



































Quantum Karma: Bohm’s Implicate Order and the Mind-Only Buddhist Ground Consciousness (Alayavijnana)


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Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
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Article  
 

Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the 

Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 
Graham P. Smetham

*
 

 

Abstract 
All animals, of whatever species whatsoever, share a fundamental genetic structure which 

underpins a hierarchical development of differentiation. It is shown here that when this 

revolution in our understanding of the functioning of genes and the DNA components of 

genes is placed in the context of the other great twentieth century revolution in science – the 

quantum revolution – the new metaphysical worldview which emerges goes far beyond the 

new vistas currently being explored by the Evo Devo community.  In particular, it will 

become clear that the primary process of evolution is not that which takes place over time on 

the material plane but, rather, it is that process of development which cascades from a deep 

quantum level of intentionality through a sequence of immaterial and subtle „implicate 

orders‟ of „unfoldment‟, to use the terminology coined by physicist David Bohm, until there 

is apparent manifestation on the „material‟ plane‟.  This article is adopted from one of the 

chapters in Graham‟s latest book „The Grand Designer‟ which can be found at 

www.shunyatapress.com. 

Keywords: Quantum Evolution, Evolutionary Development, Sheldrake‟s Morphogenetic 

Fields, Bohm‟s Implicate Orders, Goswami‟s Creative Universe. 

 

The dramatic and far reaching nature of the discoveries which led to the development of the 

perspective of evolutionary-development biology have, in large degree, still to be appreciated.  

Indeed, as we shall see in the course of this paper, it might be said that to a great extent the 

hugely significant challenge to the materialistic grounding of the mainstream view within 

evolutionary thinking has been ameliorated by attempts to claim that, although the 

implications of the evolutionary-development paradigm are indeed remarkable, they are easily 

incorporated into the Darwinian fold.  As Sean B. Carroll sums up the Darwinian perspective 

in his book on „the new science of Evo Devo‟ Endless Forms Most Beautiful: 

Darwin asked his reader to consider how slight changes, introduced at different points 

in the process (of evolution) and in different parts of the body, over the course of 

many thousands or a million generations, spanning perhaps tens of thousands to a few 

million years, can produce different forms that are adapted to different circumstances 

and that possess unique capabilities.  That is evolution in a nutshell.
1
 

What Carroll does not point out is the overwhelming predominance of a materialist meta-

physical paradigm which underpins the Darwinian worldview.  Thus when Richard Dawkins 

laid the metaphysical foundations for his exposition of his vision of The Blind Watchmaker, 

                                                      

* Correspondence: Graham Smetham, http://www.quantumbuddhism.com E-mail: qb@delysid.bltc.net   

http://www.quantumbuddhism.com/
mailto:qb@delysid.bltc.net


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Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

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 259 

he did so by claiming the validity of asserting a foundational metaphysical materialist 

worldview „for everyday purposes‟: 

We peel our way down the hierarchy, until we reach units so simple that, for 

everyday purposes, we no longer feel the need to ask questions about them.
2
 

In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea Daniel Dennett, Dawkins‟ compatriot in the cause of 

materialism, is intellectually pugilistic in his rallying cry for the worldview of materialism: 

An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery 

is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence 

consciousness, in the universe.
3
   

Thus Darwinism and materialism have become almost complementary aspects of a common 

„naturalist‟ worldview. A worldview within which the „gene,‟ in large part thanks to the 

strident proselytizing activities on the part of Dawkins, became considered to be the ontolo-

gically privileged material unit which had somehow magically evolved a desperation to sur-

vive.  In his book The Extended Phenotype Dawkins makes the following impassioned and 

wildly anthropomorphic declaration of the ontological primacy of the „gene‟: 

…we should see through individual organisms. We see through them to the 

replicating fragments of DNA within, and we see the wider world as an arena in 

which these genetic fragments play out their tournaments of manipulative skill.  

Genes manipulate the world and shape it to assist their replication.  It happens that 

they have „chosen‟ to do so largely by molding matter into multicellular chunks 

which we call organisms, but this might not have been so.  Fundamentally what is 

going on is that replicating molecules ensure their survival by means of their 

phenotypic effect on the world.  It is only incidentally true that those phenotypic 

effects happen to be packaged up into units called individual organisms.
4
   

This is an astonishingly implausible claim which basically asserts that all biological organ-

isms, all cultural activities, and consciousness itself are nothing other than expendable 

epiphenomenal products which have been adventitiously generated in order that the ultimately 

fundamental units of reality - genes – may survive, even though in reality these putatively 

ultimate units do not materially survive as the same „stuff‟ any more than any other apparently 

„material‟ aspect of an organism.  

 

One of the core tenets of this materialist Darwinism was the belief that the genes involved in 

the evolution of different species would themselves be different, different species would not 

have common gene structure.  Thus the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote confidently 

in the 1960‟s that: 

Much that has been learned about gene physiology makes it evident that the search 

for homologous genes is quite futile except in very close relatives. If there is only one 

efficient solution for a certain functional demand, very different gene complexes will 

come up with the same solution, no matter how different the pathway by which it is 

achieved. The saying “Many roads lead to Rome” is as true in evolution as in daily 

affairs. 
5
 

An excellent example of a pronouncement made on the basis of little evidence but a huge 

emotional investment in the materialist Darwinian worldview, an investment which can still 

be found in much „scientific‟ writing.  However, this presuppositional assumption has now 



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Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
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 260 

been shown by the evolutionary-development revolution in biology to be completely false; as 

Carroll writes: 

The first shots in the Evo Devo revolution revealed that despite their great differences 

in appearance and physiology, all complex animals-flies and flycatchers, dinosaurs 

and trilobites, butterflies and zebras and humans-share a common “tool kit” of 

“master” genes that govern the formation and patterning of their bodies and body 

parts. … The important point to appreciate from the outset is that this discovery 

shattered our previous notions of animal relationships and of what made animals 

different, and opened up a whole new way of looking at evolution.
6
 

In other words, all animals, of whatever species whatsoever, share a fundamental genetic 

structure which underpins a hierarchical development of differentiation. As we shall see, 

when this revolution in our understanding of the functioning of genes and the DNA 

components of genes is placed in the context of the other great twentieth century revolution 

in science – the quantum revolution – the new metaphysical worldview which emerges goes 

far beyond the new vistas currently being explored by the Evo Devo community.  In 

particular, it will become clear that the primary process of evolution is not that which takes 

place over time on the material plane but, rather, it is that process of development which 

cascades from a deep quantum level of intentionality through a sequence of immaterial and 

subtle „implicate orders‟ of „unfoldment‟, to use the terminology coined by physicist David 

Bohm, until there is apparent manifestation on the „material‟ plane‟.   

 

In order to appreciate the full impact of the „whole new way of looking at evolution‟ it will 

be useful to appreciate the view that had become central to the hardcore materialist „neo-

Darwinian‟ perspective as presented in the early writings of Richard Dawkins (he has 

become rather ambiguous and contradictory on the issue in recent times) and the continued 

materialist interpretation of evolution preached by Daniel Dennett.  As we have see above, 

the received, and completely false, wisdom of the academic „authorities‟ in the field prior to 

evo-devo was that the genes responsible for different species would be different, and the 

more distant the phyla involved the greater the difference would be expected to be. Thus 

Dawkins, writing in 1998, tells us that:  

The genes that survive in camels will, to be sure, include some that are particularly 

good at surviving in deserts, and they may even be shared with desert rats and desert 

foxes.  But, more importantly, successful genes will be those that are good at 

surviving in an environment consisting of the other genes that are typically found in 

the species. … It is not the genes of any given individual that cooperate well 

together. They have never been together in that combination, for every genome in a 

sexually reproducing species is unique … It is the genes of the species at large that 

cooperate, because they have met before, often, and in the intimately shared 

environment of the cell…
7
 

It is impossible not to point out in passing that this is actually incoherent mythology, a neo-

Darwinian piece of, unsubstantiated even at the time, internally inconsistent fantasy which has 

now been shown, by the evidence, to be beyond the misguided. Suppose, for instance, 

someone were to claim that the genes that survive in camels were not good at surviving in 

deserts! Furthermore is it actually a sane possibility that the various genes within a species 

would not be good at cooperating? According to Dawkins the genes within particular 

individuals within a species do not cooperate because they have not met before, but, on the 



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Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

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other hand, the genes of the species have often met before and therefore do cooperate.  Surely 

this is an extremely unlikely scenario, the genes of a particular species happily cooperating 

together, until, that is, they happen to congregate together in an individual of the species! It is 

also a scenario completely at variance with the evidence of evo-devo which indicates that the 

genes within any individual do nothing else but cooperate, indeed if one thinks about the issue 

for even a moment it is difficult to comprehend how an embryo could possibly develop 

without cooperation, so what the particular „cooperation‟ Dawkins is referring to, a 

cooperation not exhibited by genes within the individual, is difficult to fathom. 

 

Leaving aside this particular piece of Dawkinsian incoherence, the picture of („selfishly‟) self-

sufficient, and self-enclosed, genetic material units, carrying items of on-board information, 

units which become increasingly disparate as species and environment diverge, is clear.  Thus 

„surviving genes in camels‟, we are told, „may even be shared with desert rats and desert 

foxes‟, presumably because of the common environment.  The implication, however, is that 

species inhabiting differing environments will not share commonality of genes. This 

fundamental, and mistaken, neo-Darwinian view, then, is that the more widely species diverge 

from each other, so also does the genetic make-up of those species. As Carroll elucidates the 

entrenched viewpoint: 

The classification of organisms, the assignment into like and unlike, has largely been 

driven by a consideration of form. So the long standing assumption has been the 

greater the disparity in form, the less, if anything, any two species would have in 

common at the level of their genes.
8
 

So here we find Carroll indicating that the view which Dawkins so often stridently proclaimed 

to be „scientific fact‟ was actually always an „assumption! 

 

It was this neo-Darwinian metaphysical mythology that was completely discredited when the 

evidence became available.  Carroll writes that „this view was entirely incorrect‟ and he 

quotes Stephen Jay Gould: 

The central significance of our dawning understanding of the genetics of develop-

ment lies not in the simple discovery of something utterly unknown … but in the 

explicitly unexpected character of these findings, and in the revisions and extensions 

thus required of evolutionary theory.
9
 

It is intriguing that Gould should paper over the fact that the evo-devo revolution actually 

indicated the complete fallaciousness of core assumptions of the materialistic appropriation of 

Darwinism that had occurred by using terms such as „revisions and extensions‟. For the 

revolution in a sense was as profound as the quantum revolution in physics and, as we shall 

see, has a lot to do with the quantum revolution, although most current proponents of the evo-

devo perspective seem to be hard at work to preserve an outmoded and inappropriate 

materialist perspective.  

 

In is also revealing that Gould refers to the „unexpected character of these findings‟ for one of 

the first things which should surely strike anyone of insight on coming across the evo-devo is 

that the elucidation provided actually contains a much greater level of coherency than the 

previous understanding.  Consider, for example, Myers‟ confident and utterly fallacious claim 

that „very different gene complexes will come up with the same solution, no matter how 

different the pathway by which it is achieved.‟  The “Many roads lead to Rome” view is 

completely counter intuitive; the notion that genes should diversify and differentiate into 



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Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
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 262 

radical different characters, becoming more and more disparate as the species draw apart and 

yet at the same time should converge on identical solutions to various evolutionary challenges 

is surely unlikely, however different the species involved may be. Neither was there evidence 

for it, it was simply considered as being „obvious‟, so obvious that some proponents of 

completely fallacious worldviews made good names and livings for themselves promulgating 

falsehoods. For now we know that: 

Natural selection has not forged many times completely from scratch; there is a 

common genetic ingredient to making each eye type, as well as to the many types of 

appendages, hearts, etc.  These common ingredients must date deep back in time, 

before there were vertebrates or arthropods, to animals that may have first used these 

genes to build structures with which to see, sense, eat or move.  These animals are 

the distant ancestors of most modern animals, including ourselves.
10

 

This is a paradigm which accounts for the facts of evolution far more coherently, as well as 

being in accord with actual evidence, than the „Many Roads‟ scenario.  

