Science is our best way of learning what is true about the world. Those truths, obviously, include us humans, since we are part of the world. So this makes science not something to be admired from the outside of the human condition, but as something that points to the essence of you, me, and everybody else on our planet.
This is one reason why I ordered Mark Vellend’s book, Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics, soon after I saw a mention of it in one of the science magazines I subscribe to.
Evolution fascinates me. I love the fact that I’m related to every living entity. Lost in time is the original common ancestor of all multi-celled beings. Whatever it was, all subsequent life has sprung from that primal source. This scientific conception of creation is just as awe-inspiring as religious myths. Plus, it is true.
In a 2009 post, “Evolution shows the grandeur of life,” I shared how Richard Dawkins related evolution to everyday life.
Yes, there’s a beauty to natural selection.
Which isn’t something far or distant, but as near to us as our current experience. Dawkins says there are four “memories” that provide information on how to handle the present so as to survive into the future.
One is our DNA repository. This shows how our ancestors dealt with ancestral environments.
Another is our immune system. It is a database of past diseases and how to survive them (this is how immunizations work, by tricking the immune system into “thinking” that it has suffered a disease, thereby producing the proper antibodies).
Third is the memory that resides in our nervous system. At its simplest, Dawkins says, this works on a trial and error basis.
“The nervous system has a rule that says, ‘Any trial action that is followed by reward should be repeated. Any trial action that is followed by nothing, or worse, followed by punishment, for example pain, should not be repeated.'”
This is how we evolve during the single life we’re living here on Earth: by living and learning. I performed a lot of religious’y actions when I was an active member of an India-based spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.
I experienced certain results from those actions: meditating, vegetarianism, giving up alcohol and drugs, providing service to the guru, and such.
I’ve shared what I learned on this blog and in books that I’ve written. All that has become part of a fourth memory, culture.
Like most people, I’ve thought of biological evolution — the kind Darwin focused on in his classic On the Origin of Species — as being the “real” evolution. Notions like memes, the cultural equivalent of genes, basically, struck me as being reflections of biological evolution. Interesting, but not as genuine as how species evolve.
Vellend, a professor of biology, sees evolution differently. He says:
Darwin and Wallace’s ideas are better described as constituting a theory of evolution — one specific application of the generalized version. Indeed, Darwin himself noted the parallels between biological change and language change, taking inspiration from linguistics for his own theory. The economist J. Stanley Metcalfe captured the situation nicely: “Evolutionary theory is a manner of reasoning in its own right quite independently of the use made of it by biologists.”
In fact, Vellend goes so far as to argue that physics and evolution are the only fundamental branches of science.
So if evolution is the key distinguishing feature of systems that can’t be reduced to physics alone, then perhaps there are two — and only two — truly fundamental branches of science.
Physics can be considered the first branch, held up by historians and philosophers as the paragon of scientific achievement. Physicists and chemists have identified a set of laws from which they can understand and predict the behavior of everything from planets and continents to atoms and subatomic particles. We can call this the “First Science.”
The second fundamental branch of science is the science of evolution, applying to everything from coronaviruses to computers. Biologist Graham Bell has dubbed this the “Second Science.” The proposition is that physics and evolution together can explain everything. But in explaining how life and its products came to be as they are now, the First Science has but a supporting role to play. The lead actor in that play is the Second Science.
God obviously isn’t needed to explain how life came to be as we know it today in its marvelous multiplicity. However, Vellend points out that human intentions aren’t as important as they may seem to be as an alternative to God.
For aspects of culture other than language, the main alternative to the evolution hypothesis has been human intentions, rather than God. God didn’t invent the steam engine or the printing press, but humans did. Whereas biological evolution has been aptly described as “design without a designer,” the most impressive elements of human culture appear to have been designed with a designer.
When scholars have taken a close look at the products of human culture, however, individual designers are rarely as important as we imagine them to be. Rather, for everything from writing and storytelling to the economy and science itself, cultural evolution always involves a great many people and an immensely important role for trial and error, countless rounds of which result in the incremental accumulation of innovations.
In short, culture seems to evolve via repeated cycles of variation generation, selection, and inheritance.
This applies to religions, naturally. New religious ideas pop up frequently. Christianity was one of those variations. Certain factors led to Christianity surviving as a viable religion rather than dying out. Then culture enabled Christianity to be passed on to future generations. This wasn’t the divine will. It was evolution at work.
