INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 672 Amsterdam, August 21st, 2017 TRANS-DARWINIAN EVOLUTION - JOE CORBETT Neo-Darwinism posits natural selection of genetic inheritance from random mutations as the engine of evolution. This is the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory proposed by people like Richard Dawkins, and whether it is or is not an entirely adequate explanatory theory is a debate that will not be resolved any time soon, so it will not be my focus here. Instead, I propose a Trans-Darwinism that accepts and uses the ideas Neo-Darwinian theory, for the most part, but then goes beyond them by providing a supplemental spiritual and holistic explanation for evolution. In this view, the interior quality of physical matter is information, information moreover that is connected to a much larger whole than the organisms immediate environment, and this information acts as a kind of proto-consciousness insofar as it becomes full-blown consciousness with life (and later becomes self-consciousness) as the levels of self-organizing complexity within matter/information increases. All the while this matter/information is entangled and sometimes even quantumly coherent, and so in a sense it “knows” what it is doing in relation to the whole, and not only the whole (local) system of which it is a part, but of the larger environment as well, up to and including the entire planet and perhaps even the universe, such that evolution in the universe as a whole can be seen as a self-consciously guided process to the extent that it is a self-organizing process, in-formed by all the information past and present actively flowing into the future. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/corbett44.html