 

In order to prepare the way for an initial appreciation of the evo-devo paradigm it is useful to 

consider the „object-oriented‟ paradigm within computer modeling which constitutes the 

initial phase of computer systems development.  The object of this approach is to be able to 

design  a computer software system in a hierarchical modular fashion in which the system 

starts at the base as a highly abstract module and then descends through levels of „object-

classes‟ of increasing complexity; each level adds functionality to the level above.  Thus in 

figure 1 we see that at the top of the class tree there is the most „abstract‟ class which is just a 

bank account.  Within this class only the information which is common to all bank accounts 

can be placed, information which is specific to various types of bank account are contained in 

the classes on lower levels of the tree. 

 

A further refinement of this hierarchical structure which is a vital part of the object-

orientation paradigm is the idea of „virtual members‟.  These are members of a class which 

form part of the overall structure but cannot be fully specified within the class because the 

exact form of the member depends upon the implementation of members at a lower level of 

the hierarchy. So the top level „bank account‟ class might look as shown in figure 2.  The 

personal details of the account holder can be „implemented‟ within this level but the „virtual‟ 

members will be fully specified at a lower level of the object hierarchy.  Thus the „virtual‟ 

members specify an „abstract‟ structure which can be implemented in different ways at a later 

point depending upon the paths taken through the lower levels of the hierarchy. 



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Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
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 263 

 
                                                 Fig 1                                                             Fig 2 

 

The findings of the evo-devo revolution now indicate that a similar hierarchical modular 

development is fundamental within the evolutionary development of species.  Figure 3 gives a 

flavor of this perspective in a very crude and reduced form, indicating the principle rather 

than detail. The essential point is that, whereas the previous view of divergent „random‟ 

mutation of material gene units asserted the lack of common structure between divergent 

species it now turns out that in fact there is a common structure, which is clearly apparent 

within the genetic structure underlying all species. 

 

The first indication of this commonality was a result of research into the genetic makeup of 

fruit flies and mice.  In order to elucidate this, a quick outline of the terminology is required.  

The fundamental process which appears to drive the process of the embryonic development is 

the division and differentiation of cells (the reason for the word „appears‟ will become 

apparent later) which is itself determined by the functioning of the strings of DNA within the 

cells. Each chromosome within a cell is a long molecule of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid); the 

chromosome in turn is identified as consisting of smaller strands of DNA called genes, so 

genes are smaller components, each occupying its own particular location within the 

chromosome, some of which are identified as having particular tasks within the development 

of the embryo (figure 4a).  DNA itself is composed of two strands of nucleotides wrapped 

around each other in the famous double helix configuration; each nucleotide is comprised of 

one of four distinct bases: Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Thymine (T), Guanine (G), and these 

bases map on to each other to form the DNA helix as indicated in fig 5: A can only link with 

T, and G with C. 

 

 

 

 

 



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Fig 3 



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 265 

 

Fig 4 

 

 

           Fig 5 

Within the functioning of cell the DNA is responsible for the manufacturing of proteins 

through the intermediary production of „messenger‟ RNA (mRNA).  A single strand of 

mRNA is produced from one strand of the DNA double helix, a process termed 

„transcription‟. Subsequently the mRNA strand is „decoded‟ into a protein sequence; this 

process is termed „translation‟.  Proteins are comprised of sequences of amino acids, and this 

sequence determines the configuration and chemical properties of the target proteins; and 

these properties determine the function of the protein in the functioning of the organism, 

whether they function as carriers of oxygen or are constituents of muscle fiber and so on. 

 

One of the crucial discoveries which opened the way to the evo-devo paradigm was the 

discovery by François Jacob and Jacques Monod of the fundamental switching mechanism 

which takes place in order to regulate the mode of functioning of genes.  In their investigation 

of the functioning of the intestinal bacterium E.Coli Jacob and Monod discovered the 

existence of gene „repressor‟ sites which determine whether or not a gene is „on‟ or „off‟ and, 

therefore, whether gene transcription into mRNA takes place.  This mechanism is mediated by 

the production, in certain circumstances, of a DNA „binding protein‟; this binding protein 

binds with a specific DNA sequence and thereby turns the gene on or off. 



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The next piece of the puzzle was provided by the mapping of the genes on the third (of four) 

chromosome of the fruit fly onto the parts of the fly‟s anatomy that they directed: 

…the genes sat close together in two clusters. One cluster, the Bithorax Complex, 

contained three genes that affected the back half of the fly; the other, the 

Antennapedia Complex, contained five genes that affected the front half of the fly.  

Even more provocative, the relative order of the genes in the two clusters 

corresponded to the relative order off the body parts they affected…
11

 

This correspondence between genes and the parts of the fruit fly, and the fruit fly egg, is 

shown in figure 6. 

  
Fig 6 – Hox genes in the Fruit Fly. 

 

These two pieces of the puzzle linked together beautifully when the proteins which made up 

the genes were analyzed and it was discovered that all eight genes had a short stretch of a 60 

amino acid domain that were all similar in sequence.  This shared sequence was called a 

„homeobox‟ and the corresponding protein domain was called the „homeodomain‟; 

subsequently the genes were dubbed „Hox‟ genes.  It then became apparent that the 

homeodomains were DNA-binding domains which were triggered by corresponding proteins, 

an insight which indicated that genes were switched on or off by the presence of the relevant 

binding proteins; so the presence of proteins acted as activators of switches that determined 

the manner of functioning of various Hox genes.   



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 267 

 

      Fig 7 

Carroll gives an example of how Hox genes and gene switches function to determine the 

longitudinal stripe markings in a fly embryo. Specific protein activators and repressors bind to 

various switch locations on the DNA strand to the side of the actual gene; this is „similar to 

the way a specific key fits into a particular lock.‟  Thus in fig 7 the combination of the 

activator and repressor proteins determine that the mRNA protein  is „expressed‟ and activates 

a particular stripe in the embryo.  The question which naturally arises, of course, is what 

determines the particular combination of activators and repressors that activate the switches at 

any particular point in development.  It turns out that there is a sequential cascade of 

activation of switches, so one set of activators and repressors determine the proteins which are 

operative in the next phase; as Carroll says it is a „chicken and egg‟ scenario: 

Ultimately, the beginning of spatial information in the embryo often traces back to 

asymmetrically distributed molecules deposited in the egg during its production in 

the ovary … (so the egg did come before the chicken)… 

However, Carroll declines to speculate on where the first „egg‟ came from. 

 

The next remarkable discovery was of the same genetic structure and functioning in many 

diverse animals, „various bugs, earthworms, frogs, cows, and humans‟: 

…the similarities among the species were astounding … Such sequence similarity 

was just stunning.  The evolutionary lines that led to flies and mice diverged more 

than 500 million years ago, before the famous Cambrian Explosion that gave rise to 

most animal types. No biologist had even the foggiest notion that such similarities 

could exist between genes of such different animals. These Hox genes were so im-

portant that there sequences had been preserved throughout this enormous span of 

animal evolution.
12

 

When the arrangement of the Hox genes in mice was figured out the mapping of structure, 

including the isomorphism between gene order and body structure, between the fruit fly and 

mice turned out to be, as Carroll says, „amazing‟.  Figure 8 shows the correspondences 

between the common underlying gene structure and fly and mouse embryo. So, as Carroll 

points out: 

 



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 268 

 

Fig 8 

It was inescapable. Clusters of Hox genes shaped the development of animals as 

different as flies and mice, and now we know that includes just about every animal in 

the kingdom, including humans and elephants.
13

 

And it soon became apparent that this commonality extended to other fundamental types of 

gene complexes.  The next type of gene to be shown to be common across species was the so-

called eyeless gene (so called because, when mutated in flies, it is responsible for the loss of 

eyes) which is called Aniridia in humans and Small eye in mice, together these three genes are 

collectively known as Pax-6 and they have been found to be significant for the development 

of all kinds of different types of eyes across species. The fact that the gene responsible for the 

development of eyes is common is dramatic (or, as Caroll says, „intriguing and provocative‟) 

because humans and mice have camera-type eyes whereas flies have compound eyes; so the 

same gene regulates the development and placement of eyes but the type of eye depends on 

other factors.  This feature was demonstrated in an experiment in which mouse Small eye 

genes were transplanted into various strange places in flies such as the wings.  The result was 

the development of fly type eye structures on the fly wings, structures induced by the 

presence of mouse eye-producing genes.  

 

Another component of what Carroll calls the „gene tool kit‟ is the Distal-less (Dll) gene, 

which was so called because when it is mutated the distal, or outer, parts of fly limbs fail to 

develop.  Again these genes are found to be operative in the development of „all sorts of 

things that stuck out of animal bodies:‟
14

 

These included chicken legs, fish fins, the appendages of marine worms (called 

„parapodia‟), the ampulae and siphons on sea squirts, and even the tube feet on sea 



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 269 

urchins. This was another example, like Pax-6, of a tool kit gene involved in building 

vastly different structures that only share, at most, the common feature of projecting 

away from the main body. These animals are also representatives of different major 

branches of the animal tree.
15

  

The final component of the gene toolkit mentioned by Carroll is the tinman gene, which is so 

named after the character in The Wizard of Oz who lacked a heart; flies have an open 

circulatory system, which means they do not have a heart as such.  These genes were found to 

have mammalian versions (NK2 family) which are significant in heart formation in 

vertebrates, including ourselves.  

 

The multi-functionality of the Distal-less gene is remarkable. As Carroll points out, fourteen 

or more different types of appendages project out from the body of a Crayfish (fig 9) and the 

Distal less gene is significant in the development of them all.  But the Distal less gene is not 

only responsible for land (underwater or dry land) limb development; it is also significant in 

the placing of spots on butterfly wings: 

Distal-less still kept its old job: it was also deployed in the distal parts of all 

developing butterfly limbs, just as in all other insects and arthropods.  The spots of 

the Distal-less expression in butterfly wings were a new trick, “learned” long after its 

ancient role in limb-building. Remember everything about a toolkit protein‟s action 

depends on context.
16

 

It is in passages such as this that Carroll subtly reveals his adherence to the old neo-Darwinian 

notion that that the development of species, a process driven by changes in the way in which 

various gene components are expressed through the operation of the surrounding regulatory 

switching protein mechanisms, is a result of random mutations which occur over time, which 

in this particular case allows Distal-less gene mechanism to „learn‟ a new role.  

 

In the old Dawkins style model it was, fallaciously, asserted that the actual material makeup 

of the genes themselves mutated and thereby produced new phenotypes (fully developed 

organisms) ready to be filtered and winnowed by the tooth-and-claw fight with the 

environment.  But in the new Evo-Devo vision, as portrayed by Carroll, it is changes in the 

regulatory switches, rather than the genes, that are responsible for evolutionary changes. The 

actual mechanism or mechanism responsible for such changes, however, is left somewhat 

hazy. In the case of the Distal-less regulatory mechanism becoming involved in the 

determination of the patterning of the outer butterfly wing adornment, for instance, we are 

simply told that it somehow „learned‟ to add this functionality to its repertoire over the course 

of time.  But towards the end of his book Carroll nails his materialist and mechanistic colors 

to the evolutionary flagpole when he considers the remarkable fact that the same features, 

which are determined by the functioning of the same gene complexes (genes plus regulatory 

protein mechanisms), are found across diverse species, a discovery which is redolent with 

resonance of the dreaded notion of „design‟: 

 

This vestigial remnant of the neo-Darwinian worldview, however, is no more than an 

implausible echo of what was, in the days of the ascendency of the neo-Darwinian mytho-

logical worldview, nothing more than a speculative and incoherent fantasy which was adopted 

in order to preserve a Newtonian materialism which was itself heading for extinction.  
 



