The evolutionary process has not been suspended or diverted but is still going ahead at full speed in the context of incessant change in the environment. The question of the evolutionary significance of human life is a necessary subject for human beings puzzled by the fact that they are born, live for a limited period and then all die. The implication is that there may be a significance in the life of human beings which is not shared by other species.
Is this likely? With Thomas Huxley at St. Andrews, Herbert Spencer played the only game of golf he ever played; sitting on the cliff watching some boys bathing Spencer recorded: "We marvelled over the fact, seeming especially strange when they are no longer disguised by clothes, that human beings should dominate over all other creatures and play the wonderful part they do on earth." That this is so was surely only due to that evolutionary oddity, the large human brain. The role of the human brain has been an interesting evolutionary experiment - an animal body (emotions, sensations) with an advanced brain. The gain in knowledge achieved by trial and error by the genome results in the formation of an image of the material world within the living system. (Lorenz 1977: 23) But the growth in the size of the human brain has vastly extended and accelerated this process. Not only can the individual human being be seen as mapping his personal environment in his brain and body but humanity collectively can be seen as a great mosaic eye, a many-faceted eye opening on all time and all space, looking to the future as well as the past.
It is from this ability to model and predict that we feel the urgency of the question about the significance of human life. A disadvantage of the evolution of foresight is that it also foresees death; how to include death in the model. Whether or not human life in general can be seen as having an evolutionary significance, there is the separate problem of the meaning or purpose of the individual human life.
Evolution has had a direction, even if it has not had a purpose or meaning. The new element is our awareness of the direction. The direction has been towards greater complexity as a means of increasing adaptability to environmental change and towards increased ability to manipulate and modify the environment in the interests of survival. The significance of human life in general can be seen in this process, the significance of the individual human life as part of this process. If we are right in identifying the direction of evolution, then we can speculate about the future, extrapolating the direction of evolutionary change, considering the possibilities opening up for future human evolution.

Introduction

Rather different questions arise depending on whether one considers the evolutionary significance of human life in the past, the present or a possible future - or one could approach the topic ad hominem: that is consider the evolutionary significance of one's own life?

What kind of answers could there be - for the species ? for the individual? It may be that this is a pointless subject - or that it is an impossible subject - or that it is a subject which has been tackled, unsuccessfully, by many different people over thousands of years (philosophers, poets, psychologists, scientists, linguists) - or that it leads directly into the morass of religious doctrine, disputes, mysticism, dogmatism. Or it may be that it is a necessary subject, for human beings who are puzzled by the fact that they are born, live for a limited period and then all die.

One approach is to examine closely the terms used in the question: "Significance": this means: the meaning, for us, [hardly totally objectively] of human life. Immediately we see the swamp of debate about meaning before us. We reinterpret: has life a purpose? has life in some sense a value? has human life an underlying program, something that "makes sense" of it?

"Human life": this could be the life of the individual human being ( your life or my life and the life of each of the 5000 or so million human beings existing now - or of the innumerable individual human beings who have existed in the past or will (one assumes) exist in the future - or it could be the life of humanity, the continued life of the human species, as a distinct category of animate beings. "Human": this is obviously opposed to non-human life, the life of the multitude of species, of the multitude of members of other species, now and in the past. The implication is that there may be a significance in the life of human beings which is not shared by other species as collective entities or by the individuals which have constituted or will constitute those other collective entities - elephants, spiders, whales, cockroaches, sheep, tigers, trees, fish, octopuses, monkeys, cats, bacteria, cabbages, chimpanzees, camels, cows, mice, scorpions, snakes, kangaroos, pigs, parrots, lizards, thrushes, crocodiles etc. etc.

"Evolutionary": reminds one that the question may have to be considered in terms of immense stretches of time, of immense complications of interaction between human beings and other animate or inanimate entities, between human beings and geological change, climatic change. The word reminds us that we can approach the question by minute enquiry or massive overarching (horrible word) survey, in all space and all time. The different approaches or attempted clarifications interact and intersect, making possible the formulation of more complex issues, and lead on to the need for further sub-approaches and clarifications.

"Meaning" "Purpose" "Value" "Making sense" "Underlying program": these words or phrases are, as Valéry put it (I think), like thin planks placed over an abyss - if we walk quickly they may hold to the other side, if we hesitate or ponder, they will give way beneath us. These are very human words or phrases, parts of our total "mental" or "linguistic" (or presumably "neural") structuring. They are related to such equally weak-plank words as "good " "bad" "right" "wrong" "pleasant" "unpleasant". How can we avoid entangling ourselves with words, long before we get anywhere near our real concerns? Or should we think that the effort is not worthwhile - it is so highly unlikely that we can find anything new or satisfying or even intellectually convincing to say about human life, our individual human life, or the human life of the species?

A typical academic approach is to see what others have said and then, very readily, to show how inadequate and inconclusive it has been. Still, it is progress of a kind to find out what is not true, not convincing, not in any way adequate. This approach then has endless books, endless patterns of thought and belief, which it can drag onto the scene, religious institutions and practice, theology, philosophy, psychology, sociology (for the human group), evolutionary theory (for the species), history, political theory, and so on and on.

