Mike's Notes
I came across the two-part essay, Universal Evolution, Probability and Life's Origins, by James Miller. It has to be one of the best explanations I have read of how those three topics on Nature come together. I have copied his essays in full to the blog and hope to record a video interview with him some time in the future.
The resource references below cover both essays.
Pipi's core architecture and properties were built on many of the same conclusions about nature.
Resources
- https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/universal-evolution-probability-and
- Anti-Dühring. Marx Engels Collected Works [MECW]
- Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. Terrance Deacon
- Miller-Urey experiment
- Aleksandr Oparin
- In Retrospect: The Origin of Life. Clifford P. Brangwynne and Anthony A. Hyman. 23 November 2012, Nature. (PDF available)
- Life versus the molecular storm, Mike White 2012.
- The Finch & Pea
- Origins of Life, Freeman Dyson, Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Ilya Prigogine
- Ilya Prigogine (The End of Uncertainty, 1997)
- Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (1944)
- Why Nature prefers Hexagons. Philip Ball, April 27, 2016, Nautilus.
- Charles Darwin
- Second Law of Thermodynamics
- Aging and longevity in the simplest animals and the quest for immortality. R. Petralia, M. Mattson, P. Yao, Ageing Res Rev. 2014 Jul
- Dissipative structure
- Bifurcation point
- Lecture on Emergence. C Lloyd Morgan
- Gifford Lectures
- Emergence. C.D. Broad (1887–1971)
- The Vital Question. Nick Lane
- Carnegie Institution’s Deep Carbon Observatory
- The Story of Earth. Robert Hazen
- Dialectics (Notes and fragments). Friedrich Engels (MECW, vol. 25)
- Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself. Jamie A. Davies
- Adaptive self-organization
- In Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos, Peter M. Hoffmann.
- In Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos, a talk by Peter M. Hoffmann at Microsoft Research.
- The Taming of Chance. Ian Hacking. (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
- Dialectics. Quantity and Quality. Frederick Engels (MECW, vol. 25)
- Our Politics Start With The World. Jack Barnes, New International, No. 13.
References
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Last Updated
17/05/2025
Universal Evolution, Probability and Life's Origins
Part 2. Dissipative structures
In evolving complex structures, reactions are fueled by self-generated energy or by energy from an external source. Some of this energy is channeled into the enlargement or complexification of given ordered structures. Thus, while the entropy created grows, the complex structures aggregate and extend themselves. Deacon goes to great pains to explain this and to justify his description of it, which results in a long and complex book, but he gives a summary account in these words (Deacon, ibid., p. 235.):
“In these processes, we glimpse a backdoor to the second law of thermodynamics that allows—even promotes—the spontaneous increase of order, correlated regularities, and complex partitioning of dynamical features under certain conditions. Ironically, these conditions also inevitably include a reliable and relentless increase in entropy. In many non-living processes, especially when subject to a steady influx of energy or materials, what are often called self-organizing features may become manifest. This constant perturbation of the thermodynamic arrow of change is in fact critical, because when the constant throughput of material and/or energy ceases, as it eventually must, the maintenance of this orderliness breaks down as well. In terms of constraint, this means that so long as extrinsic constraints are continually imposed, creating a contragrade dynamic to the spontaneous orthograde dissipation of intrinsic constraints, new forms of intrinsic constraint can emerge and even amplify.
“. . . Here we see that living organisms exemplify dissipative structures that survive as long as their self-organizing processes can overcome the second law of thermodynamics. Individual death is the result. We can think about these phenomena by imagining spontaneous reactions occurring in an environment at thermodynamic equilibrium. These reactions generate instabilities in which it is possible to go further away from equilibrium or fall back to equilibrium. But as we think of this, we must remember that some chemical reactions create products that are more stable than the reactants; i.e., it takes more energy to break the bonds that have formed than it took to create them. This allows the creation of stable chemical compounds in a far-from-equilibrium condition. In some circumstances, this stability may go further away from equilibrium. Prigogine says there is a “bifurcation point” indicating the possibility of a new step in the direction already taken, or a falling back toward equilibrium (ibid. p. 66). There is no “determinate process” going on in this; it is all a function of probabilities that emerge and disappear in the chaotic flux of matter in motion. Organized structures that sustain themselves, however temporary or permanent, are denoted “dissipative structures” by Prigogine, and he argues that chemistry allows for the existence of “(1) far-from-equilibrium situations defined by a critical distance; and (2) catalytic steps, such as the production of intermediate compound Y from compound X, together with the production of X from Y.” (ibid, p. 66)
The need for a critical distance depends on sufficient local concentrations of the reactants. Within the critical distance between 2 or more atoms or molecules, the formation of a chemical bond becomes increasingly probable, provided that their chemical affinities are conducive to this kind of interaction. But beyond the critical distance, the question of bond formation does not arise. The question of catalysis is also important. The presence of a catalytic surface is important in the formation of bonds because it lowers the energy of activation that is necessary for the formation of a bond. Catalysts make bonds easier to form. Many “origin of life” experiments take this into account by providing catalytic elements (usually metals) in the initial conditions of the procedure.
