Human consciousness is not merely an emergent phenomenon; it epitomizes the logic of emergence in its very form. . . . Consciousness emerges as an incessant creation of something from nothing, a process continually transcending itself. To be human is to know what it feels like to be evolution happening.
—Terrence Deacon, “The Hierarchic Logic of Emergence”
Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?” the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously asked. This question, he proposed, is the root of all philosophy, and it is a question that still confounds philosophers, scientists, and Evolutionaries of all stripes. We have explanations for how one thing transforms into another over the slow march of time. But evolution’s greatest mystery still remains: How does something come from nothing? And ultimately, it’s not just a question about the origin of things but about novelty of all kinds. How does anything new get created? How does something entirely novel come into existence? In this world of change and flux, what is the source of unexpected creativity?
We have studied creativity in the human species for years, and yet still it remains elusive, and when we get to the natural world, the question looms even larger: How do you explain the appearance of novelty in this awe-inspiring universe around us? The religious traditions had it easy. Novelty was simple—it came from God. Take the Genesis story, in which God created the heavens and the Earth, just as they are today. He was the creator; not humanity, not nature. God did it all together, all at once—no changes, no additions, nothing that would implicate nature or humanity in a creative act. Similar narratives are found in the Hindu Rig Veda, the Quran, ancient Egyptian mythology, and the sacred texts of many other cultures. It was a neat and uncomplicated picture; unfortunately, it just happens to have little to do with the world as we understand it today. Today “Mother Nature” has taken over the role once reserved for deities. We live in a time in which it seems that nature is revealed to be increasingly creative with every scientific advance, every new discovery, each breakthrough insight into the mysteries of physics and biology. And humanity itself has become a race of creators extraordinaire, giving birth to all manner of novelties, from Shakespeare’s sonnets and Rembrandt’s portraits to iPhone apps and virtual worlds. In this sense, we have truly become, as Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand said, “as Gods.” But for all our progress, we are still only studious apprentices of nature’s masterwork. We have neither been able to fashion life from seeming lifelessness nor wring self-reflective consciousness out of the interactions of matter. Perhaps one day these mysteries will be within our grasp, but for now, we cannot match evolution’s inherent creative power.
From a certain perspective, novelty itself is something of a novelty. Of course, now we know there have been new emergences ever since the first great emergence created our cosmos out of nothing, and that human culture has been defined by a series of unexpected creative leaps. But for the most part, these leaps were so widely interspersed that we barely noticed the phenomenon within our short lifetimes. Indeed, it is worth noting that the issue of human creativity as a subject worthy of study wasn’t even raised in the culture at large until the nineteenth century. Before then, it was not studied by philosophers, pondered over by artists, or simplified into steps by self-help authors and organizational consultants. Sure, there were occasional writings about the “muse” of the artist or writer and individuals have obviously been extremely creative since the beginning of human existence. But creativity as a subject of inquiry didn’t really exist until the nineteenth century. So what changed? The answer is that as the industrial revolution starkly transformed the Western world, human beings were confronted with change and progress in history on a much smaller time scale. We saw the possibility of improving our lives and creatively working to enhance society. Human progress suddenly seemed easily discernible in the space of one lifetime. Of course, downsides emerged as well. Factories were dark, dirty, and unsafe. Masses moved from the rural existence that previously marked human life to the chaos of overcrowded cities and slums. But amid the challenges, change was speeding up. Like never before in human memory, the life of the son was almost certain to be quite different than the life of the father. Cultural development was making its own mechanisms transparent to us.
In the sciences, too, a new world was being unveiled. Nature was yielding secrets of evolutionary change, not to mention a world of natural laws and a whole new universe of subtle but discernible processes working quietly in the depths of life and matter. Our understanding of time itself was going through a revolutionary change as we began to move out of a cyclical, seasonal, more agriculturally oriented conception into the industrial, modern sense of moving forward in history, as a nation, and as a species. Change, process, progress, development, evolution—all of these words came into vogue in the nineteenth century and all of them exist in the same intellectual ecosystem as the idea of creativity.
When it comes to evolutionary theory, few subjects play a more central role than creativity. What gave rise to new forms, new species, new functions and capacities? How did life emerge? How did self-reflective human consciousness emerge? These are the questions that confront the evolutionist, and every theory or approach to understanding the evolutionary process, from Darwin to Dawkins, is, in some sense, an attempt to explain the source of this miracle called novelty. Novelty is like the Rosetta stone of evolution. If you can explain it, even partially, then you have achieved something remarkable, and perhaps brought humanity a little closer to unlocking one of the core mysteries of life and existence. And in order to more fully realize a worldview organic to an evolutionary age, we need to pay attention to the underappreciated mystery of novelty—both in the depths of ourselves and in the depths of the cosmos.
