Hi Andrea, Roger,
It's heartening to me that you both realize that Pirsig's understanding
of biological evolution is "naive". (To review: the naive understanding
of evolution is that nature is directed and purposeful and that humans
are its inevitable, penultimate product.) Actually, this naive view of
evolution is the most popular view among non-scientists and it has
permeated the culture so much that even scientists fall under its spell.
Stephen Jay Gould lays this all out very nicely in the first few
chapters of his book, Full House (1996). He spends a few pages detailing
how this view is epitomized by the psychologist M. Scott Peck in his
book, The Road Less Travelled (1978), which was on the NYTimes
best-seller list for over 600 weeks and is, by his account, the highest
grossing book of all time, by far! Gould disagrees with Peck on two major
points.
First Peck claims that life is a miracle because evolution itself should
not occur given that it runs counter to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
(that the universe is running down and self-organizing mechanisms should
be impossible because of that). The reason that thinking is flawed,
Gould points out, is that Earth is not a closed system but is constantly
being bathed in energy by the sun. So as long as the sun is shining,
planet Earth can buck entropy. (Pirsig doesn't think it's the sun,
because if you leave a chemistry professor out in the sun too long it
will turn him into a decayed blob of chemicals.)
Second, Peck trumpets the interpretation of biological evolution we are
calling naive.
PECK:
The process of evolution has been a development of organisms
from lower to higher and higher states of complexity, differentiation,
and organization.... And so it goes, up the scale of evolution, a
scale of increasing complexity and organization and differentiation,
with man who possesses an enormous cerebral cortex and extraordinarily
complex behavioral patterns, being, as far as we can tell, at the top.
The quote is true enough but it has a mischievous bias about how life
should be rated, no doubt caused by a human-centric perspective that is
hard to lay aside. By some measures, viruses and bacteria top the list
of life's success story, being the most ancient and plentiful, whereas
mammals are a fleeting blip on the outer leaves of the branch of life.
Putting these two together, the implicit assumption of the naive view is
that some mystical or unknown force of nature is thrusting life
"upward", fighting the force of entropy. Peck diagrams life's history as
a pyramid, where the most plentiful, simplest organisms form the base
and the rarer, more complex organisms are higher up with man at the apex.
Peck: "Inside the pyramid I have placed an arrow to symbolize this
thrusting evolutionary force, the 'SOMETHING' that has so successfully
and consistently defied 'natural law' over millions upon millions of
generations and that must itself represent natural law as yet
UNDEFINED." [caps mine]
To students of the MOQ, this "undefined something" should sound eerily
familiar. It's what Pirsig calls Dynamic Quality. Pirsig, like Peck,
believes that laws of nature need to be violated or circumvented
for life to express itself. Only in this way can atoms form chemistry
professors and birds fly into the sky. In typical bizarro fashion,
Pirsig proposes that we measure the degree of evolution of an organism
by the degree to which it disobeys the law of gravity. (Presumably we
could only measure things this way after Newton, since he created the
law of gravity and gravity itself.) Therefore birds are more evolved
than chimps or slugs. I'm sure he thinks the Indian's reverence for
birds also gives this idea credibility.
Anyway, to counter the naive view, Gould proposes that life started
out being as simple as it could be, and would have gotten more
complex even if only random processes "designed" it. Like a
drunkard on a random walk on a sidewalk, with a building on one side
and the street on the other, the drunk is bound to fall off the curb
at some point. From a bird's eye view, it looks like the drunk has a
purpose and a direction - it always starts at the wall and moves away
from it toward the street, given enough time. Gould claims this is a
fair analogy to the way organisms evolve. They start out at a "wall"
of simplicity that can't be simpler, and if they are going to change at
all, the change will be toward more complexity (the direction of the
"street"). The analogy is also accurate in that it correctly models the
fact that simple organisms far outnumber complex organisms - the
drunkard spends most of its time near the wall.
Clearly, Gould's is a simplified explanation and it has come under
attack from Robert Wright, who wrote a book called Nonzero (2000).
Wright's thesis is that evolution is driven by non-zero sum games, in
which symbiosis between organisms in nature, and people and institutions
in society, wins out over a dog-eat-dog world of zero-sum games with
only winners and losers, and this is responsible for getting the world
to where it is today. On the issue of directionality, Wright and Gould
agree that new genes are generated randomly, but Wright believes
the odds of that gene surviving are greater if it results in a more
complex organism, whereas Gould believes there is no preference for
complexity. Wright says that Gould ignores mechanisms that propel
evolution toward complexity, such as "arms races" amongst organisms.
See www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm
Wright doesn't claim any need for a mystical force to drive evolution
toward greater complexity, but in an email exchange between Wright and
Steven Pinker about Nonzero, Pinker suggests that it could be read
that way, depending on how much you read into the meaning of goal-
orientedness.
slate.msn.com/code/BookClub/BookClub.asp?Show=2/1/00&idMessage=4515&idBio=143
It's a very interesting topic. I wonder how much Roger's book is going
to end up sounding like Wright's Nonzero?
Glenn
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