Page 6 - DARWIN AND THE HUMAN FUTURE

had actually checked us in place or even driven us backward in evolution.On one side the quandary of the traditional Gatekeepers of evolution theory, who, with the real world breaking apart and calling for action all around us, seem to be bogged down in an endless battle over fragments of linear theory.On the other side, in sharp contrast, the free wheeling visions of Gatebreakers. I saw that to a much greater extent than was realized Darwin had departed his peers, and his worldwide naturalist pen pals, to move on from natural science into social and systems science to become both Gatebreaker and Gatekeeeper.He had even gone on to explore what in our time became the revolution of nonlinearity— that is, the hot, new scientific territory of chaos, complexity, and self organizing theories for our group and scores of others like us Here are two of the relevant passages I found emerging from the long suppression of incomprehension.Darwin on Self-organizing TheoryBesides the variations which can be grouped with more or less probability under the foregoing heads, there is a large class of variations which may be provisionally called spontaneous, for to our ignorance they appear to arise without any exciting cause.6