Darwin's Dangerous Idea (27 page)

twin, the Library of Babel—they

that you are never going to write "for no reason at all." Thanks to the myriad are contained in each other, after all) is as good an approximate model of particular twists and turns of your life to date, you just don't happen to be Universal Design Space as we could ever need to think about. For the last well disposed to compose those sequences of keystrokes.

four billion years or so, the Tree of Life has been zigzagging through this If we want to get some perspective—limited, to be sure—on what patterns Vast multidimensional space, branching and blooming with virtually un-go into creating your own authorial dispositions, we will have to consider the imaginable fecundity, but nevertheless managing to fill only a Vanishingly transmission of Design to you from the books you have read. The books that small portion of that space of the Possible with Actual designs.7 According actually come to exist in the world's libraries are deeply 6. The genetic elements transferred in
Drosophila
are "intragenomic parasites" and 7. "I confess that I believe the emptiness of phenotypic space is filled with red her-probably have a negative effect on the adaptedness of their host organisms, so we rings. ... Under the null hypothesis that no constraints at all exist, the branching path-shouldn't get our hopes up unduly. See Engels 1992.

ways through space taken by this process constitute a random-branching walk in a 144 THREADS OF ACTUALITY IN DESIGN SPACE

The Unity of Design Space
145

to Darwin's dangerous idea, all
possible
explorations of Design Space are
must secure its base camp in biology, in part 11, before looking at its power
connected. Not only all your children and your children's children, but all
to transform our understanding of the human world, in part HI.

your brainchildren and your brainchildren's brainchildren must grow from the common stock of Design elements, genes and memes, that have so far CHAPTER 7:
How did the Tree of Life get started? Skeptics have thought a
been accumulated and conserved by the inexorable lifting algorithms, the
stroke of Special Creation
—
a skyhook
—
must be needed to get the evolu-ramps and cranes and cranes-atop-cranes of natural selection and its
tionary process going. There is a Darwinian answer to this challenge, how-products.

ever, which exhibits the power of Darwin's universal acid to work its way
If this is right, then all the achievements of human culture—language, art,
down through the lowest levels of the Cosmic Pyramid, showing how even
religion, ethics, science itself—are themselves artifacts ( of artifacts of arti-the laws of physics might emerge from chaos or nothingness without re-facts ...) of the same fundamental process that developed the bacteria, the
course to a Special Creator, or even a Lawgiver. This dizzying prospect is
mammals, and
Homo sapiens.
There is no Special Creation of language, and
one of the most feared aspects of Darwin's dangerous idea, but the fear is
neither art nor religion has a literally divine inspiration. If there are no
misguided.

skyhooks needed to make a skylark, there are also no skyhooks needed to make an ode to a nightingale. No meme is an island.

Life and all its glories are thus united under a single perspective, but some people find this vision hateful, barren, odious. They want to cry out against it, and above all, they want to be magnificent exceptions to it. They, if not the rest, are made in God's image by God, or, if they are not religious, they want to be skyhooks themselves. They want somehow to be
intrinsic sources
of Intelligence or Design, not "mere" artifacts of the same processes that mindlessly produced the rest of the biosphere.

So a lot is at stake. Before we turn, in part HI, to examine in detail the implications of the upward spread of universal acid through human culture, we need to secure the base camp, by considering a variety of deep challenges to Darwinian thinking within biology itself. In the process, our vision of the intricacy and power of the underlying ideas will be enhanced.

CHAPTER 6: There
is one Design Space, and in it the Tree of Life has grown a
branch that has recently begun casting its own exploratory threads into that
Space, in the form of human artifacts. Forced moves and other good ideas
are like beacons in Design Space, discovered again and again, by the
ultimately algorithmic search processes of natural selection and human
investigation. As Darwin appreciated, we can retrospectively detect the
historical fact of descent, anywhere in Design Space, when we find shared
design features that would be Vastly unlikely to coexist unless there was a
thread of descent between them. Historical reasoning about evolution dius
depends on accepting Paley's premise: the world is full of good Design,
which took work to create.

This completes die introduction to Darwin's dangerous idea. Now we
high-dimensional space. The typical property of such a walk in a high-dimensional space is that most of the space is empty" (Kauffman 1993, p. 19).

PART II

DARWINIAN THINKING

IN BIOLOGY

Evolution is a change from a no-howish untalkaboutable all-alikeness by
continuous sticktogetherations and somethingelsifications.

—WILUAM JAMES 1880

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

—THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY 1973

CHAPTER SEVEN

Priming Darwin's Pump

1. BACK BEYOND DARWIN'S FRONTIER

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed,
and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself,
upon the earth: and it was so.

And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his
kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind:
and God saw tint it was good.

—GENESIS 1:11—12

From what sort of seed could the Tree of Life get started? That all life on Earth has been produced by such a branching process of generation is now established beyond any reasonable doubt. It is as secure an example of a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth, thanks in large part to Darwin.

But how did the whole process get started in the first place? As we saw in chapter 3, Darwin not only started in the middle; he cautiously refrained from pushing his own published thinking back to the beginning—the ultimate origin of life and its preconditions. When pressed by correspondents, he had little more to say in private. In a famous letter, he surmised that it was quite possible that life began in "a warm little pond," but he had no details to offer about the likely recipe for this primeval preorganic soup. And in response to Asa Gray, as we saw (see page 67), he left wide open the possibility that the
laws
that would govern this Earth-shattering move were themselves designed—presumably by God.

