The Purposeful Universe: Why the Emergence and Continual Evolution of Life and Intelligence are Inevitable Products of Cosmic Complexification

The Road to Omega project is based on a new cosmic narrative that will force us to completely rethink our relationship to nature. Intelligent life is not a fluke; it is the driver of cosmic evolution.

One of the most radical claims of the Integrated Evolutionary Synthesis — the Unifying Theory of Reality presented in The Romance of Reality (TROR) and the scientific framework motivating the Road to Omega project — is that evolution is progressive. In other words, it is inevitably leading to higher complexity and intelligence in the biosphere and the cosmos more broadly (at least, over sufficiently long time-scales).

When evolutionary theory first emerged, this was the mainstream view (held by Herbert Spencer, and arguably Darwin), but for ideological reasons that I explain in chapter 7 in detail, it fell out of fashion. This was largely due to the enormous influence of evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould and Ernst Mayr, who believed that the concept of progressive evolution was teleological, implying that nature has a goal, purpose, or design — and therefore could not be true, as that would seem to suggest an intelligent creator (though I should point out here that physicist Lee Smolin’s Cosmological Natural Selection theory could also explain the design aspect without an appeal to a creator).

Gould basically created a campaign to kill the idea of progressive evolution, replacing it with the mantra that evolution is “blind” and has no direction, which was to be repeated by neo-Darwinian reductionists over, and over, and over. According to his view, human-level intelligence was something accidental, not foreordained, and therefore not to be expected elsewhere. The evolutionary process created complexity, but only a limited amount, and the perception that there was some fundamental tendency toward ever-higher levels of organization in nature was merely a “statistical illusion.”

But now we know that the very evolutionary processes that Gould so elegantly described continually accumulate adaptive information (aka knowledge) in the biosphere, encoded in genetic, neural, cultural, and now, digital memory. This accumulation of knowledge, along with evolutionary transitions (aka metasystem transitions) that produce increasingly higher levels of organization and complexity, has the consequence of giving evolution a direction, or “arrow.” Today, many complexity scientists and a growing number of evolutionary theorists accept this view, and it has been entirely naturalized with mechanistic explanation, and summarizing and synthesizing this work was a major aim of TROR.

Another book about the progressive nature of evolution is complexity scientist John Stewart’s Evolution’s Arrow: The Direction of Evolution and the Future of Humanity (2007), which I regrettably forgot to mention in TROR (see his recent interview with psychologist John Vervaeke here). An equally great paper is the cyberneticist Francis Heylighen’s The Growth of Structural and Functional Complexity, which was a big influence on Part II of TROR. Together with the great Russian computer scientist Valentin Turchin, who invented the concept of the metasystem transition, Heylighen created the Principia Cybernetica Project, which was an attempt to lay out a philosophy and worldview based on evolutionary cybernetics and complexity science. It was pretty popular in the 90s, but today it looks like a project that was abandoned while it was still being developed. Still, it is worth checking out because it provides a rough model for the Road to Omega project, which intends to pick up where Heylighen’s project left off.

The aim of this article is to provide a fairly short and accessible explanation for why the emergence, evolution, and outward spread of life is the inevitable product of a fundamental statistical tendency of nature to generate increasingly complex forms of functional machinery with hierarchical organization. Stellar and planetary evolution give rise to biology, which eventually incorporates technology into its computational substrate. This merger creates an intelligent explosion that will presumably upgrade life into an essentially invincible form of adaptive complexity that will spread through the cosmos at large. Rather than seeing such a scenario as an unlikely state of affairs where life succeeds against all odds, the paradigm of emergence proposed by the Integrated Evolutionary Synthesis/Poetic Meta-Naturalism reveals that life is simply the universe’s mechanism for continued self-organization, complexification, and knowledge creation. Life is the means through which the universe comes alive, and wakes up. As Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

If we can establish that nature is in fact moving in a direction of a fully integrated and interconnected state of existence, then it would reveal that life is part of nature’s story — which is a story of a universe that has a goal, a purpose, and a destiny. Those words may irk skeptics and atheists, but to not use them would be to potentially obscure the true nature of reality. If the Unifying Theory of Reality is correct, nature is at once supremely teleological and entirely comprehensible in mechanistic terms. We may call this a computational teleology, or a Darwinian teleology, and it is a philosophical position that could provide a bridge between the naturalists and the spiritually-inclined.

The first obstacle to overcome in our attempt to prove that nature is teleological is proving that the emergence of life was not an anomalous, “accidental” phenomena that likely only happened once in the entirety of the universe, but rather an inevitable product of a creative universe.

To explain why life and intelligence emerge inevitably given Earth-like conditions, we must understand the role that energy flows play in organizing non-living matter into organic computing machinery with sentience. In other words, evolution toward conscious creatures of increasing intelligence was physically destined to emerge in a universe that is always increasing in complexity.  

Inevitable Life 

Until recently, most scientists believed that the origin of life was such an unlikely event, requiring the “chance assembly” of so many molecules, that it would be unlikely to have occurred anywhere else in the universe. The Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monod poetically summed up this view in his influential book Chance and Necessity, published in 1970, when he said, “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.” It was his passionate and uncompromising belief that “The universe was not pregnant with life.” 

However, another 20^th century Nobel Laureate, the biologist Christian de Duve, challenged this view, arguing that the universe was indeed pregnant with life, going as far as to say that biology seems to have been “written into the fabric of the universe.” 

De Duve was in good company. Carl Sagan, the most famous astronomer of the 20^th century, also thought that life was a probable phenomenon in those places where conditions are ripe for life, writing, “The origin of life must be a highly probably affair. As soon as conditions permit, up it pops!”  

Indeed, the planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life is now estimated to be about 4 billion years old. It arose only 100 million years or so after the Earth’s surface cooled enough to support life. That’s a blink of an eye in cosmic time. 

So what does it mean exactly to say that life was inevitable rather than improbable? It means that when you have the right thermodynamic conditions—thermodynamics is the science of energy flow—energy moving through a system will organize inanimate matter with the ingredients for organic chemistry into animate matter, or biology.  

“The energy that flows through a system acts to organize that system,” is the memorable line that Harold Morowitz, founding editor of the journal Complexity, wrote in 1968 in his prescient book Energy Flow in Biology. Decades later he would team up with physicist Eric Smith at the Santa Fe Institute, and the collaboration would ultimately produce the book The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth, which would lay out a new theory of abiogenesis—in other words, the emergence of life from non-life.   

According to Smith and Morowitz, life emerged because the Earth’s geochemistry created an excess of chemical energy that built up near underwater volcanoes called hydrothermal vents. The heat flow coming out of these vents organized carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms into biomolecular machinery through a metabolic reaction pathway called the reverse citric acid cycle, and life was born.  

How exactly does energy flowing through molecules organize those atoms into a complex adaptive system that can reproduce itself? Whenever there is a process that turns a simple system into something complex, we can suspect that some form of Darwinian evolution is at play. Dissipative adaptation is the newly-discovered process by which molecules assemble themselves when they are driven to interact by a flow of energy. Although this mechanism was described conceptually by Harold Morowitz many decades earlier, Jeremy England of MIT gave it a mathematical description and devised simulation studies that would serve as a proof of concept. To put it another way, the molecules of organic chemistry self-organize when sufficient energy is flowing through the system. Given enough time, a self-maintaining chemical system emerges that can copy itself.

According to the theories of England, Morowitz, and Smith, the emergence of life in the energetic conditions of the early Earth should be about as surprising as water flowing downhill. If you have the right ingredients, life emerging is not improbable but inevitable. So, when we ask how common is basic life in the universe, we must ask how many Earth-like planets are out there. Depending on what exact factors are critical—such as size, distance from a star, and molecular makeup—there are billions to trillions of them.  

So alien life is almost certainly out there, and while it is obviously not present on the majority of planets—at least not anywhere near us—it is presumably not rare either. While it may be too far for us to see with current technology, the cosmos could be teeming with life. Given its inevitability, you could say we live in a “pro-life universe,” which is how I characterized it in a 2019 article for Quartz that was the precursor to The Romance of Reality. Sean Carroll was nice enough to give me a quote for the piece and then share it on Twitter—which is an indication that the inevitable life narrative proposed by de Duve, Morowitz, Smith, and now England, is replacing the accident hypothesis of Monod.

“If life in its abundance were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order,” writes origins-of-life pioneer Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute, “then we truly are at home in the universe.” 

While this changes how we think about life—it is not accidental but a natural manifestation of the “cosmic code” (to use a term coined by physicist Heinz Pagel)—it would be quite disappointing if only single-celled life were out there. Bacteria are not going to produce anything interesting, like culture and technology. So the real question of interest is whether intelligent life is also an inevitability, given the laws of nature and the evolutionary dynamics that emerge from them.

Inevitable Intelligence 

If intelligence is not an unlikely phenomenon, but a natural manifestation of a universal tendency for complexity to arise and grow without bound where conditions permit, then we can expect intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos.