As Sri Aurobindo tells us spiritual (invisible) evolution will never entirely match contemporary scientific narratives (visible) of the same phenomena because “ a theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical evolution: it must stand on its inherent justification (LD 835) and because all good scientist “must only trace things back as far as material causes allow” (M. 1915). The evolution of soul, less its rebirth can be verified by a discipline that relies on empirical measurement as its method.

Historically, science has made a distinction between what Galileo first referred to as primary qualities and what he called secondary qualities. Galilean science has followed on this premise. Primary qualities are those independent of an observer. They are objective and are of solidity, spatial extension, motion, number, and figure. Primary qualities are said to be facts “in themselves” and are independent of a subjective apprehension of them. Secondary qualities are those that produce sensations in a subject. Secondary qualities include color, taste, smell, and sound. If we could refer to primary qualities as the machinery of nature, secondary qualities could be referred to as the machinery of subjectivity.

Secondary qualities in themselves can not be measured. At best subjective sensations can be correlated with physiological or behavioral responses. The affect of sensations on the consciousness of the subject has only begun to be studied using scientific inquiry. Cognitive science is one branch of science that would study the affect of sensations on a human subject. To study sensations however, still requires that they first be converted in terms of primary qualities to produce data that can be measured. For example, sound would be studied in terms of those algorithmic processes within the ear that convert sonic energy to mechanical energy to nerve impulse to neuronal firing in the brain. These measurements can then be quantified in terms of data. But to gather any idea of the feelings that the sensations invoke in the subject, the affect of the sensation, one would have to rely on her self-report. Sensation itself can never be decoupled from a subject.

If science has only begun to scrutinize secondary sensations it is not likely that in the near future it will seriously entertain research into what maybe called 3^rd order experience. That is experiences not associated with an object or even a sensation but, with an ineffable eidetic field that requires an organ of perception veiled to the five senses that are the focal point of a liberal education. Science knows little if anything of these things now and when it does study them it calls them paranormal phenomena or extra-sensory perception. It does not appear that at any time soon an attempt to synthesize scientific (visible) and spiritual (invisible) accounts of evolution will bear fruit. However, if we honor the tension of the encounter between the visible and invisible without reducing either in terms of one or the other, some interesting results may emerge.

The chapter of the Life Divine entitled Man in the Evolution, is one of the last ones rewritten by Sri Aurobindo and as such demonstrates some of his final thoughts on human evolution. In this chapter he weaves a fascinating web of complex associations of those cybernetic processes governing the dialectics of spirit and matter.

“This terrestrial evolutionary working of Nature from Matter to Mind and beyond it has a double process: there is an outward visible process of physical evolution with birth as its machinery, -- for each evolved form of body housing its own evolved power of consciousness is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is, at the same time, an invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into ascending grades of form and consciousness as Its machinery”.  (Aurobindo 1949 p825)

Sri Aurobindo challenges those Darwinian narratives of evolution that constraint it within linear pathways of causality, the arrow of progress and time pointing forever forward., or as he puts it, a one way transmission of heredity by selection. His own description suggests the non-linearity of evolutionary processes comprised by the forces of the seen and unseen. He doubts gradualist narratives of the evolution of species, or of one species following another neatly in an evolutionary series. The only neat succession of evolutionary appearances he seems to admit are at the macro-level from matter to life to mind. Ultimately, Sri Aurobindo posits two different ways human evolution could have happened:

There are here two possibilities; either there was the sudden appearance of a human body and consciousness in the earth-nature, an abrupt creation or independent automatic manifestation of reasoning mentality in the material world intervening upon a previous similar manifestation of subconscious life-forms and of living conscious bodies in Matter, or else there was an evolution of humanity out of animal being, slow perhaps in its preparation and in its stages of development, but with strong leaps of change at the decisive points of the transition.

Its hard to imagine a sudden appearance of a human body and consciousness on the earth, as an “abrupt creation” unless perhaps if our origins are extra-terrestrial. If we could not imagine that scenario then Sri Aurobindo would have us accept an evolution of humanity emerging from animality. Sri Aurobindo develops this narrative and references sources from Indian mythology and spirituality such as the Vishnu Purana, Tantra and Upanishads as supporting the theory that animal forms preceded human ones.

