It is interesting to contemplate an entangle bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects fitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other ion so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance, which is almost implied with Reproduction; Variability, from the indirect and direct action of external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin

We quote the last paragraph or Darwin's The Origin of the Species in toto because it contains, in a nutshell the bare bones of the theory of evolution. The paragraph was revised in the various editions which of The Origin of the Species which saw the light during Darwin's life. The first edition forgoes the word creator. Subsequent editions would mention the creator. The latter is a minor detail. From the beginning though, the paragraph managed to point out the principles of inheritance and variability as well as the linchpin of the theory natural selection. But the paragraph is also important because surprisingly enough, from a man being credited for inventing the theory of evolution, this is the only instance, in all of Darwin's public writing where he would use the word evolve. The usage is strange. The word comes strategically at the very end of the book. In fact, is the last word in the book. Furthermore, Darwin did not use it as noun but as a past participle, in a verbal construction not just to assert in a sleigh of hand and less polemic way that this process had happened, but also to imply that it kept happening. It only suiting that for the only use of the word, Darwin's tone would be at its most reverential. He mentions the "Creator," the "exalted objects," and the "grandeur." But more than reverential, the last sentence has always been unsettling. There is more than ambiguity there, there is much more than simple arrogance in Darwin's part too. But to start with the latter, lets see what that parenthetical sentence that begins with "whilst" and finishes with "gravity," manages to do. In a sort of aside, Darwin manages to place himself and his theory side by side the theory of gravity. Darwin is aware of the import of his work. In a rather quiet manner, he manages to remind us what constituted the most influential and groundbreaking scientific revolution prior to evolution.

The sentence does not only wedge or raise Evolution to the same level as Newton's discovery though. Darwin was uncertain about the amount of time that evolution required to unfold. He knew it needed lots of it. So by reminding us of the Newtonian cosmos, that very symbol of permanence and clockwork exactness, he can evoke the sort of time-line, the sort of chronology which fits the process of evolution. But there is something yet more unsettling. For the whole book, Darwin has been dealing with inheritance, with variety, with the struggle for life and natural selection. He has been giving examples from breeders and from field work. He has been, so to speak, with his eyes focused on the small, birds, the minute, worms, the web small and minute form in this planet. So why, once all is explained, once the entire theory has been laid out, why does he forget the terrestrial world he explored so well and instead focuses on the stars? We will never have an accurate answer to this. But can guess. Having painted a history which was inconceivably long, having traced a process which took eons to unfold and will take more eons to conclude, he must have been aware, we think, that our own story, the story of evolution had to be merely a fragment of a larger process. He must have believed that evolution could not be only a process relegated to the earth, so he put the earth in context, as a planet cycling a vast space and in doing so put space in the same evolutionary continuum. He intertwined, in other words, evolution, as it could be traced in this planet, with an even older tale of cosmic evolution.

Darwin at his most exalted or at his most unsettling and speculative is not the Darwin that scientists really like. They prefer the compiler of fact, the natural scientists combing through note after note from his field work. Both are reconcilable, both are one and Darwin the thorough filed worker would not have come up with the theory of evolution if it had not been for Darwin the unsettling and speculative writer. The question that arises today is of course, was Darwin right? Is there any hint that terrestrial evolution is only a part of a larger evolution? We will pick up where we left, at the symmetry breaking process that took place during the big bang and see how scientists have interpreted it and how they could interpret it if only the interpretative paradigms they use would change. We will argue, of course, that yes, Darwin was right and it was not mere arrogance to place his theory beside a theory that at the time was the most streamlined explanation of the cosmos.

