Janus (32 page)

The Ghost in the Machine
--

 

... the vast number of existing animal species (about one million)
and the small number of major classes (about fifty) and of major phyla
or divisions (about ten), could be compared with the vast number of
works of literature and the small number of basic themes or plots. All
works of literature are variations on a limited number of leitmotifs,
derived from man's archetypal experiences and conflicts, but adapted
each time to a new environment -- the costumes, conventions and
language of the period. Not even Shakespeare could invent an original
plot. Goethe quoted with approval the Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi*,
according to whom there are only thirty-six tragic situations. Goethe
himself thought that there were probably even less; but their exact
number is a well-kept secret among writers of fiction. A work of
literature is constructed out of thematic holons. [7]
* Author of Turandot and many other successful works.

 

But there is still plenty of scope left for the writer to make what he can
out of Gozzi's meagre list of thirty-six themes. And there is plenty of scope
for evolutionary strategies to make the best of the limited possibilities
inherent in the physico-chemical structure of living matter as it exists
on earth -- and presumably on other planets where conditions are similar
to those on earth. We shall return to this speculative subject later on.

 

 

 

4

 

 

It may be objected that to talk of the 'strategy of evolution' means
falling into the trap of anthropomorphism -- attributing human motivations
to nature. In fact the approach suggested here should rather be called
'biomorphic', because it is based on the purposeful aspects inherent
in the phenomena of life, as opposed to the 'robotomorphic' approach
of reductionism. Science ought not to be afraid of applying the terms
'purpose' and 'strategy' to evolution; they do not imply that there is
a divine Strategist at work. Yet it is precisely this unjustified fear
that has muddied the controversy and landed the orthodox theorists in a
morass of contradictions. To quote once more a representative spokesman,
Professor G. G. Simpson, evolution' . . . turns out to be basically
materialistic, with no sign of purpose . . . and with any possible
Purposer pushed back to the incomprehensible position of First Cause
. . . Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that
did not have him in mind. He was not planned.' [8]

 

 

Here the logical fallacy, based on a spurious alternative, is explicitly
revealed: evolution is
either
purposeless
or
there must be a divine
Purposer at work. One wonders how it comes to pass that naturalists,
once they specialize in genetics, become so blind to nature that they
fail to see purposiveness as a fundamental characteristic of life which
does not require the postulate of a Purposer because it is inherent in
the concept of life itself; or -- to quote Sinnott -- because purpose is
'the directive activity shown by individual organisms that distinguishes
living things from inanimate objects'.
^[9]
The term 'purposiveness',
applied to a living organism, means goal-directed instead of random
activity; flexible strategies to attain a goal instead of rigid,
mechanized responses; adapting to the environment, but on the organism's
own terms, often in rather fanciful ways like the orchid or the butterfly;
and adapting the environment to its own needs. Or, as the Nobel laureate
H. J. Muller wrote: 'Purpose is not imported into nature, and need not
be puzzled over as a strange or divine something else that gets inside
and makes life go . . . it is simply implicit in the fact of biological
organization." [10]

 

 

Thus it has now become more or less respectable to talk of purpose or
directiveness in
ontogeny
, that is, the individual's development during
its life -- history; but it is still considered heretical to apply the
same terms to
phylogeny
, that is, the history of evolution. Ontogeny is
purposive, phylogeny blind; ontogeny is guided by memory and learning,
phylogeny is unaffected by either of them. Yet we have seen that the
more thoughtful among the neo-Darwinians feel increasingly unhappy about
this artificially created chasm, and have started to build bridges
across it -- such as Monod's 'teleonomy', or the concept of genetic
micro-hierarchies which filter and coordinate hereditary changes. Simpson
himself, in spite of his dogmatism, was led to realize that phylogeny
is an abstraction unless regarded as a sequence of ontogenies, and that
'the course of evolution is through changes of ontogenies'. But if
ontogenies are purposeful, it is difficult to see why their summation
should be purposeless -- unless we subscribe to the Weismann-Crick dogma
of the 'unalterable germ-track' (which would be the only example found
in nature of a biological process devoid of feedback).

