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Direction or Selection?
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11011 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1993 |
2,813 Words |
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Richard L. Lewis
Richard L. Lewis is a biochemist currently working as a free-
lance science writer in New York. |
THE ORIGINS OF ORDER
Self-organization and Selection
in Evolution
Stuart A. Kauffman
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993
645 pp., $25.00
We are dealing here with that perennial question with which each generation pesters the previous one: "Daddy, where did I come from?" A persistent (or bored) child can drive far beyond the answer "Mommy's tummy," forcing one to explain, within whatever the particular cultural milieu, the first human beings, the origin of life, and the Big Bang moment of creation.
Brushing aside the elaborations and decorations that adorn such answers, the explanations can all be grouped into two, albeitly fuzzy, sets conveniently designated the math set and the magic set. The great divide between the two is the depth of explanation that is possible.
Explanations that have little or no depth to them fall into the magic camp. For the parental figure, this is by far the easiest response--the nice thing about these explanations is that they stop the kids iteration of questions dead in its tracks.
Many religious explanations of origins have this magical element to them. Although a magic wand is not explicitly mentioned in any of the scriptures I have perused, many people seem to conceptualize the creation of the universe, the creation of life, and the origin of humanity as accompanied by the sparkles of the good fairies at work in one of Walt Disney's creations.
This, we might add, does God an injustice. The Creator is clearly more a mathematician than a magician, as witnessed by the use of the calculus in mechanics, group theory in subatomic particles, and complex numbers in quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that God does, it seems, mathematics is the best way of describing it. Thus, the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences," as Eugene Wigner put it.
It is not just religion, however, that provides shallow explanations; science does it as well. Physics and chemistry are firmly in the math camp, but biology and evolution often fall back on explanations involving the goddess Chance, with biochemistry and genetics fitting somewhat uncomfortably between the camps.
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