Louisville Process Theology Network

Robert Wright on Evolution's Invisible Hand I

Aug 07, 2009

From page 205 of ?“Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information?” by Robert Wright.


?“Some people find it hard to believe that a heartless, brainless, spineless bacterium floating around in the primordial ooze could have evolved into a multibillion-celled animal that can agonize over lost loves, debate the nature-nurture question, and exceed a score of 10,000 in Pac-Man. This is a classic case of misplaced incredulity. The last 1.5 billion years of our evolution are not really that amazing.

Given a few prolifically reproducing organisms, occasional genetic mutations, limited quantities of food and territory, and lots of times, great evolutionary strides are all but inevitable. That is what makes natural selection one the most appealing theories ever: great complexity follows from a few simple assumptions.

More remarkable than evolution itself is the prerequisite for it: the fact that the bacterium or, even earlier, a bare self-replicating strand of DNA, was floating around in the first place. That does not follow from anything.

And, as we?’ve seen, it goes against the grain of the second law thermodynamics (entropy). While not forbidding the spontaneous formation of structure, the second law deems it highly unlikely.

Some scientists nonetheless attribute this seminal congregation of molecules to chance. Given enough time, they say, really unlikely things will come to pass, such as strands of DNA that make copies of themselves. But other scientists, Charles Bennett, for one, think that the first form of life owed its existence to some as-yet-undiscovered law of thermodynamics, one decidedly more upbeat than the second.

This law would dictate that some systems, given certain advantages (access to energy, for example), will grow in complexity, just as surely as most systems, under most circumstances, will not. This unformed law, says Bennett, has ?‘taken over one of the jobs formerly assigned to God.?’?”


To be continued in the next post.