In this chapter I want to explore the nature of novelty through the work of some of today’s most interesting evolutionary theorists. For the most part, I will focus on the scientific inquiry into the issue, looking at this fascinating subject through the lens of several of today’s leading thinkers in complexity theory. Because the subject of creativity also calls to mind the objections of those in the intelligent design camp who claim that current biological theory is insufficient to explain novelty in the emergence of life, I will unpack their concerns. But to help frame the overall theme of this chapter, I will first introduce one of the more provocative and interesting voices in the world of science—a man who had thought a great deal about if and how a godless universe has the power to create.
THE CAFÉ AT THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE
Certain people just have a gift for capturing a particular essence of the natural world. For example, when I watched Cosmos as a young boy, I was captivated by Carl Sagan’s masterful rendering of science’s latest forays into astrophysics and cosmology. His unique talent lay in communicating both the latest knowledge of science but also what was happening at the very edges of the field, those areas that were still unexplored, unknown, and unseen by the probing lenses of our telescopes and microscopes. His gift, in other words, was not just transmitting the latest answers to the mysteries of the cosmos but bringing to light the critical questions that defined the frontiers of science, the permeable membranes between what we know and what is just beyond our collective grasp. It was a lesson in both the discoveries of science and the nature of the quest for knowledge itself. On that journey, I understood, the right question may be much more important than any given answer.
One person who possesses an analogous skill when it comes to drawing our attention to the novelty inherent in the cosmos is author Howard Bloom. Bloom is something of a novelty himself in the world of intellectual attainment. His books, The Lucifer Principle, The Global Brain, and The Genius of the Beast, are fascinating portraits of cultural, biological, and cosmological evolution. I was familiar with Bloom’s prolific writings and had been struck by his synthetic and adventurous mind. With a deep knowledge of history and a broad expertise in many fields, he was able to move easily between different sciences and wasn’t afraid to mix hard facts with cultural analysis, weaving disparate knowledge systems together in a way that left the astute reader enriched (if a little dizzy).
A lover of science as a child, Bloom started studying cosmology, theoretical physics, and microbiology at the age of ten. By the ripe old age of twelve, he had built his first Boolean algebra machine. At sixteen, he worked at the world’s largest cancer research lab, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, and at twenty, he was researching B. F. Skinner’s “programmed learning” at Rutgers. And then his career took an unexpected turn. Caught up in the cultural changes of the late ’60s and ’70s, Bloom temporarily left behind the world of science and became a rock-and-roll media merchant, active in the superstar PR universe, with friends like John Mellencamp, George Michael, and Michael Jackson. He spent seventeen years doing what he describes as “fieldwork in the mass passions, the mass behaviors, that make history,” returning to his science-inspired roots only when the onset of a mysterious illness not unlike chronic fatigue syndrome afforded him time to begin writing. I had heard that Bloom was largely nocturnal and kept crazy hours, and it was true that e-mails from him were more likely to come at three o’clock in the morning than at any reasonable time in the light of day. In fact, my request for a meeting was met with an unusual response: “Any time between 8:00 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.”
He met me at the door of his Brooklyn brownstone and shook my hand, a diminutive man with a sparkle in his eyes. He led me upstairs several floors and into his “office,” which the layperson might understandably confuse with his bedroom. With shelves and bookcases filled to the brim, it looked like a decade’s worth of random objects had been scattered around the room and simply left to mark time. As we settled in for our discussion, Bloom joked about “the legendary mess.” Eccentric without question, he is also warm and engaging, and as we began to discuss evolution and creativity he didn’t waste any time getting to the point.
“Now, I am a stone-cold atheist. Period. I am a stone-cold scientist. Period. But there is more to this universe than science so far has been willing to grapple with. In a sense, those who argue for things like intelligent design are calling our attention to a real problem with how we understand this universe. How does a godless universe create?”
As Bloom continued to speak, I realized that I was already facing a conversational challenge that had no doubt confronted many a visitor to the Bloom brownstone. In order to answer a question, my erudite host felt like he needed to provide context—usually about ten minutes’ worth, not including a few diversions along the way. But what I began to piece together from Bloom’s monologues was his deep interest in the issue of creativity—and his concern that many don’t appreciate the extent to which radical novelty has been at the core of the universe’s evolution right from the start. As a scientist, he had no sympathy for those who are using notions like intelligent design to try to squeeze a traditional God back into a natural universe. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant areas where science has yet to fill in blanks as to how A became B and B became C in the grand journey of cosmic history.
