Natural Religion 07
Chapter seven — The epic of evolution
The epic of evolution
“The epic of evolution is the sprawling interdisciplinary narrative of evolutionary events that brought our universe from its ultimate origin to its present state of astonishing diversity and organization. In the course of these epic events matter was distilled out of radiant energy, segregated into galaxies, collapsed into stars, fused into atoms, swirled into planets, spliced into molecules, captured into cells, mutated into species, comprised into ecosystems, provoked into thoughts, and cajoled into cultures.”
But the term “epic” shouldn’t be intended triumphantly — as if the universe were a relentless march towards ever higher stages of order and complexity.
As explained by the work of two notable physicists — Layzier (1990) and Chaisson (1999) — some local increase in order is possible since “in an expanding universe actual entropy […] increases less than the maximum possible entropy”. But overall, the “rate of expansion [is] outrunning the rate of equilibration involved at local scales”.
That is to say — as we’ve written before — that the universe is accellerating in its expansion. New observational data has revealed that the deceleration parameter (sum of all the gravitational forces holding the universe together), once believed to be slowing down the universal expansion to the point of eventually reversing it in a Big Crunch, is actually less than zero. The findings imply that the entropic drift (destructive tendency) of the universe is stronger than the order-creating potential emerging from its gravitational interactions.
If the universe is really accelerating towards a Big Freeze, star formation will be rarer and rarer, and along with it, the possibility of creating new order. Therefore — while it is true that, especially as human and living beings, we are the obvious embodiment of a local tendency towards increasing order and complexity — we must also realize that the universe as a whole is accelerating towards maximum entropy and that our efforts to preserve and thrive on the local order are, on a universal scale, most probably ephemeral.
Just as stars and galaxies, living beings and especially humans are dissipative structures — that is — open thermodynamic systems that exchange energy with their surroundings: life absorbs free energy from its environment (nutrients and sunlight) and returns it degraded as entropic waste (mostly heat). The term was coined by Ilya Prigogine (1955), who explored how these phenomena would arise spontaneously when a system is perturbed beyond a critical threshold:
”a new structure or organization […] is always the result of an instability. It originates in a fluctuation, i.e. in a fundamentally stochastic element.”
Prygogine showed that self-organizing dissipative structures can emerge in persistent far-from-equilibrium conditions essentially because the local increase in morphodynamic constraints is able to speed up the depletion of the energetic gradients which are driving the system away from equilibrium.
Therefore, self-organizing phenomena accelerate the destruction of whatever gradient is responsible for generating them. They are, in this respect, self-undermining processes, which can perdure only when those gradients are constantly replenished by some extrinsic source.
The similarities with life are truly striking, and this led to a widespread tendency of defining living organisms as nothing but dissipative processes exhibiting particular self-organizing features. Still today, many scientists are convinced that life is just another highly complex form of self-organization. Rod Swenson (1989) claimed that “evolution on planet Earth can be seen as an epistemic process by which the global system as a whole learns to degrade the cosmic gradient at the fastest possible rate given the constraints”, and Roderick Dewar (2003) echoed: “Maximum entropy production is an organizational principle that potentially unifies biological and physical processes”.
But, as we’ve seen before, life differs from regular morphodynamic phenomena because life does intentional work to maintain and reproduce the dynamic constraints which make it possible. While other dissipative structures are self-undermining — they tend to maximize the rate of entropy production and deplete the energetic gradients as fast as possible given the constraints — living systems are self-regenerating — since they actively reorganize their internal constraints to compensate for depleting the gradients necessary to their survival, and tend to evolve in forms which can increase the indirectness of the “dissipation-path length” of local energy flows in order to extract as much work as possible from the available gradients.
Prigogine thought this implied that living systems would tend toward minimal entropy production, and while the true story might be a bit more complicated than that , it’s certainly not the case that they tend toward maximal entropy production. It’s very easy to see why this couldn’t possibly be the case just by thinking about how natural selection works: a system that maximizes entropy production is one that is as inefficient as it can possibly be — that is — one that wastes as much energy as possible when undergoing any transformation. A biological organism that worked like that would be extremely handicapped from an evolutionary standpoint, as it would require much more energy (i.e. food) in order to just stay alive than an even slightly more efficient competitor. If the purpose of life is to increase entropy, then life is pretty bad at it. And yet — if we look at humanity’s current example — it’s easy to see why so many researchers are inclined to think so.
