it might explain how “meaningful” adaptations and mutations could happen in less time than that required by entirely random mutations.
The fruitfulness of Jung’s ideas is more immediately understandable within the area of the cultural activities of man:
Obviously, if the archetypes determine our mental behavior, they must appear in all these fields.
But, unexpectedly, Jung’s concepts have also opened up new ways of looking at things in the realm of the natural sciences as well—for instance, in biology.
The physicist Wolfgang Pauli has pointed out that, due to new discoveries, our idea of the evolution of life requires a revision that might take into account an area of interrelation between the unconscious psyche and biological processes.
Until recently it was assumed that the mutation of species happened at random and
that a selection took place by means of which the “meaningful,” well-adapted varieties survived, and the others disappeared.
But modern evolutionists have pointed out that the selections of such mutations by pure chance would have taken much longer than the known age of our planet allows.
Jung’s concept of synchronicity may be helpful here, for it could throw light upon the occurrence of certain rare “border-phenomena,” or exceptional events; thus it might explain how “meaningful” adaptations and mutations could happen in less time than that required by entirely random mutations.
Today we know of many instances in which meaningful “chance” events have occurred when an archetype is activated.
For example, the history of science contains many cases of simultaneous invention or discovery.
One of the most famous of such cases involved Darwin and his theory of the origin of species: Darwin had developed the theory in a lengthy essay, and in 1844 was busy expanding this into a major treatise.
While he was at work on this project he received a manuscript from a young biologist, unknown to Darwin, named A. R. Wallace.
The manuscript was a shorter but otherwise parallel exposition of Darwin’s theory.
At the time Wallace was in the Molucca Islands of the Malay Archipelago.
He knew of Darwin as a naturalist, but had not the slightest idea of the kind of theoretical work on which Darwin was at the time engaged.
In each case a creative scientist had independently arrived at a hypothesis that was to change the entire development of the science.
And each had initially conceived of the hypothesis in an intuitive “flash” (later backed up by documentary evidence).
The archetypes thus seem to appear as the agents, so to speak, of a creatio continua.
(What Jung calls synchronistic events are in fact something like “acts of creation
in time.”)
Similar “meaningful coincidences” can be said to occur when there is a vital necessity for an individual to know about, say, a relative’s death, or some lost possession.
In a great many cases such information has been revealed by means of extrasensory perception.
This seems to suggest that abnormal random phenomena may occur when a vital need or urge is aroused; and this in turn might explain why a species of animals, under great pressure or in great need, could produce “meaningful” (but acausal) changes in its outer material structure. ― Jolande Jacobi, Man and His Symbols, Page 306
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