The Tao of Evolution

The only really effective way to make sense of the world (if, of course, it’s “sense” that you’re after) is by drawing analogies between something you don’t understand and something that you do. When Alan Watts wanted to explain the Taoist concept of the world, he used the analogy of music, where “the end of the composition is not the point of the composition” and it’s the moving through time and relationship of present notes and chords to those already played that paints an enrapturing audible picture. He also used weaving to explain the tantric view of the universe, where a red bird and a red cloud are separate on one side of a tapestry but, should we turn it over, they are in fact created and connected by a continuum of the same red thread. It is by such means that people can make sense of the world, and from this we can extrapolate the role and value of myth: a myth is a picture or model in terms of which people make sense of the otherwise incomprehensible world.

For my part, my preferred "myth" is evolution, and for the same reason that Watts chose music and weaving. He was raised by a mother who wove for a living, and he was a classical music fanatic; I am a student of evolutionary models, both biological and social, and toward that end I am also a hopeless fanatic. Most people see evolution as a cold, mechanical procedure that molds and shapes life according to the vagaries of environmental circumstances – a worldview that has been denigrated as the “engineering” idea of the universe. I disagree. To me, evolution is like a ballet or an epic story, wherein the story unfolds (incidentally: the word “evolution” literally means “unfolding”) and twists and winds in complex and unforeseeable patterns that are at once dazzling and sensational. Orchids, for example, are pretty flowers in their own right, but when you consider the ways in which they have co-evolved with other creatures, in order to propagate and proliferate, their behavioral strategies become almost mind-boggling. To see an orchid – the flower, sexual organ of a plant, devoid of a brain or even a rudimentary nervous system – fool a bee into thinking its stamen [?] is a viable sexual partner is simply astonishing. To see something so simple and brainless as a fungus, specifically those of the cordiceps family, invade the minds of insects to the point of zombifying them to the end of behaving in a way that is totally at odds with their own survival, but absolutely assures the propagation of the fungus, is again almost otherworldly. And ants… they farm, they form cities, they enslave other creatures, they even evolve during their own lifetimes to suit their specific social roles (e.g., an ant that is “appointed” to be a soldier ant will morphologically adapt to that role, despite having no difference in its genetic sequence than an ant that is “appointed” to be a food collector) is as mystifying and tantalizing as the most hyperbolic of science fiction. And the list goes on.

The argument of philosophers and mystics that evolution reduces the beauty and sublimity of the natural world to a series of cold, heartless calculations is not so much a reflection on the theory of evolution as it is on their own theories of the natural world. First of all, to a passionate mathematician there is nothing cold or heartless about a calculation; I’ve seen math fanatics froth at the mouth and quake with tremors of ecstasy. But, more importantly, I find this distaste for evolution as merely symptomatic of that perennially menacing psychological paradigm known so well to feminists and other civil rights activists: the appointment and disavowing of the other. “It is not us, it is not like us, we do not understand it, and we hate it.” Taken to its extreme, from this comes eugenics and racism and all sorts of other historical wretchedness. But to restrict ourselves from extremes, it is also from this that we get simple misunderstandings about the nature and role of ideas, or myths, about the natural world and what it means to us. Someone who pounds on the pulpit of evolution in order to sound a trumpet of war against spiritualism or Biblical creationism is misusing the concept, but likewise someone who rails against evolution as a disgraceful and ugly reduction of the natural world to a series of numbers and equations likewise misses the point. If to watch a flower unfold is a meditative, sublime and cherished undertaking, then to watch – via comparative taxonomy, long hours in the library, and even longer hours pondering the expansive but inevitable gaps in the fossil record – the unfolding of natural history via evolution is no less transcendent an experience. It is, to return to Alan Watts, not the end of the thing that’s the point of the thing; the point of the dance is the dance. And evolution encompasses the entirety of known and imagined life throughout all but a fraction of the history of the Earth itself. It is the greatest dance of all.