The late Stephen Jay Gould was best known for his brilliant essays, "This view of life," that he published monthly in the journal Natural History. He also wrote many books and I think the most interesting is that on the Burgess Shale, those long-extinct, soft-bodied organisms whose fossils can be found in the Canadian Rockies. However, Wonderful Life -- the title obviously taken from that sentimental drivel we are forced to watch every Christmas -- is, thank goodness, a lot more than its namesake and indeed a lot more than just a discussion of marine invertebrates that faded out over five hundred million years ago. 

For a start, it is a pastiche of a baseball book. The average work in this genre tells of some uncouth youth in a godforsaken place like Iowa, straight off the farm where he practiced killing steers from across the field with his 100 mph plus fastball, who is spotted by a coach, taken to the Big Apple, made to wash and take the straw out of his mouth, and in his first full season with the Yankees wins the Cy Young award. This View of Life tells of Simon Conway Morris, plucked from a second-rate university in the outer wilds of England (actually, the institution I too attended!), taken to Cambridge where, his talent recognized, he put together fragments of long-lost organisms and in the end won fellowship in the world's most prestigious scientific group, the Royal Society of London. 

For a second, Gould is using the book as a vehicle for telling us his philosophy of history. By the late 1980s, when the book was published, Gould was in full flight against the belief that the course of evolution is progressive -- monad to man, worm to woman, blob to Briton. He wanted to argue that it is all random, going nowhere slowly. "Since dinosaurs were not moving toward markedly larger brains, and since such a prospect may lie outside the capabilities of reptilian design ... we must assume that consciousness would not have evolved on our planet if a cosmic catastrophe had not claimed the dinosaurs as victims. In an entirely literal sense, we owe our existence, as large and reasoning mammals, to our lucky stars." Gould is referring to the comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago and that wiped out the dinos and made possible the Age of Mammals.

Not everyone was enthused by this philosophy. Richard Dawkins, the only man capable of matching Gould's brilliance in the writing about science for the general public, argued that Gould was way too pessimistic. Seizing on a notion the roots of which are in the writings of Charles Darwin himself, Dawkins argued that there are "arms races" between organisms, with lines competing against each other, and thereby getting better. The antelope runs faster and so the lion has to run faster. Finally, as in human arms races, the best adaptations -- weapons of offence or defence -- involve intelligence and so ultimately our species Homo sapiens evolved. We won because we have the biggest on-board computers. We are the best!

Simon Conway Morris himself also chipped in. He argued that there exists a kind of hierarchy of niches -- water, earth, air, culture -- and that organisms strive to move up into them (not because of mystical forces but because of the struggle for existence). Finally consciousness emerged, as it was bound to.

          "If brains can get big independently and provide a neural machine capable of handling a highly complex environment, then perhaps there are other parallels, other convergences that drive some groups towards complexity. Could the story of sensory perception be one clue that, given time, evolution will inevitably lead not only to the emergence of such properties as intelligence, but also to other complexities, such as, say, agriculture and culture, that we tend to regard as the prerogative of the human? We may be unique, but paradoxically those properties that define our uniqueness can still be inherent in the evolutionary process. In other words, if we humans had not evolved then something more-or-less identical would have emerged sooner or later."

In response, Gould gave way a little -- although as was the nature of the man (and I mean no real criticism) he presented it more as a clarification than a retreat. He agreed that evolution's history does seem directional and that we go from the simple to the complex, but this he told us was all a matter of chance. Life is like a drunkard on a sidewalk. He can never walk through the wall on the one side. Sooner or later he will fall into the gutter on the other side. Life can never get more simple than very simple, but by chance it can get more complex. Gould did not think it was likely that intelligent life would have evolved on this earth -- but somewhere in the vast universe? Well, who knows!

I see three philosophies here and in a curious way they match the three possibilities I was talking about in my post ("Counterfactuals") last week when I was talking about chance and effort in my own life. There you will remember I said that, had I become a doctor rather than a philosopher, I could still (thanks to my nature) see myself ending up more or less where I am now. This seems to me to be Conway Morris's philosophy of history. We might have evolved bright green or with six fingers, but we would be essentially as we are now. 

Then had I become a tax inspector basically I was saying that I would not have been as fulfilled as I am now. I might have been as happy, but that is another matter. (In the words of John Stuart Mill:  "Better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.") This it seems to me is the direction in which Dawkins's philosophy points. Arms races might lead to humans, but we might never have got there.  The vagaries of nature like comets might prevent that, or indeed selection itself might lead us away.  Arms races don't necessarily lead to high technology and success -- if they did, we would have caught Osama Bin Laden long ago. In the immortal words of the paleontologist Jack Sepkoski: "Intelligence isn't everything. I see being as dumb as shit in the middle of the herd as being a pretty good adaptation for survival." 

Finally, what if I had been a high-level civil servant? Something very different from being a philosopher and a writer, but in its way quite possibly fully satisfying. The important thing, after all, is to change the world, not to understand it. This, it seems to me, corresponds to Gould's philosophy of history. Suppose there is a tendency to complexity. I don't see that complexity necessarily leads to consciousness -- to sentience in the sense of awareness that we have. Do I mean that we would be complex dumb brutes? Possibly but not necessarily. Philosophers and psychologists and cognitive scientists have made massive strides in understanding the brain and the mind, but basically they have not scratched the big issue -- what is mind and its relationship to body? Intuitively we are all Cartesian dualists, but that must be false. I am with the so-called "new mysterians" who think that the body-mind problem may never be solved because we don't have the intellectual apparatus to solve it. 

I think it at least possible that there might be a third or fourth or fifth way of moving from brute matter to something else. I don't necessarily mean another form of consciousness -- in fact, part of my position is that I don't know what I could mean -- but it might be some other way of going beyond the material to some kind of awareness, although not our kind. It could work just fine and be promoted by selection, but not in a way that we know. (Why has it not happened here? Well, I would think that because our consciousness may prevent all other paths, or perhaps it would or will given enough time and our not spoiling everything,)

I am getting a bit too metaphysical even for myself. If my comments about NYC so upset my readers, gosh knows what this will do. But I will point out that we do seem to have the kind of parallel so beloved of 19th-century German evolutionists. They argued that ontogeny, the life of the individual, recapitulated phylogeny, the history of the group. I too am saying that possibly the life of the individual reflects the history of the group. Of course, I myself am not saying that one of the philosophies of histories is right. But I am saying that the same interplay between chance and design might come both at the micro and at the macro levels. And that I do find interesting.