Darwin's Dangerous Idea (11 page)

anything!
The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles Working backwards, starting at or near "the end" of a process, and solving and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if the next-to-last step before asking how
it
could have been produced, is a tried you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the and true method of computer programmers, particularly when creating whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake?

programs that use recursion. Usually this is a matter of practical modesty: if After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, you don't want to bite off more than you can chew, the right bite to start with what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I is often the finishing bite, if you can find it. Darwin found it, and then very would encounter an idea—Darwin's idea—bearing an unmistakable likeness cautiously worked his way back, skirting around the many grand issues that to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and his investigations stirred up, musing about them in his private notebooks, but leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old land-postponing their publication indefinitely. (For instance, he deliberately marks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

avoided discussing human evolution in
Origin;
see the discussion in R. J.

Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it Richards 1987, pp. 160ff.) But he could see where all this was leading, and, threatened to leak out, offering answers—welcome or not—to questions in in spite of his near-perfect silence on these troubling extrapolations, so could cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other di-many of his readers. Some loved what they thought they saw, and others rection ). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, hated it.

why couldn't that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so Karl Marx was exultant: "Not only is a death blow dealt here for the first forth,
all the way down?
And if mindless evolution could account for the time to 'Teleology' in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of empirically explained" (quoted in Rachels 1991, p. 110). Friedrich Nietzsche our own "real" minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin's saw—through the mists of his contempt for all things English—an even more idea thus also threatened to spread
all the way up,
dissolving the illusion of cosmic message in Darwin: God is dead. If Nietzsche is the father of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.

existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather. Others Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea were less enthralled with the thought that Darwin's views were utterly ever since can be understood as a series of failed campaigns in the struggle subversive to sacred tradition. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, whose to contain Darwin's idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial debate with Thomas Huxley in June 1860 was one of the most celebrated revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold confrontations between Darwinism and the religious establishment (see the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of chapter 12), said in an anonymous review:

psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: Man's derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of articulate speech; flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, man's gift of reason; man's free-will and responsibility ...—all are equally beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of of Darwinian thinking keep coming. They seem to be improved versions, not him who was created in the image of God __ [Wilberforce 1860.]

vulnerable to the refutations that defeated their predecessors, but are they sound extensions of the unquestionably sound Darwinian core idea, or might When speculation on these extensions of his view arose, Darwin wisely they, too, be perversions of it, and even more virulent, more dangerous, than chose to retreat to the security of his base camp, the magnificently provi-the abuses of Darwin already refuted?

sioned and defended thesis that began in the middle, with life already on the Opponents of the spread differ sharply over tactics. Just where should the scene, and "merely" showed how, once this process of design accumulation protective dikes be built? Should we try to contain the idea within biology was under way, it could proceed without any (further?) intervention from any itself, with one post-Darwinian counterrevolution or another? Among those Mind. But, as many of his readers appreciated, however comforting this who have favored this tactic is Stephen Jay Gould, who has offered several modest disclaimer might be, it was not really a stable resting place.

different revolutions of containment. Or should we place the barriers far-64 UNIVERSAL ACID

Darwin's Assault on the Cosmic Pyramid
65

ther out? To get our bearings in this series of campaigns, we should start with or end "so as to obtain the best result." This fitting of means to ends a crude map of the pre-Darwinian territory. As we shall see, it will have to be implies, argued Aquinas, an intention. But, seeing as natural bodies lack consciousness, they cannot supply that intention themselves. "Therefore revised again and again to make accommodations as various skirmishes are some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to lost.

their end; and this being we call God." [Davies 1992, p. 200.]

Hume's Cleanthes, following in this tradition, lumps the adapted marvels 2. DARWIN'S ASSAULT ON THE COSMIC PYRAMID

of the living world with the regularities of the heavens—it's
all
like a wonderful clockwork to him. But Darwin suggests a division: Give me Or-A prominent feature of Pre-Darwinian world-views is an overall top-toder, he says, and time, and I will give you Design. Let me start with regu-bottom map of things. This is often described as a Ladder; God is at the top, larity—the mere purposeless, mindless, pointless regularity of physics—and with human beings a rung or two below (depending on whether angels are I will show you a process that eventually will yield products that exhibit not part of the scheme). At the bottom of the Ladder is Nothingness, or maybe just regularity but purposive design. (This was just what Karl Marx thought Chaos, or maybe Locke's inert, motionless Matter. Alternatively, the scale is he saw when he declared that Darwin had dealt a death blow to Teleology: a Tower, or, in the intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy's memorable phrase Darwin had
reduced
teleology to nonteleology, Design to Order.) (1936), a Great Chain of Being composed of many links. John Locke's Before Darwin, the difference between Order and Design didn't loom argument has already drawn our attention to a particularly abstract version of large, because in any case it all came down from God. The whole universe the hierarchy, which I will call the Cosmic Pyramid: was His artifact, a product of His Intelligence, His Mind. Once Darwin jumped into the middle with his proposed answer to the question of how God