Purpose and direction

The orthodoxy is that the course of evolution has not been purposive. It may be possible to perceive a direction in which evolution has advanced but not anything which could be described as its purpose or meaning. The direction, it is often said, has been towards greater complexity, though whether this is interpreted as increased complexity for individuals or for species has to be clarified. It seems the case that one cannot say that evolutionary change has universally been towards greater complexity. "I would indeed deny that evolution (including cultural evolution) proceeds in the direction of increasing complexity. Any parasite will serve as an example".(Rindos 1985: 84). He seems to be right about parasites and indeed many species which have shown no signs of increased complexity over millions of years - but he is almost certainly wrong as regards humanity (and many large-brained mammals).

For the evolution of humans, and especially for the development of human culture, the role of the brain has been the key factor. "The most remarkable single feature in that progress has been the evolution of self-consciousness in the development of man... it has substituted the possibility of conscious control of evolution for the previous mechanism of the blind chances, of variation aided by the equally blind sifting process of natural selection." (Blakemore and Greenfield 1987: x) The direction has been towards greater complexity as a means of increasing adaptability to environmental change and towards increased ability to manipulate and modify the environment in the interests of survival. The significance of human life in general can be seen in this process, the significance of the individual human life as part of this process.

The nature of evolution

A few comments on the nature of evolution, particularly in relation to human beings. The environment of the evolutionary process is incessant change. What is selected is always and only successful behaviour. That selection carries with it whatever is associated with that behaviour, morphological, social or neural. Or as Dawkins and others would argue, the significance of evolution is to be found at the level of the gene. However, even Dawkins (Dawkins 1989: 191) does not think this is adequate in considering human evolution - we must "throw out" the gene as the single determinant of human evolution and take account of the novel process of cultural evolution which has been the main force in human evolution for tens of thousands of years.

It can be argued that physical evolution, in the sense of the survival of DNA patterns in human beings, has become residual, almost to vanishing point in most modern populations; that the evolutionary principle of selective survival of physical strains has, particularly in modern Western societies, been suspended as a result of the extension of policies of social security with few, or none, dying of starvation and the most active and creative, the socially most successful, generally having the fewest children. The technological separation of sexual intercourse from reproduction, the growing use of abortion, the short duration of marriages, the growing use of artificial fertilisation, all operate to move patterns of reproduction away from those which operated in the distant evolutionary past. Though a matter of acute controversy, at best the physical and intellectual components of modern Western society remain on average much the same from generation to generation but more probably the average physical and mental qualities deteriorate.

But if the evolutionary process has been suspended at the level of the individual in industrialised societies, has it been suspended at the level of the societies themselves, the nation states? There is no similarly well-established social security system for nations (though of course the outlines of a system have been drawn - mutual international aid, help for the third world etc.) The influence of individual nation states on the general direction of humanity's development depends on their power, activity, vitality, originality - which, in turn, depend on the quality of the individuals and the structures in which they operate. Perhaps at one remove, then, classical evolutionary pressures are still operating, along with effects of famines, disease, earthquakes, population pressure.

Individual human life

It is all very well to consider the evolutionary significance of the human species as a whole, but is it plausible, or possible to demonstrate the significance of an individual life? Many eminent people have felt that the individual life has no significance. "Everybody must wonder from time to time if there is any real purpose in life. ... For what reason do we live our lives at all?" (Hoyle 1983:6) "the course of my existence. ... at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the course of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being." (Goethe) "Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy? ... the meaningless absurdity of life ... is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man" (extracts from James 1960[1901-1902]: 146, 158) "Naître, s'agiter, disparaître, c'est la tout le drâme éphemère de la vie humaine. ... Si rien n'est immortel en nous, que cette vie est peu de chose! ... la vie consiste à répéter le type humain et la ritournelle humaine comme l'ont fait, le font et le feront, aux siècles des siècles, des légions de tes semblables." (Amiel 1922 II:208-209) "Individual men, burdened with fear, want and sorrow, dance into the arms of death. As they do they never weary of asking what ... the whole tragi-comedy is supposed to mean. They call on Heaven for an answer but Heaven stays silent. Instead of a voice from Heaven there come along priests with revelations." (Schopenhauer 1970: 180)

William James, from whom some of these extracts are drawn, was contemptuous of the whingers but at the same time showed his acute awareness of the problem of individual life: "The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche ... The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shrieking of two dying rats.... The fact that we can die is what perplexes us. .. We need a life not correlated with death" (James 1960[1901-1902]: 50, 148)

Many have felt that there ought to be something of lasting value in life: "Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say "This is it'?" (Virginia Woolf 1953: 86) "Laisser un monument, aere perennius, un ouvrage indéstructible, qui fasse penser, sentir, rêver, à travers une suite de générations" (Amiel 1922 II:238)) "To leave an imprint" (A student on the radio)

These are the views of non-scientists for the most part and may be dismissed as over-reaction by sensitive individuals. How should we consider the position of the individual from a more biological aspect? "What is the place of the individual in all this? At first sight, the individual human being appears as a little, temporary, and insignificant creature, of no account in the vast enterprise of mankind as a whole".(Huxley 1968: 97)

In biological orthodoxy, the individual can be evolutionarily significant only in a very narrow sense: does he\she leave offspring which prolong the existence of his genes - individual genes or complexes of genes? Or if not leaving such offspring, has he\she promoted the continued existence of `his\her' genes by way of assisting brothers' or sisters` children etc., an even narrower form of evolutionary significance? Has he\she achieved substantial 'inclusive fitness' - interpreted by J.B.S. Haldane in 1974 as "I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins".