Chaisson for example has calculated that human civilization represents an energy density and complexity peak within the biosphere. Vitousek et al (1986) have measured that our species — which amounts to only 0.5% of the total Earth biomass — has now co-opted around a third of the net primary productivity of the biosphere on land, and is currently affecting about 40% of the net primary productivity of all photosynthetic processes on the planet.
The numbers are truly staggering, and have prompted some researchers to coin the term “Anthropocene” to describe the commencement of an epoch characterized by significant human impact upon the planetary ecosystem. Humans seem to be monopolizing the Earth’s energy budget, and have even managed to exploit those ancient reservoirs of energy which for millennia had been slowly accumulating underground in the form of fossil fuels. Today, human civilization constitutes a huge energy-dissipating megamachine that overshoots the renewable energetic budget of the planet by almost double.
Scientists now agree that humanity is almost single-handedly causing the sixth mass extinction event in the history of life, mostly due to the population explosion of the last hundred years and the parallel rise in consumption rates which are proving unsustainable for the ecological balance.
Since the dawn of civilization we caused the extinction of over 80% of all mammal species and half of all plants, with the situation rapidly deteriorating: in the last 40 years alone — a new WWF study reports — the planet lost a whopping 40% of its wildlife due to man-made exploitation and habitat degradation.
On a systemic level, the consequences can be even more dramatic. As we recklessly dissipate the Earth’s energetic heritage, we also produce enormous amounts of entropy in the form of heat, toxic waste and exhaust gases which damage the biosphere’s homeostatic mechanisms such as the water and the carbon cycle, and menace to trigger devastating climatic fluctuations.
But seen from the old anthropocentric perspective of a “universal tendency towards complexity”, human civilization appeared to be only fulfilling its own destiny. By pushing the boundaries of Earthlife and leading it to higher peaks of complexity, humanity was basically doing God’s work on Earth, with ‘God’ intended in the illuministic sense of Great Architect of the Universe.
The exploitation of the natural environment was seen almost as a necessity by the modern ideologues of unlimited progress, and any harm done to the other life forms was seen as a mere side accident on the road to more complexity.
Still today, while any reference to God or to a strict teleological causality is avoided, a number of scientists talk of this “universal tendency towards complexity” with religious overtones, and even claim that it could hold the potential to establish some kind of universal code on which all morality is based. In a recent study, evolutionary biologist and philosopher Kelly Smith declared:
“The universe’s basic structure seems to have a preference for complexity […] Based on the universe’s large-scale history — he argued — increasing complexity is a trend that is observed in different ways, like disordered states of energy producing molecules and atoms, which then combine to give birth to the planets and suns on which life has evolved.” He described the universe as a “complexity machine”, and concluded that this realization has a distinct moral flavor, since it implies that “the rationality that humans pride themselves in is no accident.”
So this brings us to a moral dilemma: if life is truly a manifestation of this universal tendency towards increasing order and complexity, then the more complexity the better it is for life. If life is seen as “an ordering phenomenon which reduces differentials” (Schneider and Sagan 2005), this basically goes to legitimate everything that human civilization is doing to the biosphere. Moral of the story? Too bad for the other species, since humanity might have the potential to increase the scope and complexity of life and thus add another brick to the Universe’s order construction regime. Translated in socioeconomic terms, the solution becomes to inflate away the debt with more growth — essentially the standard neoliberal doctrine.
Humans convinced themselves of being sent by God to bring order to the universe, and in that pursuit they attempted to dominate the natural world. As time went on, they became so disconnected from nature that they started seeing it as a passive object that they could dispose of at will. But when in the ancient religious language it was said that the world belongs to God, it meant is that the power of man over Nature has a limit that must be respected.
It was in this light, for example, that God gave the people of Israel a legislation which included a sabbath for the Earth, so that those who respected it would live in peace, while those who didn’t would get hungry and sick since they had compromised the fertility of the soil. According to the Bible, Israel was abandoned by God and left for seventy years in slavery in the land of Babylon, “until the nation of God had paid all its sabbaths” (2 Cr. 36).
The same sense of respect for the limit was already found in almost every tribal society on the planet, in the recurrent constellation of rituals which every member would learn to comply with from a certain age. Significant is the case study reported by Vittorio Lanternari (1988), in rural Ghana:
“When the community needs to prepare a new crop field by subtracting it from the forest, the local farmers perform a prayer and a libation ritual on the chosen spot, asking permission to the local forest spirits before cutting down the trees where they live, and imploring their forgiveness for forcing them to move”.
