Ideas on Life, Change and Identity inspired by Evolution.

Attenborough does it again another spectacular program on the natural world and man's place within it, 'The Tree of Life' on BBC1; just watched it on iPlayer. But something about evolution by natural selection has always puzzled me tho, its a bit of a non-theory - it simply doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know.

Watching the latest offering and its unusual defence (there is nothing to defend since there are things de facto to explain and any explanation will do) of evolution w.r.t. creation makes one thing clear: the importance of Darwin's theory is not in-itself but rather its relevance to a culture that has assimilated some very useless ideas. What is sad about Christianity is that it has absorbed these Western ideas as its own and now wastes its energy supporting them when they are little to do with God and nothing whatever to do with Jesus! All the atheists who use this strawman argument to fire shots at Xianity are wasting their energy especially!

I imagine - and this remains to be tested - that Darwinism has never been news in the Indian subcontinent, for example, because they don't hold ideas of a fixed world.

So what is different between Creationism and Evolution by Natural Selection (ENS)?

Evolution says 2 things: (a) that things change and (2) that the change is the accumulation of hereditary variance in survivability.

It is the first point which has been the most contentious! The reason is that people think that "things" really are themselves. But when I hear people (even Attenborough) say that "species evolve" I cringe a bit because "a reptile" for example is not a "thing" it is simply a "likeness" amongst a branch of living things. "Reptiles" don't become "Mammals" by any process of evolution because "reptiles" and "mammals" don't exist. It is not Attenborough's fault, he knows perfectly well, it is just a limitation of language, but some people really do take this literally! It is as mad as saying the stream becomes a river and believing that a physical thing "stream" magically transforms into a different physical thing called "river". They are just discrete names for what underneath is not "change" between discrete things at all but simply "flow". There are not really "things" in the natural world just "Life" and that is the key issue of this blog - how do we talk about this thing "Life" (which has so many elements from physical to spiritual and transcendent).

Another example which the Creationists somehow miss is the very process of birth, aging and death. If they don't accept evolution then presumably they believe that an embryo, a baby, a child, an adult and a corpse are all the same. It is the most central fact of our lives that we undergo a "continual change". At some points we call it child, at others we call it adult, at others we call it alive and at others we call it dead - but like the river there is no point when it "is" a stream and no point when it "is" a river - these are features of the flow of our langauge and mind not the flow of water. Likewise Life constantly evolves. Sometimes the flow is called "bird" and sometimes it is called "fish" but these do not name static things - even in their own lives they are not static.

I do have to accept that there are levels of change however. While each bird evolves a lot in its lifetime, changing shape and colour, each bird begets its own "type" so that chicken gives birth to chicken and turkey gives birth to turkey. This gives rise to the idea that there is some fixed "type" that links them and is passed between them - similar to the idea of family "blood" that people envisage is passed through the generations of a family. However such a view only arises when we try to view the flow as discrete things and see similarities between the things when actually it is just one flow - a chicken begets a chicken because really they are different forms of the same underlying process. You might think of a year giving birth to a new year, while at the same time seeing it as a continual process with no start and no end (where was the Earth when it "started" orbiting the Sun?).

But ouch! that means that we as "individual" human beings can be seen as really just an evolving originless and endless process ... so what of the self, that separate thing apart from everyone else and the world? That, Buddha says, is just a fiction, like the chicken and the stream, the bubble and the flash of lightening - his idea of anatta.

Science has discovered the mechanism that enables the chicken to evolve through to death yet produce a new chicken with distinct likeness. That which we call "chicken" is not an indivisible form but a superficial result of underlying processes - especially those involving a molecule called DNA. Where once we thought a "chicken" contained chicken-ness now some people think that DNA contains "chicken-ness" - not realising that a stream does not contain anything called a stream! it is just a stage in the flow of water. A chicken does not inject anything "chicken" like into its offspring to make them chickens - any more than rain injects anything into a river. But at the same time a river can't be made from trees. The processes do exist, but existence does not come in the form of discrete "things" - which makes the word "process" here unique is naming nothing discrete and separate from anything else. The argument here is not about the physical world - mankind has indeed learned a great deal about this - it is about how we understand what we learn.

The other point of Evolution is actually the more interesting one... the mechanism. What it seems to say is that those things that are no good at existing won't exist. It explains why you don't get for example 1 legged creatures. But it doesn't actually give us any idea at all what "life" should look like. This has been the great challenge since Darwin to try and find explanations for the actual shape of things that have occurred. How much is chance and how much obeys laws is very hard to decide. Does life "have" to look like this? Would beetles dominate the macrofauna of alien planets too?

All animals have 5 fingers and toes (ignoring thumbs etc). This seems to be a historical feature, surely on other planets they could have any number. Higher animals are bilaterally symmetrical (have a left and right) is this a must or a feature of embryo formation? It seems to be the latter. As Gould argued much of the way things are is chance and historical and the idea that things focus in on optimal adaptations is over played. When we look at the diversity of life then we don't just see free adaption to the environment but rather a chunky historical display with superficial adaptation. Much of what we see is simply left overs from the past that are sufficiently successful and too fundamental to change - deep local minima in the entropy of life forms. But then is there any meaning in fact to saying that something is perfectly adapted without testing an unlimited solution space?