The evolutionary significance of the individual may be more important through his cultural activity than through his "inclusive fitness" in the strict sense. Anyone who brings about major change in how individual human beings or human groups behave and interact can be reckoned also to be a major evolutionary force

Human evolution nowadays is not a simple matter of genes and gene complexes; there is the complicated interaction of genetic inheritance and culture. A cultural contribution by an individual can readily have genetic effects on the wider population, and even perhaps on the species as a whole. For example, the founder of a religion, laying down rules accepted by a population on such matters as adultery, incest, marriage, chastity, must have long- term effects on the genetic composition and genetic variation of populations much greater than could be attributed to any single individual through his individual genetic `fitness'.

The same sort of argument can be applied to other forms of contribution made by individuals to the culture in which they find themselves. This is most obviously so in the case of scientific innovators. The originator of new, effective treatments for disease can have tremendous evolutionary significance not only for his own community but perhaps for the human species as a whole. Evolutionary significance for the individual attaches not only to outstanding individuals such as these - insofar as any individual produces a lasting effect in some segment of human culture he/she may be reckoned to be evolutionarily significant.

If one takes the extreme view represented by Dawkins' "selfish gene", then one is led to attribute no evolutionary significance to the individual human being as such. Adherents of the narrow, genetic view of evolution may say that the cultural innovation an individual makes and the persistence of that particular cultural innovation are directly caused by the genetic predisposition of the individual and the continuation of that genetic predisposition in succeeding populations.

If, at the most physiological level, the human social culture of today controls and modifies human reproductive behaviour, as in many ways it does, and leaves room for individual decision to an extent without any past precedent, for example: with the technologies of contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilisation plus oncoming much more powerful techniques of genetic engineering, then to attribute significance only to relative "inclusive fitness" seems like a zoomorphic intellectual superstition.

In the modern process of human evolution, "inclusive fitness" in the strict sense is perhaps the least important way in which an individual life qualifies as having evolutionary significance, at any rate in populations which have an advanced urban culture. "Natural Selection in man has fallen chiefly upon groups, not upon individuals, and differences in the nature and organisation of human groups are determined chiefly by what we can best sum up as differences of tradition in the widest sense of the term."(Huxley 1926: 47)

If this is so, then apart from the undesigned effects on population gene frequencies as a consequence of religious celibacy, or new medical procedures, then the individual through his contribution to the success of the group can have a long-term evolutionary significance for humanity generally. The fittest of all types of community to survive would be that which could best forecast the future, the changes the world and Universe would undergo and it is individuals who help to shape communities such as these, through their contribution to the moral and social structures or to scientific and technological advance, to the language-based dissemination of systems of ideas which benefit the community. Language, morality, social structure, science, technology can be seen as important evolutionary developments.

Brain mind and consciousness

The role of the human brain has been an interesting evolutionary experiment - an animal body (emotions, sensations) with an advanced brain. The contrast with the earlier world-dominant species is striking: a stegosaur, an armoured dinosaur roughly the size of an elephant, had a braincase only big enough to contain a brain the size of a large walnut.

The central nervous system is Nature's greatest invention for enabling organisms to deal competently with their environment.(Granit 1977: 9) What we have is a neurosensory organisation that has evolved in the service of survival. Our cognitive apparatus is itself an objective reality, which has acquired its present form in contact with and adaptation to equally real things in the outer world. (Lorenz 1977: 7) The increase of brain size in terms of the relation between brain size and body surface turned to the external world is responsible for the success of our highly adaptable species. (Granit 1977: 54)

How far mind or consciousness evolved from some precursor in lower organisms is a matter of speculation. Some for example think that mind or consciousness must have existed in other organisms before man.(Huxley 1926: 71) On this view the mind of man has evolved from the mind of some non-human mammal; something of the same general nature must be present in lower organisms. The nervous systems of all animals are built of the same matter and on the same structural, functional, genetic and metabolic principles. The rudiments of consciousness or self-awareness must have been associated with the very existence of the 'neural'. (Szentagothai 1987: 324-326)

An alternative view is that the advent of consciousness was dependent on the growth of brain-size, perhaps plus the development of language making possible a new form of self- perception. This is similar to the view that consciousness is exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.

