Nature Is Enough: Religious Naturalism and the Meaning of Life by Rue Loyal

Author:Rue, Loyal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press, Albany
Published: 2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Interlude: A Model of Emergence

At this point the argument of the chapter will be put on hold while we briefly examine a speculative model for the emergence of life proposed by Terrence Deacon. You may recall the point made several pages ago that the process of evolution by natural selection assumes the concept of function—that is, evolutionary theory explains how life develops, but it says nothing about the origins of living, functional systems. The perspective that has been developing in this chapter holds that teleology (so that causal influence) is an emergent property of living systems. This gave us the paradoxical claim that purposeful biological behaviors spontaneously emerged from the pointless meanderings of a nonliving cosmos. The principal opponents of this view are inherentists (who insist that telē must be inherent in the world from the beginning), and reductionists (who insist on the reducibility of so that causes to because of causes). The burden for emergentism is to show how teleology amounts to a radically new and irreducibly real phenomenon in the natural world. This is no slight burden, since it amounts to producing a principled account of the origins of life—that is, showing how the properties of living organisms might have resulted from novel relationships between nonliving components. We need to be clear about one point: the burden on the emergence theorist is not actually to create living systems, but rather to provide a plausible theoretical scenario for their creation without making any controversial assumptions.

The biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence Deacon has worked out a hypothetical account of how teleological phenomena might have emerged from the straightforward causal dynamics known to physics and chemistry. This model provides a theoretical link between non-life and life. Many origin-of-life investigators work on the assumption that the key thing to be explained is the origin of complex information molecules (RNA, DNA) that specify the shapes of self-organizing structures. Others, including Deacon, see the process working the other way around: complex self-organizing structures appeared first, and the informational piece of the puzzle came into play later.

We begin by recalling the basic principle of emergence: when components in a system are brought into new dynamical relations with each other, probabilities increase for the spontaneous emergence of new properties. This principle is at work everywhere in nature. With this principle in mind, Deacon recognizes three types of emergent phenomena. The first involves the emergence of new properties resulting from thermodynamic effects. The water example will again help us with this. We recognize that water has several properties, including viscosity (liquid state), hardness (ice), buoyancy (ice), and surface tension (liquid). Individual molecules of H2O have none of these properties, but when H2O molecules are brought into particular relationships the new properties emerge spontaneously. The second type results from morphodynamic effects. Here we see a process in which forms, or patterns, interact in ways that generate emergent forms or patterns. In other words, in addition to the influence of energy dynamics, it is important to recognize that shapes

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