Deepak Chopra – Consciousness Drives Evolution
When Darwin wrote his theory of origin of species, he had no knowledge of DNA or genetics. He had no idea that such a discipline as epigenetics would come, which has only come in the last decade or so. He had no idea of how genes get activated, or expressed, or regulated. So, yes, random mutations was a good theory coupled to natural selection.
If you talk to evolutionary biologists today, not all of because 99 percent of them are wedded to the old mechanistic paradigm, but biologists like Dr. Rudy Tanzi, with whom I’m doing a book called Super Brain. He is the Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University. When you talk to him, or other people of his caliber, they say that mutations don’t seem to be random at all, that mutations follow certain probability patterns, and that they have a distribution pattern and they don’t seem to be random. An individual mutation can be unpredictable, but when you look at the multiple mutations, they follow a distribution pattern.
And, of course, natural selection I have no problem with. You know the mutations that dominate get naturally selected for propagation. So, the question is, are mutations random, or they’re just unpredictable on an individual level? But, is there a probability distribution, and is there room even for teleology, which means purpose driven mutation?
Random is a convenient word. If I go to Grand Central Station or Penn Station I see all the people out there. They seem to be moving about randomly. I come every day and I see that, so many people are going to Boston, so many are going to Philadelphia, so many are going to Washington, D.C.
In fact, I could even plot a distribution pattern and create a business plan out of it, Are mutations like that? Can I plot a distribution pattern and say that there’s the evolution of species going on with natural selection, but that evolution of species is driven in a direction of complexity and purpose?