However this may be it is obvious that the critical next stage for humanity took us beyond what we suppose even large-brained mammals to be capable of, whatever consciousness may be and however the neural complexity may function to produce it. In a survey (Highfield 1994) of varying views on consciousness, Richard Gregory commented that there is no theory of consciousness. The best one can do is to point at where one might expect to find it. The survey showed a range of views from "brains cause consciousness in exactly the same sense that stomachs cause digestion; the computer-view of consciousness is essentially pre-scientific superstition" (Searle) to the directly-opposed: "the brain is a parallel computer - functioning in terms of competing multiple drafts (like the Reagan presidency) with no single centre in charge but many working in parallel to make sense of events and prepare decisions" (Dennett). Another view sees consciousness as the possibility of arousing an assembly of appropriate memories, perhaps as a result of input brain activity persisting, even up to half a second, in competing working memories.(Taylor)

In whatever way consciousness may be characterised, human consciousness and the advance of the human mind have yielded great advantages. The development of mind has meant the possibility of summing-up ever more and more power and fine adjustment of response in the present, in the single act (Huxley 1926: 24)). Consciousness has been the source of survival-value from the great advantage the organism derives operating with an internal model of the world-and-the-self-in-the-world.(Sommerhoff 1990:283) Science, it has been said, could not arise in a world devoid of conscious beings.(Longuet Higgins in Highfield 1994)

What other advantages could consciousness afford? Consciousness makes possible long-range anticipation of events; consciousness has added a new awareness of time; humanity has acquired the ability to categorize experience in terms of past and future. Conscious awareness has been an enormous asset; its raison d'etre is perfection of control over the environment. In adaptability conscious man exceeds all other species.(Granit 1977: 74)

How, starting from our body and our brain, do we arrive at reliable knowledge about what is outside us, how do we become able to predict the development of a process, the development of the process of existence? It is through the mapping of the environment in the brain. Understanding is made possible through the formation in the brain of a 'model' of the complex of events to be explained; an internal model of the world, including some kind of model of the organism itself.(Szentagothai 1987: 324)

The gain in knowledge achieved by trial and error by the genome results in the formation of an image of the material world within the living system.(Lorenz 1977: 23) The growth in the size of the human brain has vastly extended and accelerated this process. Not only is the individual human being able to map his personal environment in his brain and body but humanity collectively can be seen as a great mosaic eye, a many-faceted eye opening on all time and all space, looking to the future as well as the past. And consciousness, too, is part of the reality we perceive, as Niels Bohr has pointed out.(Granit 1977: 71)

Culture

"Are there any good reasons for supposing our own species to be unique? I believe the answer is yes. Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word 'culture'." (Dawkins 1989: 189) What makes us human are all the aspects which collectively can be described as culture: language, gesture, empathy, love, morality, music, art, mathematics, science, modelling the universe, shaping the future.

Conceptual thought and speech changed all man's evolution by achieving something which is equivalent to the inheritance of acquired characters.(Lorenz 1966: 205) Itzkoff refers to "the mysterious and unique nature of man's language.. It is the development of written language which marks the transition from the intuitive linguistic world view to a more discursive and cognitive representation of experience. This in turn eventually leads to mathematics and science". (Itzkoff 1971: 119) Perhaps in the light of investigations elsewhere, we would not now think language is so mysterious but it is surely right that language is at the foundation of culture.

Never until the origin of speech was it possible for a whole series of generations to be linked together by experience. Evolution since the time of origin of this new process has consisted essentially in the enlargement and specialisation of aggregations of minds, and the improvement of the tradition which constitutes the mode of inheritance for these aggregations. (Huxley 1868: 27)

The ever growing extent and complexity of human culture - manifested necessarily in the group, the human society, and not possible for the individual in total isolation - was founded on the development of language. It is language which made the existence of moral codes possible, allowed the perception of kinship systems, laid the basis for continuing social structures, allowed religions to be founded and science to progress. With group feeling probably an elaboration of the mother-infant relation, language made possible the growth of the group solidarity, the social consciousness characteristic of humanity.

Morality is a particularly important element in human culture and the evolution of social structure. "No society is healthy or creative or strong unless that society has a set of common values that give meaning and purpose to group life".{Kekes 1990: 186} It has of course been argued that while language makes tradition and so continuing morality possible, it can also be socially destructive. So Wolff writes: "There are three godfathers of the crime wave now swamping personal security across Europe. [Freud, Marx, Darwin] ... Darwin [by his emphasis] on an evolution which blurred the uniqueness and therefore the dignity of man] consigned the morality of individual responsibility and of personal culpability to the intellectual dustbin". (Wolff) This attack would have surprised Darwin who attached great importance to morality as a factor in the success of human groups - but it perhaps makes the fair point that the theory of evolution as currently expounded is not seen as giving any explicit support to the structures and traditions on which human societies depend. Is there any way in which evolutionary theory could be usefully constructive - a subject I deal with later in this paper.

The other vastly important aspect of human culture is the development of science. Scientific truth is wrested from a reality existing outside and independent of the human brain. Since this reality is the same for all human beings, all correct, scientific results will always agree with each other.(Lorenz 1977: 249)

Obviously the emergence of the capacity for culture has been the major aspect of humanity's evolutionary history but there is an unsettled debate about the relation between physical and cultural evolution. Is cultural 'evolution' in fact a misapplication of the term? How can the genetic basis of physical evolution be related to the processes of cultural growth and change? One approach, by Boyd and Richerson(1985) and rather similarly by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman(1981), argues that cultural and physical evolution are different but parallel processes with different modes of operation. Another approach, by Rindos, has sought a reinterpretation of cultural evolution in a Darwinian framework: selection operates similarly in both cultural and physical evolution and is " 'blind' to the type of coding (genetic or cultural) underlying behavior". Selection is 'fundamentally the differential reproductive success of specific individuals bearing certain traits'.(Rindos 1985: 74)) Carneiro observed in the peer commentary (Rindos 1985: 77), I think correctly, on Rindos' paper that cultural selection, as such, operates not on individuals but on culture traits and on societies.

