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

204 BIOLOGY IS ENGINEERING Original Sin and the Birth of Meaning 205
counts as a canonical version of anything. That is, although we can identify
mutations by simply comparing the "before" sequence with the "after"
sequence, there is no intrinsic way of telling which of the uncorrected
typographical errors might more fruitfully be viewed as editorial improvements.
9 Most mutations are what engineers would call "don't-cares," variations
that make no discernible difference to viability, but as selection
gradually takes its toll, the better versions begin to cluster. It is only relative
to a "wild type" (a center of gravity, in effect, of such a cluster) that we can
identify a particular version as a mistaken version, and even then there is the
possibility, remote in practice but omnipresent in principle, that what seems a
mistake from the perspective of one wild type is a brilliant improvement from
the perspective of a wild-type-in-the-making. And as new wild types emerge
as the foci or summits of fitness landscapes, the direction of the steady
pressure of error correction can reverse in any particular neighborhood of
Design Space. Once a particular family of similar texts is no longer subject to
"correction" relative to a receding or lapsed norm, it is free to wander into the
attractive basin of a new norm. 10 Reproductive isolation is thus both a cause
and an effect of the clumpiness of phenotypic space. Wherever there are
competing error-correcting regimes, one regime or the other will win out, and
hence the isthmus between the competitors will tend to dissolve, leaving
empty space between occupied zones of Design Space. Thus, just as norms of
pronunciation and word use reinforce clustering in speech communities (a
theoretically important point made by Quine 1960 in his discussion of error
and the emergence of norms in language ), so norms of genomic expression
are the ultimate basis of speci-ation.
Through the same molecular-level microscope we see the birth of meaning,
in the acquisition of "semantics'' by the nucleotide sequences, which at first
are mere syntactic objects. This is a crucial step in the Darwinian campaign
to overthrow John Locke's Mind-first vision of the cosmos. Philosophers
commonly agree, for good reason, that meaning and mind can
9. Note the parallel here with my discussion of the false dichotomy between Orwellian
and Stalinesque models of consciousness in Consciousness Explained (1991a). In that
case as well, there is no intrinsic mark of the canonical.
10. Once again we see the tolerance for topsy-turvy imagery. Some theorists speak of
basins of attraction, guided by the metaphor of balls rolling blindly downhill to the local
minimum instead of climbing blindly uphill to the local maximum. Just turn an adaptive
landscape inside out and the mountains become basins, the ridges become canyons, and
"gravity" provides the analogue of selection pressure. It doesn't make any difference
whether you choose "up" or "down" as the favored direction, just so long as you are
consistent. Here I have slipped, momentarily, into the rival perspective, just to make this
point.
never be pulled apart, that there could never be meaning where there was no
mind, or mind where there was no meaning. Intentionality is the philosopher's
technical term for this meaning; it is the "aboutness" that can relate
one thing to another—a name to its bearer, an alarm call to the danger that
triggered it, a word to its referent, a thought to its object. 11 Only some things
in the universe manifest intentionality. A book or a painting can be about a
mountain, but a mountain itself is not about anything. A map or a sign or a
dream or a song can be about Paris, but Paris is not about anything.
Intentionality is widely regarded by philosophers as the mark of the mental.
Where does intentionality come from? It comes from minds, of course.
But that idea, perfectly good in its own way, becomes a source of mystery
and confusion when it is used as a metaphysical principle, rather than a fact
of recent natural history. Aristotle called God the Unmoved Mover, the
source of all motion in the universe, and Locke's version of Aristotelian
doctrine, as we have seen, identifies this God as Mind, turning the Unmoved
Mover into the Unmeant Meaner, the source of all Intentionality. Locke took
himself to be proving deductively what the tradition already took to be
obvious: original intentionality springs from the Mind of God; we are God's
creatures, and derive our intentionality from Him.
Darwin turned this doctrine upside down: intentionality doesn't come from
on high; it percolates up from below, from the initially mindless and pointless
algorithmic processes that gradually acquire meaning and intelligence as they
develop. And, perfectly following the pattern of all Darwinian thinking, we
see that the first meaning is not full-fledged meaning; it certainly fails to
manifest all the "essential" properties of real meaning (whatever you may
take those properties to be). It is mere quasi-meaning, or semi-semantics. It is
what John Searle (1980,1985,1992 ) has disparaged as mere "as if
intentionality" as opposed to what he calls "Original Intentionality." But you
have to start somewhere, and the fact that the first step in the right direction is
just barely discernible as a step towards meaning at all is just what we should
expect.
There are two paths to intentionality. The Darwinian path is diachronic, or
historical, and concerns the gradual accretion, over billions of years, of the
sorts of Design—of functionality and purposiveness—that can support an
intentional interpretation of the activities of organisms (the "doings" of
"agents"). Before intentionality can be fully fledged, it must go through its
awkward, ugly period of featherless pseudo-intentionality. The synchronic
11. The topic of intentionality has been written about extensively by philosophers of
many different traditions in recent years. For an overview and a general definition, see my
article "Intentionality" (co-authored with John Haugeland) in Gregory 1987. For more
detailed analyses, see my earlier books ( 1969, 1978, 1987b).