The symmetry breaking process which we discussed in the previous chapter has been interpreted by philosophers of science, popular science writers and scientists as proof that the universe is the work of change and randomness, proof that not only the universe, but our very lives are the outcome of some toss-up that bounced out of a quantum fluctuation. The reason for this belief stems in many ways from the fact that seen only in the context of particle physics, seen only through the magnifying glass of Super string theory, the symmetry breaking process is merely a phenomenon with a chain of causality before it but not true consequence. The operative words here are of course causality and consequence. Any activity in this universe unleashes a chain of causality. The traffic jams large city inhabitants suffer in an almost daily basis are a good example of what a chain of causality is. To explain them we can go to city planners and the decisions they made or to bad drivers and the decisions they made. The fact that one ends up semi-parked for several hours after or before work is cause by either planner or bad driver. We are part of the outcome in that chain of causality. For the most part, these traffic jams are so routine, so much part of one's daily life that there is hardly a consequence to them. Enraged while tangled in them, fuming as one comes home or late for work, the event is quickly forgotten as one resumes one's daily activities. However, the bothersome-but-innocuous nature of the traffic jam has always had the potential to become not merely more than bothersome but rather noxious. Imagine for instance that the bad driver happens to crash, closes two lanes and brings traffic to a standstill the day that you are going to close an important business deal or have to make it to a job interview. You will not only be late, you will not make it at all. The traffic jam, seen through this scenario, has a consequence. In other words, something of import occurs or fails to occur because of it.

Most people are aware of this distinction. After all the traffic jam is part of our day to day experience and to avoid turning causality into consequence we often consider the traffic when we plan. When it comes to scientific data, however, it is more difficult to asses whether a piece of information like the symmetry breaking phenomena that occurred during the big bang just unleashed a chain of causality or whether it had consequence. Part of the problem has to do with scientist's almost innate tendency to avoid generalization as well as deterministic thought. If one were to explain the symmetry breaking process to most people and then show how without it neither the planet, nor them would be here, most of these people would agree that yes, the symmetry breaking process had tremendous consequences. For scientists, to frame us into the argument smacks of anthropocentrism and it is anthropocentrism, they believe that that in the past has hindered scientific progress. Scientists are partly right and partly wrong. They are very wrong when they argue the symmetry breaking process as an accident unleashing a chain of causality. Chance and accident always have a role in things, their presence is undeniable and quite noticeable in our day to day lives. So no one would deny the fact that many of the things in this world are not just subject to chance, but owe their very existence to chance. Yet to go from allowing chance a central role in the universe and argue that because certain aspects of the creation event were due to chance then the entire universe is random is both a logical and epistemological faux pas. Like the anthropocentrism scientists fear so much, it privileges one element over the other and blinds one from the larger picture.

So how can we figure or factor the consequence of an action or event like the symmetry breaking process? In the same we saw consequence in the traffic jam when we filter it through the perspective of a lost deal or interview. We filter it, put it in perspective. And what perspective will reveal the consequences of such accident? All branches of science take accident and indeterminacy into consideration. Since their role is to predict though, non has systematized it, understood it and integrated it to its modus operandi, to its very core more than evolution. To cosmologists and particle physicists the freak event, the accident, the leap and jumps are only interesting insofar as they reveal a system and an order beneath, a reoccurrence. For evolution to function as a tenable theory, evolutionary biologists need the freak, the accident or to use Darwin's own term the monster.

Yet to argue that the universe is subject to the laws of evolution is anathema to many scientists. In fact, to allow evolution a wider scope than its biological one is immediately seen as purporting nineteenth-century scientific positivism. Cosmologists find it more comfortable, less upsetting to their systems to think of the billions of years of cosmic history as the shambling down of an entropy slag heap than to try to figure whether living creatures, planets, stars, a galaxies and atoms are products of evolution. The reasons behind resisting such interpretation or such application of evolution to cosmological and inorganic matter are various. Some are tinged by that "nihilistic," post-modernist tendency that we have discussed in a previous chapter and much rather pose with their pessimism. Some have valid criticisms that should be addressed.

The first of these criticisms goes as follows: Evolution certainly shaped life on earth, these thinkers argue. Nevertheless, when one applies the idea of evolution to the cosmos, one is not being literal and science cannot work with metaphors. What they fear or rather, what they ask for is that if evolution and cosmology should actually meet, they do on a systematic basis. These critics' qualms are real and important since what they are addressing is a possible misreading of evolution. They are right and what they ask for is that the claim be tested and that evolution not be understood as merely change.

