"On the other hand, I agree with Wright that biological evolution isn't the only ordered process that shaped us. Life originally emerged from an architecture of physical and chemical laws. So natural selection isn't the first level of the cosmic order; it's at least the second or third."

"So natural selection isn't the first level of the cosmic order; it's at least the second or third. Why should we assume the architecture stops there? Shouldn't we look for directional patterns in cultural history? If such patterns exist, they'll be far more complicated than the patterns of biology, just as the patterns of biology are more complicated than the patterns of physics or chemistry. But science doesn't promise that everything can be explained with the same ease, or even in the same terms. You have to face the world as it is and develop new tools when the old ones fail."

"Natural selection has become a tremendous tool for understanding biology. But it wasn't the first kind of science we invented, and it won't be the last."

By calling this line of thinking "science", Saletan invites the criticism: where is the empiricism in this hypothesis? He seems to be arguing for a hypothesis that there exists an order and directionality to cultural evolution (at least I think that's what he is saying...). Ok, based on what?

And actually, he seems to be implying that biology and evolution towards humans with culture (or animals with pants, if you prefer) was a determined by the physical and chemical "architecture" of the cosmos. Ok, based on what? Maybe the author he cites has done some actual research on this, or maybe (far more likely I'm guessing) he sees the universe as it is and makes the common mistake of concluding it was always meant to be this way, and mistaking random events and coincidence as deterministic factors.

I'm not even saying it's necessarily wrong, but only that if we are to call that "science", then it is subject to the expectation of rigorous deduction, empirical research and development of testable hypotheses that are part of all sciences. The theory of evolution didn't come about without that hard work, and without that rigor we are merely in the realm of conjecture and metaphysics.

A good challenge. Wright makes his case in the Evolution of God and in Nonzero. He's more of a big-picture guy than I am; I tend to believe that trends move in little steps and can be reversed, or are abstractions from a more complex reality. But big-picture arguments like Wright's push us to look at the big picture and think about how everything fits together (or doesn't).

Precisely. I kept hoping the author would, at some point, acknowledge that simply the argument that seemingly different branches of thought can be brought together under one conceptual roof is a metaphysical one. As I said in my post, we need to go back to Kant and revisit the post-Enlightenment philosophers so as to get some perspective on this debate. I did not find anything in the article that was shockingly new; we've heard this debate before: Is the universe structured in such and such a way, or do our minds structure what our senses perceive? Furthermore, ideas evolve according to their own principles, as history shows.

I had a theoretic maths prof who when he got to a particularly hard proof would say in lecture "so we close our eyes and wave our arms and out pops..."

Wright's "case" is genorously described as "arm waving". He ignores all the work done on metastability of complex systems (ie there are local stability points in otherwise unstable or wildly fluctiating complex systems). Which is curious since he is arguing complexity.

You and he imply a hierarchical ordering of forces when the evidence is that it is purely statistical.

That's not "making a case" - that's ignoring inconvenient counters to your belief.

Thanks for the reply Mr. Saletan. Without having read those works, I am pretty skeptical of an argument that there are big deterministic arrows in what appear to be stochastic processes, including biological and cultural evolution. From biology, we can see a number of very strong pivot points in the process.

Darwin postulated that there may be many or one, but in fact there was but one common ancestor to all life on Earth. It left at least 23 identifiable genes that almost all life still carries in some form. We are all decended from that one original template, modified by time, but still carrying that residual imprint. It was but one solution to the question of how chemicals can form a life form, but from what we know now, it certainly wasn't the only one. What if it had been any different? Then the genetic template for all life on Earth would be different, and the evolution of life would have unfolded totally differently! How do we know that in an alternate universe, the process would still result in animals with pants.

The start is the most obvious example of a huge uncertainty. Another I think is are the great endosymbiosis events that lead to multicellular organisms. There were only two, one leading to all mitochondrial organisms (including animals) and one leading to all chloroplastic life forms (incl plants). These were discrete events of one prokaryote engulfing another in just the right way, place and time to result in a persistant reproducible metastable endosymbiosis.

Again, let's say a couple different prokaryotes had merged instead of hte exact two that lead to either all plants or all animals ... what would the outcome have been?

It's hard to believe a proof of determinism is possible knowing this. If the architecture of the universe was such that it favored the evolution of life somewhat as it is, leading eventually to animals with pants having cultures somewhat like they now do ... why does it look like the outcome was so improbable given the process? There is exactly one known emergence of life in the universe from the primordial soup. Maybe there were more, but we don't see anything left of it now. There were only two known symbiotic events leading to lineages multicellular organisms, and they are vastly different.

But I definitely agree that these sort of assertions, even if they aren't scientific, do spur uss to think about things... as we ourselves prove.