The following is the foreword to D. B. Kelley’s lifelong work, The Origin of Phenomena. It includes the most important reasons that this book was written.
Foreword
“Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of ‘survival of the stable.’ The universe is populated by stable things.” ~Richard Dawkins [1]
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, or the principle of survival of the fittest, has been confirmed via an unfathomable number of models, experiments, equations and other testable methodologies. Over the last 160 years, it has been proven via the discovery of literally millions of fossils, modern genetics, computer simulations, ordinary observation and much more. In all, natural selection has been accompanied by a truly massive number of additional, quantifiable discoveries. They have together demonstrated that it is an enormously successful—even bountiful—evolutionary theory.
As fruitful as Darwin’s theory is, however, it is actually fraught with problems, as selection is now known to operate beyond biology itself. First, although many believe it to be applicable only to life, it is known to have shaped many types of viruses and viroids—none of which are classified as living things. These phenomena are known to have been molded via selection but aren’t considered living as they don’t reproduce on their own accord.
Selection is also known to follow not only from biological interactions among genes, species, adaptations and the like but from interactions with nonliving phenomena. In other words, living systems are shaped by things like hot, cold, weather, substances and other non-biological influences. Consequently, living entities aren’t the only things that can induce selection, as the nonliving environment too induces it—a factor that traditional Darwinian theory has yet to fully explain.
Moreover, the common consensus among scientists is that life on Earth first evolved from inert matter via selection. Not only do countless repeatable experiments together support this, but biochemist Julius Rebek has shown that nonliving, organic molecules too are self-organized via a process that he has deemed “chemical selection.”
Going back even further in our evolutionary history, physicist Wojciech Zurek of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has shown that our classical world arises via Darwinian processes at work among subatomic particles. It occurs via his principle of einselection. This plays an important role in the emergence of classical physics from quantum physics via a process that he calls Quantum Darwinism.
Finally, if scientists are correct about life first evolving from nonliving matter, history being perfectly continuous, shouldn’t natural selection also be continuous? In other words, just as the continuity of history itself bridges the gap between organic molecules and the first living cells, doesn’t selection bridge this gap as well? After all, if such histories are inextricably linked and therefore pass uninterrupted, shouldn’t the driving principle behind our stability also pass uninterrupted? To put it another way, if natural selection is responsible for the self-organization of everything from biochemistry to biology, shouldn’t it ultimately connect our evolution from molecules to atoms and even particles? And if selection explains everything from particles to humanity, might it also explain the evolution of our various large-scale systems?
To look at it another way, if we evolved from stable, organic molecules to species and beyond, living things shouldn’t be the only stable phenomena that are naturally selected. With 13.75 billion years of new and stable evolutionary systems, scientists are unable to draw a line in history, showing that the preservation of stable phenomena applies to species alone. They are unable to discriminate with regard to which stable entities have followed from natural selection and which have not. Scientists simply cannot decide where selection either begins or ends. So does survival of the fittest phenomena then apply continuously at every stage in history, both biological and non-?
Baring in mind each of these questions and more, we’ll find that many of the problems that are inherent of evolutionary theory utterly disappear when we stop trying to delineate which stable entities are naturally selected and which are not. We’ll find that an understanding in terms of the preservation of stable systems alone leads to a truly colossal amount of information about not only the origin of life and species but all other phenomena, big and small, old and new.
Equally as important for our purposes, we’ll also find testable, quantifiable predictions that lend validation to every area of inquiry under consideration. In fact, we’ll see that, since the 1980’s in particular, an enormous amount of exploration has already been performed on this subject and in almost every major science. To help close the gaps in between, however, many other testable models, equations and experiments are put forth in everything from physics and quantum physics to astronomy, cosmology and more. Consequently, we’ll see that these findings together reveal selection’s presence in almost every area of science in general and that they, in turn, provide powerful confirmation of the overall argument at hand—now known for decades as Universal Darwinism, or the theory of universal selection.[2]
[1] Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, Ch. 2, p. 13, Oxford University Press, 1976.
[2] Kelley, D. B., The Origin of Phenomena, Foreword, Woodhollow Press, 2013.