 

 

Thus the hoary conundrum about the Purposer behind the purpose can be
laid to rest. The Purposer is each and every individual organism from
the inception of life, which struggled and strove to make the best of
its limited possibilities; and the sum total of these ontogenies reflects
the active striving of living matter towards the optimal realization of
the planet's evolutionary potential.

 

 

 

5

 

 

The emphasis in the last paragraph was on 'active striving'. When orthodox
evolutionists talk of 'adaptations', they mean -- as behaviourists do
when they talk of 'responses' -- a basically passive process, entirely
controlled by 'the contingencies of the environment'. This may suit their
philosophy, but is certainly not in keeping with the evidence which shows,
in G. E. Coghill's phrase, that 'the organism acts on the environment
before it reacts to it'.
^[11]
Almost from the moment a creature is
hatched or born, it lashes out at the environment, be it liquid or solid,
with cilia, flagellae, or muscles; it swims, crawls, glides, pulsates;
it kicks, yelps, breathes, feeds on the environment. It does not merely
adapt to the environment but adapts the environment to its own needs --
it eats and drinks its environment, fights and mates with it, burrows
and builds in it; it does not merely 'respond' to the environment, but
asks questions by exploring it. Let us remember
(
Chapter VII, 2
) that the 'exploratory drive' is a
primary instinct, as basic as hunger and sex, and can occasionally prove
even more powerful then these. Countless naturalists, starting with Darwin
himself, have shown that curiosity is an instinctual urge in rats, birds,
dolphins, monkeys, etc.; and we have seen that it is the main driving
force which motivates artists and scientists alike. Thus the exploratory
drive is a dominant factor in man's mental evolution; and it has been
suggested, by Hardy and others, that it may also be a dominant factor in
biological evolution. In this view, evolutionary progress is based on
the
initiative
of some enterprising individuals in the species,
who discover a new method of feeding, or self-protection, or some new
skill which, spreading by imitation, is incorporated into the species's
way of life. To illustrate the process, Hardy cites as an example, one of
'Darwin's finches' on the Galapagos islands,
C. pallidus
. This
remarkable bird pecks holes or crevices into the bark of trees, and
'having excavated, it picks up a cactus spine or twig, one or two inches
long, and holding it lengthwise in its beak, pokes it up the crack,
dropping the twig to seize the insect as it emerges. . . . Sometimes
the bird carries a spine or twig about with it, poking into cracks and
crannies as it searches one tree after another.'
^[12]

 

 

After describing a number of similar examples, Hardy suggests that the
main causative factor of evolutionary progress is
not
the selective
pressure of the environment, but the initiative of the living organism --
'the restless, exploring and perceiving animal that discovers new ways of
living . . . It is adaptations which are due to the animal's behaviour,
to its restless exploration of its surroundings, to its initiative, that
distinguish the main diverging lines of evolution . . . giving the lines
of runners, climbers, burrowers, swimmers and conquerors of the air.' [13]

 

 

One might call this the 'progress-by-initiative' theory of evolution.
The pioneers of the species initiate a new habit, a change in behaviour,
which spreads through the population and is copied by successive
generations -- until a lucky chance-mutation transforms it into a
hereditary instinct. Thus the process is initiated by the animal, and the
lucky mutation comes only afterwards, as a kind of genetic endorsement
which incorporates the new skill into the genetic blueprint. The role
of chance has been further reduced; the monkey at the typewriter needs
only to go on trying until he hits a pre-specified key.

 

 

When I wrote
The Ghost in the Machine
I found this theory rather
attractive, but on second thoughts it reveals a crucial flaw, in still
relying -- though to a lesser extent than the orthodox theory -- on random
mutations to achieve the fantastically complex changes in the nervous
system that are needed in order to insert a new habit or skill into the
organism's native equipment. The emphasis on initiative, on the active
role of the exploring animal remains attractive, but the basic riddle
of the ostrich's callosities or the spider's architectural brilliance is
left unsolved. From a methodological point of view it seems preferable to
assume that the insect-hunting skill of Darwin's finch became impressed
on its chromosomes by some unknown process
because it was useful
--
that is, by Lamarckian inheritance -- instead of invoking once more the
Darwinian mantra.

