Theologian Hans Küng observes that natural phenomena emerge, diverge, and converge in “that all forms of sense life are radically connected and that this goes on in cycles of coming to be and passing away, of dying and coming to new life, without any possibility of establishing a beginning or perhaps even an end to the whole process” (1984, p. 59).

“Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function but were not present in the last common ancestor of those groups” (Wikipedia, retrieved October 2021).

Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris suggests that evolution’s endpoints are far more constricted than is often supposed by Darwinian mechanisms, which can fall short when describing complex emergent microscopic and molecular self-organizing behaviour. He illustrates convergence in the example of how the “camera eye” has followed at least seven different evolutionary pathways here on Earth, and thus could be rationally speculated to evolve elsewhere in the universe (2010).

Conway Morris states that our religious instincts and doctrines “tell us something real about the world. They’re not simply fairy stories” and our poetic, intellectual, and moral capacities have an evolutionary basis (2010, p. 126). Did language emerge as a result of our needing to describe the ineffable, the numinous? Perhaps not unlike the building blocks of genetic code, author and graphic designer Ruedi Ruegg suggests the modularity of typographic letters themselves have an elegantly elemental yet creative quality in their converging, constraining character:

“As the component parts of the alphabet, letters are the elements with which words, sentences and whole stories are constructed. In this sense, letters are the building blocks of speech made visible. Despite all the varieties of form in which they are supplied, these building blocks are prefabricated components which we do not alter in any manner or way” (1989, p. 22).

Do studies of convergence and emergence perhaps speak to a broader approach demanded of science, religion, and art to look at life and nature anew, in all its interconnected wonder? Do the patterns we observe echoing through organism, community, and system hint at an even wider wholeness throughout the entire universe? Can science and religion themselves converge on these grounds? As Simon Conway Morris suggests:

“This world allows poets and scientists and mystics to co-exist. I think there’s a divide between what science is proclaiming and what faith is proclaiming because each side is unwilling to listen to the other. Believe it or not, they are involved in a common adventure” (2010, p. 129).

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Taoism:
“Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and regard your neighbor’s loss as your own loss” (1946, p. 309).

Conway Morris, S. (2010), in Paulson, S. (Ed.), Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science (pp. 115-129). New York, United States: Oxford University Press

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 309-310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Küng, H. (1984) Eternal Life? Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, translated by Edward Quinn. Garden City, United States: Doubleday & Company Inc.

Ruegg, R. (1989) Basic Typography: Design with Letters. New York, United States: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

“In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole” (Wikipedia, retrieved October 2021).

With varying degrees of success, futurists and inventors throughout the twentieth century, including Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla, and Viktor Schauberger, sought to harness and modulate nature’s emergent synergy. Bucky Fuller’s patent lawyer, Donald W. Robertson, alluded to the structural tensegrity (tensile integrity) that emerges from the highly functional shapes of geodesic geometry:

“The mind of the viewer, more often than not, is distracted by the picture so that he is not piqued into asking, “Why geodesic, what does that mean?”. The more visual questions are, “How big is it?”, and “What is it made of?” Big enough to cover a football field or even a city. And a geodesic dome can be made of just about anything – steel, aluminum, plastics, wood, even paper. It has in fact been built of all these materials. But a more truly revealing answer, once explained, is that a geodesic dome is really made of “geometry” (1974, p. 16).

In a paper titled “Dynamical Independence: Discovering Emergent Macroscopic Processes in Complex Dynamical Systems” (August 2021), cognitive scientists Lionel Barnett and Anil Seth delve more deeply into the notion of emergence. They suggest that beyond its synergistic properties, there can also arise a dynamical independence, where a phenomenon can display a “life of its own”, having attributes which give the impression of some new behaviour, structure, or organism:

“When we observe a large murmuration of starlings twisting, stretching and wheeling in the dusk, it is hard to escape the impression that we are witnessing an individuated dynamical entity quite distinct from the thousands of individual birds which we know to constitute the flock” (2021, p. 1).

Emergent dynamical independence at macroscopic scales is observed to evolve over time by its own rules, distinct and apart from those operating at its sometimes invisible microscopic level, on which it nonetheless supervenes or derives from (Barnett & Seth, 2021). Could the perspectival aspect of emergence perhaps speak to its more pervasive and parsimonious properties which are not often otherwise observed? What other phenomena exhibit emergent dynamical independence? Does this remind us of nature’s vast, interconnected dynamism more generally? Philosopher David Hume wonders, as:

“Every individual is perpetually changing and every part of every individual, and yet the whole remains, in appearance, the same. May we not hope for such a position, or rather be assured of it, from the eternal revolutions of unguided matter, and may not this account for all the appearing wisdom and contrivance which is the universe?” (1779, p. 47).

Barnett, L. & Seth, A. K. (August 2021), Dynamical Independence: Discovering Emergent Macroscopic Processes in Complex Dynamical Systems (pp. 1- 40). [PDF document] retrieved October 2021 from arvix:2106.06511v2 [nlin.AO] 6 Aug 2021

Hume, D. (1779), Design and God from Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, reprinted in Minton, A. J. & Shipka, T. A. (Eds.), Philosophy: Paradox and Discovery Third Edition (1990), (pp. 36-48). New York, United States: McGraw-Hill.

Robertson, D. W. (1974) The Mind’s Eye of Buckminster Fuller. New York, United States: St. Martin’s Press.