Design could arise from mere Order, the rest of the Cosmic Pyramid was put M i n d

in jeopardy. Suppose we accept that Darwin has explained the Design of the D e s i g n

bodies of plants and animals (including our own bodies—we have to admit O r d e r

that Darwin has placed us firmly in the animal kingdom ). Looking up, if we C h a o s

concede to Darwin our bodies, can we keep him from taking our minds as N o t h i n g

well? (We will address this question, in many forms, in part III.) Looking (Warning: each term in the pyramid must be understood in an old-fashioned, down, Darwin asks us to give him Order as a premise, but is there anything pre-Darwinian sense!)

to keep him from stepping down a level and giving himself an algorithmic Everything finds its place on one level or another of the Cosmic Pyramid, account of the origin of Order out of mere Chaos? (We will address this even blank nothingness, the ultimate foundation. Not all matter is Ordered, question in chapter 6.)

some is in Chaos; only some Ordered matter is also Designed; only some The vertigo and revulsion this prospect provokes in many was perfectly Designed things have Minds, and of course only one Mind is God. God, the expressed in an early attack on Darwin, published anonymously in 1868: first Mind, is the source and explanation of everything underneath. (Since everything thus
depends on
God, perhaps we should say it is a chandelier, In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the hanging from God, rather than a pyramid, supporting Him.) artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the What is the difference between Order and Design? As a first stab, we whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT

REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful might say that Order is mere regularity, mere pattern; Design is Aristotle's examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the
telos,
an exploitation of Order for a purpose, such as we see in a cleverly Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by designed artifact. The solar system exhibits stupendous Order, but does not a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully (apparently) have a purpose—it isn't/or anything. An eye, in contrast, is
for
qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of seeing. Before Darwin, this distinction was not always clearly marked. In-creative skill. [MacKenzie 1868.]

deed, it was positively blurred:

Exactly! Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" was in fact a new and In the thirteenth century, Aquinas offered the view that natural bodies wonderful way of thinking, completely overturning the Mind-first way that

[such as planets, raindrops, volcanos] act as if guided toward a definite goal 66 UNIVERSAL ACID

Darwin's Assault on the Cosmic Pyramid
67

John Locke "proved" and David Hume could see no way around. John evolution, Darwin saw the crack widen and wrote to him: "I hope you have Dewey nicely described the inversion some years later, in his insightful book not murdered too completely your own and my child" (Desmond and Moore
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy:
"Interest shifts ... from an 1991, p. 569).

intelligence that shaped things once for all to the particular intelligences But was it really so inevitable that Darwin's idea should lead to such which things are even now shaping" (Dewey 1910, p. 15). But the idea of revolution and subversion? "It is obvious that the critics did not wish to treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for understand, and to some extent Darwin himself encouraged their wishful some—an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot accommodate thinking" (Ellegard 1956). Wallace wanted to ask what the
purpose
of comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as natural selection might be, and though this might seem in retrospect to be true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the squandering the fortune he and Darwin had uncovered, it was an idea for physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book
The Mind of God,
proclaims that the which Darwin himself often expressed sympathy. Instead of reducing tele-reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor by-ology all the way to purposeless Order, why couldn't we reduce all mundane product of mindless purposeless forces" (Davies 1992, p. 232). This is a most teleology to a single purpose: God's purpose? Wasn't this an obvious and revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined inviting way to plug the dike? Darwin was clear in his own mind that the prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of variation on which the process of natural selection depended
had
to be mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn't the most important unplanned and undesigned, but the process itself might have a purpose, thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should mightn't it? In a letter in I860 to the American naturalist Asa Gray, an early the importance or excellence of
anything
have to rain down on it from on supporter, Darwin wrote, "I am inclined to look at everything as resulting high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin's inversion from
designed
[emphasis added] laws, with the details whether good or bad, suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, left to the working out of what we may call chance" (F. Darwin 1911, vol. 2, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of "mindless, p. 105).

purposeless forces."

Automatic processes are themselves often creations of great brilliance.

Alfred Russel Wallace, whose own version of evolution by natural selec-From today's vantage point, we can see that the inventors of the automatic tion arrived on Darwin's desk while he was still delaying publication of transmission and the automatic door-opener were no idiots, and their genius
Origin,
and whom Darwin managed to treat as codiscoverer of the principle, lay in seeing how to create something that could do something "clever"

never quite got the point.1 Although at the outset Wallace was much more without having to think about it. Indulging in some anachronism, we could forthcoming on the subject of the evolution of the human mind than Darwin say that, to some observers in Darwin's day, it seemed that he had left open was willing to be, and stoutly maintained at first that human minds were no the possibility that God did His handiwork by designing an automatic design-exception to the rule that all features of living things were products of maker. And to some of these, the idea was not just a desperate stopgap but a evolution, he could not see the "strange inversion of reasoning" as the key to positive improvement on tradition. The first chapter of Genesis describes the the greatness of the great idea. Echoing John Locke, Wallace proclaimed that successive waves of Creation and ends each with the refrain "and God saw