He also debates various morphological theories of how the human may have descended, considering both the proto-human as a unique non ape-like species as well as our descent from an ancestry of primates He seems finally to support a view consistent with the following:

“If the appearance in animal being of a type similar in some respects to the ape-kind but already from the beginning endowed with the elements of humanity was the method of the human evolution, the appearance in the human being of a spiritual type resembling mental-animal humanity but already with the stamp of the spiritual aspiration on it would be the obvious method of Nature for the evolutionary production of the spiritual and supramental being. “

But he decries linearity, a gradualist serialization of species and references forces other than hereditary variation as playing an important role in evolution:

“but all this need not mean that the types developed one from another in an evolutionary series. Other forces than hereditary variation have been at work in bringing about the appearance of new characteristics; there are physical forces such as food, light-rays and others that we are only beginning to know, there are surely others which we do not yet know; there are at work invisible life-forces and obscure psychological forces.  For these subtler powers have to be admitted even in the physical evolutionary theory to account for natural selection;” 

Although Sri Aurobindo is referring to these subtle forces as invisible, we should also recall one of the three laws of the future that Arthur C. Clark's has defined, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. This law is so ingrained in us, now that we can fly the globe or surf the web, that Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law cynically puts it, "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." or even more to the point Marge Simpson states "We can do anything now that scientists have invented magic,"

We are now able to parse matter almost magically to a degree that would have surpassed the understanding of Sri Aurobindo's age. His work was written before the discovery of the dna molecule. One does not really know how he would assess the biological sciences today. For instance, how would he conceive of evolution in light of genomics and bioinformatics? How would he assess the discovery of the cybernetic process that now govern bio-chemistry? How would he apprehend a paradigm of life not in vitalistic terms but in terms of information? Would he regard the application of precise cybernetic principles to biology as making visible the invisible life forces he was referring to when he wrote the above passage, in the early 1940s, when Shannon, Von Neumann, Wiener and others were just defining the new paradigm of information (cybernetics)?

Given his emphasis on the incarnation of the spirit into flesh, of soul into matter, of the divinization of cells, would he privilege information over embodiment as does the science of cybernetics? Whatever suspicions he may have held regards the cybernetic paradigm that governs our current biological understanding, is its possible that the networks of bio-technology that have exponentially arisen since the 1940s, have advanced in such a way as to have converted what he would have considered occult knowledge back then into what we view today as natural processes, that have become transparent to us through our senses extended in technology?

And what about our psychological condition? The working of the mind has undoubtedly also become more transparent to science since the time that Sri Aurobindo penned the above passage. At the time of Sri Aurobindo's passing the science of mind was still prescribing such savage procedures as lobotomy for curative treatment. When Sri Aurobindo was writing there was no brain imaging technology. Whereas our minds can be now be made visible through images that correlate psychological phenomena to physiological brain states.

So how he would he view recent developments in the biological and cognitive sciences? Would he have viewed the ability to make transparent those unseen evolutionary forces by the extension of our sense in technology as a process of occult revelation?

“if the occult or subconscious energy in some types answers to the need of the environment, in others remains unresponsive and unable to survive, this is clearly the sign of a varying life-energy and psychology, of a consciousness and a force other than the physical at work making for variation in Nature. The problem of the method of operation is still too full of obscure and unknown factors for any present possible structure of theory to be definitive.  “(832)

But while keeping in mind his rejection of eugenics in his 1915 essay on Evolution Sri Aurobindo does seem to have enough foresight into history as to extrapolate from what he knew already about bio-technology the possibility that human biological/spiritual evolution may preceded through the intervention of its own sciences; in other words that our minds may operate upon biology to produce new genetic mutations in organisms: “It has been noted that the human mind has already shown a capacity to aid Nature in the evolution of new types of plant and animal: it as created new forms of environment, developed by knowledge and considerable changes in its mentality. It is not an impossibility that man should aid nature consciously also in its own physical and spiritual evolution and transformation.” (844)

But is it possible that science will develop explanations that are consistent with spiritual narratives? Like most scientist today Sri Aurobindo does seems rather skeptical that a linkage can be made between the dialectic of spirit and matter of internal (karma/rebirth) and external (matter/spirit) in a scientific theory. It is quite possible the twain of metaphysics/physics may never met:

“A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is not indispensable. “

Aware of what science does he would know that most theories if they are truly scientific eventually grow old and die to be reborn as still other theories:

“The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the detail of Nature's execution, with the physical development of things in Matter and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery,”

