Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Life's Solutions

Bradford at Telic Thoughts points us to a provocative article in the Sydney Morning Herald on biologist Simon Conway Morris. Morris is an interesting thinker, a devout Christian and committed evolutionist whose book, Life's Solutions, makes the case that evolution is not random or blind but that it's guided by principles we do not yet understand that make the emergence of conscious intelligent beings who can understand the universe inevitable. Here's a sample:

In a view considered almost heretical by ultra-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins, Conway Morris suggests that evolution cannot explain everything in biology, that the idea of evolution as entirely random is flawed, and that convergent evolutionary processes had to produce intelligence - as they have, not only in humans but apes, crows and dolphins.

The usual mantra of evolutionists is randomness: mutations, catastrophes, virulent microbes, in which any particular outcome, including us, is a complete fluke. Not so, says Conway Morris.

"I ... suggest that evolutionary processes are endowed with a considerable degree of predictability, making humans inevitable. Sophisticated intelligence - where you can use imagination, think ahead, identify alternatives - has evolved independently a number of times, in the great apes, crows, and dolphins.

One of the reasons Conway Morris has proved controversial, perhaps, is that he is a Christian, a committed supernaturalist, though that plays no part in his biology. Another reason might be that he doesn't mind prodding the ardent atheists who have turned Darwinian natural selection into a virtual religion, finding in it the explanation for all sorts of human questions far beyond the development of species.

Conway Morris thinks that science and religion are more similar than most people realise, and that philosophical questions always accompany science.

[He] believes evolution follows a deeper structure, as do other sciences, such as physics. In quantum mechanics many things don't make sense, he says, but the suspicion is that when scientists understand what now baffles them there will be another level of understanding. "In biology, the constraints of evolution must point to a deeper level of arrangements." By this he does NOT mean God, but natural laws that transcend Darwinism. It is now legitimate to speak a logic to biology.

A particular mystery that eluded Darwin, and Darwinists ever since, he thinks, is consciousness, or mind. It is much more complicated than allowed by the "neuromythologists" (what philosopher Raymond Tallis calls those who say that mind is entirely reducible to physical processes in the brain).

"Attempts to provide a materialistic explanation haven't worked. If they had, the people who provided them would be in Stockholm getting their Nobel Prize."

We take self-aware matter (us) for granted, but in fact it's very peculiar, he says. One group, especially biologists, think consciousness is self-explanatory, emergent in some fashion; another, mainly philosophers, insist matter cannot explain minds. "Darwin's idea that the brain secretes mind as the liver secretes bile doesn't work. The roots of intelligence go much deeper than we realise, and go beyond animals. Slime moulds have something we can fairly call memory." Conway Morris pictures the brain as something like an antenna, embodied in a mind world.

In the Guardian, he suggested that if the universe is the product of a rational mind, and if evolution is the search engine that, in leading to consciousness, allows us to discover the fundamental architecture of the universe, then things not only make better sense but are also much more interesting.

What I remember taking from Conway Morris' book, which I read several years ago, is that he seems to endorse a kind of theistic evolution. This is the theory that God packed all of the biological potential for living things into the initial conditions of the Big Bang and that this potential unfolds according to laws established by the Creator to insure that what He wants to exist, will.

In other words, for Conway Morris, evolution is the means by which God produced the extraordinary diversity of living things. Perhaps he's correct, I don't know, I'm more inclined toward intelligent design myself, but I'm quite sure he's closer to the truth than are the materialists who hold that the marvels of living things are all just a grand coincidence produced by the blind accumulation of millions of highly improbable accidents.

RLC