{"id":103560,"date":"2024-01-24T17:03:23","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T00:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=103560"},"modified":"2024-01-24T17:03:23","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T00:03:23","slug":"dont-take-it-all-for-granted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2024\/01\/dont-take-it-all-for-granted.html","title":{"rendered":"Don’t take it all for granted."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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A view of Monet\u2019s garden at Giverny, by Art Anderson (Wikimedia Commons public domain image) Since I have no confirmed photographs of Eden or Paradise, this will have to do for now.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
I\u2019ve been reading a small collection of essays by the late Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021), the Harvard biologist, \u00a0ecologist, and entomologist who is best known for developing the field of sociobiology: \u00a0Every Species is a \u00a0Masterpiece<\/em> (London: Penguin Books, 2021). \u00a0Wilson was also, by the way, an outspoken advocate of \u201cscientific humanism\u201d (a term that, indeed, he is said to have coined) and a vocal critic of religious belief, although he denied being an actual atheist.<\/p>\n
The principal theme of Every Species is a Masterpiece\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 the phrase occurs on page 75 \u2014 is the importance of conserving biodiversity. Professor Wilson was afraid that we\u2019re losing such diversity because of human actions and that, in fact, we\u2019re currently in the midst of Earth\u2019s seventh great extinction event. \u00a0But that is not my principal interest here, although I plan to share a few passages from Dr. Wilson\u2019s little book:<\/p>\n
"
The creation of that diversity came slow and hard: 3 billion years of evolution to start the profusion of animals that occupy the seas, another 350 million years to assemble the rain forests in which half or more of the species on earth now live. \u00a0There was a succession of dynasties. \u00a0Some species split into two or several daughter species, and their daughters split yet again to create swarms of descendants that deployed as plant feeders, carnivores, free swimmers, gliders, sprinters, and burrowers, in countless motley combinations. \u00a0These ensembles then gave way by partial or total extinction to new dynasties, and so on to form a gentle upward swell that carried biodiversity to a peak \u2014 just before the arrival of humans. \u00a0Life had stalled on plateaus along the way, and on five occasions [increased, in a subsequent essay, to six] it suffered extinction spasms that took 10 million years to repair. \u00a0But the thrust was upward. \u00a0Today the diversity of life is greater than it was a 100 million years ago \u2014 and far greater than 500 million years before that. \u00a0(26-27)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is not actually my major point today, but I note with interest the faint wisps of an implicit (and, strictly speaking, illicit) teleology in Professor Wilson\u2019s words above \u2014 in \u201ca gentle upward swell,\u201d \u201cstalled,\u201d \u201crepair,\u201d and \u201cupward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Science as it is currently conceived can be said to have begun with Sir Francis Bacon\u2019s explicit ban, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, on considerations of teleology (purposes or aims, Aristotle\u2019s \u201cfinal cause\u201d) from consideration by scientists as such. \u00a0In particular, evolutionary theorists are generally quite anxious to deny to the processes of organic evolution \u2014 Richard Dawkins\u2019s \u201cblind watchmaker\u201d \u2014 any purposes or conscious intent \u00a0 And an agnostic-leaning deist, as Professor Wilson is sometimes described, wasn\u2019t really in a position to reinsert them (and almost certainly didn\u2019t intend to do so).<\/p>\n
In a purposeless world, there is, well, no purpose. \u00a0No goal. \u00a0What is, is. \u00a0And, or so it seems to me, the proliferation of biological diversity has no more intrinsic \u201cmeaning\u201d than does, say, the shattering of a granite boulder into thousands of variously shaped smaller fragments. \u00a0There is, in that sense, no \u201cup\u201d or \u201cdown\u201d except in mere numbers. \u00a0And so, if we\u2019re going to be honest about our denial of purpose in the cosmos, we have to be thorough-going and consistent about it.<\/p>\n
But my real point in citing Dr. Wilson here is to capture, in his words, something of the sheer wonder of the biosphere as he saw it (and which I largely share). \u00a0So I continue:<\/p>\n
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Young or old, all living species are direct descendants of the organisms that lived 3.8 billion years ago. \u00a0They are living genetic libraries, composed of nucleotide sequences , the equivalent of words and sentences, which record evolutionary events all across that immense span of time. \u00a0Organisms more complex than bacteria \u2014 protists, fungi, plants, animals \u2014 contain between 1 and 10 billion nucleotide letters, more than enough in pure information to compose an equivalent of the Encyclopedia Britannica<\/em>. \u00a0Each species is the product of mutations and recombinations too complex to be grasped by unaided intuition. \u00a0It was sculpted and burnished by an astronomical number of events in natural selection, which killed off or otherwise blocked from reproduction the vast majority of its member organisms before they completed their lifespans. \u00a0Viewed from the perspective of evolutionary time, all other species \u00a0are our distant kin because we share a remote ancestry. \u00a0We still use a common vocabulary, the nucleic acid code, even though it has been sorted into radically different hereditary languages. \u00a0(28-29)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It\u2019s easy to overlook such things, to take them for granted. \u00a0But, really, we shouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
At Theaetetus<\/em> 155 D, Plato insists that \u201cwonder is the feeling of a philosopher and philosophy begins in wonder.\u201d \u00a0In Metaphysics<\/em> 982 b 12 ff., Aristotle declares that \u201d it is owing to wonder that men both now begin, and at first began, to philosophize. \u00a0They wondered . . . about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the origin of the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Organisms are all the more remarkable in combination. \u00a0Pull out the flower from its crannied retreat, shake the soil from the roots into the cupped hand, magnify it for close examination. \u00a0The black earth is alive with a riot of algae, fungi, nematodes, mites, springtails, enchytraeid worms, thousands of species of bacteria. \u00a0The handful may be only a tiny fragment of one ecosystem, but because of the genetic codex of its residents it holds more order than can be found on the surfaces of all the planets combined. \u00a0It is a sample of the living force that runs the earth \u2014 and will continue to do so with or without us. \u00a0(29-30)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The richness of the biosphere is almost incomprehensible.<\/p>\n
"
Consider first the question of the amount of biodiversity. \u00a0The number of species of organisms on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude. \u00a0About 1.5 million species have been given names to date, but the actual number is likely to lie somewhere between 10 and 100 million. \u00a0Among the least-known groups are the fungi, with 69,000 known species but 1.6 million thought to exist. \u00a0Also poorly explored are at least several million and possibly tens of millions of species of arthropods in the tropical rain forests; and millions of invertebrate species on the vast floor of the deep sea. \u00a0The true black hole of systematics, however, may be bacteria. \u00a0Although roughly 4,000 species have been formally described, recent studies in Norway have indicated the presence of from 4,000 to 5,000 species, almost all new to science, among the 10 billion individual organisms found on average in each gram of forest soil, and another 4,000 to 5,000 species, different from the first set and also mostly new, in an average gram of nearby marine sediments. \u00a0(54-55)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\u00a0 I\u2019ve been reading a small collection of essays by the late Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021), the Harvard biologist, \u00a0ecologist, and entomologist who is best known for developing the field of sociobiology: \u00a0Every Species is a \u00a0Masterpiece (London: Penguin Books, 2021). \u00a0Wilson was also, by the way, an outspoken advocate of \u201cscientific humanism\u201d (a term […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":61343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37143,27239,249,243,37146,16086],"class_list":["post-103560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biodiversity","tag-edward-o-wilson","tag-evolution","tag-science","tag-teleology","tag-wonder"],"yoast_head":"\nDon't take it all for granted.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\" I've been reading a small collection of essays by the late Edward O. 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