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A Purposive Evolution?

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-7199355

2164-0041

David Loy,

Evolution and Science Education

The debate between Darwinism and Creationism usually generates more heat than light because it has evolved into a war between two orthodoxies. Polls regularly find that a large majority of Americans either don’t accept evolution at all or believe in “intelligent design” managed by God. On the other side, Darwinists are concerned that creationists import such immaterial (spiritual or vitalist) influences to explain the evolutionary process—factors which in their view are not only unnecessary but refuted by modern science. According to Richard Dawkins, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” But are both sides able to see only what they expect to see?While creationism is not easy to square with what science has learned about the physical world, there is also a problem with contemporary neo-Darwinism: it has become a dogma that is increasingly challenged on scientific grounds. J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It (HarperCollins 2017) is a new contribution to this debate. Turner, a distinguished biologist and physiologist at SUNY-Syracuse, focuses on the inability of Darwinism information is reproduced, but chromosomes alone is inherently cognitive and purposive. Turner states, “Homeostasis involves coupling information about the state abilities develop only much later, once a certain level of complexity develops. Turner challenges this:[H]omeostasis does not derive from natural selection; it is homeostasis that drives selection, and there is nothing natural about it. What drives the course of evolution is not the soulless lottery of the gene pool, but life’s striving for persistence. The striving is driven not by the luck of lottery, but by a cognitive sense of self, even down to the smallest bacterium, even preceding, as I have argued, the emergence of life itself. A deep intelligence is at work in life, its operations, and its history, and it cannot be denied. Yet that is precisely what modern Darwinism asks us to do. (292)Modern Darwinism asks us to do that because accepting such a deep intelligence—in effect, acknowledging that a rudimentary consciousness is inherent to all life and its development—would be incompatible with its mechanistic foundations, which deny any intentionality or purposive behavior to the lifeless matter/energy that composes the universe. Ernst Mayr, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, made fun of the “physics envy” implicit in such materialistic reductionism: the desire to reduce biology to chemistry, and ultimately to ground it in the basic laws of physics, the “hard science” that other sciences want to emulate.However, our understanding of those basic physical laws also evolved quite a bit during the 20th century, and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics in particular raise questions about how well we really understand the nature of matter. In addition to the familiar “is-light-a-particle-or-a-wave” paradox, physicists have recently reconfirmed what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance:” elementary particles such as photons that have become “entangled” can travel very far apart from each other, but measuring one instantaneously affects the other. Such nonlocal interaction remains unexplained, which leaves the basic “stuff” of the universe fundamentally mysterious . . . in which case perhaps we should be more cautious about asserting our understanding of the universe’s blind, pitiless indifference.The early scientists most responsible for adumbrating the modern worldview—Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton— were nonetheless deeply religious, and understood this world in relationship to a “higher” one. They all still believed in a Creator, although an increasingly distant one. They developed a new paradigm: God rules the universe, not through a hierarchy of spiritual subordinates but with a rational system of “hidden laws.” We use the same word for laws passed by a legislature and the laws of nature because these architects of the modern view believed that natural laws were also ordained by God. Whereas the medieval worldview saw the influence of God filtering through agents (e.g., angels) of varying degrees of blessedness and power, the great Geometer ruled this fallen world impersonally, from afar. As the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, “My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but to a clockwork.” And once God wound that clockwork up, God was not needed to keep it ticking.This opened up exciting new possibilities. Those who comprehended God’s hidden laws could use them to manipulate nature for their own purposes. But there was a downside: “The process of mechanizing the world picture removed the controls over environmental exploitation that were an inherent part of the organic view that nature was alive, sensitive, and responsive to human action” (Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature). The trajectory that would lead to our ecological crisis was set.Darwinism was so threatening to religious orthodoxy because it refuted the “argument from design,” the last remaining attempt to prove God’s existence. Since evolution by natural selection doesn’t need a God to direct it, an all-powerful deity was no longer necessary to create the extraordinarily complex organisms, including us, that compose the web of life. In fact, the new secular world had no need for God at all.That final Darwinian stroke seemed to leave us stranded, for better or worse, in a mechanistic and desacralized world, ruled by impersonal physical laws that, as Dawkins reminds us, are pitilessly indifferent to us and our fate. Death is no longer the portal to another reality, just the end of this one. We may not as individuals believe that or feel personally oppressed by its implications, but this secularization continues to remold our economic, political, and educational institutions. As this modern mindset continues to spread beyond the West and globalize, it increasingly determines the social environment within which people around the globe must live and act.Although Darwin himself was troubled by the religious implications of his work, his theory was soon used to justify a new social ethic. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”—human life, too, is basically a struggle for survival and success—which rationalizes the most ruthless forms of economic and political competition. Furthermore, if humans are mere accidents of genetic mutation, and we have no role to play in a meaningless cosmos, what is there to do except enjoy our material possibilities as much as we can, as long as we can . . . if we can? This has led to our collective preoccupation with ever-increasing production and consumption, in fierce competition with others seeking access to the same resources and opportunities.According to the prevalent Darwinist paradigm, biological evolution is the result of physical processes operating according to impersonal laws. It is a mechanistic model. But what if, instead of reducing biology to physics and viewing the cosmos as a machine, we turn that upside-down and try to understand the physical universe according to a biological model—that is, as alive? As Joseph Campbell observed, “If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.”In fact, there is a fundamental problem with the mechanistic model. As the evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris has pointed out, machines presuppose a machine-maker: someone who designs and constructs them. A machine-like cosmos made sense as long as the universe was understood to have been created by God according to his plan and purposes. That was how Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, among others, understood the laws of nature. Without a Creator, however, the mechanical metaphor doesn’t really make sense. Any machine that constantly reorganizes itself, creating more complex structures as evolving parts of itself, is not a machine. Arguably, it is better understood as an organism— which evokes the premodern worldview that Carolyn Merchant mentions.The different metaphors have very different implications. Machines can be disassembled into their components, cleaned, and after reassembly they work better than ever; don’t try to do that to an animal! That is because the various parts of a mechanism are lifeless in themselves, but an organism is not: it is purposive and strives to persist in its being, as Turner points out.According to the eminent biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, evolution is neither random nor predetermined but creative; Elisabet Sahtouris describes it as an intelligent, improvisational dance. In At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman makes the same point, “The central quality of the evolutionary process is creative emergence. . . . Living systems, from the smallest microbes to the largest organisms, exhibit self-organization; all of life is basically defined by this self-generating, self-maintaining criterion.”This is more consistent with Indra’s Net, a Buddhist metaphor that compares the cosmos to a multidimensional web with a jewel at each knot. Each of these jewels reflects all the others, and each of those reflections also reflects all the other reflections, ad infinitum. According to Francis Cook in Hua-Yen Buddhism, Indra’s Net “symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos.” Because the totality is a vast body of members each sustaining and defining all the others, “the cosmos is, in short, a self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism.” To say it again, in biological language, such a cosmos is self-organizing.According to neo-Darwinism, evolution occurs because of random DNA mutations, some of which enable the organism to be more reproductively successful in its specific environment. But what does “random” really mean? On the surface, the term is descriptive yet a negative value judgment is often implied: random mutations are by definition meaningless mutations, and a universe where they determine what happens is a meaningless universe. However, there is some experimental support for the view that genetic mutations are not completely random. Research biologists such as Lynn Margulis and Mae-Wan Ho have established that colonies of bacteria respond to changes in the environment much faster than could be explained by chance mutations. The bacteria seemed to exhibit intelligence and intentionality in the ways they were able to modify their own genetics in order to adapt to new circumstances. More generally, it has been observed that when an organism is stressed, more mutations occur, and they are more likely to occur in areas where other DNA mutations have recently occurred, creating “hotspot clusters.”One well-known experiment was conducted by the geneticist John Cairns in the late 1980s. He isolated a strain of the bacterium E. coli that was unable to digest lactose. When their only food source was lactose, however, the bacteria quickly mutated and became able to metabolize it, due to what Cairns termed “purposive mutation” and others have called “adaptive mutation.” Another researcher, Barry Hall, found that something similar happened when E. coli were placed in a solution of salicin: the colony became able to metabolize the salicin because of two otherwise rare genetic mutations that happened at a rate thousands of times faster than predicted.When the alternative is starvation and extinction, a will to survive apparently motivates a large surge in various genetic mutations, until one of those mutations provides what is sought. Significantly, no consistent pattern has been observed in the sequences of the successful mutations. In that respect, the process can be considered random, or (as I prefer) groping, but as soon as the needed mutation appears, the surge in mutations stops. Such research seems to support the conclusion that organisms are capable of responding to dynamic changes in their environment by proactively altering their own genetic code—a provocative example of Turner’s homeostasis. In short, this evidence supports a more dynamic, self-organizing understanding of the evolutionary process.So why is this important? An organic paradigm suggests an intriguing speculation that takes us far beyond individual homeostasis. It resonates with the “new cosmology” originally proposed by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in The Universe Story, which argues for a meaning to the evolutionary process. The components of an organism are not the lifeless parts of a machine but organs, collections of tissues forming a structural unit that has a specific function within the larger organism. I can’t help wondering: are human beings an organ within a Great Organism, and if so, what is our function?On the only planet we know firsthand, life originated and self-organized, evolving into species increasingly biologically complex and conscious. At least one of the earth’s species has become self-conscious, and we would be unwise to assume that development is the end of the evolutionary process. Do we really know what’s going on here, what the potential is?The issue, finally, is whether we can view evolution as the creative groping of a self-organizing cosmos that is becoming more self-aware. Does it, in some sense, want to become more self-aware? The Universe Story makes this claim more poetically: “The mind that searches for contact with the Milky Way is the very mind of the Milky Way galaxy in search of its inner depths.” What does this imply about Walt Whitman, for example, admiring a beautiful sunset? “Walt Whitman is a space the Milky Way fashioned to feel its own grandeur.” Instead of the eye being the accidental product of a mechanistic process driven by meaningless mutations, can our eyes be understood as having been created by the cosmos, in order to be able to perceive itself? Are humans a way that the cosmos is coming to know itself?