The Future of Man—Evolutionary Aspects 
societies have spread over the whole habitable area of the earth, 
and are impinging on each other politically, economically, and 
ideologically. 
The world has become a unit de facto: sooner rather than 
later, it must become a unit de jure, by submitting itself to a 
unitary system of self-government. Since the human habitat is 
one and indivisible, its resources must be explored as a global 
whole. And since thought knows no frontiers, ideas of every 
kind are diffusing faster and faster all over the world’s surface, 
demanding recognition, posing questions, generating conflicts. 
The units of organization which have proved most effective 
during biological evolution are bounded unit-systems of great 
internal complexity, whose components are engaged in a con- 
stant and vigorous interplay, leading to their mutual reinforce- 
ment within an integrated total pattern of activity. Such self- 
bounded and complex systems include the cell, the vertebrate 
individual, the social insect colony, and the brains of higher 
mammals and man. When such a system ensures the constant 
circuiting, summation, and interaction of nervous impulses, as 
does the human brain, it generates a high level of subjective 
experience. | 
Thus, since the advent of man, a new habitat has been opened 
up to evolving life, a habitat of thought: for this I shall use 
Teilhard de Chardin’s term, the nodosphere, until someone 
invents something better. This covering of the earth’s sphericity 
with a thinking envelope, whose components are interacting 
with a steadily rising intensity, is now generating a powerful 
psychosocial pressure favouring a solution of least effort, by 
way of integration in a unitary organization of ideas and 
beliefs. But this will not happen automatically: it can only be 
achieved by a large-scale co-operative exercise of human reason 
and imagination. 
When we look at the whole sweep of man’s history on earth, 
as now revealed by the labours of historians, archaeologists, and 
anthropologists, we see that everything that properly deserves 
to be called progress has depended on new knowledge and new 
organizations of knowledge in the shape of ideas. Agriculture, 
il 