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 270 

 
 

Fig 9 
 

 

These instances of evolution repeating itself directly address difficulties some have 

had in grasping the role of random mutation in the evolutionary process. Some 

people have found it hard to imagine how novelty and complexity arise from a 

“random process.” The key distinction is that while the generation of genetic 

variation by mutation is a completely random process, the sorting out of these 

variations as to which will persist and which will be discarded is determined by a 

powerful, selective nonrandom process. Of the hundreds of millions or billions of 

individual base pairs in an animal genome, all are equally susceptible to random 

copying errors or physical damage that cause mutations. But only a tiny fraction of 

all possible mutations can alter a mammal‟s coat in a viable manner, or reduce a 

stickleback‟s spines without causing catastrophic collateral damage.  In large 

populations of animals, over eons of time, such mutations will arise simply as a 

matter of probability.  When they do occur, positive selection upon the trait they 

affect will cause them to spread in populations over time.
17

   

The extent of the desperation in this presentation is clearly apparent in the fact that it is an 

account which posits the most unlikely scenario, the notion that accumulation of evolutionary 

errors is responsible for the astonishingly organized and coordinated growth of increasingly 

complex and evolved biological organisms, in the face of contrary evidence that there is an 

inbuilt directionality and at least an minimal intentionality or what Paul Davies calls a „subtle 

teleology‟ within the process of evolution.  The very example of the functioning of E. Coli 

which Carroll uses to illustrate the role of proteins as triggers for the activation of genes 

mitigates against the mythology of randomness.  As Professor Patricia L. Foster, of the 

Biology Department of Indiana University, points out: 

When populations of microorganisms are subject to certain nonlethal selections, 

useful mutants arise … whereas useless mutants do not.  This phenomenon, known 

as adaptive, directed, or selection-induced mutation, challenges the long-held belief 

that mutations only arise at random and without regard to utility. 
18

  



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 271 

And, of course, the neo-Darwinian worldview has nothing to say on the presence of 

consciousness, and, within humans, full-blown self-consciousness, as a significant feature of 

the organisms produced by the universal evolutionary process. 

 

In his excellent book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe Professor 

Simon Conway Morris has also demonstrated the prevalence of the convergence of evolution-

ary „solutions‟ to survival challenges across widely differing species, a phenomenon which 

suggests that templates for the structure of various components of plant and animal 

physiology are seeded into the potentialities underlying the evolutionary process.  And the 

conclusion he draws is that, contrary to the „drunken walk‟ within a maze of mechanistic 

randomness viewpoint of various materialist evolutionary biologists, there is teleology 

towards the production of increasing levels of complexity, and associated sentience, within 

the ground potentiality of the process of evolution such that the end point of an organism 

having the kind of self-aware intelligence of human beings is an inevitability: 

So, if convergence is going to be a guiding principle in the understanding of 

evolution, then of all the areas worth investigating one of the most interesting must 

surely be to look at what constraints if any, accompany the development of sensory 

organs.  It is here, if anywhere, that we can approach the wider problem of the 

evolution of the nervous systems, brains, and perhaps ultimately sentience. And this 

is turn might give some clues as to whether indeed intelligence is some quirky end 

point of the evolutionary process or whether in reality it is more-or-less inevitable, an 

emergent property that is wired into the biosphere.
19

  

In other words Conway Morris adopts a „Anthropic‟ perspective which hold that it is sen-

tience and consciousness which are the driving force and target of the evolutionary process, a 

viewpoint not entertained willingly amongst the denizens of materialist enclaves, but, as we 

shall see, a perspective which is now increasingly suggested by quantum evidence. 

 

The American cognitive scientist and philosopher Jerry Fodor, Professor of Philosophy at 

Rutgers University, in a recent essay Why Pigs Don’t Fly, has questioned the neo-Darwinian 

assumption of random „adaptationism‟ and has indicated that there are perhaps more viable 

alternatives: 

Everybody thinks evo-devo must be at least part of the truth, since nobody thinks that 

phenotypes are shaped directly by environmental variables. Even the hardest core 

Darwinists agree that environmental effects on a creature‟s phenotype are mediated 

by their effects on the creature‟s genes: its „genome‟. Indeed, in the typical case, the 

environment selects a phenotype by selecting a genome that the phenotype expresses. 

Once in place, this sort of reasoning spreads to other endogenous factors. Phenotypic 

structure carries information about genetic structure. And genotypic structure carries 

information about the biochemistry of genes. And the biochemical structure of genes 

carries information about their physical structure. And so on down to quantum 

mechanics for all I know.
20

 

And here Fodor takes the descent through the levels of the physical world down to the 

physical description of the functioning of reality which most physicists consider to be ultimate 

explanatory level: quantum physics. Furthermore it is significant that Fodor qualifies his 

statement of the possibility that quantum physics might be significant in the process of 

evolution by the phrase „for all I know‟, indicating a lack of knowledge to adjudicate the 



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 272 

possibility.  For it seems to be the case that very few writers and commentators on the issue, 

at least within the fold of evolutionary biologists, do have the necessary acquaintance with the 

radical findings of quantum theory in order to approach the issue of the possibility that 

evolution is primarily driven from the quantum level.  Thus Dawkins tells us that, when it 

comes to quantum theory: 

…this is where I must make my excuses and leave.  Sometimes I imagine I have 

some appreciation of the poetry of quantum theory, but I have yet to achieve an 

understanding deep enough to explain it to others.
21

  

What Dawkins does not tell us, however, is how, given his incompetence at the quantum 

level, he can possibly be certain, as he certainly seems to be, that genes are the „selfish‟ 

ontologically primary drivers of the evolutionary process.  For, as Fodor indicates, genes can 

themselves be reduced to their molecular constituents and the functioning of such molecular 

units depends upon the details of quantum physics. As Johnjoe McFadden, Professor of 

Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, points out: 

Watson and Crick‟s structure (of DNA) was therefore the culmination of 

centuries of biological progress.  The great mysteries were laid bare: how biolo-

gical information was encoded, how it was inherited and how it was changed.  

But it also pointed in a quite surprising direction, towards the involvement of 

that other great triumph of the 20
th

 century science – quantum mechanics – in the 

fundamental basis of life and the driving force of evolution.”
22

 

It is truly remarkable how most so many interested parties working in the field of evolu-

tionary biology remain quite happy to ignore the dramatic discoveries of quantum physics, 

discoveries which have completely revolutionised our understanding of what appears to be a 

„material‟ world.  For if one thing has been established beyond doubt by the quantum 

revolution it is that Cartesian-Newtonian type „matter‟ „does not exist‟, to quote quantum 

physicist Professor Henry Stapp.  Furthermore it is now necessary to accept that the ultimate 

nature of what appears to be the material world is actually, again quoting Stapp, „idea-like‟, 

or of the nature of Mind. 

 

This viewpoint is becoming increasingly established within quantum philosophy, although 

there are stubborn pockets of materialist desperation resisting the cascade of quantum 

evidence.  And, furthermore, it is a conclusion which was clearly reached by many of the 

founding fathers of quantum theory, which is why Max Planck asserted that: 

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind 

this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix 

of all matter.
23

 

And Schrödinger wrote that: 

Mind has erected the objective outside world … out of its own stuff.
24

  

Furthermore, in his 1944 book What is Life Schrödinger explicitly wondered whether 

there might be a quantum basis for the genetic mechanism of inheritance. 

 

More recently physicist Amit Goswami has indicated the necessity of placing the 

operations of a universal field of awareness-consciousness as being fundamental in the 

orchestration of the evolutionary process: 



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…if we do science on the basis of consciousness, on the primacy of 

consciousness, then we can see in this phenomenon creativity, real creativity of 

consciousness.  In other words we can truly see that consciousness is operating 

creatively even in biology, even in the evolution of the species.
25

  

This proposal will be vigorously resisted by the materialist minded cohorts of the greater 

number of evolutionary biologists within which the notion of the materialist „chance and 

necessity‟ paradigm predominates; however, it is the kind of perspective which is required 

by the quantum evidence. 

 

In my previous essay The Grand Designer: Can Hawking’s Godless Theory of Everything 

Run Without God (Vol 1, No. 7 – 2010) I demonstrated that if one took the core proposals 

for the basis of the Theory of Everything contained within Hawking and Mlodinow‟s book 

The Grand Design seriously then the conclusions they reach, in particular the conclusion 

that a „whole universe‟ can „just appear out of nothing‟ is clearly at variance with the earlier 

assertion that at the moment of the big bang the universe „appeared spontaneously, starting 

off in every possible way,‟  and then subsequently sentient beings somehow „choose‟ or 

„create‟ for themselves which universe they will occupy through the exercise of perceptual 

weeding out of possibilities.  

 

This perspective clearly requires that at the moment of „creation‟ there must be a quantum 

field of infinite potentiality which contains its own mechanism of unfoldment, rather than a 

pure „nothingness‟ which Hawking and Mlodinow seem to favor. Furthermore this universal 

field must be of the nature of consciousness-awareness. The conclusion that the ultimate 

nature of the universal process must be of the nature of consciousness follows exactly from 

Hawking and Mlodinow‟s adherence to Feynman‟s „sum over histories‟ approach to 

quantum theory, which requires that: 

The histories that contribute to the Feynman sum don‟t have an independent 

existence, but depend on what is being measured.  We create history by our 

observations, rather than history creating us.
26

  

In other words it is the exercise of sentient „observation‟, or perception, which creates „our 

history‟, which also means that sentient perception determines the nature of the universal 

process backwards in time, and also forwards in time, through the weeding out of 

potentialities. Thus in their chapter „Choosing our Universe‟ Hawking and Mlodinow tell us 

that in one possible universal history the moon is made of „Roquefort cheese‟ but somehow 

the perceptual activities of the sentient beings of the current universe has vetoed this 

possibility and opted for a moonrock moon; although there may be other universes which do 

have a Roquefort cheese moon, the sentient beings in our universe have, over vast time over 

scales, „chosen‟ moonrock.
27

 

This view agrees with the understanding of the visionary physicist John Wheeler, who also 

concludes that the evolution of the universe eventually requires the participation of sentient 

beings in the determination of its nature: 

Directly opposite to the concept of universe as machine built on law is the vision of 

a world self-synthesized.  On this view, the notes struck out on a piano by the 

observer participants of all times and all places, bits though they are in and by 

themselves, constitute the great wide  world of space and time and things.
28

 

And: 



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 274 

Law without law.  It is difficult to see what else than that can be the plan of physics.  

It is preposterous to think of the laws of physics as installed by Swiss watchmaker 

to endure from everlasting to everlasting when we know that the universe began 

with a big bang.  The laws must have come into being.  Therefore they could not 

have been always a hundred percent accurate. That means that they are derivative, 

not primary … Events beyond law.  Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, 

flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet formulate firm form … The universe 

is a self excited circuit.  As it expands, cools and develops, it gives rise to observer-

participancy.  Observer-participancy in turn gives what we call tangible reality to 

the universe … Of all the strange features of the universe, none are stranger than 

these: time is transcended, laws are mutable, and observer participancy matters.
29

 

A significant observation in this quote is that the universe „as it expands, cools and develops, 

it gives rise to observer-participancy.  Observer-participancy in turn gives what we call tang-

ible reality to the universe…‟ which indicates an interdependent evolutionary process which 

physicist Amit Goswami calls a „tangled hierarchy‟ within which the observing aspect and the 

observed aspect of the evolutionary process develop inter-dependently through a sequence of 

increasingly „explicate‟, or materialized, levels of manifestation.  This viewpoint corresponds 

closely to the suggestion by the significant trailblazing physicist David Bohm who suggested 

that the appearance of the material world emerges through initially subtle levels of „implicate 

orders‟ which manifest through quantum layers, which he dubbed „implicate orders‟, towards 

a final „material‟ manifestation. As we shall see, this view of a vertical downward (or upward 

depending upon one‟s point of view) evolution through quantum levels of manifestation 

provides a much more coherent and fertile elucidation of the manner in which the common 

structures underlying the morphology of biological life came into being. 

 

In his book Life Without Genes Adrian Woolfson presents us with a poetic vision of the sort 

of field of potentiality that he imagines must have „existed‟ before the dawn of life within the 

universe: 

In the beginning there was mathematical possibility. At the very inception of the 

universe fifteen billion years ago, a deep infinite-dimensional sea emerged from 

nothingness.  Its colourless waters, green and turquoise blue, glistened in the non-

existent light of the non-existent sun … A strange sea though, this information sea.  

Strange because it was devoid of location …
30

 

This field, of course, can only be the quantum wavefunction of the universe, a universal 

wavefunction which contains: 

…all possible histories … through which the universe could have evolved to its 

present state…
31

 

This perspective, of course, is completely harmonious with the Hawking-Mlodinow version; 

the quantum wavefunction of the universe contains all the future evolutionary possibilities 

for the development of sentient beings and the environments inhabited by then.  And from 

out of the vast entangled web of infinite possibilities for manifestation only certain 

privileged, because viable within the context of the details of the evolution of this particular 

universe, members will actually make it into reality:   



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 275 

An information space of this sort would furnish a complete description of all 

potentially living and unrealizable creatures…
32

  

The fact that not all possibilities for the manifestation of sentient beings and the environments 

inhabited by them are actualized, thereby leaving some potentialities as „unrealized‟ is, again, 

in line with the Hawking-Mlodinow perspective, wherein many potentialities, the unlikely 

possibility of a cheese-moon being an example given by them, are weeded out by the choices 

that the universal consciousness, which at some point becomes embodied within evolved 

sentient beings, makes along the way.   The dramatic implication, then, is that the potential 

forms of all sentient beings must be „contained‟ as pure potentiality within the ground of the 

universal quantum consciousness which awaits unfoldment at the edge of time. 

 

The attitude to the notion that the quantum level of reality, the level which just about all 

physicists now consider to the ultimate and grounding level, is at least inextricably entangled 

with the phenomenon of consciousness (Rosenblum and Kuttner – Quantum Enigma) or, even 

more radically, consists of a field of pre-individualized awareness-consciousness (Stapp, 

Goswami, Hameroff and others), on the part of those who lean towards a materialist view of 

reality is ambiguous to say the least.  The quantum evidence is now so now ineluctable that 

denying it is really not a viable option.  However, an option often resorted to is to falsely 

claim that the quantum evidence is so confusing that the matter has not been decided yet.  In a 

recent book called Life Ascending, which won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science 

Books, the author Nick Lane refers to the views of the Scottish physicist Graham Cairns-

Smith who suggests that what we call „matter‟ must itself have subjective features and must 

also in some fashion partake of the nature of consciousness, which was the position advanced 

by Bohm; Lane writes that: 

Matter is conscious in some way, with „inner‟ properties, as well as the familiar 

external qualities that physicists measure. Pan-psychism is taken seriously again.  

It sounds preposterous.  But what arrogance to think that we know all there is to 

know about the nature of matter! We don‟t. We don‟t even understand the way 

quantum mechanics works. … We don‟t know enough about the deep nature of 

matter to know how neurons transform brute matter into subjective feelings.
33

 

This passage illustrates the kind of intellectual schizophrenia which seems to be at the root 

of current thinking in biology and neurophysiology and other associated disciplines; and it is 

also necessary to point out in passing that the assertion that „we don‟t even understand the 

way quantum mechanics works‟ is completely untrue – we have a very precise 

understanding, it‟s just that most people don‟t like the quantum implication that conscious-

ness is the primary constituent of reality.  The fact that the concept of „matter‟ has been 

thrown into dramatic ambiguity by quantum physics, so much so that the respected physicist 

Henry Stapp has repeated many times that Cartesian-Newtonian type matter „does not exist,‟ 

and physicist and respected science writer John Gribben has written a book entitled The End 

of the Matter Myth, not to mention pronouncements such as that made in 1931 by Max 

Planck that he regarded „consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from 

consciousness‟
34

, does not stop misguided biologists and others lamenting that they do not 

know how „brute matter‟ is „transformed‟ into „subjective feelings.‟  How can a non-

existent, mythological assumed aspect of reality transform into anything?   

 

This is not to say that the material world is completely non-existent, this would be a 

ridiculous assertion. The point concerns the ultimate nature of what appears to be an 



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„external‟ material world which is conceived of as being independent of mind. The evidence 

of quantum theory quite clearly is that what appears to be a sphere of materiality which has 

its own inner self-enclosed independent essence cannot actually be like this.  Quantum 

theory unambiguously tells us that what we thought was independent „matter‟ is actually 

dependent upon mind. As quantum physicist Wojciech H. Zurek, the primary instigator of 

the theory of „quantum Darwinism,‟ a quantum viewpoint which is fundamental for 

understanding the Evo-devo evidence, tells us:    

Given almost any initial condition, the universe described by [the quantum 

wavefunction] evolves into a state containing many alternatives that are never 

seen to coexist in our world. Moreover, while the ultimate evidence for the 

choice of one alternative resides in our elusive “consciousness,” there is every 

indication that the choice occurs much before consciousness ever gets involved 

and that, once made, the choice is irrevocable.
35

 

Although at first sight the implication of the quantum evidence might seem to be that 

individual consciousnesses „collapse‟ the wavefunction, in fact it is actually more correct to 

consider the appearance of the material world to be an inter-subjective process which 

operated at a much deeper quantum level that individuated consciousness, and, furthermore, 

prior to the manifestation of sentient beings within the process of evolution there must be an 

inner cognitive function within the field of potentiality which operates to unfold poten-

tialities and thereby also unfold and evolve the future sentient beings destined to inhabit the 

unfolding universe.  

 

Nick Lane suggest that such a „pan-psychic‟ viewpoint is „preposterous‟ and, although he 

pays a brief lip-service to the fact that we do not know „all there is to know about the nature 

of matter‟ he quickly falls back into the familiar, and for many cosy, materialist worldview 

of the pre-quantum, pre-twentieth century perspective, the perspective of gentlemen fossil 

collectors and intrepid explorers and species collectors of tropical rain forests. This tendency 

to constantly fall back into a default position of primary materialism, even whilst in the 

midst of making observations which should alert the writer in question to the fallacious 

nature of the perspective is astonishing.  Lane, for example, in referring to the work of the 

neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, tells us that:  

Edelman refers to the process of brain development as neural darwinism, which 

emphasises the idea that experience selects successful neural combinations.  All the 

basic tenets of natural selection are present; we start out with a massive population 

of neurons, which can be wired up in millions of different ways to achieve the same 

ends.  The neurons vary amongst themselves and can either grow more robust or 

wither away; there is competition between neurons to form synaptic connections 

and differential survival on the basis of success.
36

 

Here Lane at first reiterates the recent discovery of neuroplasticity, the fact that, contrary to 

what the vociferous „experts‟, again on the basis of prejudice and minimal evidence, in the 

field of neuroscience prior to the appalling Silver Spring Monkey experiments, the mind‟s 

intentionality is able to determine the wiring of the brain.  In the Silver Spring experiments 

the nerve ganglia that supplied sensation to the brain from the monkeys‟ arms and legs were 

cut and various forms of encouragement, such as electric shocks, were used to force the 

monkeys to use the limbs they could not feel. Subsequently it was discovered that significant 

cortical remapping had occurred, showing that being forced to use limbs with no sensory 

input had triggered changes in their brains' organization.  This evidence of the brain's 



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 277 

plasticity helped overturn the widely held view that the adult brain cannot reorganize itself in 

response intentional actions. Professor of Psychiatry Jeffrey Schwartz, in his excellent book 

The Mind and the Brain says of this discovery: 

Mind, we now see, has the power to alter biological matter significantly; that three 

pound lump of gelatinous ooze within our skull is truly the mind‟s brain.
37

 

Lane, however, turns this perspective on its head and, in the same way that Dawkins gives an 

inappropriate ontologically privileged status to „selfish‟ genes, gives the brain‟s neurons an 

equally inappropriate status, for as Stapp points out: 

…no such brain exists; no brain, body, or anything else in the real world is 

composed of those tiny bits of matter that Newton imagined the universe to be 

made of.
38

  

By this dramatic assertion Stapp is emphasizing the fact that the quantum realm is primary; 

there is no „Newtonian‟ type matter, and therefore no ultimately existing self-sufficient 

neurons, in existence.   

 

The inappropriate positing of the „material‟ brain as being the ultimate source of the 

phenomenon of consciousness derives from the simplistic observation that there is an 

obvious connection between damage to various areas of the brain and consequent behavior: 

…specific brain injuries (lesions) cause specific reproducible deficits.  It‟s hardly 

surprising, but a lesion in the same area causes the same deficit in different people, or 

for that matter in animals.
39

 

However, as we shall see, this crude materialist assumption is incorrect.  The fact that the 

brain is ultimately an apparent „material‟ organization which emerges from a deeper level of 

quantum functioning in no way undermines the apparent coherent „material‟ functioning of 

the quantum structure of the brain.  It simply means that, at the level at which our „material‟ 

bodies and our sense faculties function, the coherent functioning of the ultimate quantum 

Mindnature, to employ a term of the Buddhist Dzogchen tradition, manifests as the 

apparently „material‟ world.  But this does not mean that the evidence as to the ultimate 

quantum Mindnature of reality is false.  The situation is that a deep implicate field of 

quantum awareness-consciousness organizes itself through a cascade of quantum „implicate 

orders‟ that finally produce the explicate structures of the brains of sentient beings in order to 

manifest as individuated consciousness within the manifested dualistic universe. 

 

David Bohm encapsulated this vision in his notion of the holomovement: 

…the notion of the holomovement was enriched by going from a three dimensional 

space to a multidimensional implicate order  and then to a vast „sea‟ of energy in 

„empty‟ space, so we may now enrich this notion further by saying that in its 

totality the holomovement includes the principle of life as well. Inanimate matter is 

then to be regarded as a relatively autonomous sub-totality in which, at least as far 

as we know, life does not significantly manifest. … Indeed, the holomovement 

which is „life implicit‟ is the ground of both „life explicit‟ and of „inanimate‟ 

matter, and this ground is what is primary, self-existent and universal.
40

 

This characterization of the universal ground of „life implicit‟, within which the potentialities 

for sentient beings and their environments have an origin bears an significant resemblance to 

the Buddhist Dzogchen account of the universal ground: 



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 278 

 The root of our material-mental universe is this self-existent pristine cognitiveness, 

a point instant virtual singularity; since its facticity is open-dimensioned and not 

discernable as any concrete thing, it is a meaning-saturated field as pristine 

cognitiveness.  The radiation field of this open dimension is the intrinsic photic 

character of pristine cognitiveness.  Since this is there as its own lucency (in its 

prismatic character) as yet undifferentiated into color values, it is the quasi-

mirroring pristine cognitiveness.  Since these modes of pristine cognitiveness have 

one and the same operational source, differing only in name, this facet is termed the 

selective mapping pristine cognitiveness.  Since these modes of pristine cognitive-

ness are self-existent, identical with respect to their lucency and indivisible, this 

facet is termed the auto-reflexive identity pristine cognitiveness.  Since by 

understanding correctly the meaning-value of this cognitive character of Being all 

intentional ideation is actualized spontaneously and this facet is termed the precisely 

actualizing pristine cognitions as the operational source of the intelligible universe 

that the eighty-four thousand portals to life‟s meaning opens up.
 41 

Here the unfolding principle which drives the evolution of the sentient beings both 

downwardly through implicate orders of manifestation, and also across time, is „pristine 

cognitiveness‟.  This is the fundamental universal cognitive function which is able to trigger 

the quantum sea of potentiality into action, and through this action, which takes place over 

vast time scales, sentient beings of all possible varieties consistent with the nature of the 

manifesting universe come into being, each embodying a tiny quantum of the universal 

„pristine cognitiveness‟ which provides the driving force for the evolution of the universe. 

Thus, as Bohm indicates, „life implicit‟ becomes both „life explicit‟ and  „inanimate‟ matter. 

 

In the following elucidation the interconnections between the Dzogchen account, based on 

Herbert V. Guenther‟s excellent exposition Matrix of Mystery: Scientific and Humanistic 

Aspects of rDzogs-chen Thought, of how a fundamental field of 'pristine cognitiveness‟ 

materializes into individualized centers of dynamic meaning-experiencing, or sentient 

beings, and the account based on the quantum insights on the part of Bohm is uncanny.  

According to Bohm: 

We can say that human meanings make a contribution to the cosmos, but we can 

also say that the cosmos may be ordered according to a kind of „objective‟ meaning. 

New meanings may emerge in this over all order. That is we may say that meaning 

penetrates the cosmos, or even what is beyond the cosmos.  For example there are 

current theories in physics that imply that the universe emerged from the „big bang‟. 

In the earliest phase there were no electrons, protons, neutrons, or other basic 

structures. None of the laws that we know would have had any meaning.   Even 

space and time in their present well-defined form would have had no meaning.  All 

of this emerged from a very different state of affairs.  The proposal is that, as 

happens with human beings, this emergence included the creative unfoldment of 

generalized meaning.
 42

 

Guenther describes the beginning phases of the evolution of the manifested and materialized 

world of dualistic experience from the „evolutionary zero point‟ according to the Dzogchen 

worldview as follows: 

It is excitatory intelligence that provides the necessary programming information for 

initiating a dramatic unfolding process (the big bang) tending towards ever greater 



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 279 

degrees of complexity (the evolving universe) while simultaneously, throughout all 

its phases, retaining the intelligence that initiated the process. When this big bang 

occurs, the surging of intelligence-qua-isotropic radiation develops a special 

envelop-like structuring of radiation field…The unitary process as an envelop-like 

structure which results from this surging of intelligence is termed the meaning-

saturated field as pristine cognitiveness.
 43

 

At this point there is still no „matter‟, the appearance of the material world comes into 

manifestation at a later point of quantum evolution from the evolutionary zero point. What 

we are discussing at this level of development is the cascade of quantum templates of 

meaning-manifestation, levels of quantum downward evolution from the nondual zero point, 

levels that Bohm termed „implicate orders‟, each implicate order enfolds a new level of 

meaning evolution in a quantum descent into apparent materiality, and this descent requires 

the materialization of sentient beings as carriers of individualized awareness of a particular 

locus of meaning-awareness: 

Later, with the evolution of new forms of life, fundamentally new steps may have 

evolved in the creative unfoldment of further meanings.  That is, we may say that 

some evolutionary processes occur which could be traced physically, but we cannot 

really understand them without looking at some deeper meaning which was 

responsible for the changes. The present view of the changes is that they are random, 

with selection of those traits that were suited for survival, but that does not explain 

the complex, subtle structures that actually occurred.
 44

 

Here Bohm indicates the serious shortcomings of the materialistic and mechanistic view of 

the evolutionary process enshrined in the materialistic vision of the Darwinian evolutionary 

process.  The view pugilistically promoted by Dawkins and Dennett for instance is that the 

universe has always been fully materialized and that evolution is nothing more that the non-

intentional and mechanical activity of essentially lifeless matter, an extraordinarily counter-

intuitive, but for some incomprehensible reason, widely accepted belief.  In contrast to this, 

now completely unacceptable, vision of the lifeless magically becoming life through blind 

mechanical churning of mindless bits and pieces of inert matter, Bohm is suggesting that 

evolution must be driven by an intentionality which acts towards the manifestation of life 

through increasingly more materialized levels of quantum potentiality.  Evolution, according 

to Bohm, must essentially be an intentional quantum process by which subtle quantum 

structures cascade down to less subtle levels to eventually become fully „materialized‟. This 

process, according to Bohm, requires: 

1. A set of implicate orders 

2. A special distinguished case of the above set, which constitutes an explicate order 

of manifestation. 

3. A general relationship (or law) expressing a force of necessity which binds 

together a certain set of the elements of the implicate order in such a way that 

they contribute to a common explicate end…
45

 

And elsewhere he indicates a set of nested orders: explicate, implicate, super-implicate, 

super-super-implicate….   

In the imagery of Dzogchen, as the „excitatory intelligence‟ manifests through the subtle or 

„implicate‟ quantum levels towards manifestation on a materialized level  it creates  



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„envelopes‟, which we can identify as quantum demarcation structures which designate 

boundaries which the cognitive process of materialization, which thereby marks out areas 

of differentiation between the activity of subjective cognition and the projected stabilized 

cognized objects, in this way the „pristine cognitiveness‟ hides its unitary nature in an 

imaginational field of activity, a field of activity within which the possibilities for the 

evolution of sentient beings and the collective environments shared by the various varieties 

of sentient beings takes shape: 

This field envelope exhibits an intentional structure, constituted both as an intending 

act phase and an intended object phase…
46

 

This account, which asserts that the cascade into manifestation begins at a deep subtle level 

of potentiality with the mere glimmer of quantum-intentional movement, prompted by the 

internal „pristine cognitiveness‟, a subtle quantum intentionality that produces the first 

implicate order of subtle intentional-subject and intended object, without any further content 

than this mere subtle intentional duality,  easily melds with the most recent „quantum 

Darwinism‟ proposal that the nature of the quantum stuff of reality is epiontic: 

…quantum states, by their very nature share an epistemological and ontological 

role – are simultaneously a description of the state, and the „dream stuff is made 

of.‟  One might say that they are epiontic.  These two aspects may seem 

contradictory, but at least in the quantum setting, there is a union of these two 

functions.
47

  

In this new quantum paradigm we find that the insight brought to modern Western 

philosophy by Bishop Berkeley that „to be is to be perceived‟ is now validated at the 

fundamental level of quantum theory: the epistemological act of perception actually creates 

a moment of ontology.  And this does not mean that something already existing is known to 

be existing, it means, rather, that the very perceptual act creates the existence at the quantum 

level, one might say that the „collapse of the wavefunction‟ actually is one moment of 

quantum perception which itself is a moment of quantum ontology.  Furthermore the 

epiontic paradigm indicates that repeated perception creates a resonant latency for the same 

perception to occur again, so the more often a perception is repeated the more probable it 

becomes.  This process of „quantum  Darwinism‟, which I have explored in detail in relation 

to various formulations in my article Bohm’s Implicate Order, Wheeler’s Participatory 

Universe, Stapp’s Mindful Universe, Zurek’s Quantum Darwinism and the Buddhist Mind-

Only Ground Consciousness (JCER, Vol. 1 Issue 8), underlies Edelman‟s „neural 

Darwinism‟ as well as biological evolution over time, in the latter context it finds its most 

explicitly developed formulation in Rupert Sheldrake‟s proposal of the functioning of 

quantum morphogenetic fields. 

 

The Russian physicist and quantum philosopher Michael Mensky has also formulated a 

similar perspective. According to Mensky consciousness is an interior aspect or quality of 

the wavefunction which reflexively operates upon quantum potentialities for experiential 

existence. For individuated consciousness itself to become manifest from fundamental 

awareness as an explicit experiential aspect of reality it must bring an experienced world 

into being; and such a world is manifested through the actualisation of the potentialities 

within the wavefunction and the subsequent selection of primary experiential pathways.  

According to Mensky a crucial question which requires explication is why the alternatives 



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which naturally arise are classical, or at least close to classical, in demeanour.  Mensky gives 

the following account: 

If the picture of the world as it appears in consciousness were far from classical, 

then, due to quantum non-locality, this would be a picture of a world with „locally 

unpredictable‟ behaviour.  The future of a restricted region in such a world could 

depend on events even in very distant regions.  No strategy of surviving could be 

elaborated in such a world for a localised living being.  Life (of the form we know) 

would be impossible.  On the contrary, a (close to) classical state of the world is 

„locally predictable‟.  The evolution of a restricted region of such a world 

essentially depends only on the events in this region or not too far from it.  

Influence of distant regions is negligible.  Strategy of surviving can be elaborated in 

such a world for a localised living being.
48

 

Entangled quantum phenomena can instantaneously affect each other over vast cosmic 

distances.  In fact distance does not seem to be an issue for this kind of entangled mutual 

determination.  It follows, therefore, that in a non-classical, quantum-entangled scenario 

there would be no environments wherein environmental behaviour was determined purely by 

local events. Such environments would not be locally coherent and predictable and 

consequently they could not support coherent life.  If Mensky‟s argument is correct then the 

classical lineaments of a life-supporting manifested reality is fashioned by consciousness 

itself for its own manifestation!  

 

In quantum field theory there in a non-substantial entangled quantum field of potentiality and 

within the process that Mensky envisages it is through the operation of a primitive level of 

quantum consciousness that this entangled and interdependent field is localised through the 

quantum evolution of the „classical‟ world of individualised sentience and materiality. 

Furthermore, Mensky indicates that the level of consciousness at which the process begins is: 

…the most primitive, or the most deep, level of consciousness, differing perceiving 

from not perceiving.
49

 

Such deep levels of consciousness contain shared structures of possible experience. These 

aspects of the structures of consciousness are coterminous with those that the analytic 

psychologist C.G. Jung called archetypes.  Although Jung‟s archetypes are primarily 

concerned with deep emotional determinations of aspects of reality, his work led him to 

suggest, like Bohm, that there is a deep level of connection between the physical world and 

the realm of the subjective.
50

 This view of the deep inner and hidden connection between the 

manifest realms of the objective world and the subjective experiential world was also shared 

by physicist Wolfgang Pauli who corresponded for a time with Jung on the subject. The 

experiential templates for the material world, which can be thought of as archetypal 

templates which interact with the established features of the objective wavefunction that 

provides the potential for a material world, must be shared, at least in part, by all sentient 

beings.  

 

Mensky‟s account of how such deep structures of consciousness, which select the 

experiences conforming to a stable material world from the wealth of quantum possibility, 

arise in the first place provides a fertile starting point for the development of the view of 

evolution as an essentially quantum process which begins with the operation of the interior 

quantum „pristine cognitiveness‟ operating within the field of quantum potentialities.  And 

the starting point, at the very base of the hierarchical cascade of implicate orders into 



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material manifestation is the glimmer of the division into perceiver and perceived.  Within 

this division into the possibility of observer and an observed, a fundamental division which 

takes place at a deep hidden quantum implicate level, the universe becomes self-referring 

and self-observing, a process which now gives rise to what Goswami calls a „tangled 

hierarchy‟, which can be compared to Bohm‟s cascade of „implicate orders‟, of self-

observation through which the fluid quantum nature of the fundamental ground becomes 

increasingly divided into quantum template „prototype‟ sentient beings and inhabited 

environments.  These prototype quantum potentialities only „exist‟ as quantum potentialities 

until consciousness intervenes to fully materialise them, a process which Goswami and 

others suggest may occur backwards in time, a quantum viewpoint which means that 

evolution would be a far more bizarre and complex process than envisaged by the single 

dimensioned Darwinian perspective.  For within this quantum perspective it would be the 

case that until sentient beings began to solidify the process of quantum evolution, backwards 

in time, the process would be only occurring at the quantum level.  This scenario involves 

the possibility that vast ages prior to the Cambrian, for instance, would at that time only be 

quantum processes, a viewpoint which is consistent with the Hawking-Mlodinow meta-

physical vision of the evolution of the universe and its inhabitants.  As Goswami indicates: 

Life and by implication we ourselves are here because of the way the universe is 

designed in possibility so we can collapse the possibility into manifestation.
51

 

As we shall see, this perspective can bring coherent elucidation to some perplexing 

evolutionary conundrums such as the meaning of the Cambrian „explosion.‟ However, such a 

perspective seems seriously counter-intuitive and Nick Lane would almost certainly employ 

the term „preposterous‟ to describe it.  But surely we have to decide whether we take the 

quantum evidence and implications seriously or not? 

