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Article Excerpt
[Darwinism] seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.
--George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1921)
Evolutionary thinking has lately expanded from the biological to the human world, first into the social sciences and recently into the humanities and the arts. Many people therefore now understand the human, and even human culture, as inextricably biological. But many others in the humanities--in this, at least, like religious believers who reject evolution outright--feel that a Darwinian view of life and a biological view of humanity can only deny human purpose and meaning.
Does evolution by natural selection rob life of purpose, as so many have feared? The answer is no. On the contrary, Charles Darwin has made it possible to understand how purpose, like life, builds from small beginnings, from the ground up. In a very real sense, evolution creates purpose.
Evolution generates problems and solutions as it generates life. Rocks may crack and erode, but they do not have problems. Amoebas and apes do. Natural selection creates complex new possibilities, and therefore new problems, as it assembles self-sustaining organisms piecemeal, cycle after cycle, by generating partial solutions, testing them, and regenerating from the basis of the best solutions available in the current cycle In time, it can create richer solutions to richer problems.
In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin showed how new species could evolve through a process of blind variation and selective retention. He transformed at a stroke our understanding of natural design. Living things manifest complex design but can be produced by a mindless process, one that does no more than passively register, in terms of survival and reproduction, the advantages of particular variations. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986) Richard Dawkins explains how nature is like a watchmaker who builds intricate mechanisms without forethought, and he thereby overturns the famous argument of the theologian and naturalist William Paley. Paley opens his Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), with these words:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.... [The precision and intricacy of its mechanism would have forced us to conclude] that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at sometime, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
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Nobody could reasonably disagree, Paley adds, yet this is tantamount to what an atheist does, for "every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation." As Dawkins notes, we now know that the complexities of natural organisms surpass those of the most intricate watch by far more than science could guess in Paley's time; yet he goes on to show how simple processes of variation and selective retention can, over many cycles, create products with even this degree of design.
Other processes working within natural selection have been found to follow the same principle: the human immune system; the synapses in the young human brain (in the neural Darwinism of Gerald Edelman and others); culture (in the work of David Sloan Wilson and others); and invention (in the work of Donald Campbell and David Hull). Such "Darwinian systems," "Darwin...
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