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“We think we move, but we are being moved.”
Nietsche
Every invention of humankind is in fact a product of evolution. It is the result of genetics, conditioning, education. We distinguish these as artificial, because they come through the human mind. But the human mind is a biological instrument and forever derivative of the nature that generates it.
Therefore, while a human mind can conceive of an objective reality, it is hopelessly prevented from witnessing let alone understanding it except in very derivative, crayon concepts hopelessly disconnected from this moment of reality.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the human conception of thought. Thinking is described as a unique function, and whatever proceeds from thinking is attributed to the thinker. But these are arbitrary distinctions. The thoughts are the product of biology, memory, conditioning, cultured. And so are the behaviors that result.
In nature, evolution is a continuous process. There is no distinction between thought and action, as humans like to theorize about when they try to claim credit for something. Thought is just another action.
So, when attempting to understand God, people anthropomorphize and try to overlay this dichotomy of thought-then-action upon a creator, when in fact there is no distinction at all. All the brilliant intelligence of design and construction are interwoven without any delay at all. The very genius of God is present in every cell, active in every wave and particle in every dimension of creation. Intelligence is built in.
Human beings must extract, using the human brain, concepts from sensory reality, or derivative concepts others have extrapolated from physical reality and the measurement of physical reality.
But God needs no such intermediary. The very notion of first-design-then-act is a very human and limited notion, limited by the mechanics of our own biochemical and limited selves. We need to process then act. God does both, and with brilliant intelligence at the same time.
There is no such thing as random in reality. That is a human concept, a placeholder for all we don’t know. But what Science shows again and again is that every detectable instance of reality has a cause that immediately and without delay preceded it. Where we see delay, we only evidence our lack of capacity to measure, or to understand.
We think A caused B, but A caused A2, A3, A4 .. on to Infinity in an instant that resulted in a flash in B. B and A are inextricably linked, just as we are to this creation.
But the human mind is not the instrument by which we can perceive in any significant way, that creation.
The human brain does contain the mechanical tools needed for us to do so. To go beyond traditional mind and rational thinking, to see and understand all at once, to comprehend a whole that the human brain is purely incapable of. This is not only possible, it is our birthright. We have the capacity to understand God and the intelligence of the creation all as a whole, as one inseparable from us.
But to do this we can’t use the sieve of the human mind. It captures nothing but sensation. Everything of value slips through.
We must throw that sieve right into the ocean of experience, internal, external, all and both. Then we capture it, and everything else, and that is purely by submission. We won’t shrink the creation down into concepts, however noble those are, and that includes the sciences. These are like AI currently, great tools for our use, for our understanding. But they do not replace that understanding. That’s on us. And we can’t get that understanding trying to shrink reality into our set of rules. Rather we act as true scientists, and approach every moment with an open mind, including the practice of meditation, of putting aside our conditions.
Then we see the distinctions between true and false, imaginary and real are in fact arbitrary and very poor. Everything the mind conceives is imaginary, and everything imaginary has a real element which it reflects, however poorly. What is real is outside that.
All the sciences point to this. It is for us to connect those dots and use our mind to serve our higher understanding and expand the invisible connection to reality.
Yes, I suppose the sciences could be reduced to basically two, and perhaps even one – physics. Science, could conceive of one primal source being the basis of everything, or even an evolving primal source; but within or emanating from that, a multitude of sciences have emerged. Which is the position of science today – and very productive its theories have been. So, I’m happy with all the various sciences, but if someone wants to reduce them to two okay by me.
I’d like to add, that it is still thought by some that a theory (such as the theory of evolution) is just an idea when actually a theory (unlike a hypothesis) is substantiated by evidence.
Also, there’s a side to Velland’s view of physics and evolution that could easily open the mental gate for including a God. He says: “Whereas biological evolution has been aptly described as “design without a designer,” the most impressive elements of human culture appear to have been designed with a designer.”
Okay, so he doesn’t mean a supernatural designer, a God, but folk may skip the point he is making about cultural evolution involving many people over time and not just the odd individual designer – or revolutionary. After all, as with biological evolution, human ideas never arrive in isolation, but are built on the shoulders of others. Or, as Velland says: “In short, culture seems to evolve via repeated cycles of variation generation, selection, and inheritance.”