Thesis #2: Evolution is the result of diversity
The concept of progress is actually rather new. Most prehistoric and ancient peoples saw history as a constantly repeating cycle, incompatible with any notion of advancement or degradation. The first conceptions of linear time are found only in the historical era. Confuscius, the Greeks and the Jews all believed that the world was, in fact, becoming worse. In this, they did concieve of history as linear, but as the opposite of progress. The Greeks held that the first, “Golden Age” had been the best era, with each succeeding age diminished from its predecessor’s glory. In Judaism, the “Fall of Man” in Genesis paints humanity in a fallen, exiled state. Later Jewish prophets outlined a messianic and eschatological timeline which extended this into an on-going societal free-fall that would end only by divine intervention with the Messianic Age. This final hope of the Messianic Age sowed the first seeds of the idea of progress.
In many ways, we can thank Christianity for the concept. In reconciling their belief in Jesus as the messiah, and the very obviously unfulfilled predictions of the Eschaton and the Messianic Age, Christians began to develop a more progressive concept of history. Their Christology immediately separates history into “before Christ” and “after Christ.” They mark the passage of years as Anno Domini-the “Year of Our Lord.” Since the New Covenant is, in the Christian mind, immediately superior to the Old–as Paul argues in his Letter to the Galatians–we already have fitted all of history into a broad sweep of progress. The condition of mankind was improved by the life of Christ. History has progressed.
The concept proved adaptable to changing memetic environments. The Enlightenment was a response to the superstitious worldview that preceded it, and like so many philosophical responses, was prone to attempts to counter-balance its opponents by going equally far in the opposite direction. The Enlightenment defined humanity as unique for its faculty of Reason, and celebrated that Reason as the seat of mankind’s “redemption” from its state of ignorance and savagery. The Enlightenment promised an optimistic future, where humanity triumphed over every obstacle in its way thanks to the unstoppable power of Reason. As E.O. Wilson described it in Consilience:
Inevitable progress is an idea that has survived Condorcet and the Enlightenment. It has exerted, at different times and variously for good and evil, a powerful influence to the present day. In the final chapter of the Sketch [for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind], “The Tenth Stage: The Future Progress of the Human Mind,” Condorcet becomes giddily optimistic about its prospect. He assures the reader that the glorious process is underway: All will be well. His vision for human progress makes little concession to the stubbornly negative qualities of human nature. When all humanity has attained a higher level of civilization, we are told, nations will be equal, and within each nation citizens will also be equal. Science will flourish and lead the way. Art will be freed to grow in power and beauty. Crime, poverty, racism and sexual discrimination will decline. The human lifespan, through scientifically based medicine, will lengthen indefinitely.
Though the Enlightenment placed its faith in Science, rather than in deities, this belief in progress remains no less a leap of faith for it. The idea of progress–particularly of humanity’s constant self-improvement through the application of Reason–became as fundamental a belief for the secular humanists as the redeeming power of Christ was for the Christians they proceeded. The beliefs fulfilled similar needs, as well, by promising similar outcomes–even if brought about by entirely different processes. Both comforted their believers with the promise that the current misery was only temporary, and that a new, better day was waiting on the horizon for those who soldiered on.
Little wonder, then, that when Darwin challenged the conceit of our species’ superiority by suggesting we were mere animals, those that did not reject the evidence entirely instead comforted themselves with the myth of progress. In the popular mind, the word “evolution” became nearly a synonym for “progress,” the process by which species “improve” themselves. In fact, evolution has nothing to do with “progress” at all.
Evolution, technically defined, is merely a change in allele frequency in a population over time. In one generation, 15% have a given gene; in the next, it is only 14.8%. Iterated over generations, this may lead to the complete extinction of the allele. The idea of evolution predates Darwin, as such change is immediately observable and undeniable. Darwin made two contributions to this; the first was defining the first mechanism for evolution in the process of natural selection, the second his contention that such evolution satisfactorily explains the origin of species.
Since the Neolithic, herders have practiced artificial selection with their livestock. If a given cow produces more milk than the others, or is more docile and easy to control, then you simply give that cow more time with the bulls, so that she will have more children. The next generation of the herd will have more docile cows that produce more milk. The herder has artificially selected for traits he desires. Over enough generations, this could lead to the entire herd being docile and producing more milk.
Darwin’s concept of natural selection merely suggests that this can also happen without the conscious guidance of a herder. A giraffe with a slightly longer neck may be able to reach foliage in trees more easily. He will be better and more easily fed, giving him more time to dally with the ladies and concieve young, who are also more likely to have slightly longer necks. Over enough generations, this could easily explain the modern state of the giraffe, the same as artificial selection sufficiently explains the state of the modern cow herd. The difference being, no single entity was consciously guiding the giraffes to that end.
The seeds of these thoughts were planted during Darwin’s time aboard the Beagle. During this time, he visited the Galapagos Islands, and noted both the similarities and differences of birds on those islands to birds on the mainland. He noted the similarities suggesting they had once been a single species, and the differences specifically adapted to the Galapagos’ unqiue ecology. Darwin allowed the implications of his natural selection to play out. If two populations of a given species are separated, each will continue changing with each generation, but now separated, their changes will diverge. Over sufficient generations, the two groups will become too divergent to interbreed any longer. Two new species will have formed.
