Re: Further Evolution beyond the Human?

Gordon S. Little ()
14 Oct 1996 22:33:03 GMT

stgprao@sugarland.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini) writes:

> In article <32561B4A.737C@tyco.net.au>,
> Brian Davison <davison@tyco.net.au> wrote:
> > I have an interesting theory on evolution to consider. It seems most
> > likely that the natural process of evolution is finished, and mankind
is
> > the final product of that evolution. So the question remains, what
> > comes next?

> If you read Stephen Gould's latest book "Full House" he'll explain why
the
> concept of evolution being "directional" to "higher" or "more complex"
> organisms is a folk fallacy.

Thanks for the pointer to Gould's new book. While I can't agree with the
original poster that "the natural process of evolution is finished" --
nothing
so simplistic -- and much as I enjoy reading Gould, I also have a problem
with
his opinion on this point, so I'll be interested to see how he defends it.

Granted that Gould is the expert and I'm not, we still know that experts
aren't always right, and this idea makes no sense to me. I think it's
rooted
in a far broader bias of Gould's, which I call the "humans are special"
bias.

First, the opinion. Gould expresses a form of it in his essay *Our Natural
Place*. He criticizes the views of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom he
accuses elsewhere of being a co-conspirator in the Piltdown hoax, with
arguments that are intriguing but less than fully convincing. I suspect
Piltdown is far from irrelevant. Teilhard's ideas were wrapped up in a lot
of
religious mysticism about "matter and spirit," but essentially he believed
that evolution did follow an upward direction, toward greater consciousness
and intelligence. Gould's paraphrase of Teilhard is that "Related species
should form a set of *multiple, parallel lineages*, each diverging and
adapting to a local environment, but each gaining continually in its
spirit/matter ratio."

Gould tries to refute this by doing something he does elsewhere: burying
his
head in the sand of details. "Few paleontologists can discern any general,
much less inevitable, trend to increasing braininess in the history of
life.
Most animal species are insects, mites, copepods, nematodes, mollusks, and
their cousins, and I, at least, can see no pervasive trend among them
toward
the domination of matter by spirit. And the evolutionary tree does look
more
to me like a complexly wandering and ramifying bush than a bundle of
parallel
twigs growing upward in a definite direction."

This last point is a nitpick. As far as I know there's no general tendency
for intelligence to increase within species, as there often is for size to
increase within species, though I don't think the same is true of phyla.
Teilhard might have overstated his case by insisting on "multiple, parallel
lineages." But this is not the main issue. Neither is the terminology of
the
debate. Pointing out that Teilhard talked a lot of mumbo-jumbo about
"spirit"
doesn't in itself destroy the essence of his argument.

Also, we should be careful what we mean if we suggest, using passive voice

--

a popular device for creating ambiguity and hiding facts -- that evolution

"is

directed."  It could mean -- and the Jesuit Teilhard probably had some such

idea -- that some intelligent force (God) is consciously directing and

guiding

evolution.  For that idea we have no proof at all, and Gould would be right

to

reject it on the evidence.  But if we mean that evolution follows a

direction

in obedience to some natural law that is not only evident, but explainable,

that's entirely different.  And that's what Gould rejects, quite

unreasonably.



What difference does it make if insects and mollusks and other low

lifeforms

aren't very brainy?  Simply being numerous doesn't make them the most

significant features of the evolutionary tree.  Some people can't see the

forest for the trees.  Gould, literally, can't see the tree for the

branches.

He's got his head buried in the foliage, saying "this twig grows up, this

one

grows down, and this one grows sideways.  There's no pattern at all."  He's

refusing to stand back and look at the big picture.  Whatever direction the

branches grow in, who could possibly deny that the tree as a whole grows

upwards -- and has been doing so since the beginning of life on Earth?



Is there any reason why it should inevitably do so?  To me it's obvious. 