Another feature of Creationism is the "blind watch maker" that: finding such intricate mechanisms as living things we would expect them to have a maker. Problem with the analogy with a clock is that a clock clearly has a "purpose" and that purpose is what causes it to be replicated in human societies. A living thing however has no purpose - it simply replicates as part of its very nature. Thus for a clock purpose, use, creation and making all have relevance which they don't for living things. What is the purpose of life? has been an long standing conundrum something that the Creationists most obviously don't address. If you found a clock you would look for a maker because it can't make itself. You find a pregnant woman and you see you don't need a creator. Thus pagans worship fertility which seems here to be an advance over creationism - the worship of that ability of living things to make themselves - or of life to pass by in countless forms one to another.

It can also be seen that really the clock is the product of evolution (maybe by Natural Selection also). It began with the notion of time in natural cycles like days which would be priordal - even our cells tell the time. As the human mind and culture developed these notions would have been central. The physics of movement of the sun (in a circle) led to the measurement of the sun in circular sundials. Quite how ancient man solved the issue of the tilt of the Earth and the mythology that surrounded this I do not know - and will investigate. Anyway sometime between Stonehenge and renaissance sundials the gnomon became slanted and the dial face became symettrical. Then with the evolution of machines it became possible to provide a wind up simulation of the suns movement and eventually came the clock. What we see as hands and a dial is really a historical development on ancient ideas of the sun going around the Earth. Digital clocks are more abstract by contrast and an interesting question would be to wonder what time instruments might be like in alient civilisations with a different solar system e.g. 2 suns.

Jewish religions seem to place importance on the "Will" of God rather than on natural processes - they do in many ways seem opposed to Nature and very anthropocentric placing importance on God/Human qualities like will, intention, labour, productivity, creation. This clearly have founded the Western world and ENS seems to challenge all of these: important for my book infact - will consider this in more depth. What has Jewish philosophy got against Nature? and more importantly what do they have to gain by this stance.

What is neat about the method of Natural Selection is that the "chicken-ness" of a chicken is created by the same process as its strutting about now as you look into the chicken coup. What I mean is that if that chicken died it does not matter for the type because there are other chickens. But if the death was caused by something general to do with its "chicken-ness" then all chickens would start to experience this culling and the type "chicken" would probably start to go into decline. (Well that is an expected scenario, while for humans that eating of it has caused it to go into massive 'acline' - i.e. de/a-scension).

So the individual life that we see, is connected with the "type" that we see and which it shares across the species. So "what" something is, is a function of "who" it has been so to speak. So each individual human life that has been played out in the history of the human race has gone together to determine what human's are like. "Our" life will contribute to what it is to be human in the future (well aspects of life that effected our children's fitness anyway).

This may look confusing - it is! The whole notion of an "individual chicken" for example becomes very confused in evolution because "chicken" is a type while individual is the particular - but it is the selection on the individual which determines the future characterists of the type. The "tree of life" that is often drawn (in the BBC program being one case) is not a tree with individuals at the end (although they do draw individuals at the end of the branches) it is a make believe tree of types. If we were to put a human at the end of the human branch who shall we chose to picture: you or me? What does a "human" look like? This is Plato's problem - what does the "Form" Human look like? what does this word refer to?

As already argued stream and river don't refer to anything discrete - they are imaginary stages in a process. Another example I neglected to add earlier was experienced as I walked the coast last summer. At one point I have the sea to my right, the next I have a river to my right - but at what point as I turn into the estuary does the water change from sea to river? Maybe there is a transition zone... but where are the boundaries of that? and so on. Things are not discrete and not separted from other things by actual boundaries - it is all in the mind. Likewise if someone asks you to point out "a" human you can do this, but you can't point to actual "human".

The "tree of life" is an imaginery painting that ties together all the imaginery "types" that we see. But as Darwin so profoundly recognised each one of these "types" differs from each other just as Plato recognised millenia before. For Plato this variance made real things inferior to their Ideal, for Darwin these variances created variance in the survival of the things and where those things replicated created a force for progressive change. But if there is no real "type" then where is the variance? A "horse" with longer legs, and a horse with shorter legs only differ because we liken them and imagine that "horse" is something they share. Actually there is no "horse", this is a discrete invention of the mind linked to language. In the great process of Life horses never come about there is only the slow morphing of generations some growing into likeness of "pigmy horses" and some growing into the likeness of "plains horses" at no point do all the animals that exist constitute "horse" or "mammal" or "ape" or "man". This is the true inter-connected view of Life that I have been seeking: Life is both each living thing and every living thing: at the same time. In this it holds an animate version of the general description of God or Buddha which are both each thing and every thing at once.

Pleased I got here. Just to catalogue one last thought. Last year I saw a duck. A few weeks later she was being followed by her ducklings. I imagined now the future where she had died. One animal has literally become a half dozen. It is easier to comprehend after the proceeding outpouring that she was not a discrete entity that somehow transformed into 6 similar entities: but rather flowing through all these forms is an endless flow of "life" akin to the flow of a river which takes the forms of streams and rivers in sequence.

==== Add 28/2/09
I see news that a new interpretation of fossils shows conclusively Pacoderms were viviparous. The argument then - since they are a different evolutionary branch to vertebrates who also show vivparity - is that viviparity is an "adaptation" which has been evolved separately at many different points. At least here Gould it seems that adaptation has been proven. The question now is what environmental conditions favour viviparity and placentality.