In the course of this passage he switches back to a focus on inner spiritual evolution and when he does this his metaphors oddly mirror those of the self-organization processes referred to in complexity theory. In Sri Aurobindo the organization of form charts a trajectory along a graduated scale of increasingly complex orders of being. He continues:

 “but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul's manifestation in material existence. In its outward aspects this is what the theory of evolution comes to, -- there is in the scale of terrestrial existence a development of forms, of bodies, a progressively complex and competent organization of Matter, of Life in Matter, of Consciousness in living Matter; in this scale, the better organized the form, the more it is capable of housing a better organized, a more complex and capable, a more developed or evolved Life and Consciousness. 

While he does not discount some claims made by Neo-Darwinians he does not entirely reject Lamarckian evolution, which is not surprising for Lamarck also charts an evolution according to a ascending scale of ever more complex organisms. He also departs from justifying his theory of evolution  by appeal to scientific empirical proofs “exact genealogy” in favor of logical demonstration of truth claims that reference “a developing plan” .

Once the evolutionary hypothesis is put forward and the facts supporting it are marshaled, this aspect of the terrestrial existence becomes so striking as to appear indisputable. The precise machinery by which this is done or the exact genealogy or chronological succession of types of being is a secondary, though in itself an interesting and important question; the development of one form of life out of a precedent less evolved form, natural selection, the struggle for life, the survival of acquired characteristics may or may not be accepted, but the fact of a successive creation with a developing plan in it is the one conclusion which is of primary consequence.

Evolution commences when the spirit enters into matter, so begins “nature's yoga”

“At first she houses herself in forms of Matter which appear to be altogether unconscious, then struggles towards mentality in the guise of living Matter and attains to it imperfectly in the conscious animal. This consciousness is at first rudimentary, mostly a half subconscious or just conscious instinct; it develops slowly till in more organized forms of living Matter it reaches its climax of intelligence and exceeds itself in Man, the thinking animal who develops into the reasoning mental being “ (825)

As this passage continues instead of a theory of Intelligent Design, he posits Real-Idea: 

“if it be asked, how then did all these various gradations and types of being come into existence, it can be answered that, fundamentally, they were manifested in Matter by the Consciousness-Force in it, by the power of the Real-Idea building its own significant forms and types for the indwelling Spirit's cosmic existence”

He then adds that due to its complexity this process does not necessarily lend itself to measurement, although it may become transparent by similarity. The process he adds is also non-linear:

 “the practical or physical method might vary considerably in different grades or stages, although a basic similarity of line may be visible; the creative Power might use not one but many processes or set many forces to act together.”

He then describes the very complex operations by which Real-Idea works in Matter :

“In Matter the process is a creation of infinitesimals charged with an immense energy, their association by design and number, the manifestation of larger infinitesimals on that primary basis, the grouping and association of these together to found the appearance of sensible objects, earth, water, minerals, metals, the whole material kingdom. “

The manner in which matter self-organizes into more complex forms in an odd way seems to anticipate contemporary narratives of some scientist at the Santa Fe Institute who intuit the novel emergence of greater wholes from the organization of increasing magnitudes of complexity in matter. Here is Sri Aurobinodo:

“In Life also the Consciousness-Force begins with infinitesimal forms of vegetable life and infinitesimal animalcules; it creates an original plasm and multiplies it, creates the living cell as a unit, creates other kinds of minute biological apparatus like the seed or the gene, uses always the same method of grouping and association so as to build by a various operation various living organisms....”

Then jumping a bit ahead in the text we learn:

In its outward aspects this is what the theory of evolution comes to, -- there is in the scale of terrestrial existence a development of forms, of bodies, a progressively complex and competent organization of Matter, of Life in Matter, of Consciousness in living Matter; in this scale, the better organized the form, the more it is capable of housing a better organized, a more complex and capable, a more developed or evolved Life and Consciousness. 

Stuart Kauffman’s evolutionary theory is interesting in that instead of reducing nature to processes of natural selection and the particles of physics, he posits the emergence of phenomena from increasing orders of complexity. Unlike scientist such as physicist Steven Weinberg who claim that all explanatory arrows point downward from society to biology to chemistry to physics, Kauffman protest this as an impoverished claim that resist the failure of physicist to reason upward from physical laws to larger scale events in the universe.