“Imagine that you and I were sitting in a café at the beginning of the universe, at a coffee table at the edge of the nothing, or what one person calls the ‘potentia,’ ” he said at one point in our conversation, initiating a lengthy metaphorical story. “You are full of imagination and I’m crusty and conservative. Suddenly, you make this nutty prediction: ‘Look over there’ (of course, there is no ‘over there,’ but this is a metaphor). ‘That spot over there is suddenly going to erupt into something that is infinitesimally smaller than a pinprick and it’s going to be a burst of time and space, an explosion of speed. It’s going to come from nowhere and—’ At that point I stop you, and say, ‘Look, Carter. You and I have been sitting around the potentia for as long as there’s been a potentia. There never has been time, and there never has been space, and there never has been speed. You’re talking about something coming from nothing. Now, remember the first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of matter and energy. Nothing comes from nothing. Something only comes from something. That’s a basic law of science.’
“And then, all of a sudden—Whammo!” Bloom gestures in the air above his bed to emphasize the point as he stares me down. “This infinitesimally tiny little thing comes into existence and it’s got a whole universe implicit in it. I mean, there’s never been time, space, or speed, and this is a manifold that comes rushing out at a speed that defies belief. Guess what? You turned out to be right.”
Seated at our metaphorical coffee table, Bloom takes me through several more phases of the extraordinary creativity that was present right from the birth of the cosmos. “We could go through the whole history of the cosmos this way,” he explains. “And at every step some astonishing, unbelievable thing is happening. And every one of those defies what we currently know about the laws of logic and science. The God problem is this.” And with that Yoda-like statement, Bloom finishes his café metaphor with a rhetorical flourish.
The God Problem is also the name of Bloom’s most recent book exploring the topic of creativity. Such language is likely to provoke a few frowns from evolutionary scientists who are desperately trying to keep the phraseology of religion out of their field. But Bloom’s invocation is for effect only; I’ve rarely seen anyone who loved science so deeply or was so well versed in this history of the field. And yet, he can’t help but play the provocateur when it comes to issues close to his heart—such as the inherent creativity of the cosmos.
Bloom is deeply attuned to the latest scientific picture of the universe and the remarkable degree of development and creativity that has unfolded in the depths of matter over the last 13.7 billion years. He points out that the more we know about the universe, the more we understand the creative leaps our cosmos has taken in its long journey from hydrogen to humans, the less random it all seems. In fact, he feels that there is a remarkable order to the process, some kind of open-ended, creative intelligence that is informing cosmic evolution, a flexible but influential metastructure to the chaotic unfolding. In a word, there seems to be a design to the universe that we have yet to fathom, but not the kind that comes from God. Bloom is talking about deeper layers of science—fundamental ordering principles that might account for the surprisingly nonrandom character of the cosmos, axioms embedded in the fabric of the nature whose existence we can see hints of when we examine past leaps of cosmic creativity.
This is not, he tells me, a “six monkeys at six typewriters” universe. That phrase comes from that old and overused piece of conventional wisdom that a group of monkeys typing randomly at keyboards would eventually, given an infinite amount of time, bang out the complete works of Shakespeare. This has been a popular metaphor, used often in the evolution debates, with many variations on the basic “dumb primates producing intelligent things accidentally” theme. The idea has been employed to show that seemingly random processes can lead to order and even intelligence, given vast amounts of time and the right circumstances. Unfortunately, the probability, experts tell us, of a collection of typing primates producing even one Romeo and Juliet, one Macbeth, or even just an episode of Melrose Place, is near zero. (Incidentally, a clever experimenter tried this in real time, setting up a room with monkeys and typewriters and leaving them alone for some time. The monkeys ended up using the typewriters as a toilet and the only work produced was a series of pages with the letter s.)
Drawing further on in his café metaphor, Bloom points out that even in the early days of the cosmos, a truly remarkable degree of coherence, order, and structure were informing evolution. In his book The God Problem, he describes the creation of the first elements in the periodic table, several hundred thousand years after the Big Bang:
How many kinds of atoms does a cosmos of zillions of particles sliding into each other’s arms produce? If things were really random, the species of newly born atoms should be wacky, crazed, and without end. But in this universe, wild, weird, wacky, and endlessly crazed is not the way things go. Not at all. . . . Look, even just two cubes tossed around in a cup, dice, have thirty-six possible outcomes. How can an entire cosmos seething with more protons, neutrons, and electrons than we have words to describe, how can a universe of nearly infinite dice and nearly infinite tosses, produce just three varieties of atoms? . . . This is staggering conformity and self-control. . . . It is not mere trial and error. . . . So what is it? It’s the paradox of the supersized surprise. It’s the mind-snarler at the core of cosmic creativity.