Deacon discusses the “bifurcation point” in Incomplete Nature (ibid., p. 249):
“But there is an upper limit to this diffusion process that has a critical effect on the overall global dynamic. This is a threshold at which dynamical discontinuities occur. These are often called bifurcation points, on either side of which distinctively different dynamical tendencies tend to develop. At this threshold, local variations can produce highly irregular chaotic behaviors, as quite distinct dynamic tendencies tend to form near one another and interact antagonistically. But exceeding this threshold, radical changes in orthograde dynamics can take place.”
The diffusion process to which he refers is when a system is approaching toward, or receding away from, a highly-constrained far-from-equilibrium configuration; there is an inflection point in the gradient which marks a change in the vulnerability of the system to outside impingement and disruption. For example, the greater the input of heat into the system, the more intense the molecular activity, and the more vulnerable the system is to disruption (imagine the denaturing of proteins).
But the real significance of “dissipative structures” is that they increase entropy when the “final” balance sheet of the molecular activity is provided. In saying this we recognize that there is no “final” balance sheet while regenerating processes are established as continuous, but there are cycles of growth and decay which create repetitive cyclic processes of structural dissipation. On the one side, the dissipative structures absorb free energy from the environment. (In the case of earth’s biomass, this is primarily energy from the sun, but we can’t forget that some microorganisms absorb non-solar energy that is stored in minerals). But in addition to the absorption of energy from the environment, living creatures emit energy through their metabolic activity. This energy is radiated outward in the form of heat. On balance, the heat radiated away from the dissipative structures exceeds the heat absorbed, so the thermodynamic balance is positive. The existence of life, however glorious it might be, actually does its part to hasten the death of the universe.
We must presuppose the interaction of molecules at the beginning of the inquiry into the origin of life without first naming and categorizing these particles, because whatever they might have been is as yet unknown. The initial approach should be based on a consideration of processes of emergence. This is not a departure from materialism, but a necessity when discussing a material change that took place billions of years ago, which science is incapable of theoretically reconstructing at present. Of course, every process has material components, and in nature, the processes and the components are not independent but exist through time as inseparable aspects of the integral synthesis of universal phenomena.
But what does the term “emergence” mean? The theme of emergence has long been a focus of discussion among philosophers of science. C. Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936) was one of the founders of this course of analysis. In his first Gifford lecture, he defined emergence as the appearance of something new that could not have been predicted by knowing the pre-existing entities that gave rise to it. And he gave an example
https://www.giffordlectures.org/books/emergent-evolution/lecture-i-emergence:
“When carbon having certain properties combines with sulfur having other properties there is formed not a mere mixture but a new compound some of the properties of which are quite different from those of either component. Now the weight of the compound is an additive resultant of the sum of the weights of the components; and this could be predicted before any molecule of carbon-bisulfide had been formed. One could say in advance that if carbon and sulfur shall be found to combine in any ascertainable proportions there will be such and such weight as resultant. But sundry other properties are constitutive emergents which (it is claimed) could not be foretold in advance of any instance of such combination. Of course, when one has learnt what emerges in this particular instance one may predict what will emerge in that like instance under similar circumstances. One has learnt something of the natural plan of emergent evolution.”
The example taken from Morgan is from the science of chemistry, but the same principle can be applied, for example, in biology. C.D. Broad (1887–1971), another philosopher of science, made the following argument about nutrition https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/broad/#Eme:
“Suppose a certain biological feature, e.g. the capacity for nutrition, is an emergent property. This means that the property is not a mere result of an immensely high degree of organisational complexity at the chemical level. The property is, to be sure, nomically dependent on the chemical level, but it is not a mere resultant of the properties, relations, and laws operative at that level. If nutrition were a mere resultant property, it would be a reducible property; it would be a property that theoretically can be inferred from features at the chemical level (i.e. the properties, relations, and laws which characterise the constituents in isolation or in other wholes than the one in question).”
Biology teaches us that life evolves; living creatures are part of an evolutionary process in which existing organisms extend, regenerate and reproduce themselves through adaptations they have accumulated in the course of evolution. But what kinds of matter in motion, chemical reactions, and cycles were possible or likely at the period of the origin of life 3.5 or 4 billion years ago? The capacity to systematically generate energy to fuel ongoing chemical cycles is one of the important questions that has been addressed. It is recognized that at the very beginning of life, there was no photosynthesis—which could only emerge as the result of a long period of biological evolution—so the first self-assembling, self-perpetuating chemical cycles had to rely on the absorption of energy from sources that were a natural part of the environment. The energy to be used by the first repeatable chemical cycles could have come from the sun, lightning, or volcanic activity, and volcanic activity includes the release of subterranean gases through vents on the sea floor.
