Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears by Mary Midgley

Author:Mary Midgley [Midgley, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134470150
Google: 3MgIFEEoy78C
Amazon: B0B7CS16RR
Barnesnoble: B0B7CS16RR
Goodreads: 17490077
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

This again is melodrama. A casino is a human institution, devised to serve specific human motives. ‘Chance’ in a casino context means the deliberate randomizing of a small section of human affairs as a special way of redistributing income. Gambling language is indeed often used for probability calculations because gamblers have been so interested in them, and it can be quite harmless there. But this does not license Monod to import the special motivations which produce gambling, and conclude that the universe is really just a vast casino.

The idea of gambling cannot be used to convey meaninglessness. It is an idea packed with meaning. The casino image is every bit as anthropomorphic as the familiar argument from design. God reappears as a sinister croupier, a president of the immortals deliberately refusing to organize things because it amuses him more to let the wheel spin and generate farces. Biology, too, is strangely distorted here. The biosphere certainly was pregnant with us, among its other children, and the universe with life. It is quite anti-scientific to suppose that, in the development of life, sudden vast leaps like winning a million could take place.

‘Immanence’ is of course a vague term, but some degree of suitability between effects and causes is a necessary presupposition of all organized thinking, not only of the sciences. ‘Chance’ in the sense in which it can be credited with contributing to either life or the human race simply means ‘relatively remote causes’. Ignorance of causes is the only proper sense for the term to bear in biology, and in most other scientific contexts. In particle physics it may indeed now have the stronger meaning of actual indeterminacy. But in no science can it mean that slightly sinister and underhand deity worshipped by gamblers, Fortune on her wheel, whose presence is needed if we are to grow dramatic and talk of farce. And it cannot show us as strangers, in the way in which the gambler is a stranger to his fortune.

Two things make the situation of the Monte Carlo winner ‘strange and unreal’. His million is unearned, and it comes to him in one enormous, sudden dollop. (Even an earned million could be disturbing if it appeared unexpectedly all at once like this.) Neither of these things is true of human life. The original human evolutionary niche was gradually earned in exactly the same way as other evolutionary niches – by ages of slow, patient adaptation, which fitted our ancestors to occupy it and ensured that it had plenty of meaning for them. (Our later raids on the evolutionary niches of others are of course a different matter, but then that is not what Monod is talking about.)

Of course human beings did not earn their niche in the wild sense of entirely inventing it by their own power. No organism needs or expects to do that. The environment came to them from outside as a set of uncovenanted blessings and difficulties; raw material to deal with. Their contribution was to adapt, both genetically and culturally, so as to deal with their circumstances.

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