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Index The adjustments of the Universe
The man forms a part of a whole and this whole is in evolution Here is the fact which emerges from now on in our consciousness. But a great question arises with more and more acuity: does the river of theevolution in which we are immersed goes somewhere or does it get lost in the nothingness ? This question commands our attitude in front of life i.e. it is essential to direct our choices and to define our ethics. Jung said very well " We are not of today nor of yesterday, we are of an immense age ". Our present being also depends on all that preceded us. Raising as Jung proposes the " historical periscope " out of the flood of the evolution, let us see what we see. The evolution lawsThe world participate in the cosmogenesis. To the concept of a static world, left like a scenery planted to be used for the history of man, succeeded that of a world in evolution, within a vast universal moveme Evolution of the matterThe big-bang model makes sense to what occurred since the beginning of time. This model is generally admitted by the qualified scientific circles. There was a beginning. The equivalent of the whole mass of the universe appeared in a point, approximately fifteen billion years ago as an extreme concentration of energy appearing in the form of light and other radiations. As Provenzano stressed : "There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the universe except energy, in one form or another". In the space time lately appeared, energy distributed in a homogeneous way. Then a sort of grumbling occurred involving its condensation in fundamental particles, which will combine to form the neutrons and the protons then the atoms and the molecules. Thereafter the natural laws induced the formation of the elements, stars, planets, galaxies and all that is offered to our perception. The whole thing is expanding according to the first observations of Lemaître in the twenties, which have always been checked index since then, in particular by the measurement of the fossil radiation arriving to us. The irruption of time creates the history. Since all thus began, all will have necessarily an end. This one, according to the astrophysicists, will occur either in a continuation of the expansion of the universe and the dissipation of the whole energy in a total cooling, or in a collapse and a final implosion. Evolution of lifeA gradually increasing complexity thus characterizes the history of the universe in its physical aspects. It has been going on with the crossing of a new threshold : the emergence of life. Indeed, under the physicochemical conditions specific to the first ages of our earth, the chemical reactions intensified, syntheses took place, new links were created between the molecules leading to large-sized chains of which some were going to acquire some properties of life : they are breakable but in their expansion, they " will learn how " to replicate themselves and to multiply, to develop new properties, new functions in the synergy of the components, to build complexes of complexes, to acquire finally the characters of living beings, initially made index in unicellular entities. This phenomenon occurred rather early in the history of our earth. The first fossils of cells should be as old as three billion years. From there, always under the impulse of the same energy directed " towards the fullest growth " - which one can discuss the meaning but not the reality &endash; the building of the various forms of the life went going on. The primary cell had no nucleus. Later on it differentiated into nucleate cell, it "learned " the sexual reproduction and it joined others of its similar to form multicellular beings. Thereafter the complex living bodies differentiated in various branches in two complementary fields, the plants and the animals which adapt themselves to their environments. One of the branches, formed by the mammals, leads finally to the man whose brain, formed of myriads of inter-connected cells, is the apex of this " pyramid of complexity ". The man within the evolutionPsychic interiority as a result of the hyper complexity is probably present to differing degree in all the living. But with mankind it becomes as a new evolutionary force. By the crossing of a new step, that of the reflection, the man reaches the conscience. He knows that he knows. He acquires the sense of time and of the history, the aptitude of planning and of choosing, the freedom to act, the notion of Good and Evil. In fact, the intelligence is an extraordinary force which intervenes from now on in the evolution. The face of the earth will be changed. After the discovery of fire, founding path, then from the breeding and agriculture, his various inventions will give gradually to the man the control of the planet and will ensure its supremacy. The same instinct of growth pushes him to constitute with his similar increasingly complex and interdependent social assemblies, covering little by little the whole globe. Biology of developmentIn the biological evolution, various mechanisms are at work. Being added to the vertical transmission of the characters of the species following the laws of heredity discovered by Mendel, in which sexuality ensures genetic enrichment, mutations in coding reveal new characters. The whole process of differentiation of the species is directed, according to Darwin, by the natural selection which promotes the best adapted to the environment. This concept is generally accepted. It explains the selection and the development of particularly efficient characters in "the struggle for life", in a given phyletic branch. But there are macro-mutations from one species to another, evolutionary discontinuities. They cannot be explained only by the natural selection. The chance, in the form of random mutations, fails to explain a progress continued all along the time in an increasing neguentropy i.e. by building increasingly improbable complexes integrating more and more informations. Perhaps in the mechanisms of the evolution, it is necessary to also make place to the inventive spirit i.e. the interior force which animates each alive being on which insisted Lamarck and which Bergson called vital dash. At all events, the origin of the spirit of invention remains a mystery. It seems that the life wants all to test. The role of education in the transmission of the acquired culture and accomplished progress should not be under estimated. At the level of man, the cultural evolution is an additive factor of most signification. Great civilizations which followed one another transmitted each one a part of their progress -intellectual, moral, artistic - to the following generations, even if a significant waste was the result of the collapse of each one in the course of time. " We are of an immense age ".... A programation ?The problem of the organization of the living matter deserves to be raised. All the biosphere is subjected to a normative constraint which appears to follow the same laws. In fact the matter is only a representation of energy. Both are equivalent and transformable one in the other. The quantum mechanics require to consider the atomic elements as grains of energy as well as waves, which localizations in space and trajectories are defined only by probabilistic laws. How can we imagine the construction made of energy and of information which constitutes our body, our private part of the universe? The body organization cannot be the fact of the physical elements which, as they are gathered constitute our tissues and organs. Indeed, these elements are unstable and in perpetual renewal during the lifespan of the whole organism. The cells themselves are renewed unceasingly, except for the cerebral and some seminal cells. But the whole of the tissues constituting our body maintains harmoniously during the life, respecting all the cycles carried out from embryo to old age, from birth to death. Our body is, in fact, the result of an organizational structure which, on an atomic scale, rests on molecular interactions, between elements separated by very large distances on their scale. These interactions are primarily electromagnetic. This organizational structure rules on genes and on genetic regulation. One can strongly doubt, indeed, that this informative structure is generated by the material elements which it groindexs. What is called the genoma cannot be the fruit of the purely hazardous union of initially independent elements unaware of each other. Let us note that the initial adjustments necessary to make life occurs are of an extremeprecision. For Trinh Xuan Thuan they are about 1/1060 i.e. that the probability they are reached by chance is practically nil. If this message, registered in our genes but still more coordinating the expression of the entire genoma, different in each type of cell, is a predetermined reality, what is its nature, its physical substrate and under what control ? Does it rest on preexisting forces anticipating their association ? One can only be struck of admiration in front of the complexity and the precision of the embryonic development directed by a definite zone of the blastula which rules all the various tissues and organs. In the same way, aren't they marvellous the subtle mechanisms regulating the harmonious growth of the individual and the maintenance of a precise homeostasis ensuring the stability of the internal milieu in a changing environment ? Currently the physicists who study the chaos laws, which has the aspect of chance without being it really, refer to a "strange attractor" which in the final analysis directs a multiplicity appearing to escape from the general determinism. For Anne Dambricourt-Malassé, vanguard paleontologist, it is such an attractor that she describes as harmonic which drive during the evolution, the contraction of the skull base and the rotation of it, responsible for the differentiation of homo sapiens and his adoption of the indexright station, independently for the essential of an environmental change. The adjustments of the UniverseWe are thus an assembly of information and, for this reason, Edgar Morin could speak about a "computing" state of the matter. The number is present everywhere behind the reality of the world. One could say that mathematics was the language of the universe. All the natural laws which the man discovers can be expressed in mathematical formulas. We know the omnipresent world of the fractals that nature adopts to solve an infinity of problems, specially in biology (i.e. structures of the vegetal arborisations, of the lungs, of the intestinal mucosa, etc). A recent work (Laurent Notale and coll. 1999) would suggest that all the tree of the evolution is governed by an equation of the fractal type. A "necessity ", stronger than the "chance" would thus rule on the differentiation of the species. Moreover, some authors as Xavier Sallantin, have recently insisted on the arithmetic meta-rules subjacent to reality. It has been evoked an innate software-system common to all the alive beings, a virtual world doubling "reality". And the thought?In a vision of the world in widened prospect, the role of psyche seems a significant factor intervening with the man in the process of the evolution. But what is the thought ? Some authors considers it as the simple result of neuronal interactions (Changeux). But that does not explain its real nature. One must admit that thinking can't be located in any cerebral cell separately (Chauvin). It is not a kind of cellular secretion. For Roger Penrose, famous physicist, it acts as a "strange phenomenon which depends on the matter but which, on the opposite, can act on it". In a recent work, he gives his conviction that a new physics must be born to make us possible to approach certain phenomena, like the conscience, which are an integral part of the universe but that our current physics is unable to apprehend . Teilhard, as for him, considers that "the stuff of the Universe" is dual-sided. There is a part of interiority in each matter grain. It is the complexity, centered on a project, which leads to the conscience by the summation and the arrangement of the elementary grains. The Californian physicist, Provenzano, member of the team which conceived and carried out the mission to Mars, specialist in the artificial intelligence, is a vigorous supporter of the teilhardian law of consciousness-complexity. He thinks that psyche is an elaborate form of energy which he names " conscious energy ". Place of manThe man fits in the evolutionary axis which is not only that of the alive world but of the entire universe, from the big-bang to us. There is no reason to think that this evolution will not continue. We can only question us on the prospects which open on the future. The two options The interpretation that we have of the place of the human phenomenon is decisive. Is the man a simple epiphenomenon in a global process having no meaning, as a result of chance only ? This is the option of the materialists. Some, such as Gould, exclusive darwinian evolutionist, think that the man cannot be regarded as a successful species; he is a mammal among the others, particularly unimportant, since its species is, by its mass for example, much lower than other species such as the bacteria. Jacques Monod could conclude in his time that, "fruit of chance and necessity, we are alone in an empty and cold cosmos ". A vision diametrically opposite and spiritualist locates the man at the node of the evolution. All contributed to give him its place, to make it possible his intelligence to open up , and this occurred as a single event on the surface of the globe. Teilhardian conceptionOf course Teilhard belongs to the second category. As a scientist acknowledged by his peers and as a priest of an indomitable fidelity he brought to the debate his remarkable spirit of synthesis. His ambition, to which it devoted his life, was to establish a unified vision, able to gather scientists and religious, task which was worth the sarcastic remarks of the ones, the aggressive mistrust of the others and the adhesion of a great number, believers and unbelievers. His thesis forms an impressive corpus by its coherence, its rigor and its premonitions. It integrates perfectly the phenomenologic data and the concepts of current science. It is expressed essentially in his main work, " The Phenomenon of Man", published in 1955, which is difficult to summarize in a few words. A personal interpretation gives an outline on figure 1: 
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