Perhaps a reconciliation can be found in two ways: first, by recognising that in human evolution selection at the group level is not only possible but the main line of advance. Secondly, by observing that cultural changes can have major genetic consequences. Ideas change the environment (directly and indirectly) and change the neural structure of members of the society. Ideas change behaviour and response to the environment. Changes in behaviour change the possibilities and probabilities of physical survival and multiplication of individual human beings. The 'culture' modifies the determination of the fitness to survive. Thus it alters the genetic pool of a population. All cultures, in a sense, are genetic engineering. The point is clearly made by Jacques Monod: "Le point important c'est que, pendant des centaines de milliers d'années, l'évolution culturelle ne pouvait pas ne pas influencer l'évolution physique; chez l'homme plus encore que chez tout autre animal. C'est le comportement qui oriente la pression de sélection. Les traits culturels eux-mêmes devaient exercer leur pression sur l'évolution du génome."(Monod 1970: 179)

As a side issue, one might comment on the relation of sexuality, culture and society. The evolution of sex and the evolution of the brain can be seen as part of the same story: the evolution of variability in response to a constantly changing environment. Freud saw culture essentially as a displacement activity for sexual expression. According to this view, the capacity to develop cultural interests depends on one's ability to sublimate or `neutralise' sexual energy. (Storr 1988:152)

Freud built his theories on the experiences of the sick. A quite different interpretation is possible. As Storr remarks, it is not only intimate personal relationships which provide life with meaning. There is also the sense of belonging to a community - or the sense of purpose in life (Storr 1988: ix, 13). Jung recorded that about a third of his cases were not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives (quoted by Storr 1988: 193). If sexuality is to be accorded a role in cultural evolution, perhaps one might consider the essential purposelessness of the life of the male individual (contrasted with the natural purposefulness of the life of the female individual) as a principal driving force. In the modern world, rather than culture being a sublimation of sexuality, sex can be seen as a displacement activity in the absence of any other purposeful activity. The evolutionary significance of the individual in the modern world lies not in his sexual but in his cultural activities.

Religious aspects

Religion has been a major expression of culture and played a major role in guiding the development of human societies. How should one relate the phenomenon of religion, which typically seeks to give purpose and direction to the life of the adherent, to the process of human evolution? Most of the major religions, surprisingly, emerged at much the same period in history. In what has been called the sixth-century [BC] revolt, seven world religions appeared within 50 years of each other - Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Vedanta Monism, Taoism - to which should be added the emergence in the West of Pythagoreanism. The different religions offer diverse accounts of the world and diverse prescriptions for human life. One of the more attractive is the Zoroastrian. "The spirit of happiness permeates not only Zoroastrian ethics, but also their rituals ... It has no doctrine of original sin, nor of one man dying to save all. Every man is responsible for his own part in the cosmic battle, and for his own destiny" (Beaver, Pierce et al. 1982: 87). Shinto sees each man not as solitary but as part of a long continuous history from ancestors to descendants, and as a constituent of social groups. Ancestor worship generally locates the individual as part of continuing human society.

The existence of religion has been a fact of human history and development. "Religion is a way of life and an attitude to the universe. ... Statements of fact made in its name are untrue in detail but often contain some truth at their core." (Haldane quoted in Mackay 1977) It is possible to see religion as an ordering system (like a geometric construction to solve a problem) or as a necessary, however arbitrary, social system. What might be the role of religion in an evolutionary context? A religion typically deals with (accounts for) death, time, eternity, sorrow, hope, desire, despair, love, good, evil, the 'meaning of life', purpose, community, sexuality.

Religion as part of the evolutionary predisposition of the human mind satisfying the ache of not understanding? or religion even as an instrument of evolution? Religion has after all been an important force in human evolution in the narrowest physical sense, by its prescriptions affecting reproduction - and by its motivating force in the struggle between groups, populations, nations. This issue has been considered by Reynolds and Tanner "Are religions adaptive? Do they help their members survive by promoting behaviors that are suitable in a particular environment? ... [religions] establish the right and wrong conditions for conception to take place, the rights and wrongs of abortion and infanticide; they control adolescent sexuality, they regulate marriage, divorce, remarriage and widowhood".(Reynolds 1992: 206)

This very detailed role of religion is apparent in the Old Testament and in the Koran: "You are forbidden to take in marriage your mothers, your daughters, your sisters, your paternal and maternal aunts, the daughters of your brothers and sisters, your foster-mothers, your foster sisters, the mothers of your wives, your step-daughters who are in your charge, born of the wives with whom you have lain...and the wives of your own- begotten sons. Henceforth, you are also forbidden to take in marriage two sisters at one and the same time. You are also forbidden to take in marriage married women, except captives whom you own as slaves".(Dawood 1959: 368)

In its original and essential function, religio - religion - is the binding together of all our knowledge of the Universe, and with it all our life and cultures. Religion has been a factor in group survival and success. It has been practically useful and central to human psychology: "The predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature" (Wilson 1978: 169). Hobbes gave a sceptical account of its origin: "in these four things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics consisteth the natural seed of religion; which by reason of the different fancies, judgements and passions of several men, have grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another". (Hobbes 1909[1651]: 85)

What religion offers to the individual human can be contrasted with what science, including evolutionary science, has to offer. "Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy" (James 1960 [1901-2]: 469). Religion can be seen as a provisional attempt at scientific truth. What does it achieve? It unites those who adhere to it; it provides a structure of beliefs which they share; it provides a shared view of life and death, of the situation of humanity in existence; it provides a prescription for their relationships one to another, and for the individual to himself and to existence; it seeks to harmonise co-existence of those who adhere to the religion; it strengthens the group to which those who adhere to the religion belong.

