I am always sometimes looking for
more refined ways of saying these things. But I still believe that the validity
of an argument doesn’t necessarily have to do with it being presented perfectly
in the jargon of a specific group of people, but of being coherent, logically
ordained, and require no previous assumptions that people don’t somehow know to
be true.
1
When we talk about Evolution, our language can be kind of
tricky, so let’s define two things before we start: behaviour and adaptative
success.
What are we calling behaviour?
Basically everything. For instance, the cells behave in a certain way to for
the tissues, that behave in a certain way to form the organs, that behave in a
certain way to give the individuals a... behaviour. For the lack of a better
word.
Now, from unicellular beings to
fishes to reptiles, birds and mammals, a lot of new behaviours arose, obiously.
And what are we calling adaptative
success? A measure of how much a behaviour was successful, or more successful
than other behaviours, in helping an individual to endure over the Earth.
Basically, that improves the individual’s chances to survive and reproduce.
So, Natural Selection means that, as
the environment can’t support all the members of a growing population, the ones
with less adaptative success will die, and the ones with more adaptative
success will prosper.
So, I believe it is only natural
that we ask ourselves: why then, the unicellular beings didn’t just get better
and better in doing things in the old unicellular way of doing things? Where
did all those infinite new behaviours, that lead to our current diversity, come
from?
2
We are lead to think that, as the
Environment itself changed, the old ways a lot of times weren’t good enough
anymore. But that don’t asnwer the question: where did these new behaviours
came from, if natural selection can only act after they are there?
Of course, the changes must have
happenned smoothly. But there is still the mistery of how a system evolved in a
direction of being able to slowly start doing something of a totally different
nature. For instance, the wings of flying animals evolved from members whose
behaviour was to walk. But how natural selection lead them in that direction,
if flying is not a natural consequence of walking with more success? The
physichs involved are very different.
Let’s try to look at it closer. We
believe that some animals started presenting some features that helped them to
fall slower, then to glide a little, glide a lot, untill they were eventually
flying. But where did this falling slower came from? Not every animal can
suddenly start falling slower.
For the smallest seed of this new
behaviour to appear, there are necessary previous conditions.
For the evolution of any being to
even start to turn in the direction of a new behaviour, there is the necessity
of previous conditions that presented themselves in the context of a totally
different behaviour.
3
So, we must think that, as the
living beings evolved, sometimes, or better yet, countless times, conditions appeared
for the seed of a new behaviour to sprout. Like, some features were selected by
the environment for a reason A, and then after some point started being
selected by the reason B. A new form of adaptative success came out of nothing.
To become good at something new
without reason seems to be how all this diversity came to be. Is it a natural
consequence of complexity itself, like, complex systems sometimes will just
present new advantages, not related to the reasons why they got to their
current state?
Look at nature in all it’s small
details. All this diversity of animals, of all the parts on their systems,
happened because something that is good for something suddenly just happens to
be good for something else.
4
That is, a feature of a system that
so far evolved in a certain direction because, combined with a certain
characteristic of the environment, helps the individual to survive and
reproduce more, after a while unexpectedly combines with another characteristic
of the environment to help the individual even more.
I think one possible definition of
coincidence can be as follows: two things meeting with no reason. That is, two
things, not related so far, follow their own separate paths, carried by
different circumstances, and at some point they just perfetly match. Like the living
system features that somehow, at a certain point, just match with
characteristics of the environment after following a path that had no relation
with that characteristic so far.
The fact that scientists have names
for these coincidences, like “emergence” or “exaptation”, just mean they are
studying it, it doesn’t mean they know why it happens.
If we think, as the environments
change, and they sometimes change for the actions of the living beings, it’s
more likely that this kind of system callled "living being" would become obsolete, than to think that it could endure and prosper beautifully, relying on the chances that complex systems may have to, just
left on their own, present a new advantageous relation with some aspect of the
environment, a relation that didn’t exist in the past and is not logically
contained in the behaviours that allowed it to endure so far.
This would require a more than
special and misterious unknown property of the reality of the Universe itself, a
property that not only we can’t explain, but in fact we can’t conceive.
P.S: Just
to make it clear, my point here is not that it is impossible to conceive
complex systems coming to existence step by step. I believe they do, but my
point is that it would require big exaptation (when something has always been
selected by reason A, then it starts being selected by reason B) in every
single meaningful step. In fact, it makes exaptation, and not adaptation, the big law of
evolution, which takes us right back to that thing people always felt when
imagining a world with no mind: too much coincidence.
Ps of ps: i here therefore cancel all i wrote on physics. Geez, who really knows anyway. I think therefore i am.