In its truest essence, then, evolution is nearly irrefutable. “Survival of the fittest,” is a true shorthand, if we understand “fittest” to refer to the ability to produce young, as well as being severely restricted to a given locale. In this case, it becomes a tautology; if a creature possesses some trait that will make it more likely to have young, then it is more likely to have young. The controversy comes from the implication of this statement. If true (and how could it not be?), then all the diversity of life can be accounted for in a natural fashion. Gods can still be invoked if one insists; evolution could be seen as G-d’s paintbrush, or Genesis as a poetic account of evolution, as all but the most hardline, fundamentalist Christians believe, but they are not necessary. The existence of life itself is no longer a proof for the existence of G-d.
Evolution, then, is simply a consequence of diversity. All organisms are subject to “dumb luck,” and untold heritages of the world were pre-emptively snuffed out by rocks falling at the most inopportune moments. Yet, the diversity of populations of organisms played with the probability of that dumb luck. Falling stones did not kill the swift and the slow in equal measure. Trees with flame-retardant seeds inherited the earth after enough forest fires had gone through. Evolution happens, as the inevitable consequence of a diverse world. As Dawkins abstracted it in The Selfish Gene, the diversity of possible chemical reactions meant that, eventually, a reaction would occur that reproduced itself. Such a reaction would have a higher probability of occuring again, as it was no longer relying on pure chance to do so. Anything that reproduces itself–even ideas–are subject to natural selection and evolution.
What, then, is the “goal” of evolution, if we can speak of such a thing? The marriage of evolution and progress has left many with the notion that evolution is driving towards some endpoint, that we are progressing ever closer to some perfect state. Usually, this is formulated as evolution’s drive towards greater complexity. Such a “drive” towards complexity, however, is ultimately a mirage, an illusion created by the unique myopia of our scale.
There is a certain baseline of simplicity for all things. No atom can be simpler than hydrogen, for example. There is a baseline for DNA where, if it were any simpler, it would not be able to reproduce itself, and thus would no longer be DNA. There is a baseline, somewhere around the complexity of the virus–whether above or below is a matter of some debate–where any more simplicity would yield something no longer alive. From this baseline, there is nowhere to go but up. Diversity spreads out in all possible directions. There is infinite diversity in the space that is equally simple, hugging close to the baseline. Diversity also moves up, towards more complex. If we were to graph such dispersion, it would not look like an arrow shooting up into the stratosphere of complexity; it would be a hemisphere against a solid floor, with its radius constantly growing.
The evidence for this view is clear and intuitive. If evolution drives ever greater complexity, rather than simply diversity, why then is the vast majority of life on earth single celled? Instead, this distribution of life–with almost all of it existing at lower orders of complexity, and the numbers of species diminishing as we climb into greater levels of complexity–is exactly the hemisphere of diversity. Nowhere do we see the straight line of “progress,” unless we track only our own, specific evolutionary path, and ignore everything else. If we stare at the radius pointing straight up and ignore the rest of the hemisphere, then, and only then, can we convince ourselves that evolution is about “progress.”
Consider the case of the Neandertal. Larger, stronger and faster than normal humans, our success (and their failure) was once attributed to their inferior intellect. In fact, their brains were noticeably larger than our own. While this may simply be a matter of ennervating muscle tissue, it means their physical faculties were at least the equal of our own, if not superior. Culturally, the only evidence of adaptation to changing stimulus we have in the Paleolithic is the Châtelperronian toolset, an ingenious integration of Acheulean and Mousterian technology. It is not found associated with “modern” humans, however, but with Neandertals. With their intellectual abilities in greater doubt, many turned to Bergman’s Rule to explain their demise: Neandertals were cold-adapted, and could not survive in the changing climate of the end of the Pleistocene. However, Neandertals have been found throughout the Middle East in areas which, while once colder than they are now, were never so cold as to justify the idea that Neandertals were doomed by their cold adaptation.
There is yet no angle to the Neandertals’ extinction besides sheer, dumb luck that does not present a host of problems. It seems, regardless of which attribute we value most, Neandertals were at least our equals, and perhaps even our betters. Their extinction, and our success, may be a case of evolution picking the worse candidate; it may simply be randomly choosing between two equally qualified candidates. What it seems very strongly to not represent is a case of “progress.” Instead, it is simply change.
This highlights one of the last important traits of evolution: its ambivalence. A friend of Darwin’s once tried to develop a system of ethics based on the conviction that, while evolution is inevitable, it is also a monstrous process, and that which helps it along is itself immoral. I argue that evolution can, indeed, be monstrous, but is not always so. Like everything else, good and evil are matters of proximity. Evolution sometimes makes things better; sometimes, it makes them worse. Evolution is driven by diversity, and in general creates even more diversity, but it is also blind and unconscious. It operates on immediate results, leaving long-term errors to be resolved by time. It is a process of continual trial and error, as it allows long-term mistakes to correct themselves with self-destruction. Thus, at any given point, we must be careful to declare anything an evolutionary “success” by its current survival–as it may just as easily be a terrible mistake in the midst of eliminating itself.