Evolution could be even more fundamental than physics

Religious dogmatists don’t like evolution because it undercuts their fantasy that God brought into being the world and everything in it via a single act of divine creation. Of course, that goes against all the evidence of a big bang setting off a 14 billion year process in which the universe changed from a subatomic speck to the tremendous size it is now, with that size continuing to expand at a speed greater than that of light.

I’ve finished a book by Mark Vellend that views evolution as being at the root of much more than biology, Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics. My first posts about the book were “Provocative idea: there are only two branches of science, physics and evolution,” and “Evolution, like other laws of nature, is logical and largely mathematical.”

As I noted in the second post, Vellend’s book, while clearly written, still isn’t easy reading. At least, not for me. Much of the book deals with what Vellend calls The Evolutionary Soundboard. This consists of dials that can be turned to produce different values of variables that drive the three principles needed to explain how things evolve, whether they be fish in the sea or smartphones in our pockets.

In a general sense, Vellend says these principles are:

(1) Generation of variation
(2) Differential success
(3) Inheritance

When applied to ideas, the principles are:

(1) Repeated cycles of idea generation
(2) Selection or rejection of those ideas
(3) Inheritance of the successful ones from one generation of thinkers to the next

Naturally there’s a lot of details to be learned about each of these principles. That’s what Vellend’s book largely is all about. But in concluding chapters, there’s a broad discussion of how the First Science (physics) and the Second Science (evolution) relate. This passage does a good job of summing up some key concepts.

The inside of a cell is a highly complex soup of molecules interacting in myriad ways, and these interactions are governed almost entirely by the laws of physics. For the most part, molecular biologists draw on principles of the First Science. On the other side, the interest is in how things come to be. Why cells contain the things they do (as opposed to other things), and how the world ended up with massive assemblages of cells that make up a human body, are questions that require evolutionary principles to answer.

Cells and organisms and ecosystems obey the laws of physics, but they are not wholly explained by them. Explaining how living things come to be requires the Second Science. Basically, the distinction between the First Science and the Second Science cuts straight through biology.

Viewed from the social sciences, the Second Science project might appear to some as an attempt to have the entirety of the social sciences swallowed up by biology — the evolutionary part of biology anyway. I hope this book has demonstrated that this is not the case. It is a quirk of history — cultural evolutionary history — that the basic principles of evolution have come to be associated most closely with biology. It could easily have been linguistics or history.

A few pages further on, Vellend theorizes that evolution might not be the Second Science, but the First Science. This notion requires some unproven assumptions about the nature of the universe and whether the multiverse exists, but every conception about this is unproven, so what Vellend says is as much of a viable possibility as other ideas about the Grand Scheme of Things.

Our universe began with a Big Bang, with matter expanding out from one dimensionless point, and according to one theory, it will end with a Big Crunch, when everything disappears into something like a black hole. The Bang-Crunch symmetry suggests that the black holes that astronomers infer from observations of our universe might represent the starting points of new universes.

The Big Bang and Big Crunch of our universe might be just one among a great many. And maybe when new universes get created, there are slight tweaks to the physical constants. If indeed there is a multiverse — a population of universes — the ones with parameters tuned just so to permit the creation of lots of black holes, and therefore lots of new universes, will dominate.

The idea of the multiverse should sound familiar to a Second Scientist. Universes vary in their physical characteristics, which can be inherited by other universes, some of which give rise to more future universes than others.

That is evolution, which makes it not so unexpected for us to have found ourselves in a universe where the fundamental physics seems so well tuned to build stars and planets. It’s not that the one and only universe in existence happens to have the just-so conditions needed to support life on some of its planets. Instead, of the countless universes out there, ours is one of the few where life was even possible.

If the conditions were different, we wouldn’t be here to know it one way or the other, or to create comic books and movies about multiple universes.

The multiverse idea is controversial in the scientific community, but it is out there, and, as far as I know, it hasn’t been disproven yet. In evolutionary terms, it remains a viable variant in the evolution of the theory of the universe(s). And if it turns out to be true, everything we know about physics is in fact the result of an evolutionary process. In the end, maybe the Second Science is really the First.