line (the sex cells that are passed from generation to gen-
eration) and the soma (the body which dies). What happens to a body affects its
chances of passing on its sex cells, but not those cells themselves. Nowadays we
would say that genetic information (the genotype) is used to construct the body
(the phenotype), and that changes to the phenotype cannot affect the genotype.
So, for example, if you spend your life dieting you may make yourself more or less
attractive, or even infertile, but you will not pass on genes for slimmer children.
We now know, however, that the food you eat, and other lifestyle choices, can
and do have effects on future generations through epigenesis. For example, a
famous study found that children of pregnant women who lived through the
Dutch famine during the Second World War were more susceptible to obesity,
diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems in later life and that these
effects may even have been passed on to the next generation (Veenendaal et al.,
FIGURE 10.4 • In the popular idea of a ‘great
chain of being’, evolution proceeds
through a line of ever-improving
creatures to culminate in the most
perfect and intelligent of them all –
‘man’. The reality is more like a
branching tree, or a great bush, in
which humans are on one twig of
the primate branch. On this view,
all the creatures alive today are
adapted to their niche, and none
is necessarily ‘more evolved’ or
‘higher’ than the rest.