SF authors say smart things (Part 1)

I’ve been doing a lot of talking about how silly “Intelligent Design” theory is, but deep thinking SF writer Karl Schroeder has pointed out that I (and a whole bunch of other folks, including almost everyone more optimistic about humanity than I am) may have been guilty of making the same mistake in the other direction:

The idea that organisms are evolving in a particular direction is exactly the same sort of error as the idea that complex systems require a conscious designer.

Crucially, the general trend toward greater complexity in earthly life is not the result of some direction to evolution; it’s the result of random drift taking place in the absence of mass extinctions.

I think most people with some understanding of natural selection would nod and shrug at this idea; one of the implications, however, is that in evolution, complexity does not correlate to fitness. Translation: smarter is better only 50% of the time. Sometimes, new organisms survive because they’re smarter than their ancestors; equally often, it’s the dumber ones who survive. This fact is reflected in the fossil record.

In the comments Schroeder gives a very pithy summary:

Ultimately what I’m saying is that intelligence is an outstanding and useful trait, like having big claws is an outstanding and useful trait, but if such traits increased fitness in and of themselves then every organism on Earth would have big claws. Big claws are great tools for particular types of organisms doing particular types of things; ditto for intelligence. It’s kind of a Copernican revolution sort of idea: the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth, and intelligence is not the pinnacle or aim of evolution. Intelligence is just one of a whole suite of traits an organism can choose from.

Schroeder actually has two blogs, his more personal one, and the one this extract is from “Age of Embodiment”, which he describes as: “Age of Embodiment is a forum for commentary on what I see as a massive cultural change that’s sweeping towards us: the end of the Modern/Postmodern age, and the beginning of a new era. ”

(An aside: I’ve got two of Schroeder’s recent books in my to read queue–picked them up this week. I quite enjoyed his two previous works Ventus and Permanence as well. And he’s a Canadian, too.)