An evolutionary argument for the spiritual concept of oneness
The first ten chapters of A Short History of the World are about the origin of our planet and life on Earth before mankind.
In Chapter IV, H.G. Wells writes,
“As men began to discover and study the Record of the Rocks this belief gave place to the suspicion that many species had changed and developed slowly through the course of ages, and this again expanded into a belief in what is called Organic Evolution, a belief that all species of life upon earth, animals and vegetables alike, are descended by slow continuous processes of change from some very simple ancestral form of life, some almost structureless living substance, far back in the so-called Azoic seas.”
If all life on Earth is descended from one common ancestor, this might offer scientific support for a concept that recurs in spiritual texts: that all individual life forms somehow participate in One collective life.
Premise 1: All life on Earth came from one common ancestor.
Last universal common ancestor, a.k.a. LUCA, “is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descent.”
An important distinction is that LUCA is not the first life on Earth, but rather the latest ancestor that is related to all currently existing life.
According to a 2016 study, LUCA probably lived 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago in the high-temperature water of deep-sea vents near ocean-floor magma flows.
A 2018 study from the University of Bristol suggests that LUCA is even older, living almost 4.5 billion years ago.
As science progresses, the specifics of LUCA’s existence will probably change, but for our purposes here, we are just concerned with the fact that all life on Earth came from one common ancestor.
Premise 2: Humans share at least some genes with most, if not all, other living creatures on Earth.
From the fact that humans share a common ancestor with plants, fish, reptiles, birds, bacteria, and so on, can we deduce that we still share characteristics with these other classes of living creatures today?
According to a 2018 study, there are 6,331 groups of genes common to all living animals.
In a 2012 article published in Science magazine, Ann Gibbons writes,
“Ever since researchers sequenced the chimp genome in 2005, they have known that humans share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives.”
According to this technically complex 2018 blog post from the Dessimoz Lab for Computational Evolutionary Biology,
“Both humans and arabidopsis have 18.7% of their genome shared with each other.”
Arabidopsis thaliana is a smallflowering plant native to Eurasia and Africa.
Some species (chimpanzees) are more closely related to humans than other species (arabidopsis thaliana), but it seems there are no living creatures of any kind that do not share at least some genes with humans.
Premise 3: Humans feel a kinship with other creatures who are like us.
In Chapter VIII of A Short History, Wells writes,
“This difference between the reptile world and the world of our human minds is one our sympathies seem unable to pass. We cannot conceive in ourselves the swift uncomplicated urgency of a reptile’s instinctive motives, its appetites, fears and hates. We cannot understand them in their simplicity because all our motives are complicated; our’s are balances and resultants and not simple urgencies. But the mammals and birds have self-restraint and consideration for other individuals, a social appeal, a self-control that is, at its lower level, after our own fashion. We can in consequence establish relations with almost all sorts of them. When they suffer they utter cries and make movements that rouse our feelings. We can make understanding pets of them with a mutual recognition. They can be tamed to self-restraint towards us, domesticated and taught.”
Especially interesting is this excerpt from that passage:
“When they suffer they utter cries and make movements that rouse our feelings.”
To extract a more general claim, it seems Wells is saying that creatures who behave “after our own fashion” are able to “rouse our feelings.”
Premise 4: All living creatures are like us, to some extent.
Is it possible the population of creatures whom we might say are “after our own fashion” is actually more inclusive than just monkeys and other mammals?
Trees, for example, drink water and grow like us. Ants organize into colonies and work together like us. Robins bring food to their helpless fledglings like us.
Even reptiles, to whom Wells suggests we cannot relate, have a great deal in common with us—eating, seeking shelter, reproducing.
It is not clear whether these behavioral similarities that we have to other creatures are due to our genetic similarities to them. If we assume behavior is resultant from genetics, then there seems to be a connection.
In any case, the argument proceeds based on the premise that all other living creatures are like us (behaviorally, genetically, or both).
Premise 5: Humans feel a kinship with all living creatures because they are like us.
All living creatures are able to “rouse our feelings” due to their each being like us. We can reach a “mutual recognition” with them, either because we are behaviorally similar, genetically similar, or both behaviorally and genetically similar.
Conclusion: The concept of oneness that recurs in spiritual thought is inspired by the kinship that humans feel with all living creatures because they are similar to us.
In the introduction to this 2020 study (on the nature of oneness experienced by meditators), Lente and Hogan write,
“The idea that the self is inextricably interrelated to the rest of the world or that everything is part of the same whole can be found in many of the world’s religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions (Ivanhoe et al., 2018). Examples of this can be seen in Eastern traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Taoism and in Western traditions such as Christianity and Platonism. These traditions espouse oneness-related concepts such as Nirvikalpa samadhi, Buddha nature, non-dual awareness, Theosis, and Henosis (Taylor and Egeto-Szabo, 2017). Although conceptions of oneness are part of Western culture, they nevertheless present a challenge to more dominant individualistic Western conceptions of a separate self.”
In a 1950 letter, Albert Einstein wrote,
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
John Lennon simplified the concept of oneness in the lyrics of the Beatles song “I Am the Walrus”:
“I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together.”
It’s possible that John Lennon felt like he was the walrus because of his behavioral and genetic similarities to the walrus, which he must have sensed at the time that he was writing the song.
And it’s for the same reason that “the idea that the self is inextricably interrelated to the rest of the world” has recurred in the belief systems of many of the world religions throughout history.
We feel oneness and believe in oneness because we, in fact, are one with the world around us.
Here, I have made the argument from an evolutionary perspective—we share genetic makeup and behavior with other living creatures on earth.
The argument can also be made from a fundamentally physical perspective. One percent of the cells in our human bodies are replaced every day. And from where do we get new cells? From the world around us. From the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.
The idea that we are separate from the rest of the world is, like Einstein says, a “delusion”.
In our modern Western culture, we tend to need a rational reason to believe in things. This scientific explanation of the similarities we share with other living creatures on earth is a rational reason to believe that the idea of oneness is more than just religious mysticism; it’s reality.
Sources:
Wells, H.G. A Short History of the World. The Macmillan & Company, 1922.
Weiss, M.C.; Sousa, F. L.; Mrnjavac, N.; Neukirchen, S.; Roettger, M.; Nelson-Sathi, S.; Martin, W.F. (2016). “The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor.” Nat Microbiol. 1 (9): 16116. doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.116. PMID 27562259. S2CID 2997255.
“A timescale for the origin and evolution of all of life on Earth.” University of Bristol. 20 August 2018. Archived from the original on 18 March 2019. Retrieved 11 June 2019 – via phys.org.
Paps, Jordi; Holland, Peter W. H. (30 April 2018). “Reconstruction of the ancestral metazoan genome reveals an increase in genomic novelty.” Nature Communications. 9(1730 (2018)): 1730. Bibcode:2018NatCo...9.1730P. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04136-5. PMC 5928047. PMID 29712911.
Van Lente, Eric, and Michael J Hogan. “Understanding the Nature of Oneness Experience in Meditators Using Collective Intelligence Methods.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 11 2092. 17 Sep. 2020, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02092
Gibbons, Ann. “Bonobos Join Chimps as Closest Human Relatives.” Science, 13 June 2012, https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-join-chimps-closest-human-relatives.
Popova, Maria. “Einstein on Widening Our Circles of Compassion.” The Marginalian, https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/11/28/einstein-circles-of-compassion/