De mens als noodzakelijke uitkomst van de evolutie

Als we Stephen J. Gould en Richard Dawkins moeten geloven, is de evolutie bepaald door stom toeval. Met andere woorden: iedere keer dat je de band terugspoelt en op play drukt, zal de wereld er anders uit zien.

In Hoe het leven de dingen regelt trekt bioloog Simon Conway Morris ten strijde tegen deze visie. Speel de band nog eens af, zegt hij, en je ziet grofweg dezelfde patronen ontstaan. Eigenschappen als intelligentie, het vermogen complexe samenlevingen te vormen en werktuigen te vervaardigen, cultuur - ze liggen allemaal besloten in de wetten van de natuur.

Hoe het leven de dingen regelt is een belangrijk boek. In een helder, dwingend betoog zoekt en vindt Conway Morris overtuigende bewijzen voor een stelling die ons denken over onze plaats in het universum ingrijpend zal veranderen.

Simon Conway Morris is professor evolutionaire paleobiologie in Cambridge. In 1990 werd hij, als een van de jongsten ooit, gekozen tot Fellow van de Royal Society, de oudste en meest prestigieuze Academie in de westelijke wereld. Conway Morris heeft veldwerk gedaan in China, Mongolië, Australië en Groenland.
Recensie(s)

De schrijver, een paleontoloog van naam, geeft zijn zeer persoonlijke mening over het evolutieproces. In zijn visie, die tegenover die van evolutiebiologen als Gould en Dawkins staat, zou elke keer als de evolutie weer vanaf het begin zou optreden ongeveer dezelfde uitkomst optreden als nu wordt aangetroffen. Inclusief dus het verschijnen van een - mensachtig - organisme met bewustzijn. Argumenten hiervoor ontleent de schrijver vooral aan het evolutionaire verschijnsel convergentie (de evolutie van vergelijkbare eigenschappen in verschillende afstammingslijnen, maar door verschillende mechanismen). Een origineel, maar complex boek. Voorzien van notenapparaat (inclusief referenties) en register. Dit boek is voor (evolutie)biologen interessant gezien de controversiele benadering van het verloop van de evolutie. Voor een geinteresseerde leek, zelfs met redelijke kennis van de biologie, is het echter erg specialistisch. Bovendien is de benadering nogal wijdlopig en is de argumentatie zeer uitgebreid (bijvoorbeeld meer dan honderd pagina's noten!).

Conway Morris' book, by his own description, is a sandwich. The meat of the book, which is very impressive, explores convergence in evolution. His conclusion is one that I admit that I was predisposed to favor, that the results of evolution are dependent on the requirements of the niche that the life form moves into, not random, unrepeatable contingencies. As I learned in my junior high school science class, and ever since, variations may be random, but natural selection isn't. "Evolution" is sometimes used a little too broadly in the sense of a history of life. A meteor strike may be a contingency that affects the situation that living beings have to deal with, but it is not, itself, a part of evolution in a strict sense. Rather, evolution is the process by which survivors will adapt to changed circumstances, or go extinct. Conway Morris makes an impressive argument that the results will be similar for similar needs and often, that there are no strikingly different alternatives. I predict that this will lead to a great deal of squabbling over how alike "alike" is. Conway Morris makes it clear that while he expects that our niche would be filled by another culture-bearing, language using, large-brained species with similar fine motor skills, he isn't necessarily requiring a primate. He also accepts that there may be bottlenecks, such as getting life started in the first place, but he is arguing that given the chance to proceed, evolution will always create similar results. I am convinced, and humbled by the breadth of his knowledge and research. Stephen J. Gould comes in for a lot of well-deserved criticism, and his fans will not be happy.

Alas, to continue the sandwich metaphor, one piece of the bread is a bit stale and the other downright moldy. The beginning chapters deal with the difficulties and probabilities of creating life in the first place. These chapters are mostly quite interesting - Conway Morris feels that the getting life to start developing may be extremely difficult under any circumstances and that present explanations are inadequate. My cavil with him in these chapters is that he goes on to declare that life is unlikely anywhere else. I have little patience with people who declare that almost certainly there is/is-not life elsewhere in the universe. Talk about hypothesizing in advance of your data! I am all for throwing around ideas, some of the most exhilarating books are those in which the author admits that it is impossible to reach firm conclusions, but still explores possibilities. Go ahead and guess: my guess is that somewhere else there is life, just because it's a big universe and it strikes me as unlikely that anything is truly unique. But that's just my guess, it doesn't make it to the dignity of scientific hypothesis. To reach a definite conclusion on the likelihood of a poorly understood process in scantily observed situations is nonsense.

The moldy slice is Conway Morris' "theology of evolution". I'm not actually sure what this is; in stark contrast to his review of convergence, he puts all of his energies into ill-supported attacks on his opponents, not developing his own ideas. Atheists (of which I am one) and agnostics can't win for losing - if they are cheerful, they are arrogant and amoral, if they are depressed, they "prove" the emptiness of their world view. Conway Morris' arguments seem to boil down to the assumptions that it is "obvious" that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that atheists and agnostics are worse people than believers. Since the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in a god, it is a little hard to understand why we have such a high murder rate in that case, but Conway Morris isn't interested in examining facts. I would not think it would need repeating that people who are pious and behave irreproachably within their own society have a long track record of barbarism towards outsiders, often murdering and pillaging with the serene mind that comes from confidence that one is acting with the blessing of God. Being a believer in freedom of speech and religion, I don't fault Conway Morris or Richard Dawkins for being open about their views. I seriously doubt that science is capable of proving or disproving deity(s), but I am confident that it hasn't done either at this point; vicious personal attacks from either side under the guise of science are shameful. I don't think that Conway Morris does his notions any favor in this angry, poorly-argued section. If he really feels that they are important, then I think he should do them justice of developing them with the care that he developed his ideas on convergence. ( )

Simon Conway Morris's book Life's Solution is fascinating. As an atheistic-leaning agnostic I'd gone along with Dawkins that religion was incompatible with evolution. Conway Morris (a British Cambridge Professor of Evolutionary Biology) gives a brilliant Darwinian account which is still compatible with "purpose". He demonstrates how certain phenomena (eg eyes) have evolved separately again and again; and that human-like intelligence was almost bound to evolve. He didn't entirely persuade me but I now recognise that a Darwinian/Christian position is intellectually credible.

Both of Morris's main themes -- that evolution of intelligent humanoids was always a likelihood on Earth and that conditions allowing the evolution of intelligence may well not exist anywhere else in the universe -- seem far-fetched to me. But the main reason I decided *not* to read the book is that I noticed he is well-disposed toward theology, knocks Richard Dawkins (and presumably kindred top thinkers like Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker), and throws around antirationalist sneer words like ultra-darwinism, reductionism, and scientism. So nuts to Morris and his book.