Chapter 8. Evolutionary Epiphanies

I was becoming more fascinated with evolution and patterns of species relationships, but more annoyed with neo-Darwinian theory and the silly idea that natural selection was the driving force for it all. Jack and Cy commented that many take Darwin too seriously, that the Darwinian world is Newtonian and organisms are seen as "pushed and pulled" by the environment. Physicists and others, when writing about life, could see the inadequacies, but not a viable alternative. This, they suspected, was because the development of individuals, where evolution is expressed, was ignored and all of the focus was on populations and species. In their own field, physicists entertain various theories and have not chained themselves to 150-year-old dogma. Interestingly, some of Lamarck's ideas, now around 200 years old, are being re-examined even though most biologists fear to speak his name.

I was thrilled to discover Jeremy Campbell's Grammatical Man, a non-technical book about self-organization, information theory and complexity, and some of the people who first explored these ideas. I was most captivated by the ideas of chemist Ilya Prigogine who won a Nobel Prize for expanding our understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A system with little or no exchange of energy or matter will go to equilibrium, to a random state, he said, but a system far from equilibrium and open to the flow of energy has an entirely different behavior. Here, the Second Law is a source of order, of self-organization, in living and non-living systems alike. Campbell describes complex systems as having unexpected properties, and he cites linguist Noam Chomsky for pointing out that human language competence, an emergent property, arises uniquely at a certain level of biological complexity.

In the classical version of the Second Law, the molecules of air in a room drift at random, without pattern, expressing maximum entropy. But if the initial conditions change, if energy in the form of heat is added to the room, the molecules not only move more quickly, but they become organized, forming convection currents for as long as the energy source remains available. This is emergence - the appearance of structure that can't be described in terms of the molecules that make it up. This is a common phenomenon, says Prigogine, under appropriate conditions.

Given only the classical version of the Second Law, self-organization seems to defy it. Self-organized systems are orderly, but they are always accompanied by something unpredictable and surprising. Campbell's example is language - given rules of grammar and a limited number of words, infinite meaning can be generated. Without constraining rules, language is gibberish, expressing maximum entropy. Without novelty, language is a predictable repetition, containing no information. This isn't a contradiction, but yin and yang, the two faces of the same law of nature.

Chomsky has a great point about language competence, and maybe it was a synapomorphy when there were more species of Homo around. It's not surprising that some of our primate cousins have a fair level of ability communicating in sign language. Causal explanations that invoke the Second Law can be described within the framework of the Covering Law Model, but the initial conditions for living systems differ from those of non-life. Living systems are able to capture their own energy, and they have an intrinsic memory of their own development as well as their evolutionary history. This allows new forms to be generated from older forms.

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