Conscious evolution refers to the theoretical ability of human beings to be conscious participants in the evolution of their cultures, or even of the entirety of human society, based on a relatively recent combination of factors, including increasing awareness of cultural and social patterns, reaction against perceived problems with existing patterns, injustices, inequities, and other factors. The realization that cultural and social evolution can be guided through conscious decisions has been in increasing evidence since approximately the mid-19th century, when the rate of change globally began to increase dramatically. The Industrial Revolution, reactions against the effects of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of new sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology, the revolution in global communication, the interaction of diverse cultures through transportation and colonization, anti-slavery and suffrage movements, and increasing lifespan all would contribute to the growing awareness of social and cultural patterns as being potentially subject to conscious evolution.
The idea of conscious evolution is not a specific theory, but it has loose connections to integral theory, metamodernism, General Evolutionary Theory (also known as Evolutionary Systems Theory), Spiral Dynamics, and noosphere thought. It is also sometimes connected to the theory of the global brain or collective consciousness. Some have suggested “conscious cultural-evolution” as a more accurate term, to reduce association with standard biological evolution, though this is not widely applied.
Conscious evolution suggests that now that humanity is conscious of its history and of how things evolve (evolutionary consciousness), and given the rapid pace of change in society and culture, humanity can (and should) choose advancement through co-operation, co-creation and sustainable practices over self-destruction through separateness, competition, and ecological devastation.
Mechanism
At the centre of the concept of conscious evolution are the approximate definitions of the term's constituent phenomena ('consciousness' and 'evolution'). However, the term implies more than these phenomena generally encompass, not least as it is often used with strong assumptions of a collective interest/ common good.
Evolution does not exclusively act upon morphological (phenotypic) variation; it can also work on a cognitive level. Daniel Dennett has suggested that evolution is simply a process which uses natural selection as a basic algorithm for progression. This could be applied to changes in behaviours, practices, concepts, theories and ideas (cultural evolution). In these situations the mutating replicators of evolution can be considered memes (theoretical units of cultural information) rather than genes. Over the last 10,000 years humanity has become increasingly capable of influencing its own environment and cognitively adapting to these environmental changes through the use of evolving memes. Memetic (cognitive) innovation (as opposed to morphological variation) has therefore become the primary driver of humanity's evolutionary success.
Humans are ‘conscious’, and are consciously manipulating the memes they use. Consciousness itself (in humans’ brains) can therefore be said to have agency over its own evolution, because memetic usage influences evolutionary success. Evolution is also something humans are conscious of. Consciousness (in human brains) can therefore be simultaneously conscious of evolution (working in this case upon memes) while consciously manipulating its own memetics, in order to influence its own evolution. Evolution (in the sense of its impact upon memetics) is therefore increasingly a subject of knowledge, rather than an unknown pressure operating on the world.
Because of this, humanity has the potential to deliberately and consciously redesign our societies and redirect human cultural evolution in line with the arrow of evolution, thus increasing our chances of survival.