In the modern world, religion in many societies has lost its force. Where it still is influential, in an ever more closely interacting world system, religions create strife as much as they support group social structures. In the 19th century with the advance of science, many, whilst recognising the necessity of religio in the fundamental sense, beliefs to bind together one's view of the world and existence, found it impossible to accept the apparently arbitrary formulations of traditional religion: "Ces réligions, fondées sur un cosmos enfantin et sur une histoire chimérique de l'humanité, peuvent-elles affronter l'astronomie et la géologie contemporaines? " (Amiel 1922 II:164) "We must therefore, I think, bid a definite good-bye to dogmatic theology."(James 1960[1901-1902: 430)

If traditional religions are, for many, no longer credible or useful, can science fill their place, do any or all of the useful things that the religions once did? How could science be presented or changed to do all these things? Would it be desirable for science to attempt this? Looked at objectively, the scientific account of life and existence goes far beyond religious accounts. As Dawkins says "The modern scientific view of the universe is incomparably more wonderful than any competing view, at any time in history, in any culture or religion, anywhere."(Dawkins) Could science function as a replacement for religion? Each religion sought to accommodate whatever was generally thought to be reality at the time, life, death and the universe, the social relationships of the time. Evolution also can be seen as a (scientific) creation story; so Edward Wilson says that the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.(Wilson 1978: 201)) That there is a need for something more satisfying than physical and biological scientific theory as currently presented seems obvious. Again quoting Monod: there remains "l'angoisse qui nous contraint à chercher le sens de l'éxistence. Angoisse créatrice de tous les mythes, de toutes les réligions, de toutes les philosophies et de la science elle-même."(Monod 1970: 193)

The human in the universe

It may seem pretentious to ask what the significance might be of humanity, or the individual human being, in the universe. The great scientist, Lord Rutherford(1968) once said:"Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department" and many lesser scientists might well agree with him. Quantitatively the individual human being is insignificant in the grand picture, the ratio to the mass of the universe approximately 1:10^48. In duration also, the human species is negligible: the world managed without man for 99.975% of its time.

Nevertheless even distinguished scientists like Stephen Hawking feel the need for something more than science currently offers: "A complete, consistent, unified theory is only the first step; our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence".(Hawking 1988: 168) Looking to the future of humanity which one hopes will have a considerably longer duration than its past, can we see the outline of an evolutionary account which may go some way to satisfying us?

The future of evolution

May we consider the distant future? What do we know about it? The cosmologists present varying accounts. "A universe that recollapses ends in a `big crunch'.. there are two basic alternatives, the bang-crunch universes and the bang-whimper universes.... there is no way in which the available observations ... can distinguish whether our Universe is open [continuing for ever] or closed [essentially a black hole ending in a big crunch]".(Gribbin 1986: 142-144) On the most widely accepted view, we have at least another 15 billion years before the universe contracts in on itself in the Big Crunch. There is time for a lot of human evolution, development, action. How are we going to spend the next 15 billion years?

It will not be plain sailing: "the size of the sun has increased by a third since its formation some 5000 million years ago. It eventually grows so huge that it will eat up the inner planets, Mercury and Venus. The most unpleasant surprise [from computer simulation] is that the earth will be inhabitable for only a quarter of the time that had been expected. The computer model reveals that we shall have to start evacuating the earth within a 'mere' 1,100 million years. The expanding sun will stop just short of eating up the Earth and Moon. It will then shrink to the size of the earth and become a white dwarf star. Another 5000 million years pass and the sun has become a black dwarf". (Berry 1994)

Some scientific fiction writers have attempted to picture what the future developments for humanity might be, for example, H.G. Wells. The most ambitious was Olaf Stapledon11, a distinguished though little known author. "Moskowitz ranks him with Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as one of the five 'immortals' of the genre". Brian Aldiss insists that Stapledon stands alone with Wells as "an indisputable giant among science fiction writers past and present. Eric Rabkin and Robert Scholes concur".(Fiedler 1983: 5-6)

The objective is to consider the significance of human lives looking ahead to an indefinite future. The assumption is that evolution is not suspended or diverted but going ahead at full speed. The future is something that is going to happen, that is going to be, something definite and real. We are the real future of those who lived before us. It becomes reasonable to consider the possibilities opening up for future human evolution. I have discussed how evolution seems to have had a direction, at any rate as far as human evolution is concerned. The question is whether that direction has been correctly identified as being towards greater complexity - or is it more specifically towards complexity adequate to the complexity of the structures and systems in which the human species finds itself? - a complexity capable of coping with, absorbing, the irruption of the unpredicted, the unforeseen, the unexpected?

