Trent Eady

Complex life needs an explanation. (So far, complex life has only been observed on Earth, but a century from now this may not be the case.) Design by one or more intelligent minds has been proposed as an explanation for the complex life on Earth. Some people have posited intelligent extraterrestrials as the designers. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that this is not the case. However, if it were the case, it would leave our extraterrestrial designers in the same fix as the complex life on Earth: in order to design Earth’s biosphere, they would have to be pretty complex themselves. Where did that complexity come from?

We could say (in a hundred different possible ways) that the complexity of the extraterrestrial designers doesn’t need to be explained (or can’t be explained). That seems pretty absurd. But let’s go along with it, hypothetically. If we were to accept that the complex life on Earth is a product of those extraterrestrial minds and didn’t provide an explanation for the complexity of those extraterrestrial minds, we wouldn’t actually be explaining anything. We would be left with exactly the same problem as we started with: unexplained complexity. For all that huffing and puffing, we would have simply added a detail to the history of the planet Earth, a detail that would be ultimately insignificant to the puzzle of our biosphere’s complexity.

The only working explanation we could use for those extraterrestrial beings would be the one we already apply to life on our own planet: evolution by natural selection. Not only is Darwinian evolution the only known in principle explanation, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it is (in practice, in actuality, in reality) the source of terrestrial life’s complexity.

Replace “the extraterrestrial design hypothesis” with “the God Hypothesis” and you find yourself in exactly the same situation. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that life on Earth evolved through organic, Darwinian processes and there is no evidence at all of any intelligent interference. But, as with the example of extraterrestrial designers, let’s grant, hypothetically, that God is actually responsible for the complex life on Earth. In order to intelligently design complex objects, God would need, by definition, the cognitive architecture (concrete or not) necessary to create complexity. Where did that architecture come from? How did it come to be so complex? Until you can answer these questions, you have merely added a detail to your cosmogony; you haven’t actually made any headway in solving the puzzle of complexity. You can point out that Paley’s watch tumbled off of a rock to get onto the heath, but that’s just a incidental detail. You still haven’t started to explain where the watch’s complexity came from. For design to be an ultimate explanation, you need complex cognitive architecture before anything else. Not only does that hypothesis fly in the face of the evidence, it explains nothing.

And it may go further than that. At the most fundamental, abstract, mechanistic level, where does complexity come from? What processes allow it to exist? Humans are the only example designing minds that anyone knows about. Darwinian evolution built the cognitive architecture that we needed to start designing things. Even though we can explain the origin of the cognitive architecture that allows human minds to produce complexity, the more fundamental question remains: at the most basic level, how does design work? Where does the complexity of a watch come from, ultimately? Maybe the dichotomy between Darwinism and design is a false one. What if design itself (by humans or any other minds) is, at bottom, a Darwinian process? This is not immediately relevant to the God Hypothesis, but it does make some tantalizing suggestions. We may come to discover that Paley’s watch, sitting on the heath, was evolved just as much as the grass around it. We may also learn that, if complex life were intelligently designed, the designer’s cognitive architecture would have been simply another environment for Darwinian evolution to occur, software on which to run a simulation of the very fundamental processes that we now know created life on Earth.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about what would most likely be the culprit if the world ended in the near future. I said nuclear or biological terrorism, he said peak oil. Whichever was more likely, I thought, we can expect to dodge both threats and move safely into the future.

Now the latest issue of New Scientist has just arrived, with a cover story on the collapse of civilization. It’s deeply unsettling to realize that Doomsday may very well be looming just around the corner, with no clear way to prevent it. Human civilization turns out to be far more vulnerable and far more fragile than I ever would have guessed – and major threats to its stability like pandemics, climate change, and the global energy crisis have already started to present themselves. I have long acknowledged, albeit uncomfortably, that human existence would eventually come to an end. Relatively shortly on the geological timescale, the Sun is going to expand until the Earth gets so hot that life is impossible and later it will engulf our planet whole. Eventually, the universe itself is going to come to an end, pretty definitively securing our mortality as a species. But a realistically possible Apocalypse in the next (say) 200 years? That was a shock that this happy optimist was not prepared to take.

The titles of the two cover story articles pretty much sums up their message (click on the links to read a PDF copy):

IF THE PANDEMIC DOESN’T GET US…

…WE’RE DOOMED ANYWAY

The main theme of both articles is that human civilization is becoming increasingly like a set of dominoes or an intricate and fragile web. Even when it’s something as small and simple as a widespread power outage or blocked truck drivers, we see an eerie decay of order and regularity. MI5’s maxim is that Western societies are “four days away from anarchy”. A pandemic could cause large-scale and long-term disruptions for nations on every continent:

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Last night I watched a great movie: The Brave One, in which Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio host who, having recovered from the physical wounds of a brutal, random attack, struggles with her new life and becomes absorbed into a new persona: a self-loathing vigilante. There are several things I loved about the film, including its provocative tagline: How many wrongs to make it right?

The movie got me thinking once again about revenge. Retributive violence is often called, with morbid irony, “justice”. It is the only aspect of our culture that I can think of that justifies, if not encourages, taking pleasure from the misery or destruction of other human beings. Normally sadism is regarded as evil in its purest form – in fact, that is precisely why those who willingly inflict harm on others are seen as monsters in the first place. According to common wisdom, sadistic acts are a perfectly acceptable method of bringing closure or comfort to the victims of sadistic acts. Two wrongs really do make a right.

Well, no they don’t, says I. Retributive violence seems like it would have created a genetic advantage for our ancestors, so it seems highly plausible to me that the lust for revenge was hard-wired into our brains, coded into our genes. If that’s the case, it’s not surprising that revenge has been considered an accepted, even institutionalized, form of human behaviour for so long. (It is important at this point to note that most aspects of human psychology and behaviour can be traced back to our evolutionary heritage, the good and the bad. Explaining something’s evolutionary origin shows us why it exists in the first place, but it doesn’t give us any help in deciding whether it is beneficial to human well-being – or even whether it was beneficial to our ancestors’ well-being, rather than just their genetic fitness.) Revenge may be deeply instinctual and natural, but it is also deeply irrational and immoral.

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