Formation of the Noosphere

* Article: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Formation of the Noosphere: A Plausible Biological Interpretation of Human History. Revue des Questions Scientifique, January 1947. pp. 7-35

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Contextual Quote

'To avoid misunderstanding, it may be well to point out that the general synthesis outlined in these

pages makes no claim to replace or to exclude the theological account of human destiny. The description of the Noosphere and its attendant biology, as here propounded, is no more opposed to the Divine Transcendence, to Grace, to the Incarnation, or to the Ultimate Parousia, than is the science of paleontology to the Creation, or of embryology to the First Cause. The reverse is true. To those prepared to follow the author in his thinking, it will be apparent that biology merges into theology, and that the Word made Flesh is to be regarded not as a postulate of science -- which would be, in the nature of things, absurd -- but as something, a mysterious Alpha and Omega, taking its place within the whole plan of the universe, both human and divine.'

- Pierre Charles, S.J [1]

Discussion

Source

* Article: Teilhard’s Formation of the Noosphere: an exegesis and update. Dr. Clément Vidal.

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"This essay is a systematic exegesis of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s (1959a) essay The Formation of the Noosphere: A Plausible Biological Interpretation of Human History that was first published in 1947. My aim here is to update and critically analyse this text by weaving Teilhard’s insights with contemporary scientific and academic knowledge. I cite and comment on the whole text, leaving nothing out, following a “scholarly skywriting” methodology (Harnad 1990). To ease and contextualize the reading of this detailed analysis, I propose a general introduction to Teilhard’s thinking in a short separate essay (Vidal 2021)."

Organicism

Clement Vidal:

"Teilhard refers to the more general doctrine of organicism that sees the universe as living. The organicist position is often contrasted with a mechanical and reductionist position, typical of physics and chemistry, that tries to reduce all phenomena to basic mechanisms. By contrast, organicists emphasize that such reductionism is insufficient, that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, that the whole determines the nature of the parts, that the parts cannot be understood in isolation from the whole, and that the parts are dynamically interrelated and interdependent (see e.g. Phillips 1970). Here in particular Teilhard focuses on the idea of society as an organism and we can trace these roots even further than the authors he mentions, for example with Thomas Hobbes (2011) and his Leviathan, Herbert Spencer (1895) or even the ancient Greeks (see also Barberis 2003).

...

I do agree with Teilhard: today this kind of analogy can be pursued with scientific rigor in a systems theory framework (e.g. Boulding 1956; de Rosnay 1979). In particular, a subset of systems theory called Living Systems Theory (Miller 1978) can help to make the analogy quite clear and systematic."

'Change of Order': Meta-Transition Theory

Clement Vidal:

"By “change of order”, Teilhard refers to what we now call a major transition in evolution (e.g. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995; Aunger 2007a; 2007b; Gillings, Hilbert, and Kemp 2016), or a metasystem transition (Turchin 1977; Heylighen 2007b). Each transition represents an evolutionary emergence of a higher level of organization and control. Typical examples include the emergence of eukaryotes, multicellularity, or sexual reproduction. This is an extremely important topic, central for understanding and interpreting the noosphere.

- 'To the natural scientist Mankind offers a profoundly enigmatic object of study. Anatomically, as Linnaeus perceived, Man differs so little from the other higher primates that, in strict terms of the criteria normally applied in zoological classification, his group represents no more than a very small offshoot, certainly far less than an Order, within the framework of the category as a whole. But in "biospherical" terms, if I may be allowed the word, man's place on earth is not only predominant but to a certain extent exclusive among living creatures. The small family of hominids, the last shoot to emerge from the main stem of Evolution, has of itself achieved a degree of expansion equal to, or even greater than, that of the greatest vertebrate layers (reptile or mammal) that ever inhabited the earth.'

The enigma of human evolution may be unveiled today by understanding the capacity of humans to form and organize groups with larger and larger populations. The expression “the last shoot to emerge from the main stem of Evolution” as the idea of “culmination” earlier would be controversial to defend today as evolutionary biologists do not put the human species at the centre anymore. The evolutionary tree metaphor is now more often replaced by a circular phylogenic tree (Ciccarelli et al. 2006), where the human species occupies a position visually comparable to bacteria. However, from a complexity perspective this visualization is misleading because a human body is many orders of magnitude more complex than a bacterium. Metaphors and visualizations of the living world such as the vertical or circular tree are contested and significant precisely because they give different importance to different species."

Biological vs Cultural Evolution

Clement Vidal:

-na We must first give their place in the mechanism of biological evolution to the special forces released by the psychic phenomenon of hominization;

This is a key insight, and is today often taken as a starting point in distinguishing between purely biological evolution, and cultural evolution, before considering their dynamical interaction (Richerson and Boyd 2006). This theme will come back in the text.

- b Secondly we must enlarge our approach to encompass the formation, taking place before our eyes and arising out of this factor of hominization, of a particular biological entity such as has never before existed on earth -the growth, outside and above the biosphere of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I have given the name of the Noosphere."