 

This understanding of the nature of quantum evolution is consistent with the fact that in 

quantum field theory the ultimate quantum field contains no substantiality; there is only a 

field of potentiality which is „operated‟ upon by „creation‟ (and „destruction) operators.  This 

description can easily be viewed as an „objective‟ presentation of the action of a fundamental 

„pristine cognitiveness‟, also termed within Dzogchen as an „excitatory intelligence‟, 

operating to unfold sentient potentialities.  The very first glimmer of epiontic quantum 

perception, deep within the quantum ground, would simply be a movement of consciousness 

which gathers into a centre an intentional disposition for perception towards an aspect of the 

ground of reality which is interdependently posited as being that which is perceived.  The 

first quantum implicate templates, therefore, would simply be that of perceiver-perceived, or 

„grasper‟ and „grasped‟ as Buddhist Mind-Only philosophy terms the division.  At this point 

there is only the intention to produce a realm of dualistic experience embodied within a 

multitude of sentient beings, but  as yet there is no actual full-blown perceiving going on, we 

are still in the early phases of quantum implicate manifestation and there is the mere 

potentiality for a division into perceiving beings and perceived entities. 

 

The next movement towards manifestation would be to divide the perceiving aspect into 

actual varieties of perception: some form of sight or echo-location etc., hearing, smelling, 

touching, tasting.  This step will be accompanied by the kind of objects which can be 

perceived according to which sense faculty and so on. Also there must be a determination as 

to mode of movement according to the potential environment.  These determinations will 

begin at a very subtle „virtual‟ quantum level, and in this way the actual basic templates of 



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possible sentient beings might be determined within quantum implicate orders prior to actual 

manifestation on the apparently „material‟ world. This process will cascade down, through 

many quantum implicate levels, or „orders‟, to ever more explicate „gross‟ levels of 

manifestation, until, of course, an actual teaming experiential dualistic interconnected 

manifold of perceiving creatures and concomitant perceived worlds is „created‟ from out of 

the epiontic field of quantum potentiality.  Such a view accounts for aspects of evolution far 

more coherently than the currently accepted materialistic Darwinian paradigm and also for 

such anomalies as the Cambrian explosion. 

 

A good example to consider is the case of the distal-less gene which has been discussed 

above.  As with the example of the Crayfish the distal-less gene complex has a remarkable 

range of applications.  Conway Morris describes the situation as follows: 

As with Pax-6 the original function of this gene is not certain, but some evidence 

suggests that its primary role was linked with the development in the embryo of the 

nervous system, and especially the sensory organs. Now it so happens that in 

arthropods many of the sensory organs are located on the appendages, and 

accordingly when there was need for improved sensory perception so parts of the 

body protruded to extend the sensory range of the sensory cells. Only later were such 

outgrowths on occasion employed for such purposes as locomotion. The widespread 

expression of the gene distal-less is, therefore, effectively a reflection of the 

recurrent and independent of such limbs: in a sense distal-less hitchhikes as a sensory 

protrusions and is subsequently transformed to allow an additional function such as a 

leg or an antenna.
52

 

So it appears that the same gene complex responsible for organizing protrusions for extending 

the range of sensory apparatus were „only later‟ „employed for such purposes as locomotion. 

The impression which is easily gleaned from such presentations is that there must be a 

sequence of animals across which a sense protrusion is, dues to chance random mutation, 

gradually transformed into walking apparatus. But the notion that there could have been an 

intermediate animal which used the same protrusion to see and walk, or smell and walk or 

hear and walk etc. is clearly difficult to contemplate seriously. This sense of dissonance is 

even more pronounced with the transformation which is supposed to have taken place, via 

„natural selection‟, from gills to wings: 

The gill-to-wing theory always had evidence in its favor (just not enough weight to 

settle the matter).  But, if indeed insect wings came from crustacean gill branches, 

does this mean that some kind of crayfish or shrimp just crawled onto land and 

started flying? No, not at all. There were many evolutionary steps between animals 

that carried a set of respiratory appendages and the origin of powered insect flight on 

two pairs of wings as we know it today.
53

 

But such a dogmatic and dubious belief in the power of gradualist „natural selection‟ cannot 

mask the fact that, if this account were to be correct, there must be a point in the evolution 

from gill to wing when the final creature in the evolutionary sequence abandoned the gill 

function completely and threw in its lot with a life on the wing, just as a few mutations back 

there must have been an animal using its wings for extracting the odd fix of oxygen from 

water. Does this sound plausible? 

 

The biologist Lisa Nagy has asked: 



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Should vertebrate and insect limbs be considered homologous [meaning descended 

from a common ancestor] because they are patterned by similar gene networks? Or is 

the similarity an example of molecular convergence…
54

 

In light of the discussion so far, however, the most plausible and coherent explanation of the 

phenomenon is that what Carroll calls „toolkit genes‟ reflects the fact that there are „toolkit‟ 

morphogenetic templates or prototypes for various modules of animal construction which 

reside as quantum „virtual‟ morphogenetic field modules within quantum implicate orders. 

Rupert Sheldrake describes the process of embryonic development as follows: 

The development of multicellular organisms takes place through a series of stages 

controlled by a succession of morphogenetic fields.  At first the embryonic tissues 

develop under the control of primary embryonic fields.  Then … different regions 

come under the influence of secondary fields, in animals those of limbs, eyes, ears 

etc. … Generally speaking, the morphogenesis brought about by the primary fields is 

not spectacular, because it establishes the characteristic differences between cells in 

different regions that enable them to act as the morphogenetic germs of the organ 

fields. Then in the tissues developing under their influence, germs of subsidiary 

fields, fields which control the morphogenesis of structures within the organ as a 

whole…
55

 

Thus the development of the embryo is controlled by a nested hierarchical of morphogenetic 

fields, which are, according to Sheldrake, „quantum probability fields‟
56

 akin to Bohm‟s 

implicate orders. This, of course, is exactly what we should expect in a quantum Evo-Devo 

universe; the development of the embryo cascades through hierarchical levels of quantum 

morphogenetic fields in the same way that evolution also took place through a sequence of 

quantum implicate orders. 

 

Figure 10 shows the very basic and partial beginnings of a hierarchical tree diagram 

indicating the kind of structure which one can conceive as underlying the upper implicate 

levels of the manifestation of various animals.  The first division of the unified quantum 

ground is, as indicated above, the mere glimmer of perception; a movement of intentionality 

on the part of the universal „pristine cognitiveness‟ in the direction of producing a manifested 

world by unfolding as many of the potentialities, which are latent within the possibilities for 

sentient life contained within the ultimate field of potentiality, as is coherently possible.  If the 

quantum Evo-Devo perspective is correct, then, in contrast to the neo-Darwinian materialist 

random-chance story in which the natural environment exists fully and materially formed 

prior to Life making a bid for survival, the true evolutionary process is one in which sentient 

beings and their environments evolve interdependently through quantum implicate levels.  

Thus the various requirements for body structure, sensory organs, means of movement 

dependent upon the environment and so no are fulfilled by the evolutionary process, both 

synchronically through quantum implicate orders and diachronically (over time),  by a 

modular „pick and mix‟ process.  The modular „design‟ of the Duckbilled Platypus is 

intriguing in this context. When the naturalist George Shaw, Keeper of the Department of 

Natural History at the British Museum, received a specimen from Captain John Hunter in 

Australia he remarked that it was “impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine 

nature of the animal, and to surmise that there might have been practiced some arts of 

deception in its structure.”
57

 

 



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Whilst it is true, of course, that at the fully manifested level all sentient beings inhabit the 

„same‟ material  world in the sense that the quantum ground of potentiality within which all 

sentient beings exist have the same potentialities awaiting unfoldment, each type of sentient 

being will unfold a different continuum experience of the „material‟ world.  But all the 

possible worlds inhabited by the varieties of sentient beings are clearly consistent and 

coherent in their overlapping features.  The entire interconnected system is a coherently inter-  

 
 

                                                                  Fig 10 



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dependent creation etched out of the potentialities within the ultimate quantum field of 

universal awareness. Darwin himself was not unfamiliar with the notion of an inter-dependent 

aspect within the process of evolution for at the beginning of his chapter The Struggle for 

Existence in his The Origin of Species we can read: 

How have all those exquisite adaptations on the part of one organization to another 

part, and to the conditions of life, of one distinct organic being to another being 

been perfected?  We see these beautiful co-adaptations most pleasantly in the 

woodpecker and mistletoe…
58

    

It would have been impossible, of course, for Darwin to have been aware of the quantum 

origin. 

 

This view of the process of the unfolding of the multifarious possibilities within the quantum 

ground of reality through a universal unfolding of potential perceiving organisms can be 

immediately applied to some iconic Darwinian scenarios.  We shall consider Darwin‟s finches 

and the African cichlids. 

 

The crucial Darwinian point concerning the Galapagos finches is that the beaks were 

supposed to have evolved by natural selection to fit the environmental surroundings, in this 

case the kind of nuts available being the evolutionary environmental factor (fig 11).  This 

process is generally considered to have taken place gradually over a long time span due to 

random mutation.  But the evidence gathered by researchers trying to support the neo-

Darwinian gradualist account actually undermines it: 

He describes the evidence they gathered demonstrating the correlation of beak size 

with food supply … and follows that with a good summary of the observations that 

the Grants made of beak size on the Island of Daphne Major after a drought.  As the 

available supply of edible seed dwindled, only tough hard-to-open seeds were left, 

and only birds with larger, deeper beaks could eat them.  Subsequent generations 

showed a dramatic increase in overall beak size in the population.
59

 

This, however, does not indicate a mechanism which hangs around for a random mutation to 

ride to the rescue of the starving finches; it indicates an exquisitely tuned responsive 

interaction between the population about to inhabit an environment and the conditions of the 

environment immediately prior to the habitation by the subsequent generations.  It is as if the 

experiences of the finches inhabiting the environment during the drought had left a trace 

within a deep level of the quantum field which then determined the form of the subsequent 

generations of finches.  This corresponds exactly to Rupert Sheldrake‟s notion of a 

„morphogenetic field‟, a kind of memory within nature, and the Buddhist alayavijnana, the 

ground consciousness, and Bohm‟s „implicate order‟.  All of these, of course, map onto the 

notion of the universal quantum field of reality. 

 

The way that such a mechanism could function is easily comprehended when one recalls that 

according to quantum theory it must be the case that all possibilities for manifestation are 

contained within the universal quantum wavefunction.  This is the basis for the Everett-

DeWitt many-worlds theory of the functioning of reality, which says that all the possibilities 

within the universal wavefunction do actually happen in different experiential worlds. 

 



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The Quantum Mindnature vision of the functioning of reality, which gives rise to a quantum 

Evo-Devo perspective asserts that whilst all the possibilities for the type of finch beak are 

contained within the universal wavefunction, which one is expressed depends upon the 

environmental conditions that the finches are about to be expressed into, so to speak.  There 

is a „morphic resonance‟ between the implicate finch template about to manifest and the 

possibilities for manifestation such that the most appropriate manifestation for the 

environmental conditions occurs.   

