Does biological life have a purpose?

Darwinian has reached near saturation and among the customary pieties there is little doubt that it will conveniently serve as a love-in, with much mutual self-congratulation, for atheism. But perhaps now is the time to rejoice not in what Darwin got right, and in demonstrating the reality of evolution in the context of entirely unexceptional natural processes there is no dispute, but what his inheritance is in terms of unfinished business. Isn't it curious how evolution is regarded by some as a total, universe-embracing explanation, although those who treat it as a religion might protest and sometimes not gently. Don't worry, the science of evolution is certainly incomplete. In fact, understanding a process, in this case natural selection and adaptation, doesn't automatically mean that you also possess predictive powers as to what might (or even must) evolve. Nor is it logical to assume that simply because we are a product of evolution, as patently we are, that explains our capacity to understand the world. Rather the reverse.

But wait a moment; everybody knows that evolution isn't predictable. Yes, a rich and vibrant biosphere to admire, but no end-product any more likely (or unlikely) than any other. Received wisdom pours out the usual litany: random mutations, catastrophic mass extinctions and other mega-disasters, super-virulent microbes all ensure that the drunkard's walk is a linear process in comparison to the ceaseless lurching seen in the history of life. So not surprisingly nearly all neo-Darwinians insist that the outcomes - and that includes you - are complete flukes of circumstance. So to find flying organisms on some remote planet might not be a big surprise, but certainly no birds. Perhaps all life employs cells, but would anybody dare to predict a mushroom? In fact the evidence points in diametrically the opposite direction. Birds evolved at least twice, maybe four times. So too with the mushrooms. Both are among the less familiar examples of evolutionary convergence.

Convergence? Simply how from very different starting points organisms "navigate" to very much the same biological solution. A classic example are our camera eyes and those of the squid; astonishingly similar but they evolved independently. But let's not just concentrate on the squid eye, from molecules to social systems convergence is ubiquitous. Forget also the idea that in biology nearly anything is possible, that by and large it is a massive set of less than satisfactory compromises. In fact, paradoxically the sheer prevalence of convergence strongly indicates that the choices are far more limited, but when they do emerge the product is superb. Did you know eyes can detect single photons and our noses single molecules? Evolution has reached the limits of what is possible on planet Earth. In particular our doors of perception can only be extended by scientific instrument, enabling a panorama from the big bang to DNA.

Yet how the former led to the latter, how it was that complexity emerged and is sustained even in that near-miracle of a chemical factory we call the cell is still largely enigmatic. Self-organisation is certainly involved, but one of the puzzles of evolution is the sheer versatility of many molecules, being employed in a myriad of different capacities. Indeed it is now legitimate to talk of a logic to biology, not a term you will hear on the lips of many neo-Darwinians. Nevertheless, evolution is evidently following more fundamental rules. Scientific certainly, but ones that transcend Darwinism. What! Darwinism not a total explanation? Why should it be? It is after all only a mechanism, but if evolution is predictive, indeed possesses a logic, then evidently it is being governed by deeper principles. Come to think about it so are all sciences; why should Darwinism be any exception?

But there is more. How to explain mind? Darwin fumbled it. Could he trust his thoughts any more than those of a dog? Or worse, perhaps here was one point (along, as it happens, with the origin of life) that his apparently all-embracing theory ran into the buffers? In some ways the former possibility, the woof-woof hypothesis, is the more entertaining. After all, being a product of evolution gives no warrant at all that what we perceive as rationality, and indeed one that science and mathematics employ with almost dizzying success, has as its basis anything more than sheer whimsy. If, however, the universe is actually the product of a rational Mind and evolution is simply the search engine that in leading to sentience and consciousness allows us to discover the fundamental architecture of the universe - a point many mathematicians intuitively sense when they speak of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics - then things not only start to make much better sense, but they are also much more interesting. Farewell bleak nihilism; the cold assurances that all is meaningless. Of course, Darwin told us how to get there and by what mechanism, but neither why it is in the first place, nor how on earth we actually understand it.

If I got his message this morning right, he didn't outright say that evolution discloses that there is some sort of fundamental purpose in the organization of life in the universe, but he strongly suggested that there might well be (though evolution tells us nothing about what that purpose is, in particular). You can see why this upsets hard materialists: if there is any sort of design in nature, it implies the possibility of a designer. SCM's point seemed to be not that evolutionary biology proves the existence of a supreme intelligence behind the material world, but that the dogmatic refusal of many scientists even to consider the possibility closes our minds to the investigation of important scientific questions. I was reminded of Richard Lewontin's (in)famous remark that scientists must be committed a priori to a materialist explanation of the universe, and must exclude any data that contradict it. That is, quite frankly, an ideological, faith-based approach to science.

SCM said that when you get fundamentalists, whether secular or religious, involved, it becomes very hard to ask difficult questions and pose speculative explanations, because both sides have so much weighing on the answers. Materialism cannot answer the riddle of consciousness, SCM said, and he's convinced it will never be able to. So unless consciousness is entirely an illusion -- which is an insane perspective -- there must be some other explanation. Why is it wrong to ask what that might be, and see if science in some way can help us understand this mystery?

I was reminded in all of this of Denis Alexander's Monday lecture about the history of science and religion, and the ideological uses to which science has been put, especially in the past two centuries. Over and over, I've been reminded since I've been here -- in large part because I'm reading so much John Gray, who is scathing about the Enlightenment and its blinding prejudices -- about how it was the most progressive and "enlightened" minds of the early 20th century, including in the churches, who believed in eugenics. These people were part of an intellectual culture growing out of the Enlightenment who, as Gray tells it, thought they were throwing off the chains of Christianity, but who in fact took with them Christianity's utopianism, without its sense of original sin, which might have given them some humility. I hope to write about this later. The book to read is Gray's "Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia," which is discussed in this illuminating Times piece by Bryan Appleyard. This bit should give you an idea of what the unclassifiable skeptic Gray is like:

Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny. He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people's beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. "They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists."

The road from Fukuyama led him directly to a series of what to future generations will seem classic works. The best are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals - a coruscating statement of our inability to free ourselves from human nature - and his latest, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Gray was, in the later stage of this phase, driven by what seemed to him to be collective amnesia. "I had been puzzled by the intensity and systematic and methodical character of the violence of the 20th century, because that century was dominated not by religious belief, but by secular belief in progress or the capacity of human beings to create a better world. It also featured unprecedented levels of mass murder.

"But I was even more puzzled by how quickly the memory of the 20th century began to fade; that, with the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China - and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal - seemed to be completely forgotten. And the reason those terrors have gone into the memory hole is that they illuminate cracks and absurdities in the beliefs of the secular humanist faith in progress." The point is that what appeared to be secular projects were as founded upon belief as any religion. The lesson was that any human project could be used to justify slaughter: "Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life."

That 20th-century amnesia, Gray says, led to new, faith-based utopian cults, but this time the primary one, neoconservatism, was of the right rather than the left. He shows, in Black Mass, how many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons. And, most hilariously - though the comedy is very black indeed - he demonstrates the quite fantastic depths of neocon irrationality.