http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ ( French: [pjɛʁ tejaʁ də ʃaʁdɛ̃] ; May 1, 1881 – April 10, 1955) was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologistand took part in the discovery of Peking Man. He conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of noosphere. Though his writings brought some controversy, his reflections on the nature of goodness and of the meaning of Jesus Christ has received praise from figures such as Pope Benedict.
Teilhard de Chardin has two comprehensive works. The first, The Phenomenon of Man, sets forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity to ultimately a reunion with Christ. Following the leads of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, he abandoned literal interpretations of creation in the Book of Genesis in favor of allegorical and theological interpretations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phenomenon_of_Man
The Phenomenon of Man (Le phénomène humain, 1955) is a book written by the Frenchphilosopher, paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness.
The book was finished in the 1930s, but was published posthumously in 1955. The Roman Catholic Church initially prohibited the publication of some of Teilhard’s writings on the grounds that they contradicted orthodoxy.
http://www.lawoftime.org/noosphere/theoryandhistory.html
The Noosphere - literally, “mind-sphere” or Earth’s mental sheathe - is a word and concept jointly coined byÉdouard Le Roy, French philosopher and student of Henri Bergson, Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Russian geochemist,Vladimir Vernadsky, in Paris, 1926. At the root of the primary definition of noosphere is a dual perception: that life on Earth is a unity constituting a whole system known as the biosphere; and that the mind or consciousness of life - the Earth’s thinking layer - constitutes a unity that is discontinuous but coextensive with the entire system of life on Earth, inclusive of its inorganic support systems. A third critical premise arising from the first two is that the noosphere defines the inevitable next stage of terrestrial evolution, which will subsume and transform the biosphere.
How this evolutionary shift might occur is at the crux of the experiment, Noosphere II. Though little else is known concerning Édouard Le Roy, our ideas about the noosphere and the transition from the biosphere to the noosphere are largely derived from the perceptions of Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky, along with the work of American Physicist, Oliver Reiser. We will summarize these viewpoints below.