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

512 THE FUTURE OF AN IDEA In Praise of Biodiversity 513
disassembled into many acts of micro-genius, tiny mechanical transitions
between brain states, generating and testing, discarding and revising, and
testing again. Then, is Bach's brain like the proverbial monkeys at the typewriters?
No, because instead of generating a Vast number of alternatives,
Bach's brain generated only a Vanishingly small subset of all the possibilities.
His genius can be measured, if you want to measure genius, in the excellence
of his particular subset of generated candidates. How did he come to be able
to speed so efficiently through Design Space, never even considering the Vast
neighboring regions of hopeless designs? (If you want to explore that
territory, just sit down at a piano and try, for half an hour, to compose a good
new melody.) His brain was exquisitely designed as a heuristic program for
composing music, and the credit for that design must be shared; he was lucky
in his genes ( he did come from a famously musical family ), and he was lucky
to be born in a cultural milieu that filled his brain with the existing musical
memes of the time. And no doubt he was lucky at many other moments in his
life to be the beneficiary of one serendipitous convergence or another. Out of
all this massive contingency came a unique cruise vehicle for exploring a
portion of Design Space that no other vehicle could explore. No matter how
many centuries or millennia of musical exploration lie ahead of us, we will
never succeed in laying down tracks that make much of a mark in the Vast
reaches of Design Space. Bach is precious not because he had within his
brain a magic pearl of genius-stuff, a skyhook, but because he was, or
contained, an utterly idiosyncratic structure of cranes, made of cranes, made
of cranes, made of cranes.
Like Bach, the creation of the rest of the Tree of Life differs from the
monkeys at the typewriters in having explored only a Vanishing subset of the
Vast possibilities. Efficiencies of exploration have been created again and
again, and they are the cranes that have sped up the lifting over the eons. Our
technology now permits us to accelerate our explorations in every part of
Design Space (not just gene-splicing, but computer-aided design of every
imaginable thing, for instance, including this book, which I could never have
written without word-processing and electronic mail), but we will never
escape our finitude—or, more precisely, our tether to actuality. The Library
of Babel is finite but Vast, and we will never explore all its marvels, for at
every point we must build, crane-like, on the bases we have constructed to
date.
Alert to the omnipresent risk of greedy reductionism, we might consider
how much of what we value is explicable in terms of its designedness. A
little intuition-pumping: which is worse, destroying somebody's project—
even if it's a model of die Eiffel Tower made out of thousands of popsicle
sticks—or destroying their supply of popsicle sticks? It all depends on the
goal of the project; if the person just enjoys designing and redesigning,
building and rebuilding, then destroying the supply of popsicle sticks is
worse; otherwise, destroying that hard-won product of design is worse. Why
is it much worse to kill a condor than to kill a cow? (I take it that, no matter
how bad you think it is to kill a cow, we agree that it is much worse to kill a
condor—because the loss to our actual store of design would be so much
greater if the condors went extinct.) Why is it worse to kill a cow than to kill
a clam? Why is it worse to kill a redwood tree than to kill an equal amount
(by mass) of algae? Why do we rush to make high-fidelity copies of motion
pictures, musical recordings, scores, books? Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper
is sadly decaying on a wall in Milan, in spite of (and sometimes because of)
the efforts over the centuries to preserve it. Why would it be just as bad—
maybe worse—to destroy all the old photographs of what it looked like thirty
years ago as to destroy some portion of its "original" fabric today?
These questions don't have obvious and uncontroversial answers, so the
Design Space perspective certainly doesn't explain everything about value,
but at least it lets us see what happens when we try to unify our sense of
value in a single perspective. On the one hand, it helps to explain our
intuition that uniqueness or individuality is "intrinsically" valuable. On the
other hand, it lets us confirm all the incommensurabilities that people talk
about. Which is worth more, a human life or the Mona Lisa? There are many
who would give their lives to save the painting from destruction, and many
who would sacrifice somebody else's life for it, if push came to shove. (Are
the guards in the Louvre armed? What steps would they take if necessary?) Is
saving the spotted owl worth the abridgment of opportunities in the
thousands of human lives affected? (Once again, retrospective effects loom
large: if someone has invested his life chances in becoming a logger, and
now we take away the opportunity to be a logger, we devalue his investment
overnight, just as surely as—more surely, in fact, than—if we converted his
life savings into worthless junk bonds.)
At what "point" does a human life begin or end? The Darwinian perspective
lets us see with unmistakable clarity why there is no hope at all of
discovering a telltale mark, a saltation in life's processes, that "counts." We
need to draw lines; we need definitions of life and death for many important
moral purposes. The layers of pearly dogma that build up in defense around
these fundamentally arbitrary attempts are familiar, and in never-ending need
of repair. We should abandon the fantasy that either science or religion can
uncover some well-hidden fact that tells us exactly where to draw these
lines. There is no "natural" way to mark the birth of a human "soul," any
more than there is a "natural" way to mark the birth of a species. And,
contrary to what many traditions insist, I think we all do share the intuition
that there are gradations of value in the ending of human lives. Most human
embryos end in spontaneous abortion—fortunately, since these are mostly
terata, hopeless monsters whose lives are all but impossible. Is this a terri-