Creativity is the God problem. We have to come to terms, Bloom tells me, with these “material miracles” that are present at every stage of the evolution of the universe. For Bloom, science is best served when our sense of awe, wonder, and astonishment at the workings of nature is heightened. To drive home the point, he comes back to one of the essential elements of science—predictability. If we can’t predict what the next great creative leap is going to be, he tells me, in this universe whose most distinct feature is its ability to manufacture one grand creative leap after another, then have we really understood this cosmos? Have we explained the natural world, understood its workings, grasped its most salient and essential features?
He points out that the problem of creativity is actually a relatively new issue in science, because the godfathers of this endeavor, individuals such as Newton and Galileo, felt the basic creativity of the universe came from God, and that their job was to more fully apprehend the nature of his divine plan. In that sense, nature was like scripture, the word of God—only a more accurate rendering, not subject to the inevitable errors of human translation. God was, as Newton dubbed him, the “divine legislature” prescribing laws to the cosmos he had crafted. It was a mechanistic universe, and science’s job was to understand the workings of the mechanism.
Indeed, French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace was so emboldened with the discoveries of science in the eighteenth century that he claimed he could predict the future of the entire universe. All he needed, he explained, was to know the exact properties, positions, and forces acting on every atom in the universe at any one moment. Such knowledge would allow him, according to the laws of physics and chemistry, to predict the entire future—every last thing right down to what happens at the final moment of our universe. If this were a universe ruled entirely by eighteenth-century mechanistic laws of physics and chemistry, this speculation actually makes sense. But the hubris of his thought experiment was based upon a fundamental error—the idea that the universe functioned like a massive clock whose gears, once set in motion, had an inevitable outcome. We might call it a universe for type-A people—no novelty, no spontaneity.
Today, that particular conception of our universe is in tatters. This cosmos is much more complex, indeterminate, and creative than Laplace ever dreamed. No longer can we observe and report on nature’s static truths; scientists today are digging much deeper, probing to discover not just how nature is but how it has become what it is. Such knowledge provides clues to the secrets of nature’s past creativity, but also hints at how it might be transforming into something entirely unpredictable in the near and distant future.
“So what is the source of creativity in the universe?” I ask Bloom directly.
For once, he doesn’t tell me a story, or set a long context with his reply. He answers simply with three of science’s most important words: “We don’t know.”
CHAOS, COMPLEXITY, AND CREATIVITY
Leaving the Bloom brownstone well after midnight, my mind was buzzing with questions. Bloom does not have answers to the story of cosmic creativity; no one does. But his colorful love of nature’s remarkable history had helped me appreciate just how much there was left to understand about Mother Nature’s laboratory of novelty.
We had finished the evening by discussing how human consciousness developed in the evolutionary process. While there are many examples of the kind of creative leaps Bloom described, consciousness certainly qualifies as Exhibit A on the how-the-heck-did-evolution-come-up-with-that? list. You don’t have to spend too much time at conferences where people are trying to explain human consciousness before you understand the appeal of the “God created it” point of view. But the larger point is that there are some real mysteries still to be solved in our understanding of evolution and many of them have a lot to do with this notion of creativity and novelty. Unfortunately, as Bloom mentioned, as soon as you start invoking the word “mystery,” people tend to get nervous and think that the next thing you’re going to do is to start invoking supernatural forces and ancient omnipotent deities to explain it.
One of the most popular new ways to think about the creation of novelty is to invoke the discoveries of the new complexity sciences. These new fields suggest that there are common principles, perhaps even universal laws, that apply across all kinds of “complex adaptive systems.” A complex adaptive system can be anything from a collection of molecules to a software program to an economy to a human being. If we could understand these principles, so the story goes, we could perhaps explain a lot of the higher forms of order, complexity, and novelty that we see in the natural world. There is a relationship between novelty and complexity, these theorists point out. As complexity increases, new and higher forms of both novelty and order emerge that mark evolution’s advance.
