Social Interactions in the History of Evolution

While I was reading Teilhard, my mind kept wandering back to the Wilson text, and the importance he placed on social interactions and the role they played in evolution. Wilson’s text raised a lot questions in my mind about social interactions in terms of their affect on the evolution/non-evolution of other creatures, and I began to form vague, and perhaps slightly ignorant theories that, to a scientist, might have verged on complete absurdities. Despite this, some of these ideas seemed to be symbiotic to views Teilhard expressed, for example, his brief discussion of the “The Crystallising World” (p.68) states – at least in my interpretation – that the reason why we cannot perceive “consciousness” within mineral formations (despite Teilhard’s theory that everything has some amount of consciousness) is because their structure, or the way the particles making them up have interacted with one another – i.e. socialized – created a “narrow limit to the internal architecture of its elements” p. 69. This structure has pretty much frozen the molecules into place, rendering them incapable of further socialization, and perhaps through that, unable to participate further in the process of evolution, especially the evolution of conscious, and so these mineral formations are unable to change, or to cumulate a level of consciousness that we, as humans with the most complex conscious abilities of all, are capable of identifying.

This aligns itself with the original idea I had after reading Wilson’s text; that perhaps the reason why some organisms/overall things on earth – yes, I’m speaking in terms of inanimate objects too i.e. the mineral world – have had greater evolutionary success than others can be attributed to the ways in which the particles interacted with one another, and the amount of “social interactions” that took place between particles. For example, I posited that perhaps consciousness does have to exist within everything in the world, to some degree, because it seems to me that if we are to identify the atom as the basic building block of matter, we also have to acknowledge that these units consist of smaller units; protons, neutrons, and electrons. And perhaps each of these parts of the atom possess some inherent sense of what they were – in terms of their charges – and from that sense they developed the knowledge of how they should interact with one another, and joined forces to form the atom which possessed this same sort of knowledge about its own functionality and proceeded to join with others and create the molecule, and so on, ultimately reaching the complex level of structures we can observe today. Now, admittedly it’s self-conscious on the smallest level, but in this train of thought it seemed to make sense to me that in order to identify their individual charges (positive, neutral, and negative) these tiny particles had to have some slight degree of self awareness, and from there launched the course of evolution.

Following this, in my attempt to make sense of the world we identify as “inanimate” now having life thrust onto it by this acceptance of conscious permeating everything, I posited that perhaps the reason why the mineral world, for example, has not continued in the same evolutionary trajectory towards life and conscious minds as the “living,” “cellular world” is due to the fact that the elements that interacted to form them did so in a way that bound them to a particular structure within the solid state that we see them in today, and due to this formation, the mobility of the particles was stopped, or at least slowed down to such a high degree that their social interactions happen on a much slower scale, and between a limited number of elements, or perhaps do not happen at all. Personally, I’m more inclined to believe that these interactions are still taking place, but at such a level that our minds cannot fathom or at least be bothered to trace them. I find support in this belief from Teilhard’s statement that within rocks there is a “perpetual transformation of a mineral species” p. 69. This is not to say that I believe that one day, rocks will have the complex cognitive abilities that we, as humans, possess. On the contrary, the mineral world has a limited number of elements that it’s particles are able to interact with, and this defined number of elements puts a limit on the degree of socialization that can take place within this realm. This limited degree of social mobility lessens the already slim chances that a particle, or element, will interact with another that it a.) has not interacted with before and b.) that this interaction will create such a large transformation that these mineral forms would be able to take a step forward on the evolutionary scale, or tree of life. Thus the structural complex of particles placed within the solid bounds of minerals is a limiting force on the possibilities of total evolution, viewed from the perspective regarding the importance of social interactions in the history of evolution.

However, it’s also important to note that if we continue to accept Teilhard’s theories as holding true, and what he posits about the beginning of the world containing nothing but this primordial dust, consisting of particles that were “(i) perfectly alike among themselves (at least if they are observed from a great distance) ; (ii) each co-extensive with the whole of the cosmic realm ; (iii) mysteriously connected among themselves… by a global energy,” then these minerals have in fact participated in the process of evolution to form their current structures (p.59). Teilhard states that consciousness travels from its standpoint today, back in time throughout the history of evolution in a way that it is continuously lessening, not in terms of the quantity of its existence, but in the quality, or complexity of it, reaching all the way back to the uniform particles of primordial dust that the earth was covered in. At this point, the quality of consciousness would have been so low that for us as humans to perceive of it would be impossible, both because our conscious’ are so complex and individual and because the type that existed within these particles was not only present in such slight amounts, it was also uniform. Thus consciousness participates in its own branch of the evolutionary tree as it is simultaneously participating – as an inherent part of the pre-living primordial dust that is the foundation for every form of life – in the evolution of each branch throughout the course of time. The significance of social interactions in this evolution is of the utmost importance, because the evolution of consciousness took place through the accumulation of greater and more complex levels being created by the interactions of these primordial particles as they joined together and formed more complex structures amongst themselves, ultimately stumbling upon a construct in which the level of consciousness reached a point in which are able to identify the first living things as kinds of “megamolecules” and from there continuing onwards in the same manner to form the conscious that we posses today. Ultimately the evolution of consciousness works in conjunction with the evolution of organisms, or as Teilhard states it “a consciousness is that much more perfected according as it lines a richer and better organised material edifice,” thus both of these processes rely on social interactions – ranging from the smallest particle to human interaction today - to propel them forwards in their evolutionary journeys.