By making reference to biological phenomena such as preadaptations -in which an organism uses a preexisting anatomical structure inherited from an ancestor for a potentially unrelated purpose. (an example being the preadaptation of dinosaurs who first developed feathers for their insulation properties and only later used them to assist in flight) Kauffman argues that biology can not be reduced to physics (aka atoms or particles) but rather to selective conditions in the evolution of the organism that can only be explained by emergent properties.

Specifically, emergence refers to the process by which complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions and also to an unpredictable yet definite system which arises from the interactions within a limited and defined space.

In his book Reinventing the Sacred in which he attempts to discredit the methodology of Galilean Science that would reduce nature solely in terms of primary qualities Kauffman argues: “the biosphere is a co-constructing emergent whole that evolves persistently. Organisms and the abiotic world create niches for new organisms, in an ongoing open textured exploration of possible organisms. There is a physical basis of this “open texture” in the non-ergodic universe....

At a still higher level, the human economy cannot be reduced to physics. The way the diversity of the economy has grown from perhaps a hundred to a thousand goods and services fifty thousand years ago to tens of billions of goods and services today, in what I call an expanding economic web, depends on the very structure of that web, how it creates new economic niches for ever new goods and services that drive economic growth. This growth in turn drives the further expansion of the web itself by the persistent invention of still newer goods and services. Like the biosphere, the global economy is a self-consistently co-constructing, ever evolving, emergent whole. All these phenomena are beyond physics and not reducible to it. “(Kauffman 2008 p4)

In short, Kauffman claims biology is emergent with respect to physics, just as life, agency, value, meaning have all emerged from the evolution of the biosphere (Kauffman 2008 p43) In other words biology emerges from physics but can not be explained by it -aka biology can not be reduced to physics- and similarly consciousness emerges from biology but can not be explained by reducing it to biological terms.

While being careful not to confuse scientific explanations with what are essentially spiritually oriented ones the idea of biology emerging from yet, not reducible to physics and consciousness emerging from yet, not reducible to biology, does not conflict with the Vedantic suggestion that begins The Life Divine:

“Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. (Aurobindo 1949 p3)

And when Sri Aurobindo adds:

And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind.”

Kauffman would agree with Sri Aurobindo to the extent that reason itself does not represent the pinnacle of human development and we must go beyond reason if we are truly to find wholeness:

“Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know. The Enlightenment’s reliance on reason is too narrow a view of how we flourish or flounder.” (Kauffman 2008 p.xi)

Some complexity theorist take the emergent view of life to even suggest a creativity in nature that assumes a natural teleology:

Discussions of the origin of life usually assume that there is a specific event, however improbable, by which dead matter became a living entity. Naturalistic accounts, although in seeming opposition to theistic explanations of the apparent design of even the simplest cells, often share the assumption that there is a specific line to be crossed. If the problem is recast as one of a process of emergence of biochemistry from protobiochemistry, which in turn emerged from the organic chemistry and geochemistry of primitive earth, the resources of the new sciences of complex systems dynamics can provide a more robust conceptual framework within which to explore the possible pathways of chemical complexification leading to life. In such a view the emergence of life is the result of deep natural laws (the outlines of which we are only beginning to perceive) and reflects a degree of holism in those systems that led to life. Further, there is the possibility of developing a more general theory of biology and of natural organization from such an approach. The emergence of life may thus be seen as an instance of the broader innate creativity of nature and consistent with a possible natural teleology. 

(http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118495085/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0)

Kauffman further makes the claim that his view of evolutionary emergence will again endow science with meaning: once one gets beyond reductionism, it leads to a radically new scientific world view, which changes our place in the universe as human beings. We are not meaningless chunks of particles spinning around in space. We are organisms with meaning in our lives, and the way the biosphere will evolve is ceaselessly creative. (http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2008/11/19/stuart_kauffman/)

Kauffman however, is still a scientist, and a very respected one at that, whose scientific world view only allows him to seek natural rather than supernatural causes. So although he even uses the word God, his God is a fully natural one and he even makes a distinction between an immanent God within nature and God being nature itself:

“I'm saying God is the sacredness of nature. And you can go a step beyond that. You can say that God is nature. That's the God of Spinoza. That's the God that Einstein believed in. But their view of the universe was deterministic. The new view is that evolution of the universe is partially lawless and ceaselessly creative. We are the children of that creativity. One either does or does not take the step of saying God is the creativity of the universe. I do. Or you say there is divinity in the creativity in the universe....(http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2008/11/19/stuart_kauffman/)

and he concludes his book by stating:

The God we discuss then might be God as the unfolding of Nature itself. We may wish to broaden our sense of God from the creativity in nature to all of nature law governed and partially beyond natural law. Then all unfolding of Nature is God, a fully natural God. And such a natural God is not far from an old idea of God in nature, an immanent god, found in the unfolding of Nature. Whether God is immanent in nature's magnificent unfolding of nature itself in its magnificent unfolding and persistent becoming is God the is an essential difference. We do not need to believe in or have faith in a God as the unfolding of Nature. This God is real. The split between reason and faith is healed.(Kauffman 2008 p288)

Sri Aurobindo's metaphysics are much more complex than Kauffman's.  His view of God has three poises transcendent, cosmic, and immanent. Kauffman would reject the first two poises as supernatural, and would even seem to reject the view of an immanent God; if that God was purely a supernatural one. It is unclear whether Sri Aurobindo's immanent poise of God can be regarded as entirely supernatural. While at times he does seem to resort to narratives in which there is a clear dualism between prakriti (nature) and purusha (soul) he ultimately suggest that matter is secret God. This later view -so long as this Nature is seen also as fully Divine- would seem to partially unite the narratives told by the spiritual sage and complexity scientist. In fact, Sri Aurobindo's term “natures yoga” that imparts to nature a principle of emergence in which it become ever more fully conscious, while not identical to an emergent view of nature whose creativity endows it with a natural teleology, certainly is similar enough to suggest a dialog between the two perspectives may prove fruitful.

The view of evolution that sees the increasing complexity of nature as central to its narrative also raises the question as to whether increasing complexity should be seen in terms of progress. In the next section we will explore ideas of evolution and progress with regards to society, but we will close here with a short examination of how biological evolution relates to progress.

The idea of biological progress itself need not relate to a specific teleological but its an interesting question and one as usual that is disputed by scientist. For example, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould disagreed as to whether we should view the evolution of the brain as progressive or not.

Richard Dawkins notes that on a short evolutionary time scale it can be demonstrated that the brain has over the course of the past three million years grown larger; that is until about fifth thousand years ago when its growth seems to have ceased. But he views the period from three million years ago to fifty thousand years ago as suggesting progress: “It looks, in a general way, as though there are some progressive changes running through this series. Our brain case is nearly twice the size of erectus's; and erectus's brain case, in turn, is about twice the size of that of Australopithecus afarensis.” (Dawkins)

But just how relevant this fact is for valuing biological evolution in terms of progress is made problematic by Stephen Jay Gould who argues that statistically this has little relevance when arguing for directionality in evolution:

Gould 'showed then that apparent trends in the sizes of foraminiferans and the brains of mammals are better viewed as expanding variance with a fixed lower limit of size, rather than as trends of increasing size. Since then others have joined him in refusing to see evolution as steady progress.” (http://www.newscientist.com)

Gould and others suggest that biological evolution results not solely in an increase in complexity but in decreases in complexity as well:

“Gould tells us how Bruce McFadden in 1988 analyzed the history of the horses and found a complex pattern of branching with many reversals of direction. He describes how Dan McShea, in a series of papers since 1992, has found no consistent trend to complexity in the evolution of backbones. He also describes what is perhaps the most telling of these examples— G. Boyajian and T. Lutz's analysis in 1992 of the evolution of ammonite shells. These have sutures that make simple curves in the earliest fossils, but became on average increasingly complex as evolution progressed. Boyajian and Lutz used fractal dimension as an objective measure of complexity, and compared ancestors with their identified descendants. Rather than a general trend to increased complexity, they found a tangled web of lines in which complexity decreased as often as it rose, with simple-sutured shells present throughout. If the starting point is the simplest possible structure, evolution will result in increasing mean complexity even if lines of descent are random walks.                   (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15220504.900-review--the-game-of-life.html)  

If increasing complexity can be equated with progress than Gould's account of its increases and decreases or advance and reversals seem comparable to Sri Aurobindo's accounts of human progress in which:

"It may be conceded that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature-movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending, -- there has been no straight line of progress" (LD 841)

Of course biological progress and the emergence of complex social systems from biology are two different phenomena and in the next section the question will be poses as to whether the evolution of human societies should be viewed as progressive.