How can one prove that evolution literally happened and is happening in the universe? Before we begin looking at the evidence for a cosmic evolution, let us briefly refresh our memories and go back to the first chapter where we discussed the three principles of evolution and then we should attempt to see how these principles seem to fit or explain various stages of cosmic history.

So, as we discussed in the first chapter what biologists call evolution is the combination of three principles. The first principle is the principle of conservation. By conservation biologists mean to label the phenomenon of inheritance at its deepest. As far as the species are concerned, what defines them as species is the conservative principle, the fact that there are a number of characteristics that pass down and remain from parent to offspring. In fact, in the organic world the principle of conservation is so strong that embryologists have shown us how the human embryo grows gills like its fish ancestors, then tears them and rebuilds them into lungs. It also constructs and then destroys much of the brain tissue in a process referred to as neural carving.

The second principle of evolution is conservation's antithesis: innovation. Many have misread the theory of evolution and seeing it as either mere progress, or mere moving forth have focused on innovation. To biologists though innovation is semantically different than the innovation we talk about when we talk about technology. Whereas in technology innovation implies a sort of stream-lining toward a more efficient or powerful tool, in biology it simply involves the fact that the DNA molecule, through internal errors of replication mutates and consequently alters the DNA that the new offspring will inherit. These mutations constitute the freaks and monsters that we argued evolution depends on. Like the symmetry breaking, they arise by chance. Nevertheless, evolution assimilates these accidents into a larger scheme, a larger model.

And at the center of this larger model, acting as the linchpin between the two antithetical principles is the principle of selection. Conservation by itself amounts to stasis. Conservation and innovation add up to blind change, to causality, so to speak. The kernel of evolution is neither innovation nor conservation then, but selection. Darwin came upon the principle of selection after reading Thomas Malthus. Malthus made Darwin aware that species reproduced at a much faster rate than their environment could support. In other words, living beings tend to reproduce as fast and as much as they can and the only thing that checks this reproduction is the depletion of resources. Individuals compete for these resources and some survive long enough to reproduce while other's loose and die before they reach reproductive age. Since the individuals that survive are a product of innovation and conservations and in their turn will beget offspring that preserve the genetic background. As innovations arise the success of this innovation in coping with the environment will determine whether that innovation is passed down.

When literary critics or art critics, for instance, use the term evolution to denote certain change in the art or literary work, they are borrowing from science. Their borrowing, however, is metaphorical. Art cannot really evolve. Yes there are and have been conservative principles in the art world. We think of these principles under the single rubric of tradition. There are also innovations. However, these innovations are not by chance but are often determined by an artist individuality, milieu, historical circumstances or at least reflect the artists cultural background. Furthermore, these changes have not accrued to create a completely different species. Art has the same function and purpose than it did in the Renaissance. Furthermore, other than invoking market forces, we cannot speak of a selection principle in the world of art.

It is this kind of application of the theory of evolution that many scientists have rejected. If we are to speak of a cosmic evolution then we should have evidence of the three principles at work in the history of the cosmos. Can we, in other words, say that the universe has given us evidence that it is not merely governed by the forces that we have discussed but that these forces are on their own turn subject to the conservative, innovative, and selective principles of evolution?

Teilhard de Chardin's answer was a categorical yes. To many, his categorical yes entails the very failure of his ideas. We believe that Teilhard de Chardin was right though and that not only is there more than sufficient evidence for the three principles of evolution in the cosmos, but that if we are willing to shift our paradigm a little not only will we understand Teilhard de Chardin's perspective but also will begin to redirect the aims of scientific inquiry in the same way that every scientific revolution has done.