If we are right in identifying the direction of evolution, then we can speculate about the future, extrapolating the direction of evolutionary change, considering the possibilities opening up for future human evolution. Of course, we, individually or as a species, could be knocked down tomorrow by a (cosmic) bus. One cannot rule out the suspicion that the human race is to be superseded, how we don't know (though no doubt the `thinking dinosaur' also didn't know!)

Marvin Minsky has suggested that humanity will be superseded by intelligent machines, the intelligent computer of the next century. Humanity, in comparison, he opines, is of little significance: "little chimpanzees running round in clothes". In the very distant future there might be more biological replacements for us if we destroy ourselves - candidates might be the ants or the birds or the apes or some sea-creatures. I do not know the origin of Itzkoff's speculation: "It has been hypothesized that the lifetime of a species averages between five and ten million years; when one considers that it is hardly fifty thousand years since homo sapiens climbed out onto his special evolutionary limb one dares not imagine the possibilities and directions that his knowledge will take". (Itzkoff 1971: 152)

Some views are more optimistic than others. So, in the 19th century, Amiel (1922 II:329): "On finira par tâter le pouls à l'espéce et au globe aussi facilement qu'à un malade. L'activité sera convertie en conscience; Gée s'apercevra elle-même." (an anticipation of Teilhard de Chardin). Others rely on science - "scientific work and lucid thought are persistent and cumulative ... Man, consciously controlling his own destinies and the destinies of all life upon this planet" relying on "a picture of the universe that is generally valid and divested of fabulous interpretations." (Wells and Huxley 1931: 865, 878)

There have been more pessimistic or more realistic prognostications of which Stapledon's work is an example: "Last and First Men is a two-billion-year-long mytho-history which imagines eighteen succeeding species of mankind, before their inevitable end) ... And even if by some miracle mankind achieves a happier state, what then. Sooner or later some unimportant astronomical event will casually destroy us.... In the light of their impending extinction, however, they dedicated themselves to the 'forlorn task of disseminating among the stars the seeds of a new humanity".(Fiedler 1983: 58, 222)

The scientific structure of thought has been part of the right development, partial but valuable - and is strengthened by and strengthens the new perception of the direction of development of the universe. Is there any reason why an enlarged evolutionary theory should not be socially constructive? There is room for shorter-range orthodox speculation as well as speculation about the very distant future. For example, with current changes in sexual behaviour one might consider whether at last the engine is being uncoupled from the evolutionary train. What might be the evolutionary implications of current social and sexual patterns? - the spread of homosexuality, of a single-female social pattern, of the decline of marriage and the growth of divorce, of sex separated more and more from reproduction, the implications of abortion, contraception, and artificial fertilisation and perhaps artificial incubation, of genetic engineering. In terms of conventional evolutionary biology all these developments must surely have major long-term consequences. This sort of enquiry could be the start of a new type of evolutionary theory, looking to the future as much as to the past.

The other approach would be in looking to the much more distant future. What are we not foreseeing? How could we be preparing, protecting against the irruption of the unpredictable (from within or without the human system), preserving the science, the technology, the unified understanding required to create and maintain the adequate neural complexity, preserving the human 'social' system on which the sciences etc. depend? Perhaps the prospects are not too bad. The distribution of the scientific and technological capability across many countries is in itself a protection against catastrophe. We are fortunate to have the reservoir, repository or safe-deposit for the scientific and technological system offered and constituted by language.

The effort to foresee the near and more distant future in an evolutionary perspective, to consider how we might guard against future threats to the species, may have an additional value, injecting the idea of purpose and goals into the evolutionary account of human development, presenting an understandable picture of man's position and prospects in the universe, suggesting how the work of the individual in his short life, the scientist, the engineer, the politician, or the orderly, constructive, ordinary citizen, on whom the social fabric depends, can contribute to a larger purpose, equal in its ambition and magnificence to anything that religions have been able to offer.

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APPENDIX: THE NEXT TWO BILLION YEARS

Stapledon, Olaf 1930. Last and First Men: A story of the near and far future. Harmondworth: Penguin.

"a masterpiece ... among the most imaginative works ever written" [Brian Aldiss]

"one of my gods (the other, of course, is H. G. Wells) ... whose books are full of lessons for our time" [Arthur C. Clarke]

Outline of Last and First Men

Preface:

"I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man. ... the human race in its cosmic setting. ... an essay in myth creation ... the thought that it [our present civilisation] may decay and collapse ... must be faced at least as a possibility. ... the whole enterprise of our race may after all be but a minor and unsuccessful episode in a vaster drama ...

"I have imagined the triumph of the cruder sort of Americanism over all that is best and most promising in American culture. May this not occur in the real world!

Extracts and episodes

"the defeated nation ... now became the most pacific ... a profound change of heart ... chiefly in Germany

"the Russian state came increasingly under the influence of Western, and especially American, finance... the Russo-German war ...

"This dread [of war] was one cause of the formation of a European Confederacy, in which all the nations of Europe, save Russia, surrendered their sovereignty to a common authority ... in every serious crisis it broke.

"a second-rate German author ... claimed that a heroic and obviously Nordic ruled by divine right over an ... obviously Slavonic spirit.... Moscow, Leningrad and Berlin were shattered from the air.

