Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

202 BIOLOGY IS ENGINEERING
revolutionary epistemological or metaphysical accompaniment to his science;
we should not be surprised by how hard it is for people to swallow. Ever
since Socrates taught Plato (and all the rest of us) how to play the game of
asking for necessary and sufficient conditions, we have seen the task of
"defining your terms" as a proper preamble to all serious investigations, and
this has sent us off on interminable bouts of essence-mongering. 8 We want to
draw lines; we often need to draw lines—just so we can terminate or forestall
sterile explorations in a timely fashion. Our perceptual systems are even
genetically designed to force straddling candidates for perception into one
classification or another (Jackendoff 1993), a Good Trick but not a forced
move. Darwin shows us that evolution does not need what we need; the real
world can get along just fine with the de facto divergences that emerge over
time, leaving lots of emptiness between clusters of actuality.
We have just glanced briefly at a particularly important instance of this
characteristic Darwinian explanatory schema, and we should pause to confirm
the effect. Through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to
witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough
complexity to "do things." This is not florid agency—echt intentional action,
with the representation of reasons, deliberation, reflection, and conscious
decision—but it is the only possible ground from which the seeds of intentional
action could grow. There is something alien and vaguely repellent
about the quasi-agency we discover at this level—all that purposive hustle
and bustle, and yet there's nobody home. The molecular machines perform
their amazing stunts, obviously exquisitely designed, and just as obviously
none the wiser about what they are doing. Consider this account of the
activity of an RNA phage, a replicating virus:
First of all, the virus needs a material in which to pack and protect its own
genetic information. Secondly, it needs a means of introducing its information
into the host cell. Thirdly, it requires a mechanism for the specific
replication of its information in the presence of a vast excess of host cell
RNA. Finally, it must arrange for the proliferation of its information, a
process that usually leads to the destruction of the host cell.... The virus
8. One of the major themes of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger was that
Socrates is to blame for much of what is wrong with philosophy, because he taught us all
to demand necessary and sufficient conditions. It cannot be often that Darwin and
Heidegger support each other, so the occasion is worth noting. Hubert Dreyfus has long
maintained (e.g., 1972, 1979) that Artificial Intelligence is based on a failure to appreciate
Heidegger's critique of Socrates, and though that may be true of some strands of AI,
it is not true of the field in general, which is firmly with Darwin, a claim that I will defend
later in this chapter, and in greater detail in chapters 13 to 15.
Original Sin and the Birth of Meaning 203
even gets the cell to carry out its replication; its only contribution is one
protein factor, specially adapted for the viral RNA. This enzyme does not
become active until a 'password' on the viral RNA is shown. When it sees
this, it reproduces the viral RNA with great efficiency, while ignoring the
very much greater number of RNA molecules of the host cell. Consequently
the cell is soon flooded with viral RNA. This is packed into the
virus' coat protein, which is also synthesized in large quantities, and finally
the cell bursts and releases a multitude of progeny virus particles. All this
is a programme that runs automatically and is rehearsed down to the
smallest detail. [Eigen 1992, p. 40.]
Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the
Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of
molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence
meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
Right from the beginning, the cost of doing something is running the risk of
doing it wrong, of making a mistake. Our slogan could be: No taking without
mistaking. The first error that ever was made was a typographical error, a
copying mistake that then became the opportunity for creating a new task
environment ( or fitness landscape ) with a new criterion of right and wrong,
better and worse. A copying error "counts" as an error here only because there
is a cost to getting it wrong: termination of the reproductive line at worst, or a
diminution in the capacity to replicate. These are all objective matters,
differences that are there whether or not we look at them, or care about them,
but they bring in their train a new perspective. Before that moment, no
opportunity for error existed. However things went, they went neither right
nor wrong. Before that moment, there was no stable, predictive way of
exercising the option of adopting the perspective from which errors might be
discerned, and every mistake anybody or anything has ever made since is
dependent on that original error-making process. In fact, there is strong
selection pressure for making the genetic copying process as high-fidelity as
possible, minimizing the likelihood of error. Fortunately, it cannot quite
achieve perfection, for if it did, evolution would grind to a halt. This is
Original Sin, in scientifically respectable guise. Like the Biblical version, it
purports to explain something: the emergence of a new level of phenomena
with special characteristics ( meaners in one case, sinners in the other).
Unlike the Biblical version, it provides an explanation that makes sense; it
does not proclaim itself to be a mysterious fact that one has to take on faith,
and it has testable implications.
Notice that one of the first fruits of the perspective from which error is
discernible is a clarification of the concept of a species. When we consider all
the actual genomic texts that get created in the process of copying, copying,
copying—with occasional mutations—nothing intrinsically