Perhaps the most important insight to come out of the complexity sciences is the idea that novelty is produced at the edge of chaos. That means that novelty generally doesn’t appear in systems that have too much order and stability. It takes chaos, instability, and greater degrees of freedom to produce the conditions for higher forms of order and novelty to occur. A system generally has to be thrown into disequilibrium for new and higher levels of self-organization to emerge. We don’t need to have degrees in physics to understand this subtle but profound truth. Here, again, is a principle that applies across many scientific disciplines and also to that most interesting of nature’s species, human beings. Consider what it takes to get a human being to change his or her life, to really make entirely new breakthroughs, to achieve novelty, to actually evolve. Absent outside pressures, it is simply very rare for an adult human being to fundamentally change. People tend toward inertia and homeostasis, just like any complex adaptive system. But if you apply a little pressure from life—say, a health crisis, an economic crisis, or an emotional challenge—then the dynamics of the system change. Suddenly that human being is thrown into some subtle or gross form of disequilibrium. It could even be a positive challenge—a career promotion, or an unexpected windfall. All of these will disturb the human system to such a degree that new behaviors, new leaps of positive evolution, or higher forms of order may come into existence. Life may self-organize at a new level. So it is right at the edge of chaos that the system has its greatest potential for change, its ripest moment for evolution.
In the case of the human, we have to include the reality of conscious choice, which plays a role in the process, but the principle is the same. Of course, it’s also possible to go too far. Too much chaos doesn’t lead to higher order, just more chaos and disorder. It creates not breakthrough but breakdown. One can understand from this example why former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly writes, “The art of evolution is the art of managing dynamic complexity.” Again, it’s a general principle that applies to the evolution of any complex adaptive system, whether it’s a corporation, a computer network, or a human being.
Much of the interest in these new sciences has been driven by our growing appreciation for just how extraordinarily complex the universe that we live in is. Not only has the macrocosm of cosmology and astrophysics proven to be vaster than we ever imagined, and the microcosm of particle physics and quantum mechanics more extensive and boundless than we ever thought possible, but the sheer unbounded complexity of the world as revealed by science has also grown along with the explosion of our knowledge. A thundercloud might not immediately seem like the most complex thing to a casual observer—until you actually try to model and predict its behavior on a computer. Then one begins to appreciate just how daunting it is to understand the behavior of complex systems. In fact, much of this new science has been driven by the information age. The growth of computing power has opened up new vistas for our understanding of complexities once far beyond our reach.
There is more to the nature of complexity than merely understanding the behavior of systems like thunderstorms or a flock of birds or the movements of the stock market. What about the evolution of new forms, new systems, new structures, new life, entirely new species? What about Bloom’s “material miracles”? Might complexity science have something to say about that? In fact, there seems to be an interesting connection between evolution, complexity, and novelty, one that we are just beginning to understand. And it starts with a simple but explosive truth: As biological evolution proceeds, complexity increases. And another truth: As cultural evolution proceeds, complexity increases.2 Complexity, it would seem, is essential to understand. In fact, we could probably just simplify the two statements and say: As evolution proceeds, complexity increases. It’s a fascinating piece of data, but why is it true?
To be fair, it should be acknowledged that this is a controversial statement in evolutionary theory, in part because no one understands exactly why it is true, or can even come up with an agreed-upon measurement to determine whether it is true. Yes, we can see that the atomic composition of iron, which was formed in the core of stars, is more complex than hydrogen and helium atoms, which are the original (post–Big Bang) building blocks of the elements. But developing a quantitative definition of complexity that applies to physical systems is quite tricky. The same goes for cultural evolution. It seems rather obvious that our globalizing culture today is far more complex than previous civilizations, but it’s one thing to know this intuitively, and quite another to come up with a clear measurement. (Are we three times more complex than the ancient Greeks? Ten times? A million?) As Robert Wright notes, “precisely defining complexity or organization is such a notoriously frustrating task that many people give up and fall back on an intuitive definition, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography: ‘I know it when I see it.’ ”
In his 2003 book Biocosm, James Gardner explored the idea that there may be an as-yet-undiscovered law of nature that can help explain the evolution of complex systems. Gardner writes:
How did the beautifully intricate and interdependent ballet of molecules through which DNA is replicated and proteins are assembled first get composed? How did the universal coding scheme of DNA, common to virtually all living creatures, arise in the first place? How did Mother Nature first assemble the lavish palette of options from which the grim reaper of natural selection could prune away all but the choicest samples? . . . Should we be searching for rules of self-organization that precede the operation of the great Darwinian principle of natural selection? Is this self-ordering process altogether different from the process of random mutation, which is the only source of novelty condoned by orthodox evolutionists?
