Three Big Bangs Read online

  Conway Morris and de Duve are swimming upstream against a powerful current in contemporary theoretical biology. As noted earlier, considering escalating information transfer, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry found major escalations at critical thresholds in evolution: the origin of the genetic code, the origin of eucaryotes from procaryotes, meiotic sex, multicellular life, animal societies, and human language. But they find “no reason to regard the unique transitions as the inevitable result of some general law”; to the contrary, these events might not have happened at all (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995:3). Both Maynard Smith and de Duve find a series of escalation events, although Maynard Smith finds them unexpected; de Duve finds them expected.

  Was all that resulted already there in the potential at the big bang, inevitably to unfold and evolve, as de Duve claims? Were later-coming fauna and flora, including humans, already there in the possibility spaces of even the simplest predecessor organisms? Maybe some of the possibility was within one organism, some within another. This seems to argue that whatever eventuates must always have been potentially there in the primordial matter-energy. Conway Morris suspects that the basic forms into which living organisms can evolve are preset; “the nodes of occupation are effectively predetermined from the Big Bang (Conway Morris 2003:310). That is a metaphysical claim, not a scientific claim.

  But isn’t it equally plausible to believe that new possibility space opens up, not previously there? New information, as in DNA, opens up new opportunities, previously impossible to hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, iron so long as they are devoid of such information. New possibility space appeared with the co-option of the mitochondria and chloroplast predecessor organisms to novel functions. Some achievements that are genuinely new pop up. The precedents in both their actuality and possibilities are necessary but not sufficient for the consequents. There is breakthrough discovery, innovative creativity.

  Biologists, a century back, used to call such events “saltations.” Physicists, pressed for words from their discipline, might call it a “quantum leap.” Maybe we need a new term: “cybernetic leap.” Biologists inclined toward chance may call this “tinkering” (Jacob 1977). Biologists impressed with the novel results will call it evolutionary “exploring” or “searching.” Some call it “genetic engineering” (Shapiro 1998; 2005). Historians will remark that such events are narrative adventures; they do not follow any Aristotelian logic, nor any hypothetico-deductive science. One needs a metaphysics for such co-option because there appear new ontological levels, both actual and possible. Sight appears where before was only heat-stress protection, language where before was only skin-pressure sensibility. Sight and language open up the possibility of writing/reading. Co-option is a vital key to historical creativity.

  Retrospectively, of course, after these novelties happen, the historian can trace the steps by which they happened. The paleontologist and paleo-molecular biologists can give scientific explanations, a posteriori. But at each developmental juncture, were (per impossible) a biologist standing there watching, nothing would be a priori. One can claim that the possibilities were always there; one can with equal plausibility claim that new possibility space has opened up en route in the course of natural history. Prospectively, if one could stand at each present moment, at each “now” over the course of evolution, there would always be the great unknown. There is the generation of new possibility space in which information breakthroughs become possible. The pivotal element in a metaphysics of such evolutionary biology is the future—not the past, not even the present. Past and present are necessary but never sufficient for the future. In that sense our accounts will always be insufficient, incomplete, before this capacity for future innovation.

  Sometimes the explanatory account is by laws applied to initial conditions, and the same laws again reapplied to the resulting outcomes, now treated as further initial conditions. But sometimes, with co-options, endosymbioses, lateral genetic transfers, mutations, the outcomes are not just further sets of initial conditions. The novel outcomes revise the previous laws; the rules of the game change, as well as the initial conditions, and the future is like no previous past. One can say that all this surprising serendipity is somehow “inherent” from the start; but the explanatory power of such a claim is rather vague. Predictably, there will be unpredictable co-options!

  Stuart Kauffman puts this pointedly:

  Now the critical question. Do you think you could say ahead of time, or finitely prestate, all possible Darwinian preadaptations of, say, species alive now, or even humans?… Ever novel functionalities come to exist and proliferate in the biosphere. The fact that we cannot prestate them is essential, and an essential limitation to the way Newton taught us to do science. Prestate the relevant variables, the forces acting among them, and the initial and boundary conditions, and calculate the future of the system…. We are profoundly precluded from the Newtonian move. In short, the evolution of the biosphere is radically unknowable…. The evolution of the biosphere is radically creative, ceaselessly creative, in ways that cannot be foretold. (Kauffman 2007:912–913)

  Astronomers speculate about their multiverses; biologists celebrate on this Earth alone rich plurality of kinds, an endlessly creative explosion with a radically open future—unless, alas, the species appearing at the third big bang puts this life on Earth in jeopardy. Reflecting about the first big bang, we observed that a theory of everything that made the anthropic qualities of matter-energy inevitable would still require a deeper account of why there should be such a universe. Similarly, a surprising universe of the kind we have needs a deeper account. We reach the same puzzle here on Earth below that we found in the heavens above. If life is inevitable, it is remarkable. If life is contingent, it is equally remarkable. Either way, there is radical creativity demanding a deeper account.

