“The animal creation is captive to matter, God has given freedom to man. The animal cannot escape the law of nature, whereas man may control it, for he, containing nature, can rise above it.”
`Abdu’l-Bahá
May 14, 2012. Evolution is one of the most successful of the modern sciences. Not only does it enjoy wide-ranging empirical evidence for its basic tenets and provide support for a multitude of disciplines, practices, and applications, but it is also extraordinarily rich in the scope and extent to which it offers broad and powerful ways of thinking about reality.
But lets talk about chance.
Chance comes into play in evolution as a mechanism that creates random gene variations that are accepted or rejected by natural selection.
The role of chance in evolution has engaged more than several thinkers as they contemplate evolution’s broader implications. Among them was Jacques Monod, the gifted French biologist and Nobel Prize winner who viewed the role of chance as centrally important to our understanding of the universe. His view was that:
Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.
In Chance and Necessity, his widely read philosophical magnum opus, he summarizes his views in the book’s last chapter. Humans are the product of the natural selection processes of evolution driven by chance – by accidental events:
We call these events accidental; we say that they are random occurrences. And since they constitute the only possible source of modification in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structures, it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere.
Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact
Stephen J. Gould, one of our greatest evolutionary scientists, thought in a similar vein. That we exist is accidental, he argued. It is the result of blind forces and contingency. If our world were to start all over from the beginning, we would get entirely different results because of the vagaries of chance:
Wind back the tape of life to the origin of the modern multicellular animals in the Cambrian explosion, let the tape play again from this identical starting point, and the replay will populate the earth … with a radically different set of creatures. The chance that this alternative set will contain anything remotely like a human being must be effectively nil, while the probability of any kind of creature endowed with self-consciousness must also be extremely small.
Michael Ruse, a philosophy professor and a prolific writer who has weighed in on all things relating to evolution, agrees with Gould. He warmed to his topic when Pope Benedict XVI said in his 2011 Easter homily that:
If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature. But no, Reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine Reason.
Chastising the Pope (Huff Post, 5/11/2011), he described him as misguided because he wasn’t following the accepted views in evolution:
Human evolution had no more forethought than, say, the pattern that a pile of sand makes when emptied from a bucket. … Evolution depends on mutations that simply don’t have direction. … To put direction into evolution is to be a supporter of the non-scientific theory of Intelligent Design. … there is a flat-out contradiction between the claims of modern biological science and the theology of the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, this is fairly extraordinary set of claims, given that we exist and presumably have arrived here by a process that is at least related to the claims of modern biological sciences. (At least there was enough of a sense of direction to get us here!) But beside that, it is a theological statement to the effect that evolution doesn’t have a direction. AND it contains a major scientific faux pas - a mistaken statement to the effect that randomness (i.e., random mutations as a driving force) rules out direction as a result of natural selection processes. Yet, remarkably, Ruse’s view is representative of that of many major thinkers in evolutionary thought.
So, something funny is going on here, and we need to understand it.
As far as I can tell, Monod, Gould, and Ruse are making broad, sweeping generalizations about the nature of the world on the basis of understandings of the mechanisms of evolution that rely on popular and antiquated concepts of randomness rather than relying on modern understandings – what physicists call stochastic processes or the behavior of complex systems – that have developed since Darwin’s time. Either that, or they are following the prevailing winds of intellectual fashion.
But before we explore the science of the various roles played by chance and random processes – roles that physicists have explored in exhausting detail in such varied arenas as thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, complexity theory, information theory, and even stellar evolution – lets look at the social and historical backdrop of the interpretations of chance presented by Monod, Gould, and Ruse.
Evolution as the Modern Creation Story
Evolution, in many ways, is the modern creation story – a scientific updating of the ancient creation myths of Mesopotamia, Greece, and Israel and of the great religious and philosophical traditions that are such an important part of our heritage. So it should be no surprise that there have been numerous attempts – some more successful than others – to harness evolution to various philosophical or ideological perspectives.