The paradigm shift is quite simple. If we take the explication and recording of specific phenomena as the aim of science what we end up with is a science that accounts for causality and avoids dealing with consequence. What currently have in much of the scientific work is a tallying or reckoning without any attempt to give it meaning. As any music lover or any enthusiast to the arts, which are the most semantic of human endeavors, knows, meaning in the any of the arts is not so much a matter of content as it is a matter of form. Without trying to over-stretch an analogy, we would argue that scientific research is content based and only new branches of mathematics will instill it with a formal aspect. Let's clarify. Particle physics, gathering colors, flavors and spins and blasting atoms to discover yet another particle, cosmology, accounting for all celestial bodies and phenomena, biology counting up the genome are all dealing with what we refer to as content. If the genome project is anywhere indicative of this tendency, what we have are sciences that instead of being predictive or proscriptive have become new taxonomies, sciences that are once more, merely descriptive.

Biology, however, seems to be a step ahead of the game. The reasons are mainly historical. What the genome project is doing is tallying or describing the contents of the DNA molecule. Unlike particle physicists and cosmologists, biologists started counting only after they had discovered the form, the structure of the DNA molecule and therefore the meaning or function of the molecule. What we need is a formalist science. What, though, would that entail? Unlike content, which has semantic purposes but also as often might contain semantic noise, what we chose to refer to as forms is really nature's strategies imposed upon time.

The latter definition is not simple. Nevertheless it is important and before we continue with cosmic evolution, we should look at what it means. As we have mentioned earlier, great scientific revolutions commonly do more than point out a new ting, they shift the paradigms by which we lived. After the Copernican revolution no other revolution shook the ways in which we thought more than Darwin's. Yet, while most people believe that Darwin shifted our paradigms by placing us in the same line of descent as primates, the true and more difficult concept to assimilate was what Darwin's theory implied about time and the world we lived in. For most pre-Darwinian science as well as philosophy assumed time was a sort of cosmetic since the universe and everything in it was static. Yes, thinkers and laymen perceived changes. Nevertheless, they did not think big or small changes amounted to anything. Darwin's theory of evolution did not only argue that the earth was much older than what anyone thought. A single original life-form diversifying into the millions of species found on earth today required hundreds of millions of years. Still, if Darwin did not have the geological record to support him at the time of his theory, his theory still something radical, it identified a mechanism, a strategy through which nature, the innate characteristics of a species is both preserved and changed. Evolution, in other words, by juggling its three principles of conservation, innovation and selection, is a strategy imposed upon time.

Who or what imposes the structure will be the question which we will deal with in the next chapter. For the time being however, we should continue to define how a formalist science would be or is radically different than a content based science. As we have seen throughout the book, cosmologists deal with vast amounts of time, much vaster than those which evolutionary biologists deal with. On the other hand, their counterparts, particle physicists deal with the most minute, with quantities that for us are unimaginably small. Both cosmologists and particle physicists though have a single concern for the most part, to explain individual phenomena. Their sciences, in other words only deal with isolated moments in time. Even astrophysics, which because of its observational methods seems as historical as evolution (after all, the stars and pulsars astronomers observe are pretty much the fossil record of the universe) focuses mainly in isolated instants, albeit cosmic instants. Yes, often we get a chronicle of the universe. But as we have argued, more than a history, this is a chain of causality.

If they were to attempt and shift the content based nature of their work and refocus on the formal aspects, the main problem for physicists is that the "mathematical" model that evolution has employed for the most part to compute the changes through time, is not precise enough for the sort of exact computing that has to go on when one deals will millionths of a second. Mathematics, of course, has being in many ways at the forefront of scientific research. No we don't mean to say th2at mathematicians don the lab coat often and work with experimental science, though some of them do. No, mathematics has been at the forefront because many of the mathematical models that have been crucial for scientific progress were already well established by the time any scientists came and try to apply them to reality. In other words, the mathematics existed before it explained. The prime example of this is Einstein, who came to the scene when the rules of four dimensional geometry had been worked out by George Friedrich Reimann, Nikolai Ivanovich and Janos Bolyai. The subject of four-dimensional geometry was still regarded by most as difficult and arcane. Einstein actually struggled to understand the math. Nevertheless, as he adopted the model, it would prove the seed to general theory.