An attorney by training, Gardner is a superb writer who brings a legal sense of clarity to his second profession of science writer and complexity theorist. He notes that this conundrum has led certain theorists, notably complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman, to speculate as to the existence of a possible fourth law of thermodynamics, one based upon a new understanding of self-organizing complex systems. Kauffman is one of the leaders of the field of complexity science. He has spent his career investigating nature’s remarkable tendency to exhibit a kind of spontaneous, self-organizing order—“order for free” he calls it—which can produce higher forms of organization and novelty in all kinds of systems and potentially speed evolution’s advance. Some complexity theorists, Kauffman included, suggest that Darwin’s natural selection might ultimately prove to be only one source of novelty, and perhaps not even the most important creative process in nature. Kauffman calls it the “powerful idea that order in biology does not come from natural selection alone but from a poorly understood marriage of self-organization and [natural] selection.”
In fact, in his recent book, Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues for a new way of looking at the universe that appreciates the “ceaseless creativity” of the cosmos, a creativity that he suggests is partially beyond any natural law. Kauffman feels that the innate capacity of the universe to produce extraordinary new and novel forms of order with emergent, unpredictable properties is so profound that we must rethink the reductionist worldview of science. Not everything is reducible to physics and chemistry and the interactions of physical systems, not even in principle. “My claim is not simply that we lack the sufficient knowledge or wisdom to predict the future evolution of the biosphere, economy, or human culture,” he writes. “It is that these things are inherently beyond prediction. Not even the most powerful computer imaginable can make a compact description in advance of . . . these processes.” Kauffman’s book is a passionate argument for the open-ended, exuberant creativity of life and of evolution, a creativity that we can embrace in our lives even if we do not fully understand it through our science.
Kaufman’s bold declarations about the inherent unpredictability of the natural world are reflected in the work of another well-known complexity theorist, Stephen Wolfram. A brilliant scientist by any measure, he is an expert on computational systems and has done much of his work on what are called “cellular automata.” These are algorithms that take very simple computer programs, sets of rules governing cellular grids, and then run them over and over again to see what kind of interesting behavior emerges. For example, imagine a cellular grid on a computer screen. Now imagine a few basic rules that determine whether any given cell on the grid should be black or white, based on the color of its neighbors at any given moment. Then run a program that repeats those same instructions over and over again. As the grid moves through various cycles in which the same rule is applied, it goes through all kinds of changes. And what Wolfram noticed was that with very simple rules, one can produce complexity of a stunning degree. Novel levels of order emerge in the grid, self-organizing structures that would seem to be completely unpredictable from the instruction set. His conclusion is straightforward but far-reaching—simple axioms can lead to extraordinary novelty and complexity. It is a conclusion that has led him to speculate that perhaps the extraordinary novelty, order, and diversity we see in the natural world is at root nothing more than a set of axioms, a foundational cosmic instruction set, let loose to create this magnificent universe. In fact, he has speculated that even the universe itself might be little more than a giant cellular automaton computer. Perhaps a simple code is at the heart of it all—perhaps everything we see in nature, from the most sublime and beautiful falling leaf in the Amazon to the winner of the 2020 NBA title can all be traced back to a basic, understandable set of principles. Wolfram calls this discovery “one of the more important single discoveries in the whole history of theoretical science.”
It is fascinating to consider there might be still undiscovered universal laws of nature which are, as Gardner puts it, “locked into the very logic of the universe and that endow cosmic processes and their constituent subroutines with an inherent tendency to produce cascading phenomena of increasing complexity.” Can Wolfram’s automata really produce the kind of category-leaps of emergence—for example, the appearance of life—that we find unfolding across evolution’s long history? Bloom, for one, describes Wolfram’s work as providing important evidence for exactly the kind of open-ended, metastructural axioms that he suggests are being reflected in the creative activity of the cosmos.
Such speculations, at this point, are as much philosophy as science, but not too long ago such thoughts would likely have been dismissed as overly religious or metaphysical. Such is the compelling mystery of complexity. It has inspired a generation of scientists to look with a different kind of lens at the vast universe and offered tantalizing hints that there may be a lot more creativity built into the hidden algorithms of evolution than is yet dreamt of by our most able philosophies.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN AND NOVELTY
Blaise Pascal once noted that humans are stuck between two infinities: the infinitely small and infinitely large. “We wander in a vast medium,” he wrote, “always uncertain and drifting, pushed by one wind and then another.” But Pascal was missing a critical third piece of the puzzle that changes those observations. As Teilhard noted, we are living expressions of a third infinity—the infinitely complex. We seem to be in the midst of a vast process of increasing complexification, one that has also given birth to human beings, a species that just happens to have something called the human brain—what some have called the most complex structure in the known universe.
