Based on a comprehensive review of human and societal evolution the book
develops an approach to conscious, self-guided evolution.
In the course of the evolutionary journey of our species, there have
been three seminal events. The first happened some seven million yeas
ago, when our humanoid ancestors entered on the evolutionary scene.
Their journey toward the second crucial event lasted over six million
years when - as the greatest event of our evolutionary history - homo
sapiens sapiens, started the revolutionary process of cultural
evolution. Today, we have arrived at the threshold of the third major
event, `the revolution of conscious evolution, ' when it becomes our
responsibility to enter into the evolutionary design space and guide the
evolutionary journey of our species.
The book tells the story of the first six million years of the journey
in just enough detail to understand how evolution had worked in times
when it was primarily biological, driven by natural selection. With the
human revolution some fifty thousand years ago, with the emergence of
self-reflective consciousness, the evolutionary process transformed from
biological into cultural. From this point on, the book follows the
journey with detailed attention, in order to learn how cultural
evolution works. The book is organized in three parts. Part One
commences with an exposition of a brief history of the evolutionary idea
through time with a focus on a review of the science of general
evolution and specifically social and societal evolution. Next, the book
unfolds the `evolutionary story' of our species from the time when the
first humanoids entered the evolutionary scene to our current era. Part
Two develops a systems view of evolution, explores the ways and means of
how evolution works, characterizes evolutionary consciousness and
develops the idea of conscious evolution. Part Three builds upon the
knowledge developed in the first two parts and sets forth the key
conditions of conscious, self-guided evolution, elaborating the core
condition, which is the acquisition of evolutionary competence through
evolutionary learning. The focus of this part is on an approach to the
design of evolutionary guidance systems that our families,
neighborhoods, communities, organizations, social and societal systems
can use to design the future they aspire to attain.
The work is set aside from other statements in three important ways. It
provides: (1) a comprehensive review of how evolution has worked with a
focus on socio-cultural evolution, (2) an explanation of evolutionary
consciousness and the conditions of engaging in conscious evolution, and
(3) most significantly, it develops a detailed approach and a
methodology to the design of evolutionary guidance systems