  The predictable/unpredictable debate couples with further debate about whether to call what has happened progressive change. Again, biologists and philosophers of biology are quite divided. Michael Ruse insists, “Evolution is going nowhere—and rather slowly at that” (Ruse 1986:203). A frequent argument is that most forms of life, although they may respeciate and differ, do not get any smarter—the beetles or the plants. The linchpin of contemporary biology is that the better adapted survive, but the better adaptations with which most species survive have nothing to do with evolutionary progress—those beetles and plants again. Anyone who today believes that progress was a heading during evolutionary history, Ruse concludes, is guilty of “pseudo-science.” Trying to document this in Monad to Man, a 400-page Harvard University Press book, Ruse himself goes rather slowly, and one reason is that he has to argue away what many classical biologists have believed: that there is some tendency toward increased complexity across the millennia of natural history, and that this is some sort of advance.

  Ernst Mayr asks:

  Who can deny that overall there is an advance from the procaryotes that dominated the living world more than three billion years ago to the eucaryotes with their well organized nucleus and chromosomes as well as cytoplasmic organelles; from the single-celled eucaryotes to metaphytes and metazoans with a strict division of labor among their highly specialized organ systems; within the metazoans from ectotherms that are at the mercy of climate to the warm-blooded endotherms, and within the endotherms from types with a small brain and low social organization to those with a very large central nervous system, highly developed parental care, and the capacity to transmit information from generation to generation? (Mayr 1988:251–252, 256)

  Indeed, the series of morphological and physiological innovations that have occurred in the course of evolution can hardly be described as anything but progress. (Mayr 1982:532)

  Edward O. Wilson concludes his study of the diversity of life:

  Biological diversity embraces a vast number of conditions that range from the simple to the complex, with the simple appearing first in evolution and the more complex later. Many reversals have occurred
along the way, but the overall average across the history of life has moved from the simple and few to the more complex and numerous. During the past billion years, animals as a whole evolved upward in body size, feeding and defensive techniques, brain and behavioral complexity, social organization, and precision of environmental control—in each case farther from the nonliving state than their simpler antecedents did.

  More precisely, the overall averages of these traits and their upper extremes went up. Progress, then is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard, including the acquisition of goals and intentions in the behavior of animals. It makes little sense to judge it irrelevant…. In spite of major and minor temporary setbacks, in spite of the nearly complete turnover of species, genera, and families on repeated occasions, the trend toward biodiversity has been consistently upward. (Wilson 1992:187, 194)

  George Gaylord Simpson, after surveying the fossil record extensively and noting that there are exceptions, concludes, “The evidence warrants considering general in the course of evolution… a tendency for life to expand, to fill in all available spaces in the liveable environments, including those created by the process of that expansion itself…. The total number and variety of organisms existing in the world has shown a tendency to increase markedly during the history of life” (1967:242, 342). R. H. Whittaker finds, despite “island” and other local saturations and equilibria, that on continental scales and for most groups “increase of species diversity… is a self-augmenting evolutionary process without any evident limit.” There is a natural tendency toward increased “species packing” (1972:214).

  William Day concludes that “as we arrange the sequences of evolution’s advance, we discover an unsettling implication”:

  Each step is an evolutionary curve; all steps together outline an accelerating advance for all biological evolution…. Each major development in evolution appears to take less and time to occur. And each development begins slowly but, fed by its own momentum, begins to accelerate until it races to its developed state. When it reaches a final level—a higher stage in evolution—the offspring of the new life form begin to repeat the cycle, evolving some feature that ultimately leads to another succeeding step… it continues to accelerate stage after stage…. We are in the middle of something momentous that is taking place. (Day 1984:257–258)

  Karl Popper concludes that science discovers “a world of propensities,” open to historical innovation, the possibility space ever enlarging.

  In our real changing world, the situation and, with it, the possibilities, and thus the propensities, change all the time…. This view of propensities allows us to see in a new light the processes that constitute our world: the world process. The world is no longer a causal machine—it can now be seen as a world of propensities, as an unfolding process of realizing possibilities and of unfolding new possibilities…. New possibilities are created, possibilities that previously simply did not exist…. Especially in the evolution of biochemistry, it is widely appreciated that every new compound creates new possibilities for further new compounds to synthesize: possibilities which previously did not exist. The possibility space… is growing…. Our world of propensities is inherently creative. (Popper 1990:17–20)

  The result is the evolutionary drama. “The variety of those [organisms] that have realized themselves is staggering.” “In the end, we ourselves become possible” (1990:26, 19).

  Stuart Kauffman similarly finds himself amazed at life, at agency: “It is utterly remarkable that agency has arisen in the universe—systems that are able to act on their own behalf; systems that modify the universe on their own behalf. Out of agency comes value and meaning.” “Life is valuable on its own, a wonder of emergence, evolution and creativity. Reality is truly stunning” (Kauffman 2007:909, 914).

  Like the theory of everything, which would make cosmic origins inevitable, we do not know if we will get a parallel theory of inevitable evolution. If the scientists say “contingent” evolution, metaphysicians will likely say that this is not enough explanation for the second big bang and its three-billion-year explosive history, any more than “random” is enough explanation for the first big bang and its results. If the scientists say “inevitable” evolution, the metaphysicians will still say that such events demand further explanation, just as does a theory of everything that would make the first big bang inevitable. If, as seems more likely, biologists find some mixing of the two, the results on Earth are still impressive, indeed explosive. Both historically and logically, the generative context of life requires both order and contingency. We found earlier that exploring immense possibilities in the life struggle cannot be fine-tuned clockwork.

  Evolutionary tendencies go beyond optimizing local species survival, exploring combinatorial state spaces that increase exponentially with the number of components. Among these, brains are especially impressive. Life starts up, and, on many of its trajectories, it smarts up. This exuberant proliferation of life on Earth is a second big bang, demanding a philosophical response in the only one of Earth’s creatures capable of such a response. But to get such cerebral capacities we need a third big bang.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mind

  The Human Big Bang

  The third big bang is the explosive growth of the human brain, sponsoring the human mind. Uniquely among the species on Earth, Homo sapiens is cognitively spectacular. Consider a graph of increasing cranial capacity in the hominoid line (fig. 3.1, Pilbeam 1972/ Wilson 1975). That trajectory makes virtually a right-angle turn. Edward O. Wilson remarks: “No organ in the history of life has grown faster” (Wilson 1978:87). Steve Dorus and his team of neurogeneticists conclude: “Human evolution is characterized by a dramatic increase in brain size and complexity” (Dorus et al. 2004:1027). Theodosius Dobzhansky puts it this way: “The biological evolution has transcended itself in the human ‘revolution’” (Dobzhansky 1967:58).

  J. Craig Venter and more than 200 coauthors call the human brain “a massive singularity.” Reporting on the completion of the Celera Genomics version of the human genome project, they caution in their concluding paragraph:

  In organisms with complex nervous systems, neither gene number, neuron number, nor number of cell types correlates in any meaningful manner with even simplistic measures of structural or behavioral complexity…. Between humans and chimpanzees, the gene number, gene structures and functions, chromosomal and genomic organization, and cell types and neuroanatomies are almost indistinguishable, yet the development modifications that predisposed human lineages to cortical expansion and development of the larynx, giving rise to language, culminated in a massive singularity that by even the simplest of criteria made humans more complex in a behavioral sense…. The real challenge of human biology, beyond the task of finding out how genes orchestrate the construction and maintenance of the miraculous mechanism of our bodies, will lie ahead as we seek to explain how our minds have come to organize thoughts sufficiently well to investigate our own existence. (Venter et al. 2001, 1347–1348)

  Figure 3.1 Increasing cranial capacity in the hominoid line (Wilson 1975, from Pilbeam 1972)

  The human embryo starts as a single cell, without consciousness, and in the adult human an ideational consciousness is life-orienting. This “massive singularity” these geneticists find in humans is all the more interesting when it comes by consensus of the same geneticists discovering the genetic continuities with the other primates from which humans originated.

  Bruce Lahn, the lead researcher in the Dorus study, concluded:

  We’ve proven that there is a big distinction. Human evolution is, in fact, a privileged process because it involves a large number of mutations in a large number of genes…. To accomplish so much in so little evolutionary time—a few million years—requires a selection process that is perhaps categorically different from the typical processes of acquiring new biological traits…. It required a level of selection that is unprecedented. Our s
tudy offers the first genetic evidence that humans occupy a unique position in the tree of life. Simply put, evolution has been working very hard to produce us humans. (Lahn, interviewed in Gianaro 2005)

  David Premack puts this differently but with equal force: “Human language is an embarassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness” (Premack 1985:282).

  Michael Gazzaniga speaks of “the explosion in human brain size”:

  We are hugely different. While most of our genes and brain architecture are held in common with animals, there are always differences to be found. And while we can use lathes to mill fine jewelry, and chimps can use stones to crack open nuts, the differences are light years apart…. A phase shift occurred. (Gazzaniga 2008:13, 3)

  So the puzzle is how can a change of some one or two percent in DNA results in light-years of mental explosion.

  Theory of Mind: The Human Singularity

  Perhaps the radical threshold is crossed with the emergence of consciousness, already present for millennia in the primate line. Certainly, consciousness prior to humans is an already radical emergent. Such escalating psyche has been impressive, resulting from the second big bang. Still, such primary consciousness was graded and simplified through earlier species, present in much simpler-brained organisms: birds, reptiles, fish, invertebrates; we do not know how or where to draw the lines. Consciousness, however novel, did gradually evolve. “Conscious” has the root meaning “I know.”