I was reading a book on evolution (Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth), and it made the point that an awful lot of nature is futile, if we look at it from the perspective of design.1 Take trees: they don't actually get any more sunlight by being taller than if all of them were equally short. If every tree were 10 feet tall, they would be just as well off - better even, because they would not have to spend so many resources on what amount to mere stilts. But once one tree grows taller, it blocks the sun for others, and the race is on.
So this seems to be futile - futile because so much energy is expanded simply for the sake of competing with others when everyone would have been better if they hadn't entered into the competition in the first place.2 My concern here is in what exactly "futility" is.
My impression is to regard this race as futile because the trees are merely reacting to each other and to their circumstances. Each response is deflected away from what "really" needs to be done and toward those other trees and their contingent actions. If only these trees could get on with living instead of pointless tasks!3
But what would it mean for the tree to get on with the task of being a tree? We might have a picture in mind of trees taking care of real tree stuff, like getting light using as few resources as possible, and not getting distracted by the pine race. But whatever this hypothetical entity is, it is no longer a tree. Trees are what they are because of other trees. This competition they are locked in is just as much a part of them as the need for light in the first place. Conversely, the need to survive by taking in photons and synthesizing them into nutrients is just as much a "futile" race as growing taller than the other trees. The replication of DNA in all of its myriad manners is its own race, in which each set of genes is "competing" against the others.4
So there would be no reason to think that the race of the trees against each other is any more or less futile than anything else going on in the trees' lives. There is no core essence to "being a tree." This other race against other trees is not extrinsic to the tree's true nature, a race to be avoided if possible so that it could live a more tree-ish life.5
Things are what they are because of their causes, or to put it more mystic-sounding-like, things are what they are not. The tree is what it is entirely because of its relations to other trees, to other plants, to animals, and so on. It is meaningless to dismiss any of this as "futile" as opposed to some other possible existence. If it had a different existence, it would be something else. Taken to the extreme, we have the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" - everything simply is its relations to everything else, with no ultimate underlying substance or essence to anything. There is no core "tree" that can be separated from everything else. There is no firm division between "this" and "not this," between "this kind of thing" and "that kind of thing."
How might this relate to human life? Let us return to the Prisoner's Dilemma again. If there were a well-defined human nature, we can say certain things are good, and it would be better for everyone if we had some agreement that no one should be a jerk. But given the current considerations, there is no well-defined good. Things are what they are, and what they are is defined by their competition and relations to everything else. Also, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, we see that short-term gains lead to long-term losses. But now we also see that there are even longer-term changes which alter the rules of the game.
How do we put these sundry ethical views together? On one level, maybe we can just acknowledge that different considerations lead to different conclusions, and that there has yet to be a single system to unify all of this. But these different views may not be contradictory. Human beings are what they are, both as biological beings striving to copy their DNA (whether or not they are aware of this) and as rational beings able to look at the big picture. The interaction between these aspects is not a theory to be solved.
1 Dawkins himself does not say that it is futile; his view I think at least dovetails with the one I put down here. He just points out that if we were to take as a hypothesis that there were a designer of the universe, many things that would see would be futile from that perspective.
2 I won't go into whether this futility is evidence against design. I don't think that the example of trees settles it, but many other examples seem to me to present a rather sound case.
3 To some extent, of course, this is anthropomorphizing them, but there is no need to equate end-directedness to intent; more in another post.
4 Some readers but balk at the physicalism here. It seems to me that there needs to be a whole lot of work down to show that nature in any way, shape, or form demonstrates any sort of final cause beyond itself. Saying that it needs to be that way in order for there to be any hope in the world is an admission that any such view is wish fulfillment, pure and simple (not to mention the fact that many people find such a non-goal-oriented view of nature nevertheless inspiring and beautiful gives the lie to the assertion). Now, whether or not human beings can be reduced to such a physicalistic picture is a separate issue, one that is more complicated – all I am pointing out is that by our natures as human beings we have at least one foot in the same world as all of these physical going-ons.
5 Granted, trees that are planted all by their lonesome do not grow like trees in a forest, but a) they do not completely become like they would have had they not been the descendants of the other trees in the competition, & b) we can still talk about individual trees in the forest as being products of their environment.
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