"a young Chinese physicist ... had been experimenting to find means for the utilization of sub-atomic energy by the annihilation of matter ... an intolerable scorching sun ... suddenly the whole island leapt asunder ... a gigantic mushroom of steam and debris ...

Approx 2300 AD Sino-American War First World State founded

To AD 4000 Americanized world

The Dominance of Science

Science so complex that only a tiny fraction of it could be mastered by one brain - the huge science called subatomic physics

About two centuries after the formation of the world state ... the time was ripe for a formal union of science and religion - the Sacred Order of Scientists was founded

All the continents were by now minutely artificialized

The whole American continent succumbed to a plague of pulmonary and nervous diseases..

The American madness spread to the other continents also and very soon all living traces of their civilization vanished

During a hundred thousand years man remained in complete eclipse

After a brief revival the planet was so seriously damaged that mind henceforth lay in deep slumber for ten more millions of years

The idea of irresistible decay obsessed the race at this time. The whole mass of scientific knowledge was rapidly lost ...

The revival of civilization in Patagonia

It was found possible by means of a huge initial expenditure of energy to annihilate the positive and negative charges in one not very common kind of atom ... an inexhaustible source of power

Which went out of control and destroyed most of the planet Of the two hundred million members of the human race, all were burnt or roasted or suffocated within three months - all but thirty-five who happened to be in the neighbourhood of the North Pole.

Who eventually devoted themselves to recording as much as they could of Patagonian science and culture

It was some ten million years after the Patagonian disaster that the first elements of a new human species appeared

An era of great geological change coupled with the effects of the destruction of most of the surface of the planet

Evolution of divergent human species and development of intelligent monkeys

For nearly a quarter of a million years the Second Men passed through successive phases of prosperity and decline

The brain of the second species threatened to outgrow the rest of its body

A virus, whose subtle derangement of the glandular system was never suspected, ... propagated throughout the world a mysterious fatigue ... the vast lethargy produced a vast despond.

The third ... civilization of the Second Men passed ... into a phase of brilliant natural science.

It was time for man to take control of himself and remake himself upon a nobler pattern.

The First Martian invasion. ... when the Second Men were gathering their strength for a great venture in artificial evolution.

Another dark age followed after the bacterial weapons used to destroy the Martians infected the human race also.

We have now followed man's career for some forty million years.

When the Second Men had remained in their strange racial trance for about thirty million years ... a subtle chemical re-arrangement of the germ-plasm such that there ensued an epidemic of biological variation ... one new type consolidated itself as a new species, the Third Men.

Biological control through manipulation of the germ-plasm the race developed a very remarkable new art ... plastic vital art ... the production of a worldwide and perfectly systematic fauna and flora.

It took this brightest of all the races of the third species many thousands of years of research to discover the more delicate principles of heredity, and to devise a technique by which the actual hereditary factors in the germ could be manipulated.

The First of the Great Brains

Those who sought to produce a super-brain... creating an organism which consisted of a brain twelve feet across ...

Let us pass on to the first true individual of the fourth human species.

A large circular brain-turret ... some forty feet in diameter He casually solved ... the ancient problems of good and evil, of mind and its object, of the one and the many, and of truth and error.

When some three thousand years had passed ... the unique individual determined to create others of his kind.... including a direct sensitivity to radiation for telepathic communication

And produced intelligent machines which destroyed the Third Men except for a few specimens

Which ultimately they modified to produce the Fifth Men with a telepathic capacity and a lifespan of thousands of years

Who eventually destroyed the great brains and relapsed into barbarism and then advanced continually for millions of years

Unlimited power from the disintegration of the atom

Some ten thousand million persons

Life-span extended to 50,000 years

As their science advanced they saw a time would come when mentality would be driven out of existence

The exploration of time

Research was concentrated on the possibility of flight through empty space and the suitability of neighbouring worlds

Clearly humanity must leave its native planet It did not take the Fifth Men many centuries to devise a tolerable means of voyaging in interplanetary space. Immense rockets were constructed, the motive power of which was derived from the annihilation of matter.

Mars could not be made habitable

Colonisation of Venus

Migration of whole human population to Venus

Man's sojourn on Venus lasted somewhat longer than his whole career on earth.

The Sixth Men

Creation of the Seventh Men, the bat-like flying men, of very small size Who committed mass suicide eventually

Development then of the Eighth Men who discovered that the sun was about to become a white dwarf

Migration to Neptune after development of Ninth Men capable of living there

About halfway through period from man's origin to annihilation

Remaining period spent on Neptune

Ten more species followed until the last, the Eighteenth Men.

A million million of the Last Men

The visitor would doubtless be surprised to see no books. In every room however there is a cupboard filled with minute rolls of tape, microscopically figured. Each of these rolls contains matter which could not be cramped into a score of your volumes. They are used in connection with a pocket- instrument the size and shape of the ancient cigarette case.

The average length of life is not much less than a quarter of a million terrestrial years.

It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul..

In respect of the future, we are now setting about the forlorn task of disseminating among the stars the seed of a new humanity ... an artificial human dust capable of being carried forward on the sun's radiation

Great are the stars and man is of no account to them... He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All- Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. ... It is very good to have been Man. ... a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.