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

184 PRIMING DARWIN'S PUMP Eternal Recurrence—Life Without Foundations? 185
Eve. The creator of this miniature world is clearly taunting us, ridiculing the
seriousness with which we face our life problems. The moral seems clear: if
the meaning of this drama must come from on high, from a Creator, it would
be an obscene joke, a trivialization of the strivings of the individuals in that
world. But what if the meaning is somehow the creation of the individuals
themselves, arising anew in each incarnation rather than as a gift from on
high? This might open up the possibility of meaning that was not threatened
by repetition.
This is the defining theme of existentialism in its various species: the only
meaning there can be is the meaning you (somehow) create for yourself.
How that trick might be accomplished has always been something of a
mystery among existentialists, but as we shall soon see, Darwinism does
have some demystification to offer in its account of the process of meaningcreation.
The key, once again, is the abandonment of John Locke's Mind-first
vision, and its replacement with a vision in which importance itself, like
everything else that we treasure, gradually evolves from nothingness.
We might pause, before turning to some of these details, to consider where
our roundabout journey has brought us so far. We began with a somewhat
childish vision of an anthropomorphic, Handicrafter God, and recognized that
this idea, taken literally, was well on the road to extinction. When we looked
through Darwin's eyes at the actual processes of design of which we and all
the wonders of nature are the products to date, we found that Paley was right
to see these effects as the result of a lot of design work, but we found a nonmiraculous
account of it: a massively parallel, and hence prodigiously
wasteful, process of mindless, algorithmic design-trying, in which, however,
the minimal increments of design have been thriftily husbanded, copied, and
re-used over billions of years. The wonderful particularity or individuality of
the creation was due, not to Shakespearean inventive genius, but to the
incessant contributions of chance, a growing sequence of what Crick (1968)
has called "frozen accidents."
That vision of the creative process still apparently left a role for God as
Lawgiver, but this gave way in turn to the Newtonian role of Lawfinder,
which also evaporated, as we have recently seen, leaving behind no Intelligent
Agency in the process at all. What is left is what the process, shuffling
through eternity, mindlessly finds (when it finds anything): a timeless Platonic
possibility of order. That is indeed a thing of beauty, as mathematicians
are forever exclaiming, but it is not itself something intelligent but, wonder
of wonders, something intelligible. Being abstract and outside of time, it is
nothing with an initiation or origin in need of explanation.
12. Descartes had raised the question of whether God had created the truths of mathematics.
His follower Nicolas Malebranche ( 1638-1715) firmly expressed the view that
they needed no inception, being as eternal as anything could be.
What does need its origin explained is the concrete universe itself, and as
Hume's Philo long ago asked: Why not stop at the material world? It, we
have seen, does perform a version of the ultimate bootstrapping trick; it
creates itself ex nihilo, or at any rate out of something that is well-nigh
indistinguishable from nothing at all. Unlike the puzzlingly mysterious, timeless
self-creation of God, this self-creation is a non-miraculous stunt that has
left lots of traces. And, being not just concrete but the product of an exquisitely
particular historical process, it is a creation of utter uniqueness—
encompassing and dwarfing all the novels and paintings and symphonies of
all the artists—occupying a position in the hyperspace of possibilities that
differs from all others.
Benedict Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, identified God and Nature,
arguing that scientific research was the true path of theology. For this heresy
he was persecuted. There is a troubling (or, to some, enticing) Janus-faced
quality to Spinoza's heretical vision of Deus sive Natura (God, or Nature): in
proposing his scientific simplification, was he personifying Nature or
depersonalizing God? Darwin's more generative vision provides the structure
in which we can see the intelligence of Mother Nature (or is it merely
apparent intelligence?) as a non-miraculous and non-mysterious—and hence
all the more wonderful—feature of this self-creating thing.
CHAPTER 7: There must have been a first living thing, but there couldn't have
been one—the simplest living thing is too complex, too designed, to spring
into existence by sheer chance. This dilemma is solved not by a skyhook, but
by a long series of Darwinian processes: self-replicating macros, preceded
or accompanied perhaps by self-replicating clay crystals, gradually
advancing from tournaments of luck to tournaments of skill over a billion
years. And the regularities of physics on which those cranes depend could
themselves be the outcome of a blind, uncaring shuffle through Chaos. Thus,
out of next to nothing, the world we know and love created itself.
CHAPTER 8: The work done by natural selection is R and D, so biology is
fundamentally akin to engineering, a conclusion that has been deeply resisted
out of misplaced fear for what it might imply. In fact, it sheds light on
some of our deepest puzzles. Once we adopt the engineering perspective, the
central biological concept of function and the central philosophical concept
of meaning can be explained and united. Since our own capacity to respond
to and create meaning—our intelligence—is grounded in our status as
advanced products of Darwinian processes, the distinction between real and
artificial intelligence collapses. There are important differ-