There is of course a sense of belatedness in the culture and scientists are not immune to it. Academic conferences are often a bemoaning for the fact that the intellectual environment that fostered the Einsteins and Bohrs is gone. Gone the rigid academic German universities who trained what might have been one of the most remarkable generations. Gone also the stock of ideas floating in the air which proved most fertile, as luminary after luminary seemed to pick a scent of this and that idea and transform the way we understood the world. So to beg the question, is there a mathematical model that physicists could adopt in order to shift toward a more formalist way of doing science?

Since the mid-seventies and early eighties, the worlds of finance, meteorology, and ecology have been radically transformed as Chaos and Fractal mathematics began to seep into their studies. Chaos, the more elaborate of the two, deals with what scientists refer to as chaotic behavior. By chaotic behavior scientists describe a system -this could be a weather system, the stock market or an ecosystem - whose behavior is non linear so that a small change in the initial conditions of the experiment have a very large influence in the outcome of the experiment. Chaos is in so many words, the study of consequence with a vengeance. Let us try to explain with a rather elaborate analogy. The elaborateness is mainly due because the concepts are not that easy. But anyway, imagine yourself with a non-reflex camera. Non-reflex, as most people know, is the kind of camera where the viewfinder and the lens are not one and the same so there is a discrepancy, albeit a tiny one, between what the photographer sees and what the lens captures. The camera and its subject, in this case are a linear system. There are "predictive errors" which can be considered from the beginning. So if the photographer is trying for a close up of a vase, say, then all she would have to do would be to take the discrepancy into consideration and correct it. Her system, which involved view-finder, lens camera and subject, was all too predictable. If she were to go out of a studio, and instead of a static object like a cup, she decided to shoot pictures of people walking the street though, even though she is aware of the camera's "predictive errors," as soon as people begin to move in and out of the frame and the clouds cover the sun on and off, she will be dealing with a chaotic system. Too many of her initial conditions can change and are not predictive, so that the shot she envisions will most probably not be the one she ends up with, even if she took into consideration the predictive errors.

The fundamental feature of chaotic systems them is that if two identical systems are given slightly different "spins" the difference between them diverge exponentially fast. Ultimately, then what chaos allows the scientists as a mathematical model is to consider a system not as an isolated phenomenon but as a process unfolding through time. Hence chaos' success as a predictor to the stock market, the weather and ecosystems. How does chaos work? Instead of attempting to predict all the initial conditions of a system, chaos models the unfolding of a system several times taking tiny different spins into consideration in order to predict an outcome. Your weather forecaster, for instance, runs computer simulations that start with today's conditions. Since they are trying to predict the weather for the day after tomorrow, they let the simulations unfold through those two days. Most often the different outcomes will be widely divergent. The weather, after all, is one of the most chaotic systems. Their prediction though is based not on what sorts of divergences they encountered, but the places where the different simulations concurred. Stock brokers follow a similar process with the market in order to get charts which reveal the exchange floor's ups and downs. Ecologists also run different models of sample ecosystems and attempt to predict the growth of populations and the depletion of resources.

Many, who argue that a cosmic evolution is a chimera of sorts, point out that if we wanted to use chaos models to prove it, we would have to have various models of the universe, or rather various universes to see how the different scenarios unfold and only then could one argue patterns. Some cosmologists, dismayed by this impossibility have in fact gone as far as to postulate the fascinating idea of a multi-universe. What they argue, in short is the existence of not one but many universes, which have had radically different histories. Some might have been stillborn, others might have ended up with more than four dimensions and forces at the symmetry breaking stage. Unfortunately, while the multi-universe model seems intriguing, as a postulate it helps little on our quest to prove that cosmic evolution is a fact. We know much more about our universe than we did a century or two ago. We can recognize a structure, we have taxonomied much of its contents. Nevertheless, such task took millennia and the rise of several civilizations to achieve. So to actually imagine that we could trace the history of each or several universes in the multi-universe in order to simulate the different universal models and find patterns is more than naïve.

