The Forbidden Universe (41 page)

Despite the bravado and bluster of atheist proselytizers, the very least that can be said is that evolutionary theory is by no means the final proof of their dogma. But there are also certain biological phenomena that apparently provide real evidence for a creative force at work. And this takes modern science ever closer to the core belief and central message of the Hermetica: that every human being is potentially a god, that the universe is alive and that we are all part of its divine long-term plan and destiny.

It seems self-evident when we look at life on Earth and the evolutionary history that science has reconstructed, that life developed from the simple to the complex: from bacteria, through multi-celled micro-organisms, flatworms and insects to mammals, specifically humans. The impression is one of irrepressible progress, creatures becoming gradually more complicated and more able to interact with and modify their environment, besides becoming increasingly intelligent. From this perspective, the human being is the pinnacle of evolution on Earth, the ‘most wonderful’ result of natural selection to date, as Dobzhansky commented. Karl Popper noted that the ostensibly accidental mutations that drive evolution also uncannily push a species forward – never a step back. Species seem to change by ‘sequences of evolutionary changes in the same “direction”’.
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Ultra-Darwinists such as Dawkins reject this evolutionary directionality as simple ‘species-ism’. We humans think we’re the best evolution has produced because we would, wouldn’t we, being us. We imagine evolution has progressively produced more impressive species until it made us, its best work to date. But Dawkins argues this attitude is a mistake, if a forgivable one. Objectively, a bacterium or jellyfish is just as ‘perfect’ a piece of evolutionary design as Professor Dawkins himself (if far more silent). To him, the whole notion of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms of life extrapolates too much from simple classifications. And human-like intelligence is by no means an inevitability; the planet got by without it for long enough, after all.

The most that hard-line evolutionists will admit is that natural selection moves a species towards ever more suitable adaptation to its specific environment, but that’s not the same as achieving progress for life on Earth in general. Some evolutionists – Dobzhansky being the prime example – do accept the idea of directionality. To them there is no doubt that evolution does tend to produce increasingly complex and more self-aware creatures. Human beings
are
the pinnacle of evolution (so far), although undeniably there is still considerable room for improvement.

Another scientific champion of directionality who believes that it reveals that there are evolutionary rules and principles yet to be recognized, is Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeontology at Cambridge University’s Department of Earth Science, and Fellow of the Royal Society. Despite being a committed Anglican, Conway Morris is equally critical of intelligent design and ‘ultra-Darwinists’ such as Dawkins, who he describes as
‘arguably England’s most pious atheist’,
²
and being ‘angry with God’.
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As for his own position, Conway Morris sums it up in these words:

Conway Morris’ special area of interest, convergent
evolution
– ‘the recurrent tendency of a biological organization to arrive at the same “solution” to a particular “need”’
⁵
– has led him to the conclusion that it happens far more than neo-Darwinian theory dictates.

Conventional evolutionists believe that if we could restart life on Earth, because the evolutionary paths it took were shaped by random factors, the outcome would be very different. In this scenario animals and plants that are nothing like those we are familiar with would populate the world. Human-like creatures may not exist, since nothing would be inevitable. Conway Morris disagrees, arguing that convergent evolution shows that the number of
evolutionary
pathways is limited and that therefore outcomes are largely predetermined. As he said in a 2007 lecture:

There are vast numbers of ‘macro’ examples of convergent evolution, such as the many in Australia discussed earlier,
where the similarity between two species is immediately apparent from their appearance. However, Conway Morris demonstrates that many more similarities are not so obvious, since they relate to individual features, the anatomy and workings of a particular organ, say, or even an internal biochemical process. Backed up by a landslide of examples, it is clear that convergent evolution is, if anything, the norm. Evolution plays the same themes over and over again.

Conway Morris takes the prime example of two creatures that are to all intents and purposes as different as two creatures could be: the human being and the octopus (or more generally, mammals and cephalopods, which also include squid and cuttlefish). He observes the two species are so different that octopuses were frequently used in early science fiction – such as H.G. Wells’s
The War of the Worlds
– as the model for aliens. Humans and octopuses are the product of two entirely different evolutionary lineages. One a vertebrate, the other an invertebrate, they reflect one of the most fundamental and ancient branchings of the evolutionary tree. It is a very, very long time since we shared a common ancestor; cephalopods are, in fact, a class of mollusc, closely related to mussels and slugs. As we live in an entirely different environment and have gone through completely separate adaptations, it is hardly surprising we should look so different from octopuses. First impressions do seem to confirm conventional wisdom: the further back in time two species shared a common ancestor, the more different they will be now.