 

This perspective is not only consistent with the current evidence, it also adds completion and 

depth were at the moment there is only detail.  Work on the actual mechanism underlying the 

phenomenon of the morphing finch beak has been carried out by Dr. Cliff Tabin and a team 

of developmental biologists at Harvard Medical School.  The key to the process was found to 

lie within the operation of the BMP4 (bone morphogenetic protein number 4) gene which 

signals for the production of the BMP4 protein.  This gene turns out to be remarkably 

multitalented as it also coordinates the development of the embryo. 

 

 

   

                             Fig 10 

In order to verify the significance of the BMP4 gene in the morphology of beaks the 

researchers artificially increased the production of BMP4 in chicken embryos and the beaks 

of the chicks became wider and more robust.  Researchers also found that a different gene 

was responsible for the expression of another protein, calmodulin, which resulted in long 

probing beaks.  So the operations of just two genes, which coordinate the expression to the 

amounts of two different proteins, appear to control the morphology of beaks.  This leads to 

significant insights.  New morphic forms can arise through the subtle operation of existing 

genes.  It appears as if there is an overall template for a finch, for instance, which could be 

conceived of as being of the form of a Sheldrakian „morphogenetic field‟, which is then 

tweaked in its expression by the detailed operation of the genes underlying the template.  

Viewed from the perspective of Zurek‟s quantum Darwinism, it becomes clear that both the 

morphogenetic template field of the finch and the information which determines the actual 

expression of the details of the template, the exact form of the beak for instance, must reside 

in a quantum information field.  This is clearly homologous to Bohm‟s notion of the 



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implicate order.  This is a dramatic insight bringing together crucial insights from cutting 

edge quantum theory and evolutionary biology, and we can only expect exciting 

developments are close at hand within this field. 

 

What is quite clear from the evidence so far, however, is that the materialistic notion of 

gradual step by step random mutation which is promulgated with pugilistic fervor by Richard 

Dawkins and others turn out to be completely false.  The only reasonable picture that can be 

drawn in the light of all the evidence available clearly points to the „emergence‟ of the 

subjective perceiving aspect of the overall quantum process, together with the objective 

environmental container (the terms „container‟ and „contained‟ are used within Buddhist 

philosophy), in co-dependence on the overall interconnected field conditions.  Such a co-

ordinated co-arising through levels of quantum resonance is completely consonant with 

quantum non-locality.  I hope that John Wheeler would have approved of my appropriation 

of his famous graphic image in figure 11 which illustrates this viewpoint. 

 

It has been suggested by some Evo-Devo enthusiasts that the emerging perspective clearly 

shows that some form of subtle teleology is clearly indicated within the process of reality.  

The form of this teleology, however, has yet to be explicated. The Quantum Mindnature 

perspective, with its assertion of the minimalist teleology of a self-perceiving function within 

the quantum ground of reality, as is clearly indicated by the phenomenon of the collapse of 

the wavefunction, provides exactly the form of teleology that is required to explain the 

developmental evolution at all levels, even that of the cosmos itself.  Also, quite clearly this 

perspective completely elucidates the nature of the „goldilocks enigma‟ of the anthropic fine-

tuning of the universe. 

 

 

Fig 11 



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Another „iconic‟ Darwinian phenomenon is that of the African fish called cichlids which 

have evolved into such a huge diversity of species that they have become one of the best 

known evolutionary radiations. The cichlids have evolved into a dramatic diversity of 

different shapes and sizes, with a variety of jaw types which are adapted for different kinds 

of foods.  Research has shown that exactly the same process operates in this case as in the 

case of Darwin‟s finches.  All of the different types of cichlid have the same gene profile but 

the astonishing diversity is produced by the expression of the basic gene profile into different 

forms according to the environmental opportunities.  It seems that the same template will be 

expressed in any form which will fit into an environmental niche.  This is exactly what one 

would expect of a creative self-perceiving universe which operates in order to maximize the 

number of perceiving organisms, of all possible types, according to the possibilities offered 

by the surrounding environments. This process, however, is not one in which the 

environment is fixed and given but, as we have seen previously, it is a process of 

interdependent co-origination between perceiving organisms and their environment.  

 

 
 

A simple analogy that Dawkins offers in order to illustrate the „sieving‟ process of the 

environment which he considers to be fundamental to „natural selection‟ is that of a hole 

which is able to sort balls into those bigger than it and those smaller: 

the result of one sieving process are fed into a subsequent sieving, which is fed into 

…, and so on.
60

 

The random jiggling of the sea of endless possibility, thrown up by the chance workings of 

completely non-conscious, non-intentional molecular interactions is ordered, in small gradual 

steps, by the taming influence of the natural sieve (fig 12). 

 



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                                                   Fig 12 Dawkins‟ Balls 

 

This picture, however, has one small, but vastly significant mistake.  Where does the sieve 

come from?   In the example of the balls and the hole, for instance, the hole is external to the 

random system of balls waiting to be ordered.  The theory of evolution, if it is to claim an 

ultimate significance, should be self-contained, that is to say it should apply to the universe 

as a whole, without recourse to external agencies.  This is, after all, exactly the kind of 

metaphysical requirement that Dawkins appeals to in his refutation of the notion of a creator 

God. And the fact that Dawkins does consider his vision to have ultimate metaphysical 

relevance is clearly apparent; he tells us, for instance, that: 

Darwinism is true, not just on this planet but all over the universe wherever life 

may be found.
61

   

The sieve, therefore, must be internal to and generated by the evolutionary process itself.  

The only other alternative is that the sieve is already in place, expectantly waiting for 

emergent life to make a bid for survival so to speak.  

 

The only metaphysically viable possibility is that the sieve is generated by the very process 

which Dawkins is trying to explain by means of the sieve; which means that the sieve must 

be itself generated by its own process of sieving!  This might seem like a tall order, but in 

fact it is easily elucidated in the quantum Mindnature Evo-Devo perspective.   

 

The environment, which arises interdependently through the quantum Evo-Devo 

evolutionary process, is relatively stable in relation to the flexibility of perceiving organisms; 

this is indicated by figure 13.  In this image we can see that the kind of evolutionary sieve 

that Dawkins requires can be generated by the evolutionary process itself. 

 

The process of a self-resonating, self-manifesting process of evolution which is depicted in 

fig 13 is a beautiful example of a process of dependent origination; both aspects, subjective 

and objective, of the manifestation arise in dependence upon the other.  Indeed, as we have 

seen, Darwin himself was not unfamiliar with the notion of a co-dependent aspect within the 

process of evolution.  

 



DNA Decipher Journal | March 2011 | Vol. 1 | Issue 2 | pp. 258-297  

Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
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 291 

 

                                                                  Fig 13 

 

At the end of his recent reworking of his controversial 1981 book A New Science of Life  

Rupert Sheldrake writes that: 

The hypothesis of formative causation is a testable hypothesis about objectively 

observable regularities of nature.  It cannot explain the origination of new forms 

and new patterns of behaviour, nor can it explain subjective experience.  Such 

explanations can be given only by theories of reality more far-reaching than those 

of natural science, in other words by metaphysical theories.
62

 

If the formative causation hypothesis was to be shown to be correct by experimentation and 

observation, Sheldrake goes on to say, this would not mean that the materialist-mechanistic 

worldview would necessarily be shown to be invalid, it would, however, have to compete 

with other metaphysical theories.  In this section we shall briefly examine how the Quantum 

Mindnature metaphysical perspective constitutes a precise and coherent account of how 

formative causation would naturally emerge from the internal perceiving operations at the 

quantum level. 

 



DNA Decipher Journal | March 2011 | Vol. 1 | Issue 2 | pp. 258-297  

Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
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www.dnadecipher.com 

 

 292 

The following brief outline of Sheldrake‟s proposal is based on his own summary in A New 

Science of Life.  He suggests the existence of morphogenetic fields which are responsible for 

molding the physical stuff of reality into the forms that is adopts.  Morphogenetic fields 

provide: 

…further type of causation … responsible for the forms of all material 

morphogenetic units (sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, crystals, quasi-

crystalline aggregates, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms).  Form, in the 

sense used here, includes not only the shape of the outer surface of the 

morphogenetic unit but also its internal structure.
63

 

The morphogenetic field which moulds any particular morphogenetic unit provides a „virtual 

form‟ which directs, through some natural mechanism (the inverse quantum Zeno effect) the 

way in which the physical „stuff‟ is organized.  Inorganic morphogenesis is rapid but organic 

morphogenesis takes place through a hierarchy of levels (akin to Bohm‟s nested implicate 

orders) of developmental pathways, each pathway is called a „chreode‟. Thus the 

development of an organism takes place through the operation of a succession of nested 

morphogenetic fields.  Morphogenetic fields are established over time through a process of 

„morphogenetic resonance‟ which depends on „patterns and structures of vibration‟
64

  Once 

the morphogenetic structure is established there is a continued action of morphogenetic 

resonance which stabilizes the unit and, furthermore, the stability of the morphogenetic field 

itself depends on the repeated manifestation of the morphogenetic unit it gives rise to, so 

there is an interdependent relationship between the morphogenetic field and its 

morphogenetic unit.  This means that „phenomena become more probable the more often 

they occur.‟
65

 

 

The isomorphism between Sheldrake‟s notion of morphogenetic fields and the probabilistic 

quantum wavefunction is quite clear: 

…morphogenetic fields are not precisely defined but are probability structures 

that depend on the statistical distribution of previous similar forms.  The 

probability distributions of electronic orbitals described by solutions of the 

Schrödinger equation are examples of such probability structures, and are similar 

in kind to the probability structures of the morphogenetic fields of morphogenetic 

units at higher levels.
66

 

Morphogenetic fields, then, are exactly the kind of quantum probability fields which would 

be created or built up by the kind of processes involved in the quantum Mindnature 

perspective. The close connection between the formative causation hypothesis and the 

quantum Mindnature perspective resides in the fact that it is the quantum process of repeated 

perception or activation at the quantum level that builds up the probability structures within 

wavefunctions; it is this internal quantum process, therefore, that creates morphogenetic 

fields.  In other words morphogenetic fields can be considered to be classical level 

expressions of thee deep operations of the quantum level of consciousness. 

 

As we have seen the manifestation of the dualistic realm of experience takes place through a 

hierarchy of quantum levels, beginning with the merest spontaneous movement of the 

ground consciousness towards the activity of perception.  This movement of universal 

intentionality, which is a naturally innate function of universal „empty‟ consciousness, has 

the effect of activating, and thereby strengthening the latencies of, potentialities within the 



DNA Decipher Journal | March 2011 | Vol. 1 | Issue 2 | pp. 258-297  

Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
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 293 

ground of reality. Once the process has began the quantum process of manifestation cascades 

through increasingly more complex levels of manifestation. 

 

Sheldrake himself says that the hypothesis of formative causation itself does not explain the 

genesis of the cascade of the manifestation of the evolutionary process; it only describes the 

mechanisms involved once the process gets going:   

The action of the morphogenetic field of a morphogenetic unit on the 

morphogenetic fields of its parts, which are morphogenetic units at lower levels, 

can be thought of in terms of the influence of this higher level probability 

structure on lower level probability structures; the higher-level field modifies the 

probability structures of the lower-level fields.
67

  

This process of higher-level fields controlling and modifying lower-level fields is, Sheldrake 

tells us, illustrated by the way in which molecules modify the fields of the atoms which make 

it up.  The hierarchical morphogenetic field control mechanism underlies important 

biological phenomena such as protein folding.  Furthermore the inverse Zeno effect which is 

involved in the operation of enzymes is exactly such a quantum phenomenon that seems to 

control a „classical‟ level manifestation. 