It is easy to underappreciate the depth of this mystery. This universe hasn’t gone from dust to more complex dust. It’s gone from dust to the music of Mozart, from nondescript hydrogen to the heroes of Homeric poetry. But for some of the more religiously inclined, the complexity of nature hasn’t just been a cause for deeper reflection about the nature of evolution; it has been a cause to doubt it altogether.
Remember, we live in a universe in which one of the defining characteristics, we are told by physicists, is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system will tend to increase over time. Simply put, that means that all other things being equal, things will tend toward disorganization, disorder, and decay. In fact, I’ve been conducting a regular experiment in the second law of thermodynamics while writing this book. Leave a hot cup of coffee on the desk next to the computer and don’t disturb it for half an hour, and I can say without a doubt that it does tend to get cooler and less tasty over time as the heat dissipates into the air. To my occasional dismay, I’ve yet to discover an exception to this rule. And in fact, I’m not the only one. It’s pretty much an accepted absolute law of the universe in all scientific quarters. Perhaps astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it most succinctly when he wrote, “If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” It should also be said that there are those who quibble with the basic presumption of the second law in relationship to this universe, the issue of whether or not the universe is, in fact, an isolated system (I guess the thinking is that there may be other universes or a metaverse that are connected with ours) but we’ll leave that aside for now.
At first glance, the evolution of complexity may seem to contradict this basic principle of entropy. After all, our biosphere hasn’t fallen into a more disorganized and decayed state over the last few billion years, and even the universe itself doesn’t exactly seem hell bent on a sort of null point of randomness, equilibrium, and homogeneity. Quite the opposite. It doesn’t seem to be running down; it is just as arguably ramping up! So does the evolution of complexity over the course of biological history (and perhaps even cosmological history) mean that there is something wrong with the second law of thermodynamics? Questions like this are part of what has inspired scientists like Kauffman to search for a “fourth law.”
I find this question particularly interesting because of an e-mail I received recently from my teenage nephew, who attends a private Christian high school in Houston, Texas. His education has been exemplary—except when it comes to evolution. His e-mail contained an attached file called “Evolution: Not a Chance!” that had been given to him by one of his teachers. It used the argument that because the second law of thermodynamics tells us that systems run down and things fall apart and that this is not what evolutionary theory tells us, therefore something must be wrong with evolutionary theory.
This argument is dead on arrival. Biological evolution gets around the implications of entropy because the Earth is not an isolated system. We are riding the light, so to speak, using the sun’s energy to power our way along. The sun is losing energy, but we are the beneficiaries. Like a rogue user of someone else’s powerful Wi-Fi outlet, the earth naturally uses energy from the sun to power the entropy-busting evolution of life. Remember, I explained in chapter 4 that evolution happens on the borders, on the energy gradients, at those places where energy flows from one system to another. And it’s at that great border between earth and space, where the energy from the sun floods our planet’s surface, that evolution has happened, and where the most extraordinary novelty has come into being.
“You have to hand it to the creationists. They have evolved,” jokes Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, which monitors attacks on the teaching of evolution. Joking aside, it’s true that some religious opponents of evolution are getting more sophisticated in their attempts to discredit the accepted scientific paradigm. And some have tried to use our emerging recognition of the extraordinary complexity and creativity in evolution as ammunition in this battle. In the 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, biologist Michael Behe argued that certain biochemical systems in the body are so intricate and so interdependent—that there are so many independent systems and parts that must work together in order for these systems to function at all—we should consider them to be “irreducibly complex.” He suggests that such systems simply could not have evolved through the basic methods of natural selection. The absence of any one of the parts in these systems would have caused the whole system to cease functioning, the argument goes; therefore, in order to be adaptable, these systems would have had to evolve all at once in some great leap forward, as opposed to evolving more gradually in the stepwise accumulations that characterize Darwinian evolution. In his book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, William Dembski explains Behe’s argument:
A system performing a given basic function is irreducibly complex if it includes a set of well-matched, mutually interacting, nonarbitrarily individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system’s basic, and therefore original, function. The set of these indispensable parts is known as the irreducible core of the system.
