Nature’s Experiment

Is the universe intelligent? It often appears that way. Over the course of earth’s 4.5 billion year history, nature has produced countless lifeforms. Each of these, in a sense, is an experiment. And that includes us.

We like to think we’re special; the penultimate form of intelligent life that has ever existed. That may or may not be true, but in any event, it may not mean that our survival is assured. 99.9% of all life forms that have arisen on this planet are extinct. There’s a reason for that; nature’s experiment pits life against life, and even life against nature.

Some paleontologists believe that humanity once shrank to as few as 25,000 individuals. If so, to bounce back to 8 billion plus is a remarkable achievement. It’s said that the human population is leveling off, or even shrinking. If you’ve ever raised bacteria in a petri dish, then you already know what happens when a population exceeds the resources of its environment.

It can be said, and is said by some, that because human beings arose from nature, everything that human beings create is natural. There’s a logic to that, but to call plutonium or artificial intelligence natural because human beings invented them seems to me to be a stretch. The theme of many sci-fi movies and novels is that artificial intelligence comes to view organic life as defective and something to be eliminated. We’ll see.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to muddle through. It’s what we do, muddle. It’s from mud we arose, and it’s still where we play, making a muddle of things.

When nature’s experiments fail, nature doesn’t give up. You gotta like that in a living system. As far as nature is concerned, it’s always “batter up“. That intelligent life evolved from a primitive mammal instead of species of dinosaur, a Velociraptor for example, may have more to do with the intrusion of an asteroid 65 million years ago than anything special about human beings. The rise of mammals may have been a cosmic accident.

If nature’s human experiment flops, and there’s a 99.9% chance it will, there is still time for yet more experiments. The earth is roughly 4 1/2 billion years old, and with another 4 billion years there’s plenty of opportunity for some new experiments.

I’m not proposing that the human experiment is already a failure, but at this point in evolution, our intelligence far exceeds our wisdom. What is wisdom? I’d propose that wisdom is the ability to see beyond oneself and the system in which one is embedded, to be able to understand more than simple cause-and-effect.

The human tendency is to understand what’s called Effective Cause, the simple type that assigns blame. Wisdom understands Total Cause, sees the interconnectedness of all events and does not isolate moments into matters of blame. Wisdom is understanding complexity.

Perhaps wisdom is in such short supply because complexity is well, complex. Truth, for example, is never completely true. We simply don’t know enough to know the absolute truth. We are pretty good guessers, and that’s helped us muddle through, but the consequences of our ignorant mistakes may be too great to overcome.

We need to accept the fact that we are an experiment and that like all of nature’s animal experiments we are vulnerable to failure. What humanity needs is a good lesson in humility, and something tells me we’re going to get it.