Evolution and the Anthropic Principle

WE HAVE BEEN CONSIDERING a number of aspects of Darwin’s theory. In so doing we have found a tension between the theory of natural selection taken strictly and things which Darwin clearly holds strongly and wants to say. In particular we have found difficulties with his view of evolutionary progress, with his view of our own mental capacities, with his attempts to rank human societies, and also with what he considers desirable within human societies. To put it bluntly, natural selection gives no warrant for any progressivism regarding evolution. It makes it hard to see what faith we should have in our scientific and philosophical speculations. It gives no warrant for associating success in evolutionary terms with a greater degree of civilisation. At the same time the theory of natural selection seems to sanction a type of society which would run counter to many commonly held moral virtues and decencies. The interesting thing is that in each case Darwin himself gives sign of straining against the strict view of natural selection, and of wanting to promote a less austere view of things.

In a way, this connects with what we said at the beginning abut moving away from a genocentric biology towards an approach which emphasised complexity and co-operation. If what is central to our study is not the gene or the organism, considered as discrete atomic individuals, but the complexes which they are and of which they form parts, we may begin to see existence in terms other than that of the survival of individuals and of what contributes to that.

In what we have come to see as the austere version of evolution, that delimited by Darwin’s strict theory of natural selection, the picture which is given is of life being a desperate struggle by individuals to survive in an environment which if not actually hostile is largely indifferent to them. The key levers in this drama are random variations within the individuals and selective retention of a few of them by an environment which cares nothing for any of it. We are obviously a long distance from Darwin’s own sense of natural selection carefully scrutinising, selecting, preserving, ceaselessly and silently working for the good of all and each, and it is difficult to see where any such notion could gain a foothold. Nor is there any sense that the process as a whole is likely to move in a progressive direction, towards greater intelligence, complexity and morality. Rather to the contrary, the universe looks far more like that described by Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity (Knopf, New York, 1971): ‘The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man.’ (p 145)  We human beings are here by chance, in a universe which is not responsive to us at all, and within which our existence has no significance. For Monod, mankind is a gypsy, living in an alien world, which is deaf to his music. (He apparently saw no difficulty in having this alien world giving rise to creatures (us) who are able to conceive the world and their activity in terms of values.)

In recent years, as is well known, the view that the universe was not pregnant with life and consciousness has been challenged by what has become known as the anthropic principle. It is obviously true, tautologically so, that, given that we are here, the universe must be such and must have been such as to allow for the existence of intelligent knowers, such as ourselves. It turns out, though, non-tautologically, that a very high degree of fine tuning even at the start of the universe, would have to have been in place in order for intelligent life (us) to have been possible. Can anything be concluded from the fine tuning point?

At the very least, it suggests that Monod’s basic stance needs qualification. From the very beginning, the universe was, if not pregnant with life, certainly ready for the emergence of life. And the more precise the fine tuning and the more etched into the substance of things that fine tuning is, given the immense amounts of time and space involved for things to work themselves out, the closer readiness becomes to pregnancy. In a universe of the extent of ours, it is not unrealistic to think that possibilities embedded in the universe’s basic structure are highly likely actually to occur. It is reasoning of this sort which leads the adherents of the so-called ‘strong’ anthropic principle to conclude that life and mind do not have to be imported into the universe from outside or by chance. They are ‘etched deeply into the fabric of the cosmos, perhaps through a shadowy half-glimpsed life principle.’ (Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma. Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? Penguin Books, London, 2006, pp 302-3) Given the notorious problems in explaining life and consciousness in purely physicalistic terms, such a view is not just helpful in general terms. The difficulties themselves might actually open us to the possibility that some such thing must be true, that life and mind are there, embryonically, right from the start – otherwise it becomes well-nigh impossible to see how they could have arisen.

AT THIS POINT IT is worth mentioning Christian de Duve’s book Vital Dust (Basic Books, New York, 1995) in which the distinguished biologist (and, like Monod, a Nobel prize winner) shows in great and sober detail, how, the importance of chance events in the actual history notwithstanding, the development of life towards human consciousness (and maybe beyond) is almost inevitable, once life in its most basic form had emerged. (See especially his summary pp 294-300.)  And he also argues, in line with proponents of the anthropic principle, that given the physical conditions obtaining on the Earth 3.8 billion years ago, RNA-like molecules were bound to arise at some time or other. Further given the nature of the universe itself those conditions apt for the emergence of RNA were almost bound to arise not only on the Earth, but in many, many other planets. Hence de Duve’s evocative title ‘Vital Dust’, suggesting that the elementary particles of which the universe is composed have an inbuilt tendency to form themselves into life and mind-promoting complexes. In the letter to Lyell referred to earlier, Darwin had said that he ‘would give absolutely nothing for the theory of natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.’ Consciousness and even life itself can look highly mysterious, if we are reductive physicalists, but not so miraculous if our perspective is that of de Duve. A de Duvian perspective, then, can help to smooth out the course of a theory of evolution in the way Darwin himself required.

We do not have to acquiesce in the more colourful conclusions drawn by advocates of anthropic thinking to see its basic orientation as suggestive in a number of ways. If the universe is disposed to produce life and mind right from the start, we will no longer see ourselves as tangential to it, a mere random accident in a fundamentally lifeless system, gaining whatever knowledge we have of it as a chance side effect of our striving to survive in it. If our mental faculties are rooted in the fabric of the universe, it will not be surprising or problematic if they do deliver knowledge of it way beyond the basics we need for survival. If the universe as a whole is evolving forms of life and mind, the progressive thrust of evolution in that direction will not be such a mystery. Also, if life and mind are themselves goods from the point of view of that evolution, we may well be led to value states of feeling and mind for their own sakes, and not simply as aids to survival and reproduction. Indeed something more than survival and reproduction may come to be seen as implicit in nature from the start; so our own tendencies to morality and co-operation (genuine altruism) will no longer seem the anomaly they will inevitably are if nature is conceived in strictly Darwinian terms.  Finally an approach to evolution and life which stresses complexity and mutual belonging will be far less concerned to emphasise struggle in the way Darwin does, which will obviously have ecological and ethical resonances.

It remains to be seen whether any of this would be helpful to religion in restoring that sense of the Creator which Darwin found so hard to dispense with even in his agnosticism. On the positive side, a universe pregnant with life and a biosphere pregnant with mind would be far more congenial to religious understanding than the bleak cosmic landscape envisaged by Monod. And the idea of God or the divinity working through creative processes is one common to many religious traditions (and it would also pick up on Teilhardian ideas of the cosmos existing in order to know itself). On the other hand these ideas may in themselves do little to exorcise the weariness and despair many others than Darwin feel when confronted with all the apparent waste, prodigality and suffering inherent in creation. Without some revelation or gift of grace, the problems involved reconciling ourselves to a God who chooses to work like that, or who can work in no other way (which may be even worse for the traditional notion of an intelligent designer) remain as intractable as ever.

Anthony O’Hear, an editor of The Fortnightly Review New Series, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham and Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London. He is the author, most recently, of The Great Books: A Journey Through 2,500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature.