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

60 AN IDEA IS BORN
publication of Origin, "I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of
Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of
descent __ If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory
of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish..." (F. Darwin 1911, vol. 2,
pp. 6-7).
According to Darwin, then, evolution is an algorithmic process. Putting it
this way is still controversial. One of the tugs-of-war going on within evolutionary
biology is between those who are relentlessly pushing, pushing,
pushing towards an algorithmic treatment, and those who, for various submerged
reasons, are resisting this trend. It is rather as if there were metallurgists
around who were disappointed by the algorithmic explanation of
annealing. "You mean that's all there is to it? No submicroscopic Superglue
specially created by the heating and cooling process?" Darwin has convinced
all the scientists that evolution, like annealing, works. His radical vision of
how and why it works is still somewhat embattled, largely because those who
resist can dimly see that their skirmish is part of a larger campaign. If the
game is lost in evolutionary biology, where will it all end?
CHAPTER 2: Darwin conclusively demonstrated that, contrary to ancient
tradition, species are not eternal and immutable; they evolve. The origin of
new species was shown to be the result of "descent with modification." Less
conclusively, Darwin introduced an idea of how this evolutionary process
took place: via a mindless, mechanical—algorithmic—process he called
"natural selection." This idea, that all die fruits of evolution can be explained
as the products of an algorithmic process, is Darwin's dangerous idea.
CHAPTER 3: Many people, Darwin included, could dimly see that his idea of
natural selection had revolutionary potential, but just what did it promise to
overthrow? Darwin's idea can be used to dismantle and then rebuild a
traditional structure of Western thought, which I call die Cosmic Pyramid.
This provides a new explanation of the origin, by gradual accumulation, of
all the Design in the universe. Ever since Darwin, skepticism has been aimed
at his implicit claim that the various processes of natural selection, in spite of
their underlying mindlessness, are powerful enough to have done all the
design work that is manifest in the world.
CHAPTER THREE
Universal Acid
1. EARLY REACTIONS
Origin of man now proved. —Metaphysics must flourish. —He who
understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
—CHARLES DARWIN, in a notebook not
intended for publication, in P. H. Barrett et al.
1987, D26, M84
His subject is die 'Origin of Species,' & not die origin of Organization;
& it seems a needless mischief to have opened the latter speculation at
all.
—HARRIET MARTINEAL - , a friend of Darwin's, in a
letter to Fannie Wedgwood, March, 13, 1860,
quoted in Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 486
Darwin began his explanation in the middle, or even, you might say, at the
end. starting with the life forms we presently see, and showing how the
patterns in today's biosphere could be explained as having arisen by the
process of natural selection from the patterns in yesterday's biosphere, and so
on, back into the very distant past. He started with facts that everyone
knows: all of today's living things are the offspring of parents, who are the
offspring of grandparents, and so forth, so everything that is alive today is a
branch of a genealogical family, which is itself a branch of a larger clan. He
went on to argue that, if you go back far enough, you find that all the
branches of all the families eventually spring from common ancestral limbs,
so that there is a single Tree of Life, all the limbs, branches, and twigs united
by descent with modification. The fact that it has the branching organization
of a tree is crucial to the explanation of the sort of process involved, for such