What the proposition also seems to miss is the point that whereas in meteorology and financial forecasting chaos is being used as a predictive tool, the same mathematical models applied to the history of the universe do not predict an outcome, but find the patterns in the chaos, find recurrences or those strategies which nature imposes upon time. What we look, when we look at the history of the universe using chaos as a magnifying glass is not a history of events, per se, but a history of those forms which emerged at certain stages in the history of the universe and were able to become stable and last despite entropy. There is of course, no genetics to speak of when it comes to forms. Genetics becomes an issue when inorganic molecules are able to polymerize and this will be the subject of our next chapter. We cannot, in short, argue that one initial stellar structure passed down its traits to an offspring. What can be argue as we look at different structures emerge in the universe are two things:

A) First because of the forces of nature and the way they dispose of matter and determine its behavior, the universe allows only for certain structures to survive. There are only so many viable structures in our universe. And while this may not seem exactly tantamount of a genetic hand me down, in many ways it is. Since genetics, the replication of information so that it be passed down from parent to offspring is as constrained and determined at the particle level to the forces of nature as the formation of matter, the formation of stars of galaxies and solar systems.

B)Second, while it is possible to see that some basic structures do not only seem to remain, but actually seem to be refined, perfected and become more viable as time goes on, the really amazing pattern that emerges is a pattern of simplification as far as structures are concerned and of complexification as far as the amount of information these structures contain. This latter tendency will become more obvious once organic evolution takes hold. And in itself, the concept contains too many difficult terms - e.g. complexity, information - that will only become clearer as we look at the process itself.

The question that is left for us, is, at what point can we begin to talk about structures proper? The early universe with its inconceivable energy and heat certainly does not seem like a kind host to structures. Nevertheless, despite the fact that nothing like what we currently know as matter resided there, already by the time the universe was one-ten-thousandth of a second, the quarks and anti-quarks had ceased their mutual annihilation and the survivors linked up in trios as protons and neutrons. Already then, in less than what we call an instant, the universe harbored the seeds, the components of all future atomic nuclei. Atomic nuclei are the first among many forthcoming examples of what we have called viable structures. They are the first that seem to follow our two principles. First, they are shaped and determined by the forces of nature. Second, they will become the seed to structures which are more complex. So much so, that by the time the universe was 3 minutes and 42 seconds old, protons and neutrons had linked up and formed the nuclei of helium and the nascent universe became 20 percent helium and 80 percent hydrogen, the two lightest of atoms.

Two those who attend patterns and like forms, these first few minutes of the universe might seem almost poetic in the way in which like a leitmotif they manage to weave what might be called the central theme of the history of the universe if the latter were a piece of music. To those who don't care for patterns all that should suffice is that initial list of ingredients and a freshmen course in physics, for it is almost elementary knowledge that the two elements that dominated the early universe are not only the simplest ones but also the only two in the recipe for stars. Stars have long way to come, but when the universe was one hour old, the universe had cooled enough so that most nuclear processes had stopped and the germ of everything that was to come had stabilized. The cooling at such early stages was of course relative since even when the universe was one year old, its ambient temperature was the same than that of the center of a star.

The origin of those simplest of structures is certainly no strong argument for a universe that evolves. For while the existence of nuclei will at least buttress the existence of a conservative force of a steady bedrock in the long process of universal history, it does not and cannot account for the other two principles of evolution, innovation and selection. To search for these we would have to fast forward to the next highlight in our more than abridged history. And the stage of the universe where we start to find something that resembles innovation and selection is when the universe around 106 years to 109 years (17 billion years before our time to give the reader a better idea) to around 3.8 billions years ago. These are of course tremendous, unimaginable spans of time, unimaginable already when we look at the last two dates, since we are talking about a process that took place 15 billion years or more. Nevertheless, within these process we can pinpoint four crucial stages which if not confirm, at least hint of innovation and selection. The first process harks back to the origin of cosmic background radiation. And it involved photons decoupling, leaving electrons free to combine with nuclei to form stable atoms. What stable atoms allowed for was the formation of matter as we know it so to speak. In fact, 17 billion years ago what emerged was the formation of globular clusters of heavier matter we call proto-galaxies. This moment - if one would be allowed to call such span of time a moment - marks two things. The emergence of more complex structures which utilize a basic "cell" so to speak, a basic structure. What we see emerge also is the first instance of large-scale clusters. While this clusters did not necessarily become galaxies, they were pivoted and governed, we believe by, quasars, the point-like sources of light whose red-shifts indicate that they lie at distances of billions of light years away and believed to be the nuclei of young galaxies. What we see at this stage, in short, is the beginning of yet another structure. The initial recipe for a star was utilized, so to speak, by the universe, and at this stage we see the star becoming, as it is still in many ways the pivot to other structures. As anyone with a cursory knowledge of astrophysics or stars knows, not all stars are viable. In fact, the longevity and survival of a star are determined by its mass.