The underlying reality is very different. There is startlingly more convergence than one might think. Most obviously, cephalopods have evolved eyes that work, like those of mammals, on the camera principle, with precisely analogous structures performing the same functions. But there are other, equally astonishing similarities. The blood
and circulatory system – especially the aorta – of cephalopods is very much the same as that belonging to mammals, and nothing like that of other molluscs. The most intelligent of the invertebrates, the octopus, has evolved a completely different type of brain from mammals’, but parts of it are precisely analogous to the mammalian
hippocampus
and cerebellum. Even the male octopus’ sex organ, although positioned at the tip of a tentacle, is structurally very like the mammalian penis, and bears no comparison with other molluscs’. So despite the overall differences in anatomy and its very separate evolutionary path, the octopus is far more ‘mammalian’ than we imagine.

There are many other examples which demonstrate that convergence is too widespread to be pure chance. The camera eye evolved no fewer than seven times, quite
independently
. The compound eye of insects has evolved at least four times. Trichromatic colour vision has evolved separately many times, as is the case with New World monkeys and the Australian marsupial honey possums.

That’s the big stuff. Convergent evolution also happens to molecules. The biochemical processes that sustain organisms are often complex, and yet distantly-related species have independently developed exactly the same systems. One of the most striking examples involves photosynthesis in plants, which uses sunlight to transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. It’s not just important for plants, of course: as Conway Morris points out,
photosynthesis
literally underpins the whole biosphere. Most plants use a chemical process known as C
₃
photosynthesis, but many use an alternative, the much more complex C
₄
. This is an adaptation to an environmental change: over the last ten million years or so there has been a dramatic drop in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, making life difficult for many plants. But not all the plant species that use C
₄
photosynthesis have, as we might expect, evolved from the
first one to hit on it. Despite its complexity, this system has evolved quite independently
at least 31 times
.
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Conway Morris’
Life’s Solution
(2003) is packed with the most extraordinary examples of convergent evolution among animals, insects, plants and bacteria. He argues that the unexpected prevalence of convergence shows that, rather than evolution picking paths from a limitless number of possibilities, it continually finds and follows the same well-worn grooves. To him the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the phenomenon reveals the existence of some factor that neo-Darwinism has yet to recognize. Conway Morris concludes by saying: ‘It seems to me that evolution very much has directionalities, and in that sense it has destinations.’
⁸

Restricted options imply that certain biological phenomena will
inevitably
evolve. Re-running the history of life on Earth would end up with creatures and plants pretty similar to modern ones. Conway Morris argues one of the outcomes is not only intelligence but that ‘the constraints of evolution and ubiquity of convergence make the emergence of something like ourselves a near-inevitability’.
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According to the conventional view, humanity is just an insignificant accident, lucky to be here. But Conway Morris makes humans the focus of the universe, the very reason it exists. If evolution was always a journey towards humankind, then we are very special indeed.

Further evidence that the evolutionary trajectory is aiming for creatures like ourselves comes from recent discoveries about intelligence and human-like behaviour throughout the animal kingdom. These revelations are finally overcoming humanity’s belief that our species is set apart from the rest of nature, the only creature able to properly think and feel. Now we know that intelligence – the ability
to solve problems and react creatively to changing circumstances – is widespread in nature. We may or may not be alone in the universe, but we are not alone on our home planet.

Swiss anthropologist Jeremy Narby’s book
Intelligence in Natur
e
(2005) relates how intelligent, problem-solving behaviour is not just found in higher animals such as primates and birds, but even among butterflies and such lowly life forms as slime moulds, which can negotiate mazes to find food. Recognizable intelligence is a feature of even the most primitive organisms. Amoebae engage in
coordinated
, cooperative behaviour to hunt their prey in packs. In 2007 James A. Shapiro, a bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago, wrote a landmark paper entitled ‘Bacteria are Small but not Stupid’, a plea for the recognition that bacteria are sentient beings because they ‘continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus’.
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Other research, including that of Jonathan Balcombe, as set out in his book
Second Nature
(2010), has shown that not just intelligence, but other characteristics we usually think of as exclusively human, such as awareness of death, a sense of grief, even a sense of fun, are an intrinsic part of animal lives. Although elephants’ capacity to grieve over the death of a herd member is well known, recently they have been recorded as using ritual – such as passing around sticks – at the death of a loved one. Chimpanzees in a zoo, meanwhile, have been observed to stand silently in a circle and cry as a deceased friend was carried past. As Balcombe repeatedly emphasizes, animals are not just living,
they have lives
. And the complex and often touching nature of their lives reveals their innate intelligence and an awareness of more than simply the mundane and the present.

Many evolutionary biologists, such as Ernst Mayr, believe
that while life might be common in the universe,
intelligent
life is so improbable it is virtually exclusive to Earth. Others, such as Christian de Duve take issue:

Simon Conway Morris is of the same mind. In 2007 he gave the annual Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh – the series was instigated in 1887 by Lord Gifford to explore the theological implications of scientific advances – under the banner title of ‘Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation’. The second of the six lectures was tellingly subtitled ‘The Inevitable Evolution of Intelligence’, while in another he declared the emergence of life, and of intelligence and of intelligent beings ‘really is set into the entire fabric of the cosmos’.
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