The evolution of the biosphere cannot be predicted

Lent 2018: Day Five

Stuart A. Kauffman is keen to show that biology and physics observe different laws - so different in fact, that any attempt at a final theory, as dreamt of by Steven Weinberg, will forever remain an impossible dream.

Whereas the Newtonian worldview works fine on an idealised, friction-free billiard table, or in an entirely abiotic solar system in which barren rocks orbit a ball of thermonuclear plasma, it breaks down once life is born. And once that life begins to evolve, it ceases to have any sway.

The outcome, says Kauffman, is no longer entailed by any natural law. It is unprestatable. You cannot state it in advance.

"The biosphere becomes complex and diverse because it can; it becomes into those very possibilities that it creates," he says. As I wrote towards the end of my previous post, those possibilities are so vast as to be unrepeatable - in a battle between eternity and infinity, infinity wins. As the biosphere evolves, whole series of accidental happenings affect individual members of each living species, which unfold in future generations, wave after wave, driving evolution in paths than cannot be prestated.

Kauffman gives an example of the lungfish, which at some point in its evolutionary history, evolved a swim bladder, a sac in which the fish can regulate the ratio of water and air to alter its buoyancy. Without that evolutionary adaptation, he says, the microscopic worms and bacteria that live within the lungfish's swim bladder would never have evolved. Now, who could have considered that possibility as the ancestors of the lungfish first made tentative hops from one puddle to another? New biological functions are evolving constantly. New adaptations. "Life is a miracle of largely unprestatable becoming."

This, suggests Kauffman, supports the view that the Universe is antientropic. It's not winding down, nor cooling off like a glass of tea on your desk. Not only is it physically expanding at an accelerating rate, pushed outward by a mysterious dark energy that science cannot see nor even define, but biologically is is evolving in directions that we could have never guessed.

These 'unfoldings' of what is Actual create new possibilities for the biosphere to evolve further, as those possibilities then become actuals that create more new possibilities, and so on. Unlike those Newtonian billiard balls whose future trajectory can be worked out precisely, life is entirely too complex, too diverse, for any law to be able to determine how it will continue to unfold. "The swim bladder enables, but does not cause the bacterial or worm species to evolve to live in it." It is random mutations in their DNA that cause them to adapt to life inside the lungfish's swim bladder.

"No laws entail the evolution of the most complex system we know in the universe. We are beyond entailing laws, so beyond Newton, Einstein, Schrodinger and even Darwin," says Kauffman. "We can still get to the moon using Newton. But no laws at all entail the specific evolution of the biosphere." This, he says, is where reductive materialism fails. "The biosphere does not fit the Pythagorean dream that all that is has foundation, preferably mathematical."

More soon!

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