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

68 UNIVERSAL ACID
It is not unusual to find such metaphors, redolent of capitalism, in evolutionary
explanations. Examples are often gleefully recounted by those
critics and interpreters of Darwin who see this language as revealing—or
should we say betraying—the social and political environment in which
Darwin developed his ideas, thereby ( somehow ) discrediting their claim to
scientific objectivity. It is certainly true that Darwin, being an ordinary
mortal, was the inheritor of a huge manifold of concepts, modes of expression,
attitudes, biases, and visions that went with his station in life (as a
Victorian Englishman might put it), but it is also true that the economic
metaphors that come so naturally to mind when one is thinking about
evolution get their power from one of the deepest features of Darwin's
discovery.
3. THE PRINCIPLE OF THE ACCUMULATION OF DESIGN
The key to understanding Darwin's contribution is granting the premise of
the Argument from Design. What conclusion ought one to draw if one found
a watch lying on the heath in the wilderness? As Paley ( and Hume's Cleanthes
before him ) insisted, a watch exhibits a tremendous amount of work
done. Watches and other designed objects don't just happen; they have to be
the product of what modern industry calls "R and D"—research and
development—and R and D is costly, in both time and energy. Before Darwin,
the only model we had of a process by which this sort of R-and-D work
could be done was an Intelligent Artificer. What Darwin saw was that in
principle the same work could be done by a different sort of process that
distributed that work over huge amounts of time, by thriftily conserving the
design work that had been accomplished at each stage, so that it didn't have
to be done over again. In other words, Darwin had hit upon what we might
call the Principle of Accumulation of Design. Things in the world (such as
watches and organisms and who knows what else) may be seen as products
embodying a certain amount of Design, and one way or another, that Design
had to have been created by a process of R and D. Utter undesignedness—
pure chaos in the old-fashioned sense—was the null or starting point.
A more recent idea about the difference—and tight relation—between
Design and Order will help clarify the picture. This is the proposal, first
popularized by the physicist Erwin Schrodinger (1967), that Life can be
defined in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In physics, order or
organization can be measured in terms of heat differences between regions of
space time; entropy is simply disorder, the opposite of order, and according
to the Second Law, the entropy of any isolated system increases with time. In
other words, things run down, inevitably. According to the
The Principle of the Accumulation of Design 69
Second Law, the universe is unwinding out of a more ordered state into the
ultimately disordered state known as the heat death of the universe. 2
What, then, are living things? They are things that defy this crumbling into
dust, at least for a while, by not being isolated—by taking in from their
environment the wherewithal to keep life and limb together. The psychologist
Richard Gregory summarizes the idea crisply:
Time's arrow given by Entropy—the loss of organization, or loss of temperature
differences—is statistical and it is subject to local small-scale
reversals. Most striking: life is a systematic reversal of Entropy, and intelligence
creates structures and energy differences against the supposed
gradual 'death' through Entropy of the physical Universe. [Gregory 1981,
p. 136.]
Gregory goes on to credit Darwin with the fundamental enabling idea: "It
is the measure of the concept of Natural Selection that increases in the
complexity and order of organisms in biological time can now be understood."
Not just individual organisms, but the whole process of evolution that
creates them, thus can be seen as fundamental physical phenomena running
contrary to the larger trend of cosmic time, a feature captured by William
Calvin in one of the meanings of the title of his classic exploration of the
relationship between evolution and cosmology, The River That Flows Uphill:
A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain (1986).
A designed thing, then, is either a living thing or a part of a living thing, or
the artifact of a living thing, organized in any case in aid of this battle against
disorder. It is not impossible to oppose the trend of the Second Law, but it is
costly. Consider iron. Iron is a very useful element, essential for our bodily
health, and also valuable as the major component of steel, that wonderful
building material. Our planet used to have vast reserves of iron ore, but they
are gradually being depleted. Does this mean that the Earth is running out of
iron? Hardly. With the trivial exception of a few tons that have recently been
launched out of Earth's effective gravitational field in the form of spaceprobe
components, there is just as much iron on the planet today as there
ever was. The trouble is that more and more of it is scattered about in the
form of rust (molecules of iron oxide), and other low-grade, lowconcentration
materials. In principle, it could all be recovered, but that would
take enormous amounts of energy, craftily focused on the particular project
of extracting and reconcentrating the iron.
It is the organization of just such sophisticated processes that constitutes
2. And where did the initial order come from? The best discussion I have encountered of
"is good question is "Cosmology and the Arrow of Time," ch. 7 of Penrose 1989.