 

The evidence which has been claimed for the formative causation hypothesis is controversial 

and is generally discounted by mainstream workers in the field.  And, because the power of 

the dominance of the materialist worldview is still overwhelming (which itself is surely an 

example of „the presence of the past!‟) the kind of evidence required in order to convince 

skeptics would have to be irresistible.  This is because there seems to be a deeply ingrained 

antagonistic prejudice towards theories which threaten materialistic approaches to 

understanding the process of reality. 

 

The approach adopted within the quantum Mindnature perspective in challenging the 

mechanistic-materialist worldview begins from a significantly different point because it takes 

the quantum evidence as it is now as the ground for developing a metaphysical overview, an 

overview which precisely coheres with all significant current quantum perspectives.  As this 

work shows the breadth, scope and depth of the overarching and detailed metaphysical 

perspective is so dramatic that it is difficult to conceive of an alternative metaphysical 

perspective bringing together diverse areas of discourse together in such a detailed and 

precise manner.   It was not anticipated at the outset, for instance, that the natural 

evolutionary development of the quantum Mindnature perspective itself would account for 

the process of evolution as well as otherwise unexplained phenomena within the field of 

evolutionary development.  And one of the significant implications of this perspective is that 

something akin to formative causation must be operating at, and through, the quantum level. 

 

Sheldrake identifies four possible metaphysical theories which count account for the 

formative causation hypothesis: 

 

Modified Materialism: is definitely not a feature of the quantum Mindnature perspective.  It 

is actually difficult to see how any kind of materialism can account for morphogenetic fields 

which are non-local.  Quantum phenomena are, of course, non-local, but quantum 

phenomena are not „material‟ in the manner in which „classical‟ materialism conceives of 

„matter.‟  As Stapp says there is „no room‟ for „classical matter in a quantum universe. 



DNA Decipher Journal | March 2011 | Vol. 1 | Issue 2 | pp. 258-297  

Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
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 294 

The conscious self:  According to Sheldrake: 

The conscious self can be thought as not interacting with a machine, but with 

morphogenetic fields.  These morphogenetic fields are associated with the body 

and depend on its physical and chemical states.  But the self is neither the same as 

the morphogenetic field, nor does its experience simply parallel the changes 

brought about within the brain by energetic and formative causation.  It „enters 

into‟ the morphogenetic fields, but it remains over and above them.
68

 

The suggestion which Sheldrake makes for how the „self‟ can influence the physical body 

closely parallels Michael Mensky‟s viewpoint proposed in the Extended Everett Concept 

paper and it also incorporates elements of Stapp: 

…how does [the self] act upon the external world through morphogenetic fields?  

There are two ways in which it could do so: first, by selecting between different 

possible morphogenetic fields, causing one course of action rather than another; 

and second, by serving as the creative agency through which new morphogenetic 

fields come into being … In both cases it would act like a formative cause, but 

one that is, within limits, free and undetermined from the point of view of 

physical causation.  It could indeed be thought of as the formative cause of 

causes.
69

 

The creative universe: Sheldrake‟s version of the creative universe is based upon Henri 

Bergson‟s proposal of the élan vital, a vital spark at the core of reality driving the process of 

manifestation and evolution.  The translation that Sheldrake makes of Bergson‟s term is 

„vital impetus‟, and quite clearly this perspective is completely in accord with the view 

developed within this work that the ground of reality has as an innate function of its own 

nature the mere requirement of perception of its own potentialities.   The drive towards 

perception is exactly the élan vital driving the process of reality. 

 

As Sheldrake indicates this metaphysical viewpoint implies a hierarchy of levels of 

individuated consciousnesses: 

Such creative agencies could give rise to new morphogenetic fields by a kind of 

causation very similar to … conscious causation … In fact, if such creative 

agencies are admitted at all, then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they 

must in some sense be conscious selves.
70

 

According to Sheldrake such a viewpoint cannot account for how or why the universal 

process got underway in the first place and does not provide a „goal‟ for the process.  

However, the metaphysical perspective proposed by the Quantum Mindnature Universe, 

which is based on the evidence of quantum theory, supplies the explanation of both genesis 

and „goal‟, although the goal is not achieved once and for all time but is, rather, a continuous 

process, by the same simple and natural observation: there is at the heart of the universal 

consciousness an inner pressure towards perception of the latent potentialities of the „empty‟ 

ground of reality.  This pressure towards perception is evidenced in the ‟collapse of the 

wavefunction‟.   As Sheldrake points out this perspective does not imply any independent 

„transcendent‟ creator.  The creative force is simply an innate aspect of the universal process 

of reality. 



DNA Decipher Journal | March 2011 | Vol. 1 | Issue 2 | pp. 258-297  

Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

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 295 

Transcendent reality: The notion of a transcendent creative agency is fraught with 

difficulty because of the different ways in which the term „transcendent‟ may be understood.  

Some presentations of this position leave the detailed delineation of the metaphysical 

structure of the „transcendence‟ being claimed conveniently ambiguous so that various 

dubious claims can be implied. 

 

The significant issue is whether the creative agency conceived of is asserted to be 

substantially and effectively independent of the realm of manifestation that it is supposed to 

be creator of.  This is the position of most fundamentalist Christian beliefs which picture an 

independent God fashioning a separate domain for his created creatures, giving them a set of 

laws to follow and then stepping back to survey the disastrous results.  For Buddhist 

philosophy such a simplistic picture is simply logically incoherent.  If the supposedly 

„creative‟ agency were to be completely independent and separate of the creation, which is to 

say an absolutely and irrevocably different and separate nature, then it could not have any 

creative relationship with something that it is totally separate and independent of.  

 

The kind of „transcendence‟ which is incorporated into the quantum Mindnature perspective 

is the subtle Advaita (non-dual) metaphysical structure which asserts that there is an 

ultimately non-dual creative process of reality that creates a vast illusion of dualistic 

experience.  From this perspective there is not so much a „creation‟ as a continuous process 

of creating on the part of the non-dual creative ground.  The details of this perspective, as 

shown in this work, are remarkably subtle; one of the subtleties being the fact that the 

sentient being caught up in the dualistic play of illusion are themselves agents of the creative 

force. 

If we construe the phrase „transcendent conscious being‟ in following passage as referring to 

the non-dual creative aspect of an interdependent and interconnected process of reality, 

Sheldrake‟s characterization of the notion of transcendent reality comfortably applies to the 

quantum Mindnature universe: 

If this transcendent conscious being were the source of the universe and 

everything within it, all created things would in some sense participate in its 

nature.  The more or less limited „wholeness‟ of organisations at all levels of 

complexity could then be seen as a reflection of the transcendent unity on which 

they depended, and from which they are ultimately derived.
71

 

Such a view precisely applies to the metaphysical position developed in detail within this 

work.  The illusory and limited sense of selfhood that is part of the dualistic experience of 

non-enlightened sentient beings is precisely a reflection and embodiment of the unity of non-

dual creative source and, furthermore, the change of state from the unenlightened perspective 

to an enlightened perspective is itself an illusion though which the illusion of separation 

dissolves. 

 

This subtle Advaita metaphysics of a transcendent and immanent reality embraces and 

includes the previous two positions of „conscious selves‟ (although they are ultimately 

illusory) and the „creative universe‟: 

…this fourth metaphysical position affirms the causal efficacy of the conscious 

self, and the existence of a hierarchy of creative agencies immanent within nature, 

and the reality of a transcendent source of the universe.
72

 



DNA Decipher Journal | March 2011 | Vol. 1 | Issue 2 | pp. 258-297  

Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

www.dnadecipher.com 

 

 296 

The Quantum Mindnature metaphysical perspective developed in this work on the basis of all 

the currently available quantum evidence and interpretations provides exactly such a 

metaphysical perspective which elucidates and explains how the mechanisms of formative 

causation would be produced through the epiontic operations of the quantum levels of the 

universal ground consciousness which is the quantum Mindnature Matrix of the Universe. 

                                                      

1 Endless Forms p5 
2 Blind Watchmaker 
3 Dennett – Darwin‟s Dangerous Idea  p27 
4 Extended Phenotype p5 
5 Endless Forms p72 
6 Endless Forms p9 
7 Reweaving the Rainbow p213 
8  Endless Forms p54 
9 P72 
10 P72 
11 P61 
12 P64 
13 P65 
14 P69 
15 P70 
16 P208 
17 P290 
18 Foster P. L. (1993) „Adaptive Mutation: The Uses of Adversity‟ in Annual Review of Microbiology Vol 47 p467-504 
19 Conway Morris p148 
20 New York Review of Books 
21 Dawkins, Richard (2006).  Unweaving the Rainbow p50 
22 Quantum Evolution - Mcfadden 
23 Das Wesen der Materie” (The Nature of Matter), speech at Florence, Italy, 1944 (from Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-

Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797) 
24 Schrödinger, E. (1944) p121. 
25 Interview with – in What Is Enlightenment. 
26 See The Grand Design p140 
27 See The Grand Design p140 
28 Barrow, John D., Davies, Paul C. W., Harper, Charles L. (eds) (2004) p577 – Wheeler, J A (1999) „Information, physics, 

quantum: the search for links.‟ In Feynman and Computation: Exploring the Limits of Computers, ed A. J. G. Hey, p309 

(314). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. 
29 Wheeler quoted in Barrow, John D., Davies, Paul C. W., Harper, Charles L. (eds) (2004) p73 – Freeman J. Dyson: 

„Thought-experiments in honor of John Archibald Wheeler.‟ 
30 Woolfson, Adrian (2000) p74 
31 Barrow, D. John & Tipler, Frank J. (1986) p105 
32 Woolfson, Adrian (2000) p76 
33 Life Ascending p252 
34

 The Observer (January 25th, 1931) 
35 Decoherence and the Transition from Quantum to Classical – Revisited p4 
36  Life Ascending p247 
37 Schwartz, Jeffrey M. & Sharon Begley (2003) p369 
38 Stapp, Henry (2007) p139 
39 Life Ascending p240 
40 Essential Bohm p102 
41 Matrix of Mystery p52 
42 Essential Bohm p180 
43 Matrix of Mystery p51 
44 Essential Bohm p180 
45 EB p103 
46 Matrix of Mystery p51 
47 Barrow, John D., Davies, Paul C. W., Harper, Charles L. (eds) (2004) p136 – Wojciech H. Zurek: „Quantum Darwinism 
and envariance.‟ 
48 Rosenblum, Bruce and Kuttner, Fred (2006) p179 



DNA Decipher Journal | March 2011 | Vol. 1 | Issue 2 | pp. 258-297  

Smetham, G. P., Quantum Evo-Devo Universe: Quantum Evolution and the Evidence of Evolutionary-Developmental Biology 

 

ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 
Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 

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 297 

                                                                                                                                                                     

49 Mensky, Michael: „Reality in quantum mechanics, Extended Everett Concept, and Consciousness‟ p6 
50 Jung, C.G.(1977) p538 
51 Creative Evolution p113 
52 Life‟s Solution p242 
53 Endless Forms p176 

54 Nagy in American Zoologist 
55 A New Science of Life p136 
56 A New Science of Life p104 
57 http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Duckbilled_Platypus/ 
58 Darwin, Charles (1859) 
59 Jonathan Wells and Darwin‟s Finches. 
60 Dawkins, Richard (2006) The Blind Watchmaker p45 
61 Dawkins, Richard (2006).  The Blind Watchmaker 
62 NSOL p237 
63 NSOL p143 
64 NSOL p144 
65 NSOL – Back cover blurb 
66 NSOL p145 
67 NSOL p105 
68 NSOL p240 
69 NSOL p241 
70 NSOL p243 
71 NSOL p244 
72 NSOL p244 


