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In this paper I ask the question ‘Can we exercise our free will without causing damage to everything around us?’ It seems to me there is only one way and that is to use our freedom to hand over, to become a humble part of nature. In struggling to envisage how this could happen I point to the way the cells in our body combine and co-operate to make possible the emergence of a new ‘holism’; that is the human being. ‘He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.’ (Matthew 10:39) WHEN human beings behave in a degraded and depraved manner – young girls or men falling about drunk on a Saturday night or assaulting one another, or avaricious and greedy developers or bankers grasping everything they can, depriving others around them of the wherewithal to survive or, even worse, the behaviour of paedophiles, whether clerical or a parent in the family – at such times one often hears it said: ‘Ah sure it’s only human nature’ or ‘That’s what human beings are like’! But the truth is that these behaviours are much less than we are capable of. It’s also often said in these circumstances: ‘He’s behaving like an animal’ or ‘That fellow’s just an animal’. But animals don’t behave like this. They are quite strictly controlled by their instincts and don’t go to excesses like this. They behave in a natural way that is appropriate to their stage of evolution. Once human beings achieved self-awareness and could survey the past, present and future, the way was opened to the possibility of all these excesses. We can see something and say: ‘I could have that’, and then proceed to grab it. It could be someone else’s girlfriend or some material gain that we don’t deserve but we want to grasp these things no matter who gets hurt. 36. Human Potential 479 I’ve been trying to wrestle with this problem, trying to understand why we continue to behave in this way, causing all the pain and suffering that fills our lives. Human beings frequently try to justify their behaviour by appealing to science. I feel that, in our attempts to explain this sort of selfish and avaricious behaviour, we have availed of a distorted view of evolution. This is derived from the over-emphasis that Darwin placed on chance mutations, natural selection and survival of the fittest as the main vehicle through which evolution developed. Darwin himself is not to blame for this bias, for he accepted the idea that characteristics of an organism modified during its lifetime could be inherited. The latter view was suggested by Lamarck, who was also the first to put forward the theory that living creatures evolved. As Mayr states in his book, Evolution and the Diversity of Life (1976): It seems to me Lamarck has a much better claim to be designated the ‘founder of the theory of evolution’ . . . he was the first author to devote an entire book primarily to the presentation of a theory of organic evolution. He was the first to present the entire system of animals as a product of evolution. Lamarck was already an old man when Darwin wrote his great work, The Origin of Species, fifty years later. It is rather the neoDarwinians , like Richard Dawkins or Jacques Monod – it was the latter who said: ‘Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere’ – who have been pushing this narrow view that evolution is all about natural selection, competition and survival of the fittest. This gives an apparent scientific rationale to justify the ruthless behaviour, over the past several centuries , of colonial exploitation of the third world. More recently, the same reasoning has been used to justify the greed and selfish behaviour of laissez faire, neo-liberal capitalism, whose dictum is that the only way to advance oneself is by trampling others into the ground and that it is quite acceptable to selfishly grasp what you want at the expense of others. The truth is that by far the greater part of evolution involves cooperation and symbiosis, what Lynn Margulis refers to as symbiogenesis. Natural selection and survival of the fittest, although a necessary part of evolution, plays a lesser role. In his book The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton has this to say: 480 The Writings...

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