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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).

The Parochial Pretensions of Wilber's 'Spirit in Evolution'

A Cosmic Farce Masquerading as Metaphysics

Frank Visser / Grok

Ken Wilber wants you to believe that evolution is the unfolding of a cosmic Eros—an immanent Spirit that cannot not evolve, a universal telos that drags matter upward through ever-higher holons until it recognises itself as God.

Science, by brutal contrast, says something far colder and far more honest: life appears wherever the physical conditions permit it, and nowhere else—with no hidden purpose, no guaranteed ascent, no cosmic cheering section.

That single contrast detonates Wilber's entire edifice.

Look again at the Moon and Pluto.

Wilber's system has no good answer for their sterility. Spirit, he claims, is the fundamental drive of the Kosmos, yet for 4.5 billion years that drive has produced exactly zero biological complexity on every world we can directly study except one. When pressed, the Wilberians retreat to distant exoplanets: “Eros is cosmic; it's just waiting for the right conditions elsewhere.”

Science, however, does not wait. It predicts, tests, and measures. And science's answer is mercilessly simple:

Life emerges when, and only when, three mundane conditions coincide for a geologically significant length of time:

1. Liquid water (or some other polar solvent) in prolonged contact with
2. A source of free energy (starlight, redox gradients, radioactive decay) and
3. A suite of bio-essential elements (C, H, N, O, P, S, and trace metals) cycling through chemical disequilibria.

Give a planet those conditions and chemistry begins experimenting with self-replicating systems almost immediately—Earth's oldest plausible fossils and isotopic signatures appear within a few hundred million years of the oceans forming. Remove any one of those conditions and nothing happens, not in four billion years, not in fourteen billion. No latent Spirit stirs. No holons twitch. Entropy simply continues its reign.

This is why the Moon is dead: no atmosphere, no magnetic field, no liquid water for the last 4 billion years.

This is why Pluto is dead: surface temperature 40 K, no geochemical cycling frozen solid.

This is why Venus is dead: runaway greenhouse, oceans boiled away.

This is why Mars is (so far) dead: thin atmosphere, water locked as permafrost or lost to space.

None of these worlds failed because Eros took a holiday. They failed because the physics and chemistry were not sufficient. Science's view is ruthlessly impartial: the universe is not withholding Spirit from 99.999999 % of its real estate; it is simply not providing the thermodynamic and solvent conditions under which self-replicating chemistry can get started. Where the conditions are met, life appears to arise quickly and enthusiastically. Where they are not, nothing happens—no matter how fervently Wilber's Kosmos allegedly yearns for self-realisation.

That is the deepest insult to Wilber's metaphysics. Science requires no transcendent Eros, no hierarchical Great Nest, no turquoise-stage civilisations as the inevitable omega point. It needs only water, energy gradients, and time. Yet with those ordinary ingredients it produces something Wilber's Spirit manages to produce exactly once in the only solar system we can test: a thin, fragile, utterly contingent film of replicating chemistry that eventually stumbles into philosophers who mistake their local accident for a cosmic destiny.

Wilber's Spirit is not merely unnecessary; it is actively contradicted by the distribution of life we actually observe. If Eros were truly the fundamental force he claims, the cosmos should be lush with ascending holons. Instead, the cosmos looks exactly as it would if life is nothing more than an opportunistic side-effect of blind physicochemical opportunity—abundant wherever conditions allow, and gloriously, brutally absent everywhere else.

The Moon's empty plains do not testify to Spirit patiently waiting. They testify to the fact that Spirit is not there at all—because no special spiritual ingredient is required, and none is present. The same silence that reigns over Pluto's icy heart reigns over trillions of other worlds: not the silence of meditation, but the silence of a universe that evolves only when physics accidentally hands it the keys, and otherwise lets entropy win without protest.

That is science's answer.

It is austere, it is humbling, and it leaves no room for Wilber's parochial dream of a cosmos whose entire in love with one species on one planet. The stars are not ascending. Most of them are simply burning—and the few that host life do so because liquid water happened to persist, not because Spirit finally decided to show up.

In the end, the barren lunar surface is not a mystery to be explained away by appeals to latent Eros on distant worlds.

It is the default state of the universe—and Earth is the exception that proves the rule.