Behind this apparently naive behavior, lies a deep awareness of what Lantenari calls ‘social pronosticability’, the realization that any form of aggression to the natural environment introduces an element of uncertainty to the future of the social group: hence the necessity of self-limitation.
Today we lost the sense of the limit. By multiplying at an uncontrollable rate we became a ‘cancer to the planet’, as the Club of Rome had bluntly pointed out in the 70’s, just after the publication of the “Limits to Growth”. Modern civilization was incredibly successful at imposing its order on the natural environment, but as the order increased, so did — dramatically — the entropic disorder. When we talk about pollution we are in fact talking about ‘burnt out’ energy that is no more available for use within the system. Today, that “human civilization is speeding towards its collapse” is not just an apocalyptic slogan but a honest admission confirmed by the scientific data.
The arrow of time goes on simply because energy keeps passing from a state of availability to one of unavailability. Our reckless exploitation of the natural resources is therefore equivalent to an acceleration towards our end, and most probably to the end of life as we know it — Is this what we really want?
The evolutionary journey of life is not something to be taken for granted,since it’s strictly dependent on the common energetic heritage of our planet, and it’s going to end when this energy runs out. Our actions shape the future irreversibly, because for every energetic transformation there’s a cost that is permanently subtracted from the total energy stock. It follows that life’s possibilities after us are determined — to a large extent — to the use that we make today of the Earth’s non-renewable resources.
If we waste energy, we shorten the duration of life.
If we realize that, then what sense does it make to work for a company whose only aim is to make more money? What sense does it make to consume lots of unnecessary stuff just for the fun of it, as the ads obsessively suggest us to do? What sense does it make if “the economy is growing”, as economists and politicians keep boasting on TV?
What matters most: the universal order or life itself?
In the famous Akkadian Epic, Gilgamesh — after inadvertedly killing his wild brother Enkidu — sets out on a perilous journey to find the secret of eternal life, only to learn that “Life, that you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands”.
What we can learn from Gilgamesh is that life is not eternal and that life’s Epic of Evolution is really an insidious rope walking on the edge of the abyss. Our existential precariousness — the primordial fear of the void, the cursed stone that the builders rejected — is thus set to become the cornerstone of the new planetary community, that which can bind together every living being.
The good news is that there are no more jealous gods holding the secret of life away from us.
The secret is here, in front of us, as it always has been in all these years.
But for us to tap into the self-regenerative source of all life, we must first recognize the frailty of our common condition, since no authentic moral life is possible which doesn’t integrate in itself the prospect of failure.
This in not to say that humanity should restrict itself from evolving further or even from increasing complexity, when necessary: humanity is free to explore the universe, but to do so it must stay alive. Survival is the pre-condition for any further development, and humanity must consider the possibility of increasing in scope only if this first condition is granted. Looking at all the damage we’ve done pursuing the illuministic faith in unlimited progress, humanity must now learn to be more cautious and set its priorities straight.
If today Religious Naturalism is an idea whose time has come, it’s because we realize that our cosmology and our morality must again be harmonized. The current cognitive dissonance between what is and what matters can be healed only by a new tradition able to reintegrate the two spheres in a coherent narrative understandable by everyone. Instead of dividing reality in two separate compartments, we must find the link that unites them.
It is in this sense that the idea of “divine life” represents, in my opinion, the best concept available to bridge the gap between the objective and subjective realms, physics and metaphysics, matter and consciousness — an thus serve as the root metaphor, in Rue’s terms, “that can infuse the cosmos with value”.
To equalize God and life would only be a metaphor. Life is obviously not the entirety of the universe. But life is the part of the universe which matters to us. More precisely, life is the precondition for values and for teleological causality, that “soul or vital function” which Aristotle had called entelechy. Life is the door to the subjective realm, and hence to every metaphysics, ethics and politics. With life, an epistemology (knowledge about something, the first “observers”) emerges from the ontology (unconditional being or existence).
Life lies at the intersection between these two domains, and the epic of its teleodynamical emergence and evolution provides us with a scientifically valid explanation about its natural origins and ultimate purpose which is not materialistic and which doesn’t fall back to substance dualism (see Vitalism). The dualism is still there but becomes a property dualism integrated in a physical monism. In other words, 2 in 1 instead of 1 vs 1.
So then, what is life all about?