Nor, given the extent to which modern scientists have viewed scientific understanding as obviating the need for theology, should we be surprised to see evolution bandied about as if it were a quasi-religion (as the British philosopher Mary Midgley has described in Evolution as a Religion, the Zygon article of the same title, and a number of other publications). The modern American creationism movement, the intelligent design movement, and the growing worldwide distrust of evolutionary science (a poll cited in Wikipedia shows that the number of American who reject evolution has increased from 55% to 60% from 1985 to 2005) are likely a reaction to this bandying about.
So, the role of evolution in modern society is not only that of a science, but also that of a system of thought which views itself as the modern enlightened replacement for the creation stories of Biblical belief. And given the great breadth of its powers of explanation – powers that unify an astonishingly large number of biological (and increasingly, social) phenomena – it is easy to see why people feel justified in seeing it as such. Evolution – like the book of Genesis – is a very powerful creation narrative.
The Pleasures of Omnicompetence
Midgely, in The Myths We Live By sees the sense of power and authority that many ascribe to evolution as due to the myth of scientific “omnicompetence.” This myth, an inheritance from the Enlightenment, views science “as able to answer every kind of question. And that naturally must include questions about value.”
She quotes Nehru from his address to the Indian National Institute of Science in 1960:
It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving people … The futures belongs to science and to those who make friends with science.
The Bhopal Disaster
She then notes:
The interesting thing here is not just Nehru’s confidence but what he meant by science … He meant a whole new ideology, a moral approach that would justify using those facts to change society in a quite particular way.
Is Nehru intending to rely on science alone, Midgely asks?
Aren’t you also going to need good laws. effective administrators, honest and intelligent politicians, good new customs to replace the old ones, perhaps even a sensitive understanding of the traditions that you mean to sweep away? … [Of course he knows this, but he] includes in ‘science’ the whole world view which he takes to lie behind it, namely, the decent, humane, liberal attitude out of which it has actually grown. … He expects that the scientific spirit will include in it wise and benevolent use of those discoveries.
But this is the myth of the “omnicompetence” of science, not the reality. The reality of science includes nuclear warfare, the Bhopal disaster, environmental pollution, global warming, profiteering, worldwide economic collapse and the “wholesale waste of resources on gadgetry” in addition to the good things that science can provide.
What does this mean for chance, randomness, and the interpretations of evolution we described above?
My answer is that it means that Monod, Gould, and Ruse are doing their very best to tell the world about their convictions about what is right and what is scientific – the two being synonymous in their minds. They not only believed that doing good science is important – both Monod’s work and the less embarrassing of his philosophical speculations are still of great interest – but they also believe in the Enlightenment worldview which science, in their view, encompasses and entails.
We now read Monod’s comments on the meaningless of life – and its emotional call to find meaning in science – as an almost comical exaggeration of the French existential philosophical viewpoint of the 50s, as most certainly it was. And Gould? Without a doubt, he was a warrior, fighting the good and holy fight against fundamentalism and intolerance of all kinds, the belief in progress among them. And Ruse? Maybe he is just fighting Catholicism.
The problem, of course, is that science doesn’t bestow on its followers righteousness and automatically correct views – it is agnostic, a double-edged sword in this regards.The Enlightenment view of science that Midgely describes accompanied science, rather than being caused by it. If science is to be as Nehru wanted it to be - the pursuit of truth and the implementation of it in benevolent ways – then it needs something like the principles of the Baha’i Faith to accompany it. Otherwise, like Monod, Gould, and Ruse, it will simply bend to breezes and vagaries of the time.
Next Week
Next week, I will discuss random processes and complex system, making them intelligible and relating them to ideas of chance in evolution.
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This is the 14th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.
As with mostly strongly held beliefs or formative influences, religion is part of a believer’s identity.
Hence, my faith or religion or spiritual orientation, if you will, is what gives me both the incentive and the tools with which to strive consciously to progress in all of the other areas—to be a better mother, wife, writer, musician. The conscious aspect, I think, is important. The scriptures of religion make a point about self-knowledge and self-awareness. Buddha remarks that:
This is similar to Christ’s message to believers in the Sermon on the Mount, which is contained in the seventh chapter of Matthew.
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