In current biology, evolution is a purposeless process with random outcomes, so re-running it should give different results because randomness doesn’t repeat (Gould, 1990). Yet it can also converge to the same result, as birds, bats, insects, and fish all 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 can run evolutionary algorithms, programs that solve problems by imitating evolution. They first generate an initial population of possible 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 repeats 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 has no purpose and is based on trial-and-error, but it always ends up in the same place, so it isn’t directionless.
Evolutionary potential studies that replay evolution 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 if the solution space is small, it isn’t just happenstance either.
If life is unlikely, as it is, evolution will find the same solutions, so replaying it will give the same results. Cells will still evolve membranes to survive and copy themselves to ensure it. Some will discover how to use solar energy by photo-synthesis, giving plants as primary producers that animals feed on as secondary consumers, and on each other, using senses like sight and smell, and flagella, fins, limbs, or wings to move. Repeating evolution gives the same results, so it has a direction and isn’t going nowhere. The tree of life, like all trees, has an up direction, despite Gould’s contrary claim.
The periodic table represents the solution space for matter, just as Figure 5.19 does for life. Based on cosmogenesis, hydrogen arose a few million years after the big bang but it took billions more years to make heavy elements like iron that we need to make hemoglobin in our blood. Matter evolved as life did, as it found stable combinations that survive by increasing order, so it also has a direction because it always gives the same periodic table elements.
Evolution in general then discovers ordered combinations that survive or are stable. Each step allows more possibilities, so the branches of the tree increase as it grows. Matter is just a trunk with isotope twigs but if the tree of life is placed on top of it, as life evolved from matter, the many branches of life are possible, so fourteen billion years of evolution haven’t led nowhere.
The height of this universal evolutionary tree depends on how many upward-growing offshoots it has, so evolution has a height as well as a direction. Branches produced by steps that increase order are more evolved than those that extend sideways without increasing order. For example in Figure 5.19, simple bacteria and archaea merged into eukaryotes, the modern cells that led to plants and animals (Lane, 2015). This was an order-increasing step because order increases when species merge, as it does when protons and electrons merge into atoms. Eukaryotes are then more evolved than bacteria, and they evolved into all higher life-forms, including us.
In current biology. bacteria are as evolved as we are, or more as they have been here longer, but time elapsed doesn’t measure evolution. Hydrogen was the first atom but it isn’t the most evolved atom. 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 like fungi on a forest floor, for a good reason. We are the tip of an upper branch of the tree while bacteria spread at the base. If the height of the tree of life reflected its order-increasing steps, the right-hand branch of Figure 5.19 would be higher than shown. A tree of life whose height is the degree of order can then reflect the timeline of the evolutionary process in Figure 5.20.
Yet aren’t we 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 animals 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 sentience is no different. Evolution is based on accidents but the universal trend to order isn’t an accident. Where a tree fruits may be accidental, but that it fruits isn’t an accident at all.
We are special based on our position on the tree of life, but it doesn’t exist just for us. 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct today, so if we destroy ourselves, we may join them. Even if we explode all our bombs in a nuclear holocaust, the earth will bloom again in a few thousand years, so another species can take our place, as we did that of the dinosaurs. Life finds a way, but isn’t fussy about which one. Homo-sapiens was the lucky ape that won the evolutionary lottery, but some species had to, because sentient life is possible so evolution will find it.
Evolution affects all life, as the sun shines on all, but some call this 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 does too, so why listen to him? He is after all just re-inventing the old universe is a machine theory in biology terms. Quantum theory debunked that idea last century by letting even photons make choices, and evolution debunks it today by letting creatures do the same, so genes don’t determine our future. Biological nihilism has no more value than physical nihilism, and it fails at the same hurdle, that choice exists.
The permutations and combinations of life are so vast that no design can predict them, so evolution is a good strategy. Everything connects, so who knows what will produce value? For example, fungi are neither plants nor animals but they help forests thrive and gave us penicillin, so they aren’t pointless. Evolution doesn’t make errors as we do because given two paths, it takes both, just as quantum reality does. It does however 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.
Our universe isn’t a machine designed to manufacture a product to a pre-ordained blueprint, but an evolution trying 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 how can our world achieve it?