Despite being embraced by many prominent politicians, Behe’s and Dembski’s ideas, usually called intelligent design in the media, have received little love from the scientific community and have even been heavily criticized by more forward-looking religious thinkers. The problem with Behe’s and Dembski’s argument is not merely that it often seems to be such a transparent attempt to make a place for an outside-the-process intelligent designer, something akin to the traditional Christian God. Rather, it is that they have such a limited view of what God’s creativity might look like. I would suggest that the larger problem with intelligent design is not that it has questions about the capability of current evolutionary theory. That is a natural part of scientific inquiry and reasonable minds can render judgment on the veracity of those arguments. My problem is that many tend to follow such criticism by implicitly or explicitly appealing to the most uncreative picture of nature available, the “God just created it” picture of the universe.
I find it ironic that what many cite as wondrous evidence that evolution is remarkably creative, others use as a reason for retreat from and rejection of evolution altogether, and appeal to an omnipotent designer. Even if we are spiritually or religiously inclined, why would we want to fall back to a vision of God as omnipotent designer rather than a God whose work is only more fully revealed in the creative impulse of the evolutionary process? As theologian John Haught wrote in a response to Behe:
What I object to is the narrowness of any theological approach that seeks to defend the idea of God, or to understand God’s relationship to an evolving universe, and especially the evolution of life, by focusing exclusively on “design.” It is not surprising that such an approach leads many of its proponents to reject evolutionary science or to edit it severely. Design, as Bergson pointed out long ago, is unrepresentative of what we now know about the strange story of life on this planet. And today it fails to advance dialogue between theology and biological science.
Writing as a theologian, my point is that we should not abstract, and then isolate, the element of order from the often disturbing fact of novelty in actually living phenomena. Our understanding of God is considerably diminished by failing to reflect fully on the fact of novelty in nature. The concept of “design” is too stiff to accommodate either the complexity of nature or the depth of religious experience of God.
I would elaborate on Haught’s excellent points with the observation that not only is our understanding of God diminished by failing to fully reflect on the fact of novelty, but our understanding of ourselves is diminished as well. As our picture of the universe continues to expand and we grow more and more cognizant of the creative power of nature, it is simultaneously as if the creative capacity we once reserved entirely for God has seemed to flow out of heaven and into earth. And as a product of nature’s creation, we share in that bounty. As our picture of evolution grows more creative, so does our picture of ourselves. God’s onetime omnipotence has become our own creative potential. And there is an interesting feedback mechanism at work here as well. As creativity more deeply informs our collective sense of self and our worldview, our capacity to consciously and creatively influence the evolutionary process itself grows. Intelligent life-forms become partners in and creative contributors to evolution’s “design” rather than just the passive result of its mechanics. This may enhance the power and potential of the process itself in ways that we cannot even begin to foresee today. Some have suggested that this feedback mechanism may in fact be a critical part of the process. In an EnlightenNext interview, Jim Gardner compared cosmological evolution to the development of an embryo. He explained to me that when an embryo begins to develop, at some point along the way it needs critical feedback to complete the developmental process:
When an embryo begins to develop, every step in that development is not specified in advance by the DNA sequence. What happens is that the embryonic development reaches stage one, and then the tissue complex—that is, the embryo—starts sending signals back into the DNA, which modulate further expressions of the gene into new tissue. So it’s a feedback loop, and the informational complexity inheres in that feedback process, not simply in the nucleotide sequence. That’s truly the extraordinary miracle of it. The process of embryogenesis is exquisitely programmed to actually take account of the state of its own ongoing development and to use the succeeding stages of development as a sort of augmentation to the basic instruction manual, which is the DNA contained in the genome.
Might humans, or intelligent life in whatever form, play that same role in the cosmological, universal evolutionary scheme of development? Might we in some way represent this feedback loop for the universe itself? Could our reflection on the evolutionary process itself be an essential element not only in fulfilling the next stage of our own development but in creating the next novel stage of cosmogenesis? Gardner’s hypothesis is one of the most original—and compelling—evolutionary speculations that I have come across in some time.
Whatever we ultimately realize about the connection (if any) between the destiny of intelligent life and the destiny of the universe, there is at least one thing that I have become convinced of beyond a reasonable doubt: Creativity and novelty are not simply curious sidebars in the evolutionary script, beautiful by-products of a random cosmos or fortuitous flourishes of a designer God. They are written into the very cosmic narrative itself. So if we want to build a worldview informed by the evolutionary dynamics of the universe, creativity must not be peripheral to our efforts. As we will see in the chapters to come, creativity cannot really be delineated as one subject among many. Its footprints run across all of these pages, and its significance is ultimately not just a scientific matter but a spiritual one as well.