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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Ken Wilber's Evolutionary Confusion

When Science Becomes a Metaphor for Spirit

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Context: Let's see how AI interprets one of my main criticisms regarding Ken Wilber's misunderstanding of evolutionary science.

1. A Rare Glimpse Behind the Curtain

In a rare 2007 blog post, Ken Wilber attempted to clarify his view of evolution in response to scientific criticism.[1] The result, however, revealed not clarity but confusion. Wilber acknowledged that Darwinian natural selection cannot be replaced by mere chance but insisted that even with selection, “something more” must be operating—a cosmic “tilt toward self-organization,” which he interprets as the spiritual drive of Eros.

This passage captures in miniature the central flaw of Wilber's entire metaphysical project: the conflation of descriptive scientific mechanisms with metaphoric spiritual aspiration.

2. What Wilber Gets Right—and Then Gets Wrong

Wilber is correct about one thing: self-organization has indeed been discussed by scientists such as Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman as a complement to natural selection. Complex systems—from convection cells to metabolic networks—do show spontaneous order under far-from-equilibrium conditions.

But what Wilber misses is what self-organization explains and what it doesn't.

• Natural selection operates on variation, heredity, and differential survival. It explains adaptive complexity.
• Self-organization explains spontaneous pattern formation in physical and chemical systems, often without adaptive function.

When Kauffman speaks of “order for free,” he is describing non-teleological emergent regularities—snowflakes, sand dunes, autocatalytic networks—not a cosmic impulse toward Shakespeare or enlightenment.

Wilber, by contrast, treats self-organization as if it were a spiritual principle smuggled into science, a “pressure toward higher forms.” That is not science—it's metaphysical projection.

3. A Tilted Universe—or a Tilted Interpretation?

Wilber writes:

“The universe is slightly tilted toward self-organizing processes … escaping present-level turmoil by jumping to higher levels of self-organization.”

This “tilt” language sounds suspiciously like teleology in disguise. Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures does not imply that systems “seek” higher levels. It describes a thermodynamic response to energy flow, not an ascent toward consciousness. Systems far from equilibrium can increase their internal order while increasing overall entropy—a purely physical phenomenon.

By spiritualizing this, Wilber anthropomorphizes physics. The “escape” from turmoil is not a cosmic yearning for higher being; it's a mathematical description of energy gradients.

4. The False Dichotomy: Either Darwin or Eros

Wilber does not crudely equate Darwinism with randomness—he acknowledges that “natural selection saves previous selections.” Yet this phrasing already betrays a deep misunderstanding. Selection does not simply preserve what worked before; it continually tests and amplifies new variations, favoring those that increase fitness. Evolution is not a museum of “saved selections,” but an ongoing creative process driven by variation and feedback.

After conceding that selection operates on more than chance, Wilber still insists: “But even that is not enough, in my opinion.” At that moment, he reopens the gap he just closed. By portraying selection as a merely conservative mechanism, he makes room for his metaphysical “Eros” to enter as the missing creative principle. In truth, the creativity lies within the evolutionary process itself—through the relentless exploration of mutations, recombinations, and environmental pressures—not in any spiritual drive guiding them from above.

5. The Misuse of Self-Organization

Wilber appeals to Stuart Kauffman's work as if it supports a transcendental impulse in evolution. Yet Kauffman himself repeatedly insists that emergence is not teleological. In At Home in the Universe (1995), Kauffman writes that self-organizing systems “do not require selection to achieve order,” but this order is not directional—it has no intrinsic purpose or goal.

When Wilber fuses Kauffman's ideas with Whitehead's “creative advance into novelty,” he turns a neutral systems concept into a metaphysical drama. In doing so, he leaves science behind and enters the realm of myth—while pretending to remain scientific.

6. The “Shakespeare Problem”

Wilber often dramatizes the improbability of evolution by saying, “From dirt to Shakespeare is quite a distance.” This rhetorical flourish is misleading.

