How
has
For
as long as our ancestors have been making tools, it has no doubt seemed obvious
that an excellent artifact can be created only by something even more
excellent: a clever artificer. You never see a shoe creating a cobbler; you
never see a house making a carpenter. Darwin overthrew that received wisdom.
One of Darwin’s earliest critics, Robert Beverley MacKenzie,
could not contain his outrage:
In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute
Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental
principle of the whole system, that, in
order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how
to make it..
This proposition will be found…to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's
meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute
Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the
achievements of creative skill.
This is indeed a “strange inversion
of reasoning,” but once the topsy-turvy perspective it implies has been
accepted, most of what we have believed about who we are survives intact. We can still be in awe of the “Wisdom in all
the achievements of creative skill” while attributing this wisdom not to a
single Creator, but distributing it over billions of years in trillions of
lineages of replicators, trying their luck in the
great tournament of life, mindlessly discovering and rediscovering the
brilliant design principles that constitute the diversity of life. Tradition
honors the trickle-down theory of value: what we do and think can be valuable only
if it derives its value from something even more valuable–only if we are the
servants, in effect, of a greater master.
We are animals. Are we just animals? The ideological tug-of-war
over “human exceptionalism” can be damped, if not
stopped outright, by emphasizing a few uncontroversial facts. Sight, the
capacity to extract huge amounts of relevant information from a relatively safe
distance, was an innovation that multiplied the opportunities of intelligent behavior:
locomotion, predation, evasion, migration, and so on. Sight and flight have
each evolved numerous times, but language has so far evolved just once, so far
as we know, in our genus. (Neanderthals may have been a second talking species
for a while.) Language is the key to our huge advantage in knowledge and
technology. Other animal species transmit significant amounts of know-how
non-genetically from parent to offspring, about food gathering, danger, and
mating success, for instance, but without language, the lessons to be learned
are rather simple preferences and prohibitions, not elaborate systems of
hard-won technique and patiently gathered data.
It has taken our species thousands
of years of communication and investigation to begin to find the keys to our
own identities. Our newfound capacity for long-distance knowledge gives us
powers that dwarf those of all the rest of the life on Earth. It has been
estimated that ten thousand years ago, the human population comprised a small
fraction of 1% of the mass of vertebrate life on land; today, we, together with
our livestock and pets, make up about 98% of that total. We exploit an ever
increasing share of the planet’s resources, but we do offer something in
return. Now, for the first time in its
billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing sentinels,
able to anticipate danger from the distant future—an asteroid on a collision course,
or global warming—and devise schemes for doing something about it. The planet
has finally grown its own nervous system: us. We are responsible for the future
of life on the planet, in a way no other species could ever be.
Daniel
Dennett is University Professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive
Studies at