It's

true that increased intelligence, or complexity of any kind, doesn't

necessarily confer a survival advantage on any given species.  If there's

no

selection pressure to evolve in such a direction, then it won't.  It's

likely

that intelligence or complexity can even be disadvantages to many species,

if

their lifestyle gives them no opportunity to exploit them.



But by the laws of chance, there will eventually arise opportunities --

ecological niches -- in which intelligence or complexity in some form does

confer a decided survival advantage.  And, again by the laws of chance,

some

organisms will eventually evolve to exploit those niches.



Some of those new organisms may not survive in the long term.  They may be

wiped out by some later change in the environment, a common event in the

history of life.  But if that increase in complexity is of sufficient value

that it confers a general survival advantage -- if it's a quantum leap in

survival capability -- the chances are that it will be retained.



The human brain is just such a quantum leap.  So is a pair of legs, or

fins,

or anything that enables an organism to move instead of waiting for food to

come to it; or an eye or an ear, or any kind of sense organ that helps it

to

avoid danger or find food better.  No doubt these organs themselves evolved

in

a series of much smaller steps; not a whole eye at once, but a

light-sensitive

patch (as Gould himself points out).  Just the same, once these things have

evolved, the chances are they'll stick around.  Evolution will have reached

a

new plateau.  It won't go backwards and lose what it's gained.  So the next

chance move can only be in an upward direction from there.



Here's another way of looking at it.  Evolution, as Gould rightly implies,

doesn't of itself "point" in any particular direction.  Species exert a

form

of pressure "outwards" on their environment through random variation.  The

environment exerts a counterpressure, selection pressure, "inwards" on

species, forcing them to conform, to shape themselves to fitness criteria.

It's the interaction of these two forces that produces Darwinian evolution.

But the primary pressure, the force of Life itself, is random variation.

Without that, there would not only be no evolution, there would be no life

at

all.  Life is always pushing the limits and expanding them.



"Pressure" is like the air in a tire.  It doesn't push in any favored

direction.  It pushes equally in all directions at once.  But once we stick

a

nail in the tire and open up a hole, the air hisses out through it, driven

by

pressure.  The air isn't being "directed" through the hole, any more than

evolution is being "directed."  It exploits the hole, because the hole is

there.  But once the air is out, there's no putting it back.



The pressure of Life is the same.  It isn't directed anywhere special.  But

it

exploits every niche it can find.  Once it finds totally new niches, which

call for totally new capabilities, it rarely loses them.  Life "breaks

out."

Muscles break out.  Legs break out.  Eyes break out.  Intelligence breaks

out.

Once it's broken out, there's no putting it back, short of a worldwide

catastrophe.  It can only go onward and upward.  (Note too that if we

"break

out" of the Earth itself, even a "world" wide catastrophe won't stop us.)



It's possible that Gould is only arguing about other details, and wouldn't

deny all this if it were put to him.  But he's too often anxious to

sidestep

to other details, and balks at confronting ideas like this.  Ironically,

the

same balkiness is shown by creationists in denying, not just the fact, but

the

possibility, of evolution itself.  Creationists refuse to encompass the

significance of geological time, even if they admit to its length in the

first

place, which many of them don't.  They argue that an eye or a wing couldn't

possibly have evolved just by chance.  Of course it didn't do it all once,

as

already pointed out.  But they won't comprehend how long even a million

years

is, or how much can happen in that time.  So they can't see just how much

the

laws of chance can do, and almost inevitably will do, given enough time.



Gould proposes that significant evolutionary changes can occur in as little

as

ten thousand years or less.  Yet he refuses to take the next step up and

declare what the laws of chance will inevitably do, given enough time --

hundreds of millions of years -- to drive life upward to higher complexity.



His refusal may seem odd, but while it does reflect a very broad pattern of

thought habits, I don't think it's faulty logic so much as bias, an

emotional

turning away when faced with the implications of some particular line of

thought.  I see it as characterized by, if not rooted in, the "humans are

special" bias.  This bias takes two different and quite opposite forms, but

the motivation behind them is the same: the need for reassurance.



The first or "religious" form is found -- not surprisingly -- in

creationists,

among others, and tends to be associated with right-wing positions: hence

the

"religious right."  Religion doesn't have to be incompatible with science

or

objectivity, since religious faith occupies the realm of the

nonfalsifiable,

which science, occupied with testing, largely cannot touch.  I personally

liked Einstein's opinion on the existence of God.  But science has long

been

encroaching on the traditional territory of religion by falsifying some of

its

major beliefs, and it's there that we find "irrational" resistance.



It's not enough to explain the persistence of creationism, or the

persecution

of Galileo, among other events, by "the influence of religious teaching,"

or

even people's reluctance to give up our first guesses about how the

universe

works or how we got to be here.  These beliefs are tenacious because faith

alone is not enough for many people.  They need "proof."  If God created

humans separately as a deliberate act, to give them dominion over the earth

(as Genesis puts it) -- or in Galileo's time, if the entire universe

revolves

around our planet, like courtiers bowing to a King -- surely this is proof

that "humans are special."  It proves that God (or God's laws, anyway) must

be

looking after us, and all will be well.  The "proof" must be defended at

all

costs against alarming theories like evolution, because the fear that we

might

be on our own is too frightening.



I wonder if a modern-day Jesus would have derided creationists as "doubting

Thomases," "ye of little faith," who demand "proof" of their faith even if

that "proof" doesn't fit with discovered reality.  I'm sure we can find

plenty

of examples of this in other religions and cultures, but it's notable that

even in Western culture, when traditional religious faith is undermined,

far

from yielding to a new "age of reason," all kinds of irrational beliefs

spring

up to replace it.  They include everything from the mystic powers of

crystals

and pyramids to a risen Elvis to UFOs, von Daniken's "astronauts" in

particular.  All these provide pretexts for a hope that someone, or some

force

at least, "out there" might be looking after us.



Gould, as a celebrated contributor to evolutionary theory, is at the

opposite

pole from any of this.  But the "humans are special" bias has a second, or

"humanist" form.  If we can't prove that God, or the laws of nature, are

there

to look after us, then many people need reassurance that we're fully

capable

of looking after ourselves.  Since individuals can't always do this for

themselves, one corollary is that we have to do it "collectively"; and the

"humanist" form of this bias tends to be associated with left-wing

positions.



In evolutionary theory, one consequence of this bias, up to the early

twentieth century anyway, was the persistent idea that if humans evolved

from

apes, then it must have been our brain that evolved first, or at least in

tandem with physical changes such as upright walking.  In reality, the

reverse

was true: upright walking came first, and the final enlargement of the

brain

that made us fully "human" in the modern sense was relatively recent.



Not that anyone claimed we woke up one day, looked around, and said "Hey

guys,

we're *human*!  What are we doing swinging in trees and shuffling around on

our knuckles?  Why don't we walk upright like men?  Let's get rid of these

hairy ape bodies and grow some proper human faces, with chins.  And let's

start using tools and stuff."  It was far subtler than that.  Yet

underneath

it all still lay the hope that if humans did evolve from apes, it was our

wonderful, "special" human brain that somehow drove it all; that in some

way

we consciously helped to direct our own evolution.  If God isn't

controlling

things expressly for our benefit, then humans must be in control.



Gould of course believes no such thing about the order of human evolution.

Yet this bias undoubtedly contributed to the too-easy acceptance of the

Piltdown fraud: a large modern cranium with an ape jaw.  While Gould

recognizes the role of belief in "brain primacy," he attributes this simply

to

a "flaw in logic," based on analogy with the role of intelligence in the

modern world.  He doesn't see the underlying, more emotional root of the

bias,

which lies in human hopes and fears.  In another essay, on Lucy, he

downplays

(though without denying) the fact that science was ever misled by "brain

primacy."  Here he directs our attention to the present instead of the

past.



Yet in other areas Gould never denies that science has suffered from bias,

especially in the past.  Far from it.  In *The Mismeasure of Man* and many

other writings, he's only too ready to attack any example he can find of

"racist" and "sexist" biases, especially in the measuring of human

intelligence.  Here he directs our attention more to the past than to the

present, although science, which has always made some stupid mistakes in

the

past, progresses overall toward more refined and accurate knowledge.



In recent years it seems increasingly hard for Gould to write an essay

without

tilting at something connected to this topic.  He opposes the "strict

Darwinists" who hold that every feature of an organism must necessarily be

adaptive.  I expect he's right about that; but he takes it too far.  In one

essay where he ventures into the field of gender, *Male Nipples and

Clitoral

Ripples*, he debunks Freudian misconceptions about female sexuality that

are

now glaringly obvious, but he bends over so far in the opposite direction

as

to suggest, absurdly, that female sexuality has no adaptive function at

all;

it just arose as a homologous by-product of male sexuality.



As this issue affects the brain, Gould is anxious to suggest that our brain

development is not necessarily adaptive; that nature may have

"accidentally"

endowed us with an overcapacity that we didn't need for survival in

primitive

environments, which we're now fully free to use for other purposes.



Gould doesn't want to see our "special" human brain measured and studied in

detail, any more than creationists want to see Homo Erectus fossils dug up,

for fear of what it might prove.  The same is true over much of today's

left,

for which Gould has taken up a cudgel.  There we find social

constructionism

run rampant, every human trait attributed to "socialization" and "culture"

and

static "structures" of various kinds (as if there were no dynamic

"functional"

differences that built those structures in the first place), outright

denial

that intelligence differences play a role in human society, and even of the

pattern of innate difference between the sexes -- a fact for which there's

just as overwhelming evidence as there is for evolution itself.  Truly this

is

the "religion" of our time, complete with irrational beliefs to bolster

faith.



What faith?  Faith in humans, naturally.  If God or the laws of nature

aren't

working consistently in our favor, especially if they seem to be the cause

of

much ruthless Darwinian competition in a brutal, dog-eat-dog universe, then

it's not good enough to know that humans are able to override much of

nature's

law through reason and compassion.  Humans must be free of nature's law

entirely.  Our wonderful, "special" brains must make us free to be whatever

we

want to be.  And not just some or most humans, but every human.  All that's

stopping us is "socialization," or "culture," or a whole slew of "isms," or

whatever.  Biology or the differential capabilities and drives nature

implants

in us must have nothing to do with human woes.  They can be banished by

waving

a magic wand of "reeducation."



This is all very well, and it's not to say we can't improve our human lot

substantially; but unfortunately any doctrine that refuses to take reality

into account is doomed to hurt many people instead of helping them.



Clues to Gould's belief are abundant throughout his writing, but in that

central essay, *Our Natural Place*, he utters the magic words explicitly:

"Humans are so special."  Yes, we are "special," and unique on the Earth;

but

that doesn't mean we're as free of the influence of nature's laws as Gould

would like to think.  Much of the essay is a protest against sociobiology,

about which Gould can't make up his mind whether it's "too zoocentric" or

"too

anthropocentric."  That's because he refuses to accept that all of nature,

ourselves included, is subject to the same laws, for all that their

influence

differs.  In the end he escapes to another favorite protest: "Perhaps the

problem with all these visions -- zoocentric as well as anthropocentric --

is

our penchant for building comprehensive and all-encompassing systems in the

first place.  Maybe they just don't work."  Maybe not for him; but the

reason

they "don't work" is not intellectual, but emotional.



If evolution is not "directional," as Teilhard claimed, then our human

brain,

far from being ordained by God, is a fortuitous accident.  But this makes

it

every bit as "special" as if God had ordained it.  It's not an inevitable

outcome of the laws of nature.  It's unlikely to be challenged or

superseded.

We're safe; we can do anything we want to.  But I wouldn't bet on it.



      Gordon S. Little

     (G.Little@bull.com)