In current biology, evolution is a purposeless process with random outcomes, so re-running it on earth should give different life forms because randomness doesn’t repeat (Gould, 1990). Yet it can also converge to the same answer, as birds, bats, insects, and fish evolved flight independently, so replaying the evolution of life might give much the same solutions (Morris, 2003).
We can’t reverse time to re-run evolution but we do run evolutionary algorithms, programs that solve problems by imitating evolution. They work by generating an initial population of solutions then evaluating their fitness to reject those that don’t work. Selected parent solutions are then combined and mutated to produce offspring that are again evaluated, and this is repeated until a solution emerges. This method can solve hard problems that logical calculations can’t, and if an answer exists, re-running the algorithm repeatedly finds it. The program is purposeless and based on trial-and-error but it always ends up in the same place, so it isn’t directionless.
Evolutionary potential studies that replay the evolutionary tape with generations of simulated bacteria find that Gould’s theory that evolution never repeats is incorrect (Blount, 2017). Natural selection doesn’t plan ahead but it isn’t just happenstance either, as it converges to the same or similar results for a small solution space.
If life then is very unlikely, as it seems to be, evolution will converge to the same solutions, so replaying the evolution of life on earth will give much the same results. Cells would still evolve membranes to help them survive, and replicating themselves would ensure it. Some would discover how to capture solar energy by photo-synthesis to give plants as primary producers, allowing animals to feed on them as secondary consumers, and on each other based on sight, smell, hearing, and mobility by flagella, fins, limbs, or wings. If repeating evolution gives the same results, it has a direction, whether it is purposeful or not. Biology describes evolution by the tree of life (Figure 5.19) but a tree has an up direction, so to say that evolution has no direction is illogical.
Figure 5.19 represents the solution space for life, and the periodic table does the same for matter. Cosmogenesis suggests that while hydrogen formed a few million years after the big bang, it took billions more years to make heavy elements like iron that are needed to make hemoglobin in our blood. The periodic table then represents an evolution, where each step decreases entropy to increase order by adding protons and electrons. The evolution of matter then also has a direction, as it will always produce the same periodic table elements. In general, matter and life evolve by the same process, based on finding stable combinations that survive.
If evolution is based on finding stable combinations that increase order to survive, the number of steps that increase order define its degree. For example in Figure 5.19, simple bacteria and archaea merged into eukaryotes, modern cells that led to plants and animals (Lane, 2015). This was an order-increasing step because when cells merge, freedom decreases, just as when a proton and electron merge into a hydrogen atom. Complex cells are then more evolved than bacteria, and they evolved into higher life-forms for the same reason that atoms evolved into molecules, like water.
Biologists currently argue that bacteria are just as evolved as we are, or more as they have been evolving longer, but time elapsed doesn’t measure evolution. Hydrogen was the first atom, but that doesn’t make it the most evolved. Likewise, human beings are more evolved than bacteria because their ancestry has more order-increasing steps. Evolution is described by a tree not a matrix for a reason, and we are the tip of a new branch while bacteria are at the base.
Are we then just a glorious accident, as Gould says? If a meteor hadn’t hit the earth 65 million years ago to wipe out 75% of all life, mammals would still be small creatures hiding underground in a dinosaur world, and homo sapiens wouldn’t exist. We are an evolutionary accident but aren’t all its products? The first atom was an accident, as was the first molecule, the first cell, the first plant, and the first animal, so we are just the same. Yet the evolutionary trend to increase order isn’t an accident because it is universal. Evolution is based on accidents but isn’t itself accidental.
We see ourselves as special, but to think that life exists for us is egotistical. 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct today so if we destroy ourselves or the planet, we may join them. Yet even if we explode all our bombs in a nuclear holocaust, after a few thousand years the earth will bloom again, and some other species will take our place as we took that of the dinosaurs. Homo-sapiens was the lucky ape that won the evolutionary lottery but some species had to, because beings like us are possible, and the grand evolution is ongoing.
Evolution is objective because it treats all species the same, just as the sun shines on all life, but some interpret this as indifference:
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. … DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.” (Dawkins, 1995), p133.
Yet if we all dance to the music of our genes, Dawkins is the same, so why listen to him? The idea that evolution is a machine re-invents the old universe is a machine that quantum theory debunked last century. Just as quantum theory requires photons to make choices, evolution requires creatures to make choices. Biological nihilism, like physical nihilism, has no value, and it fails at the same hurdle, that choice exists.
The permutations and combinations of life are so vast that no design can encompass them, so trying every option is a good strategy. Everything connects, so who knows what works? For example, fungi are neither plants nor animals but they help forests and gave us penicillin, so who are we to say they are pointless? Evolution doesn’t make mistakes as we do because given two paths, it takes both, just as quantum reality does. But it does take time, so while life began almost as soon as it could, the early fossil record has no complex life because it hadn’t evolved yet. Humans have existed for about three million years but for the earth, that is like the blink of an eye.
Evolution then has no design because it is the design. Our universe isn’t a machine designed to manufacture a pre-ordained product like us, but rather is evolving to try every possibility, as if it was looking for something. It is like an algorithm set up to solve a problem, but what then is the problem, and why was a virtual reality chosen to accomplish it?