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Creating the creators: if creation demands a visionary creator, then how does blind evolution manage to build such splendid new things as ourselves? - special issue: The Science of Creativity
Discover, Oct, 1996 by Stephen Jay Gould
PERHAPS DARWIN WAS FEELING A PRICK OF conscience for having torn away the mainstay of human smugness with his documentation of evolution - after all, we would never again be able to view ourselves as created rulers of a world made expressly for us. But for whatever reason, as he wrote the last paragraphs of his epochal Origin of Species, Darwin felt compelled to summarize the few bastions of traditional hope that evolution might buttress. Life's long continuity could at least inspire some oonfidence in an extended future; and the pathway from squishy invertebrate to transcendent human must mean that evolution implies progress. Darwin wrote: "Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection."
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This comforting view still defines our general cultural understanding of evolution and its implications. Two rarely questioned beliefs, however, stand at the center of this vernacular interpretation.
First that even though evolution has produced an enormously complex tree of branching lineages, life as a whole has moved from a world inhabited only by bacteria to a modem from now dominated by the paragon of neural advance, Homo sapiens. In this general sense, evolution is inherently and predictably progressive.
Second, that evolution, as Darwin taught us, works by a process called natural selection. This mechanism requires that survivors in the struggle for existence be better adapted to local environments. Thus, each step in an evolutionary sequence must feature aprecise and intricate fit of organism to environment. Natural selection tracks environmental change, as organisms remain intricately adapted while gaining in general complexity.
A kind of wonderful irony, both instructive and amusing, permeates this common understanding of evolution as a progressive sequence of creatures, each exquisitely well adapted to local environments. We believe that such an account of evolution makes our own appearance both sensible and predictable. Indeed, our preference for viewing evolution as progressive and strictly adaptational arose largely to validate our own presence as an unsurprising consequence of natures intrinsic order. And now, the irony@ to produce a creature with our structural and neurological complexity, evolution must be "creative" in the vernacular sense of this word-that is, evolution must be able to develop novel structures with previously unrealized functions. How else could a process that began with bacteria ever add the number of novelties required to evolve a human being (or any complex multicellular creature) Yet, if evolution truly worked simply by fashioning exquisitely adapted creatures in an ascending series, humans could never have originated at all.
Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction. In our world of radically and unpredictably changing environments, an evolutionary potential for creative response requires that organisms possess an opposite set of attributes usually devalued in our culture: sloppiness, broad potential, quirkiness, unpredictability, and, above all, massive redundancy. The key is flexibility, not admirable precision. Ironically, then, to make us at all, evolution must work by processes contrary to the prejudicial hopes that we invest in Darwins legacy to validate our traditional status as lords of all by right of residence atop life's pinnacle. Going even further, humans could arise only because evolution disproves what we have so long promulgated as our natural right and status. So choose your alternative: either evolution can work as a sop to our hopes, and we can't ever arise; or evolution cancels our hopes and permits creatures like us to originate. What choice do we have since we do, after all, exist,
I would argue that three basic principles define and permit the "creativity", of evolution in the vernacular sense noted above - the capacity to originate novel structures and functions. Ail three share the common property of emphasizing flexibility and latent potential,'rather than the admirably precise adaptation that serves as a paradigm for textbook illustrations of evolution - long giraffe necks to eat high leaves, showy peacock tails to win more female attention, complex mimicry to resemble another species, or a stick, or a leaf, or a piece of dung, all in order to fool predators.
1 Quirky Shifts and latent potential. Consider the paradox of the peacock: the magnificent showy tail wins the most precious of immediate Darwinian advantages for individual males-more sexual access to more females, and more genes passed to future generations. But what else can you do with such an encumbrance? Change of circumstance and environment is the only constancy in evolution. If organisms are locked into complex structures with elaborate and inflexible functions, how can they evolve to meet these inevitable changes? And if they can't evolve, they will die. Immediate success based on inflexible complexity therefore spells geologic doom.
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