Let me start with this delicious quote from the foreword of a book by Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man, (published in 1982 by Touchstone Books). The book was about the history of information theory. There's a lot more to this story than information, but it's a great place to start…
“The proper metaphor for the life process may not be a pair of rolling dice or a spinning roulette wheel, but the sentences of a language, conveying information that is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. These sentences are generated by rules which make much out of little, producing a boundless wealth of meaning from a finite store of words; they enable language to be familiar yet surprising, constrained yet unpredictable within its constraints…The world need not regress toward the simple, the uniform and the banal, but may advance in the direction of richer and more complex structures, physical and mental. Life, like language, remains ‘grammatical.’ The classical view of entropy implied that structure is the exception and confusion the rule. The theory of information suggests instead that order is entirely natural: grammatical man inhabits a grammatical universe.”
If you find this quote intriguing, read on! But be warned: I like my theories open-ended (unpredictable), but my science hard-nosed (constrained). My colleagues (most especially Jack Maze) and I have spent the last few decades approaching these ideas empirically because science demands evidence and I have little patience with anything too woo-woo.
I'm Kali Robson, a botanist by training, with a huge interest in evolutionary theory. The options seem so limited...my only choice is between Natural Selection or "intelligent design?" That's too much like a choice between magic and miracles. Neither is satisfying to a skeptic and I can't suspend my disbelief well enough to accept either. But there are other options out there - pieces of a better causal explanation for biological organization and change. I want to write about alternative ideas about evolution, about science and the structure of theories. Considering there's no job market for "heretics" like me, I bought a new domain (Jan 2005) and started a web site where I can add chapters over time... maybe start some good discussion...we'll see...
Friends have been offering some very helpful edits and I'd like to acknowledge them. Alphabetically, they so far include Ruth Deery, Cy Finnegan, Jack Maze and Katalina Severin. Sometimes I quote them directly and I certainly thank them for taking the time to read the first draft and offer suggestions.
Send an e-mail if you're so inclined.
Chapter 1. One Unavoidable Assumption
Chapter 3. The Demon of Determinism
Chapter 5. Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Homology and Analogy
Chapter 6. Evolution without Darwin?
Chapter 7. Emergence and Morphogenesis
Chapter 8. Criticisms from the (Real) Cladists
Chapter 9. Pattern from Confusion: The Second Law
And here are some links worth visiting:
Stan Salthe's web site Read a detailed critique of neo-Darwinian theory.
Mishtu Banerjee's interactive web site space You can even play with datasets on this site, if you like.
This is a story about science and evolutionary ideas, about ways of looking at the world that provide more accurate descriptions than some classical views. Science works within a set of rules making a theory more than mere opinion. Some religious views fail to acknowledge the rules of science and the structure of theories, so the views of “creationism” and “intelligent design” are simply opinions. Based on a vast store of undeniable evidence, evolution certainly happens, but the traditional theory of evolution based on competition, fitness, selection and genetics fails to address the events it is supposed to explain – organisms, species and divergence. We are very far from developing more than a rudimentary understanding of biological systems and the classical theory isn’t helping; it’s more of a distraction. How do we get from genes and other molecules to self-organized entities? How do we get species and how does speciation work? We don’t know. There is no theory of morphogenesis, the self-generation of form. No version of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection will get us to a theory of morphogenesis. It’s a logical impossibility that natural selection, a leftover idea from the Industrial Revolution, gussied up with genetics though it may be, could explain any of the main features of biology or evolution. Sure, there’s competition and selection in any ecosystem, but these are superficial forces – before they can act there must first be diverse and interconnected life forms. Natural selection is a variation decreasing force and it is, in the great scheme of things, relatively trivial.
Our human complexity makes us able to reason, to try to follow rational paths of thought, to eliminate certain possibilities as either incorrect or as lacking logical or coherent connections to a particular question about our world. So, why have we followed the neo-Darwinian Theory of Natural Selection for all these years? “Maximizing fitness” – it’s all about pushing all the “competition” out of the way, eating all of the food and getting your two bits into the “gene pool.” Maybe this explains much of corporate behavior, but it explains almost nothing of interest about biology or evolution (except that it gives a pretty good feel for what goes on in highly disturbed, damaged ecosystems). Adaptation is an important phenomenon, perhaps not so much in the Darwinian “adapt or die” sense, but in the rather more Lamarckian “integrate yourself into your surroundings” sense.
A fair bit of evidence suggests that the universe is not winding down to a death-like state of equilibrium, as we thought not too long ago. On the contrary, some evidence points to a universe that is increasing in organization and also in complexity and diversity. For many years we have held to the classical view of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which suggests that the universe is winding down, moving towards equilibrium and slowly falling apart. In 1977 a guy named Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pointing out that this very same Second Law can cause organization to occur spontaneously in any system with energy flowing through it – convection currents in warm water, bacteria and humans – all come from this same regularity or law of nature (except that living things have a memory and can add to themselves). Distant evidence, for example images from the Hubble telescope, suggests aspects of the universe such as galaxies become more organized with age. A few people (including me – my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation were both on this subject) jumped on the idea of the expanded Second Law and tried to run with it, but met with very strong resistance. I’m not sure why – I expected a lot more enthusiasm and curiosity that didn’t materialize. Some dropped the whole thing, but I never could…
Certainly, the evidence from life on Earth tells us that increasing organization and complexity are the trends. We started with one-celled bacterial life forms and a few billion years later we find all sorts of multicellular life. We find a living, interacting nature that is whimsical with variation and so rich with diversity that we have only catalogued a bit of it. We find a zillion single-celled life forms and also big, wonderful creatures – oak trees, elephants and grizzly bears. Many species are stunningly complex beyond their physical organ systems and physiology – they have awareness, problem-solving capabilities, humor and affection. We find Homo sapiens, a species that is no more physically complex than many of its fellow life forms, with emergent properties far beyond the big mammal compliment of muscle, bone and DNA. Humans have language, economies, art in many forms, the ability to make intricate tools, and a fearsome capacity for destroying everything around them. Is this magic? Is this miraculous? Maybe, but those are neither satisfying nor scientific explanations. This web site, the beginnings of a book, explores other possibilities and the contributions of various people to an alternative theory of evolution and morphogenesis. No single person has all of the ideas, but several people have some critically important pieces. I’d like to try to put them all together because it’s just too interesting to resist.
Introduction