For many, the formation of clusters, of proto galaxies and even the decoupling of the photons which allowed for the electrons to combine with nuclei and form stable atoms is not so much a prove of evolution as much as causal phenomena, phenomena which took place because the conditions were right. In many ways to see the whole series of events as a chain of causality is merely to avoid the larger issue: those events and the events that followed, including the evolution of life which began 3.2 billions years ago required an incredibly fine tuned universe. Even accounting for chance like evolutionary theory does, even taking accidents into account, the formation of matter, let alone the emergence of life required what Martin Rees has called the "six numbers." These include:

N is the number that measures the relationship between strength of the electrical forces that hold atoms together. This is a large number. But still, with fewer zeroes, the universe would have not been longed lived enough for significant or large structures that would allow for the formation of proto galaxies, or galaxies, let alone the existence of evolution.

e is another number that measures what happens in the atom. Namely, it describes how firmly the atomic nuclei are bonded together. Its value, 0.007, explains how early stars were able to become the factories which transformed hydrogen into all of the other heavier elements of the periodic table.

Q All of these numbers were determined early on in the history of the universe. In fact, Q is the number that planted their seeds so to speak, and the seeds also of all the large structures in the universe. Q represents the ratio of two fundamental energies. If the value of Q were tipped towards either side, the universe would be inert and lack a structure or it would be too violent for stars and galaxies could survive.

These three numbers determined much of what happened at the stages that we have been dealing with. The fact that they seem so fine-tuned has provided plenty of material for philosophers and theologians to speculate as to the nature of the universe, and question the dogma that a random quantum fluctuation, an accident was the culprit of the fine tuned universe. The detractors of this argument have belittled the argument and shielded themselves by accusing these thinkers as arguing from design. But this is really not arguing by design. What it does is merely acknowledge the fact that the universe is fine-tuned and point out some the shortcomings of contemporary science in its inability to explain. Finally, it hopes, more than anything, to proscribe the possible paths which research should take if science is willing or wanting to explain this astonishing phenomena.

The scientists that have accepted the fine tuning and attempt to understand it as more than merely a series of gigantic coincidences have argued for evolution as the way to understand the way the universe developed. The proofs abound. And they do not only tell a neat and clean story about the emergence of matter and the clustering of gasses into stars, but have as some important scientists have developed and worked them out given us a larger clue about what evolution really is. Chief among these scientists is David Layzer, who in his 1990 book Cosmogenesis managed to argue not only for an evolving universe, but also clarified many of the misunderstandings which many of the detractors of an evolving universe had.

Layzer book, like many books that have attempted to put forth similar theories is not comprehensive. No book could be. What is amazing is that the book sees merely a recasting, a repetition of many of the things that Teilhard de Chardin had written at least half a century earlier and which the scientific community had neglected and misunderstood. Like Teilhard de Chardin, Layzer argued that first and foremost if we were to think of an evolving universe, then we would have to consider evolution not merely as a process or a way to make sense of phenomena. No, on the contrary, the one thing that thinking of an evolving universe required was to think of evolution as "creative." By labeling evolution as creative, Layzer was able to make scientists think about a theory in a different perspective. As we have seen, many critics had argued that a scientific theory should be predictive. It should tell something of the future. To say that the universe evolves, they pointed out, does not so much account for what will happen but merely tell us what happened.