 

 

 

6

 

 

Evolution, as seen through human eyes, appears as a shockingly wasteful
process. Biologists take it for granted that for every one of the existing
one million species, hundreds must have perished in the past; and those
lines which have survived seem to have become stagnant, their evolution
having come to a standstill in the far-distant past. The principal cause
of both extinction and stagnation appears to have been over-specialization
with its concomitant loss of adaptability to changes in the environment.
Julian Huxley has compared evolution to a maze with an '. . . enormous
number of blind alleys with a very occasional path to progress . . .
All reptilian lines were blind alleys save two -- one which was transformed
into birds, and another which became the mammals. Of the bird stock,
all lines came to a dead end; of the mammals all but one -- the one which
became man.' [14]

 

 

The human paradigm of over-specialization is the pedant, the slave of habit,
whose thinking and behaviour move in rigid grooves -- a predestined victim
of any unexpected calamity. His equivalent in the animal kingdom is the
pathetic koala bear, which specializes in feeding on the leaves of a
particular variety of eucalyptus tree and on nothing else; and which has
hook-like claws, ideally suited for clinging to the bark of the tree --
and for nothing else. All orthodoxies tend to breed human koalas.

 

 

One line of escape from the maze of blind alleys is of particular
relevance to our theme: a phenomenon which goes under the name of
'paedomorphosis'. It was described by Garstang in the 1920s, and taken
up by several biologists*; but although the existence of the phenomenon
is generally accepted, it made little impact on the orthodox theory
and is rarely mentioned in the textbooks. It indicates that at certain
critical stages evolution can
retrace its steps
, as it were, along
the path which led to the dead end and make a fresh start in a new, more
promising direction. The crucial event in this process is the appearance
at the foetal, larval or juvenile stage of some useful evolutionary
novelty which is carried over into the adult stage of the organism's
progeny. The following example will show what is meant:

 

There is fairly good evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the
chordates -- and thus we, the vertebrates -- are descended from the
larval stage of some primitive echinoderm, rather like the sea urchin
or sea cucumber [echinoderm = 'prickly-skinned']. Now an adult sea
cucumber would not be a very inspiring ancestor -- it is a sluggish
creature which looks like an ill-stuffed sausage with leathery skin,
lying on the sea bottom. But its free-floating larva is a much more
promising proposition: unlike the adult sea cucumber, the larva
displays bilateral symmetry like a fish; it has a ciliary band --
a forerunner of the nervous system -- and some other sophisticated
features not found in the adult animal. We must assume that the
sedentary adult residing on the sea bottom had to rely on mobile
larvae to spread the species far and wide in the ocean, as plants
scatter their seeds in the wind; that the larvae, which had to fend
for themselves, exposed to much stronger selective pressures than
the adults, gradually became more fish-like; and that eventually they
became sexually mature while still in the free-swimming, larval state
-- thus giving rise to a new type of animal which never settled on
the bottom at all, and altogether eliminated the senile, sedentary
cucumber stage from its life history. [16]
* Among them Hardy and de Beer in England, Koltsov and Takhtajan
in the Soviet Union. [15]

 

Now this lowering of the age of sexual maturity is a well-known evolutionary
phenomenon called
neoteny
. It has two aspects: the animal starts to breed
while still in a larval or juvenile stage; and it never reaches the fully
adult stage, which is dropped off -- eliminated from its life cycle
('terminal abbreviation'). Thus the ancestors' juvenile stages of
development become the definite condition of their descendants, while
the ancestors' mature characteristics have fallen by the roadside. What
this amounts to is a process of 'juvenilization'* and de-specialization
-- a successful escape from a dead-end in the evolutionary maze. As
J. Z. Young wrote, commenting on Garstang's views: