From: Myrtle Point Cottage (bolles@qtm.net)
Date: Wed May 21 2003 - 16:00:36 BST
An attempt to answer Rich and Steve, in no particular order.
First, "am I a scientist"? You could mean many things with this question. I have had a lifelong interest in certain sciences (evolution, how the mind works, anthropology, communications and some others), but I do not earn a living by being a scientist. If that, in your judgment, disqualifies me, that’s really your problem. Science, both the process and the current results, are a love of my life. But no, I cannot tell you the purpose of gravity, except to say that it is what keeps me from being, willy-nilly, a dead space traveler.
Does evolution have a purpose and is it directed? My answer is no to both. And my answer comes, at least in the beginning, from persons whose learning and wisdom I respect, but more importantly, from a careful consideration of what evolution is. If directed, who is the director, and what is his/her ultimate goal? Believing that evolution is directed is a very human conclusion intended to help us believe that we are the kings of creation, and therefore endowed with power over all other life forms and natural resources. It is a self-fulfilling sort of answer, by which we deny that we are only one of many equally righteous species inhabiting, by chance, this planet. 65 million years ago a 7 mile diameter rock hit the planet. The results wiped out the dinosaurs (except for the birds, the smaller of whom survived), who had reigned for 250 million years as the lords of creation. Had chance taken that rock past Earth, the top species on earth today might well be intelligent, tool-using and tool-making descendants of the dinosaurs.
Do you also believe that dice are directed and have a purpose? What room is there in your world for accident? Has anyone in your world been snatched away from you by sudden, accidental death? Was there a purpose for that accident? And who "caused" the accident?
Randomness is a well-accepted part of our universe. (It is not a cause for anything. It is a characteristic of events.) Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle comes into play here. You can know the direction OR velocity of any electron. You can’t know both values at any moment of time. It was a fond hope of scientists in the eighteenth century that given a large enough supply of "calculators" (however you define these), we would be able to predict the entire future of the universe, but this one physical truth (noone has ever refuted Heisenberg) makes that impossible. Certainty died, and in its place we live with probabilities. To look for certainty in a universe built on chaos, self-organization, chance, randomness and just plain accident, is a sure recipe for poor mental health.
Evolutionary biologists currently define survival as a species characteristic, not one that is important for individuals. The measure is the number of offspring expected from a breeding population, which must, for survival to happen, exceed the death rate for that population. Fitness can be thought of as suitability for existing in a particular environment, and our knowledge of life in extreme environments is such that we now believe that life exists in all environments. Some biologists now think that life began in hot smokers on the floor of the ocean, where species of bacteria living on sulfur compounds are found in temperatures of several hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit.
Pirsig’s question, "fittest for what?" sounds to me as if he, too, was caught up in the search for purpose in the universe. A species has no purpose of its own. Its driving force is the urge to reproduce its genes. This is not conscious nor articulated, it just is what genes do. We need to constantly remind ourselves that evolution, whether of stars or starfish or movie stars is a process by which the next generation can come into being. It is not a characteristic, and you can’t touch it. It is what we all do, without even thinking about it.
No, I have not yet read Pirsig’s books. My wife is hard at work trying to convince me I should. I have a deep suspicion about anyone’s claims that ultimate truth can be found within the covers of any book (not excluding the Bible or Koran or the Oxford English Dictionary). If you are interested, there are a few I can recommend which posit some tentative guides to the land where truth might be found.
Questions, anyone?
Bob Bolles
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