To demand accurate predictive power from a theory is one of the tendencies we have seen and labeled as reductionism. In many ways this demand comes from quantum and particle physics where scientists are tremendously accurate. Atoms, however, are not chaotic systems. As we have seen from discussion of chaos, as systems grow more complex, they become more chaotic. To David Layzer, this chaotic nature in a complex system like the universe entailed understanding evolution not as the mere progression from one stage to another but rather as an "intelligent" process, a sentient conscious process where truly innovative products whose aim was to create order out of chaos. As Layzer put it, we live in a world of "becoming as well as being a world in which order emerged from primordial chaos and begot new forms of order. The processes that have created and continue to create order obey universal and unchanging physical laws. Yet, because they generate information, their outcomes are not implicit in their initial conditions."

Layzer's view, like Teilhard de Chardin's vision seems almost poetic in its common sense. It envisions a universe where few simple laws manipulate matter until the raw material becomes something larger than itself. It is not a hierarchy as some might argue. It is a process where the aim is to use matter to produce something that is immaterial: information. This information is transcribable, readable, cumulative. In our experience the DNA molecule might be the most refined example of chemicals, manipulated by permanent physical laws, which contain transcribable, readable information. Our brain might also be used as another example and we will deal with both in the next chapter. To conclude, let us look at some of the objections people have raised to Layzer's argument and see what sort of proof we would need to find in order to accept Layzer's as a viable theory.

Layzer argument is seen in many circles as contentious and admittedly it seems to step on many scientific toes, so to speak. He did not only stripped science from its predictive powers, but by calling evolution creative he implied that something like a will, a force and aim was inherent to the universe and its products. To accept that the universe did not merely evolve but its entire history was "propelled" by a creative force would mean that all the physical laws were ancillary to a macro-law, a law which determines the behavior off all the other laws.

To find this macro-law is more than ambitious. Some would actually call it quixotic. It would entail re-directing scientific research in a drastic way. It would also entail talking every precept, relativity, quantum and argued that they are merely something like loose pieces of a jig saw puzzle. And the obvious question that arises for scientists is whether this redirecting makes sense, as a vista, as a didactic or pedagogical aim. The question is: is there or has there been a more direct hint of a macro-law out there in something other than the forms which sprung in the universe and codified information and in their turn created more complex systems?

One of the most promising clues or hints of the existence of a macro-law came as the biggest scientific law in 1998 and is one of the six numbers Martin Rees argues as indispensable for the universe as we know it. Its origin dates back to Einstein's general relativity. Seeing that one of the predictions of general relativity was that the universe was expanding, Einstein introduced Lambda, a cosmological constant that would function to repel and balance the effect of gravity. Einstein would grow to call Lambda the largest mistake of his career. And truly the reasons why he inserted Lambda are by now obsolete. Nevertheless, as scientists hailed the discovery, what Lambda pointed toward was the discovery of an unsuspected new force, a force that acted "intelligently" to control the expansion of the universe and whose effects where discernible on the scales in which evolution is discernible: through epochs, eons. Furthermore, as a force seems to contain some of the requirements of a macro-law since in the throughout time and in the long range, it becomes more dominant over gravity. It is the faintest, the weakest force in nature and so far the most mysterious. Nevertheless, it controls all other forces since it controls the expansion of the universe and its ultimate fate. In fact, it will not merely determine the future of the universe, but actually determined its past. If it would had been a stronger force, it would have overwhelmed gravity early on when the density of the universe was greater and would have impeded the emergence of galaxies. It in short might be one among many hints of a "will" a "sentience" which is not necessarily deterministic, because as Layzer has pointed out, its mechanics are creative. The other hint, is of course, in the next stage in evolution, 3.8 billion years ago, when earth had cooled sufficiently for a solid crust to form. By then galaxies had formed of course, and the solar system became one more structure in the universe's ongoing process of becoming. It would take .6 billion years for microscopic cells to colonize the planet, two billion years for plants to emerge. By then, we can see the subtext of evolution: the emergence of forms which economize energy in order to store information - economy in form to contain complexity.