Evolutionary Latency

Earlier, in At Home in the Universe, I suggested that theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman is right in his so-named book: there were, from the very start, "profoundly robust" properties lurking in the evolving biosphere. Certain latent qualities of living organisms would have emerged, no matter what the other, chance details of evolution happened to be.

Thus did the "deep and beautiful laws" of emergent, self-organized complexity make creatures like us: "we the expected," Kauffman calls us. We could have turned out like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or the aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in terms of our looks and bodily configuration, but our kind was nonetheless ever in the offing.

By "our kind" I mean, principally, creatures that are self-aware — not just conscious, but alive to their own consciousness. I believe (see my earlier post Abortion and Personhood) that our personhood and our self-awareness are one and the same thing. So what I have just said is tantamout to saying that we as persons could have been, and were, expected to evolve in our universe all along.

Straight-up Darwinists don't tend to believe that. They tend to emphasize the haphazardness and unpredictability of evolution's pathways, owing to the fact that most or all hereditary variation stems from genetic mutation, and mutations are gene "copying errors" that happen at random. That makes for a panoply of variants, as well as the usual more mouths to feed than there are places at the table (which scientists call "superfecundity"). So that blind force of nature, Darwin's "natural selection," simply sifts the variants that are less fit — less well adapted to current living conditions — out of the mix, and voilà, over incredibly long amounts of time you get ... whatever you get.

But Kauffman says the Darwinist's troika of mutational variation, superfecundity, and natural selection have a "handmaiden": self-organization, the process by which a lovely "order for free" has managed to emerge and continues to emerge spontaneously in the natural world. Another term for the phenomenon would accordingly be emergence, as when Kauffman calls his professional endeavors "a search for a theory of emergence." And I would call it evolutionary latency: from day one there was, within the workings of our cosmos, a quiescent, dormant, irresistable "urge" to produce not only life but conscious, self-aware, personal life.