His reticence on this score was wise on several counts. First, no one knew better than he the importance of anchoring a revolutionary theory in the bedrock of empirical facts, and he knew that he could only speculate, with scant hope in his own day of getting any substantive feedback. After all, as we have already seen, he didn't even have the Mendelian concept of the 150 PRIMING DARWIN'S PUMP

Back Beyond Darwin's Frontier
151

gene, let alone any of the molecular machinery underlying it. Darwin was an It is small wonder that Darwin didn't hit upon a suitable mechanism of intrepid deducer, but he also knew when he didn't have enough premises to heredity. What do you suppose his attitude would have been to the spec-go on. Besides, there was his concern for his beloved wife, Emma, who ulation that within the nucleus of each of the cells in his body there was a desperately wanted to cling to her religious beliefs, and who could already copy of a set of instructions, written on huge macromolecules, in the form of see the threat looming in her husband's work. Yet his reluctance to push any double helixes tightly kinked into snarls to form a set of forty-six chro-farther into this dangerous territory, at least in public, went beyond his mosomes? The DNA in your body, unsnarled and linked, would stretch to the consideration for her feelings. There is a wider ethical consideration at stake, sun and back several—ten or a hundred—times. Of course, Darwin is the which Darwin certainly appreciated.

man who painstakingly uncovered a host of jaw-dropping complexities in the Much has been written about the moral dilemmas that scientists face when lives and bodies of barnacles, orchids, and earthworms, and described them the discovery of a potentially dangerous fact puts their love of truth at odds with obvious relish. Had he had a prophetic dream back in 1859 about the with their concern for the welfare of others. Under what conditions, if any, wonders of DNA, he would no doubt have reveled in it, but I wonder if he would they be obliged to conceal the truth? These can be real dilemmas, with could have recounted it with a straight face. Even to those of us accustomed powerful and hard-to-plumb considerations on both sides. But there is no to the "engineering miracles" of the computer age, the facts are hard to controversy at all about what a scientist's ( or philosopher's) moral encompass. Not only molecule-sized copying machines, but proofreading obligations should be regarding his or her speculations. Science doesn't often enzymes that correct mistakes, all at blinding speed, on a scale that super-advance by the methodical piling up of demonstrable facts; the "cutting edge"

computers still cannot match. "Biological macromolecules have a storage is almost always composed of several rival edges, sharply competing and capacity that exceeds that of the best present-day information stores by boldly speculative. Many of these speculations soon prove to be misbegotten, several orders of magnitude. For example, the information density' in the however compelling at the outset, and these necessary by-products of genome of E
coli,
is about 1027 bits/m3" (Kiippers 1990, p. 180).

scientific investigation should be considered to be as potentially hazardous as In chapter 5, we arrived at a Darwinian definition of biological possibility any other laboratory wastes. One must consider their environmental impact.

in terms of accessibility within the Library of Mendel, but the precondition If their misapprehension by the public would be apt to cause suffering—by for that Library, as we noted, was the existence of genetic mechanisms of misleading people into dangerous courses of action, or by undercutting their staggering complexity and efiiciency. William Paley would have been trans-allegiance to some socially desirable principle or creed—scientists should be ported with admiration and wonder at the atomic-level intricacies that make particularly cautious about how they proceed, scrupulous about labeling life possible at all.
How could they themselves have evolved if they are the
speculations as such, and keeping the rhetoric of persuasion confined to its
precondition for Darwinian evolution?

proper targets.

Skeptics about evolution have argued that this is the fatal flaw in Darwin-But ideas, unlike toxic fumes or chemical residues, are almost impossible ism. As we have seen, the power of the Darwinian idea comes from the way to quarantine, particularly when they concern themes of abiding human it distributes
the
huge task of Design through vast amounts of time and space, curiosity, so, whereas there is no controversy at all about the principle of preserving the partial products as it proceeds. In
Evolution: A Theory in
responsibility here, there has been scant agreement, then or now, about how
Crisis,
Michael Denton puts it this way: the Darwinian assumes "that islands to honor it. Darwin did the best he could: he kept his speculations pretty of function are common, easily found in the first place, and that it is easy to much to himself.

go from island to island through functional intermediates" (Denton 1985, p.

We can do better. The physics and chemistry of life are now understood in 317). This is almost right, but not quite. Indeed, the central claim of dazzling detail, so that much more can be deduced about the necessary and Darwinism is that the Tree of Life spreads out its branches, connecting (perhaps) sufficient conditions for life. The answers to the big questions must

"islands of function" with isthmuses of intermediate cases, but nobody said still involve a large measure of speculation, but we can mark the speculations the passage would be "easy" or the safe stopping places "common." There is as such, and note how they could be confirmed or discon-firmed. There only one strained sense of "easy" in which Darwinism is committed to these would be no point any more in trying to pursue Darwin's policy of reticence; isthmus-crossings' being easy: since every living thing is a descendant of a too many very interesting cats are already out of the bag. We may not yet living thing, it has a tremendous leg up; all but the tiniest fraction of its know exactly
how
to take all these ideas seriously, but thanks to Darwin's recipe is guaranteed to have time-tested viability. The lines of genealogy are secure beachhead in biology, we know that we can and must.

lifelines indeed; according to Darwinism, the only hope of entering this cosmic maze of junk and staying alive is to stay on die isthmuses.

152 PRIMING DARWIN'S PUMP

Back Beyond Darwin's Frontier
153

Maybe, it is argued, the Creator does not control the day-to-day succession of evolutionary events, maybe he did not frame the tiger and the lamb, maybe he did not make a tree, but he
did
set up the original machinery of replication and replicator power, the original machinery of DNA and protein that made cumulative selection, and hence all of evolution, possible.

This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty explaining. Once we are allowed simply to
postulate
organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity.... But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as the machine itself. [Dawkins 1986a, p. 141.]