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Teilhard de Chardin

And published tomorrow in CLA this pretty skimpy, unoriginal take on Teilhard de Chardin---what IS interesting is the focus on complexity--- that in fact is a great secret.....

The dog, the cat, or the bird train their young in countless ways to hunt, to fly, to build a nest. ... Far from being an artificial, accidental, or accessory phenomenon, in relation to living creatures, education is nothing less than an essential and natural form of biological additivity....[W]e see heredity pass through education beyond the individual to enter into its collective phase and become social.

These are the words of Pierre Teihard de Chardin (May 1, 1881, and died on April 10, 1955) in The Future of Man, (written 1941, published 1959). This was after his death, since the church did not allow him to publish much during his lifetime.  And though by the time of publication DNA had been discovered, that would have been beside the point to our priest.  Neither DNA nor evolution theory really "explained' the appearance of the new. He was pointing his audience to the reality of man as part of a planetary wide growth, in a "Universe of  convergent consciousness."

And In the words of his Britannica article

[W]hat is of permanent value in traditional philosophical thought can be maintained and even integrated with a modern scientific outlook if one accepts that the tendencies of material things are directed, either wholly or in part, beyond the things themselves toward the production of higher, more complex, more perfectly unified beings.


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