Complex life did not leap from mud to poetry overnight; it arose through billions of cumulative, incremental steps. Each transition—replication, multicellularity, nervous systems, symbolic language—was locally adaptive, not cosmically predestined.

Appealing to improbability ignores the statistical accumulation of order through selection over immense time spans. The “distance” from dirt to Shakespeare may be emotionally vast, but scientifically it's a story of continuity, not miracle.

7. The Pseudo-Scientific Eros

Ultimately, Wilber's “Eros” is a metaphysical restatement of creationism in secular language. Like intelligent design, it posits that nature's creativity requires an invisible inner agency. Yet unlike traditional creationism, Wilber disguises this agency as an “immanent” principle woven into the cosmos.

He wants science's credibility and spirituality's mystery at once—but the synthesis dissolves under scrutiny. Eros is neither measurable nor necessary. It explains nothing that natural processes cannot, but adds an untestable metaphysical surplus.

8. What Wilber's Dismissal of Critics Reveals

When confronted with these scientific objections, Wilber dismisses his critics—especially Frank Visser—as “extremely conventional” scientists. Ironically, it is precisely this conventionality that protects science from smuggling in metaphysics under empirical disguise.

To call scientific realism “conventional” is to confess that one's own framework depends on extra-scientific commitments—in Wilber's case, a neo-Theosophical spiritual evolutionism dressed in complexity theory.

9. The Real Synthesis: Selection and Self-Organization, Without Spirit

A genuine synthesis between natural selection and self-organization does exist—but it remains firmly within science. In modern systems biology:

• Self-organization provides the raw patterns and constraints in which evolution operates.
• Natural selection then refines those patterns into adaptive structures.

There is no need to insert “Eros” between them. Emergence arises from lawful interactions, not cosmic intention.

10. Conclusion: When Metaphor Becomes Metaphysics

Wilber's 2007 blog post lays bare the central confusion of his evolutionary vision: he mistakes the poetry of emergence for its mechanism. By importing spiritual yearning into physics and biology, he transforms scientific description into mythic narrative.

Evolution indeed produces novelty and depth—but not because the universe “wants” to. It happens because nature explores possibilities through lawful processes of variation, selection, and self-organization.

Wilber's “Eros” may inspire, but it does not explain.

NOTES

[1] Wilber, Ken. "Re: Some Criticisms of My Understanding of Evolution", www.kenwilber.com, December 04, 2007 (offline). Archived.

This quote from that blog post is (uncritically) listed on Wikipedia:

"I am not alone in seeing that chance and natural selection by themselves are not enough to account for the emergence that we see in evolution. Stuart Kaufman [sic] and many others have criticized mere change and natural selection as not adequate to account for this emergence (he sees the necessity of adding self-organization). Of course I understand that natural selection is not acting on mere randomness or chance—because natural selection saves previous selections, and this reduces dramatically the probability that higher, adequate forms will emerge. But even that is not enough, in my opinion, to account for the remarkable emergence of some of the extraordinarily complex forms that nature has produced. After all, from the big bang and dirt to the poems of William Shakespeare is quite a distance, and many philosophers of science agree that mere chance and selection are just not adequate to account for these remarkable emergences. The universe is slightly tilted toward self-organizing processes, and these processes—as Prigogine was the first to elaborate—escape present-level turmoil by jumping to higher levels of self-organization, and I see that "pressure" as operating throughout the physiosphere, the biosphere, and the noosphere. And that is what I metaphorically mean when I use the example of a wing (or elsewhere, the example of an eyeball) to indicate the remarkableness of increasing emergence. But I don't mean that as a specific model or actual example of how biological emergence works! Natural selection carries forth previous individual mutations—but again that just isn't enough to account for creative emergence (or what Whitehead called "the creative advance into novelty," which, according to Whitehead, is the fundamental nature of this manifest universe).

The Ken Wilber page on Grokipedia was smart enough to notice this Wikipedia quote went unchallenged. Hence this brief essay.