Teilhard's Convergence Principle

TEILHARD'S CONVERGENCE PRINCIPLE HORTON A. JOHNSON* I. The Principle Throughout evolutionary history there has been a general increase in the complexity of the individual. This characteristic feature of living things, the tendency to climb to higher and higher levels of organization, is nowhere more eloquently presented than by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his remarkable book The Phenomenon ofMan [i]. For the evolutionary drive toward the complexification ofthe individual, toward the condensation of many simple structures into a relatively few but more elaborate structures, Teilhard used the term "convergence," and through a survey of current knowledge of evolution he has made a compelling case for a universal convergence principle as inherent in living stuff as the gravitational field is inherent in matter. As naturally as a stream of water flows downhill, the stream ofevolution flows upward to increasingly improbable configurations. In more specific terms, Teilhard saw in the evolutionary process an allpervading tendency ofindependent elements ofa system, each ofwhich has some sort of biological relevance, to converge upon one another and to interact as subunits ofa more complex system. Convergence ofrelevant parts is really a selective process, a sorting out ofthe more relevant from the less relevant, which has taken place at all organizational levels of the evolutionary tree from the synthesis of the first biomolecule to the emergence ofhighly organized species. The effect ofthe convergence or concentration ofsubunits on the probability ofsynthesis ofa complex molecule is expressed by the law ofmass action. At the other end of the organizational spectrum, the specialization and complexification ofa species by the separation ofthe more effective from the less effective individuals are ex- * Medical Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, L.I., New York. Research supported by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. 394 Horton A. Johnson · Teilhard's Convergence Principle Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 196} pressed by the law ofnatural selection. But Teilhard considered both of these to be manifestations of a single principle. Extrapolating from the convergence of the human species, Teilhard projected into the future an evolutionary organization and unification at the psychosocial level, a general theme already familiar to readersofSirJulian Huxley and Lecomte du Nouy. Whatever may be its implications for a psychosocial evolution, the fact remains that at the naturalistic level the process ofself-complexification, or convergent integration, to use Huxley's term, seems to be an empirical principle which demands reckoning with in spite of our reluctance to do so. Our almost automatic reluctance to deal with convergence as a first principle in biology relates to the difficulty in placing it into our present frame ofreference; it is a blatant disavowal of the second law of thermodynamics . The thousand-million-year-drift ofliving things toward more highly organized forms is a countercurrent in a universe drifting continuously toward the ultimate disorder. Looking at the process over short periods of time, the mere day-to-day maintenance of order in living things is outofharmony with the laws which describe the entire non-living universe. Erwin Schroedinger has balanced the books thermodynamically by saying that living things defy the second law by extracting negative entropy from their environments; but we are left with the philosophical enigma ofone system's having a greater affinity for negative entropy than another. In the last analysis Schroedinger himselffeels that the production and maintenance oforder by living things cannot be adequately described by existing laws and that in living systems "we must be prepared to find a new type ofphysical law prevailing" [2]. Teilhard sought an understanding ofthis question by speculating in very abstract terms, postulating that everything, living or non-living, has a dual aspect: a ivithout, which operates according to the laws ofthermodynamics, and a within, which follows the principle of convergence. Clearly, the convergence principle is not easily handled in our current conceptual framework. But philosophical satisfaction in science is a secondary consideration, a luxury, and should not delay establishing empirical relationships, defining them quantitatively, and putting them to useful work. In a letter to Richard Bentley, Newton onceconfessed that he considered gravitational force acting at a distance through a vacuum to be a philosophical absurdity [3], 395 but this did not hinder his defining this force in...