Various hypotheses have been developed around this assumption, including one that indicates that life originated in the pores of sea-bottom alkaline hydrothermal vents (initially proposed by Michael Russell of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elaborated by Nick Lane in his book The Vital Question). The alkalinity of the heated water welling up from the subsurface, as it mixed with the acidic seawater, established the conditions for the continuous flow of reactive chemical and heat energy. Other scientists have been examining microbial life forms that exist deep within the rock structures in the earth’s interior, for example at the Carnegie Institution’s Deep Carbon Observatory, hoping to expand knowledge about the variety of modes of existence of living creatures. See Robert Hazen’s book, The Story of Earth. Although there is no specific evidence as yet to confirm these hypotheses, scientists agree that life began by means of a transition from non-living chemistry and arrived, perhaps through many intermediate stages, at a stage whereby evolution through natural selection could be definitively established.
As Deacon has argued (ibid., p. 430),
“So, the first organism wasn’t a product of natural selection. The constellation of processes that we identify with biological evolution ultimately emerged from a kind of proto-evolution, supported by a kind of protolife, that ultimately must trace back to the spontaneous emergence of the first molecular systems capable of some minimal form of evolutionary dynamic.”
But we need to recognize that the existence of any self-organizing, complex, self-regenerating system of chemical reactions that emerged from the primordial chaos would require the generation of constraints (evolving limitations that prevent the emergence of disorganizing processes). The developing structures that would protect the cohesion of the generated molecular pattern and push forward its cyclic regeneration. Organized systems do not suddenly appear as if by magic. For the emergence of any given dynamic system of relationships, or cyclical processes, there is a point in time when it does not yet exist in an organized form, but only in potential. A potential is “real” in the sense that, while it has not yet emerged as a definite material process or entity, there does exist a probability in the given configuration of chemical relationships that it can emerge to become part of the ongoing processes in a given locale.
We recognize that in any natural evolutionary process, there are transitions that lead from lower to higher levels of any existing formation, or from preparatory stages to advanced stages of development. There is often discontinuity in these transitions. Higher levels contain features that cannot be predicted by examining the antecedent stages. The potential that is realized in a higher stage is not found by examining the lower stage, but that does not mean that the unrealized potential, existing within the lower stage, is illusory or fictitious. This is due to the probabilistic nature of natural evolutionary changes.
This process of the transition of any potential into full existence is probabilistic, that is, it is an outcome that becomes more-or-less likely given the existing molecular circumstances. Unrealized potentials are therefore undetermined. A wide range of different outcomes are possible, and some are more probable than others. This or that outcome is not solely reliant on the momentum or dynamic of a particular process, taken in isolation, but will vary depending on the changing environment which that process inhabits, and forms a part of. Molecular relationships and interactions are constantly emerging and dying away in uncountable different circumstances. The emergence of organized chemical systems out of the ever-changing world of pre-existing possibilities not only must conform to these pre-existing physical constraints, but also must develop new, more specific constraints which then become critical features of the process concerning its structural stability, as well as in relation to the environment that gave birth to it and continues to surround it.
Before an entity becomes real in the world, there must be some potential. And every potential that emerges corresponds to conditions that both facilitate its transition into full existence, and at the same time prepare the constraints that define its limits. But whatever has not yet happened only comes about as a result of prior conditions, which themselves are constantly changing. Thus, probability becomes an essential condition of all processes of change in nature. The study of transitions from what is probable to what is occurring, or what has previously occurred, brings us the question of chance and necessity. This contraposition is often interpreted as an absolute contrast. In reality, however, accident and necessity cannot be contrasted with one another as an “either/or” question. As Friedrich Engels argued in 1878 (MECW, vol. 25, p. 498):
“Another opposition in which metaphysics is entangled is that of chance and necessity. What can be more sharply contradictory than these two thought determinations? How is it possible that both are identical, that the accidental is necessary, and the necessary is also accidental? Common sense, and with it the majority of natural scientists, treats necessity and chance as determinations that exclude each other once for all. A thing, a circumstance, or a process is either accidental or necessary, but not both.
“… And then it is declared that the necessary is the sole thing of scientific interest and that the accidental is a matter of indifference to science. That is to say: what can be brought under laws, hence what one knows, is interesting; what cannot be brought under laws, and therefore what one does not know, is a matter of indifference and can be ignored.”
Engels goes on to explain the problems encountered in trying to argue that every minuscule variation in nature is absolutely predetermined, such that there is no such thing as “accidental.” This renders science itself impossible, because there are no methods by which natural variations can be predicted. Elements that emerge from a defined starting point cannot be predicted because what is possible depends not only on what potentials are generated within the molecular chaos.
Engels, then, refers to the philosophy of Hegel, which provides an answer to this rigid dichotomy between accident and determinism (Logik, II, Book III, 2: "Die Wirklichkeit"), MECW, vol. 25, p. 500):
“Hegel came forward with the hitherto quite unheard-of propositions that the accidental has a cause because it is accidental, and just as much also has no cause because it is accidental; that the accidental is necessary, that necessity determines itself as chance, and, on the other hand, this chance is rather absolute necessity.”
While Hegel’s form of posing the nature of this contradiction might be difficult to interpret in the common language of today, it is his way of characterizing the relationships within nature that provoked the awakening consciousness of the young Marx and Engels back in the 1840s. Engels continues:
“… Darwin, in his epoch-making work, set out from the widest existing basis of chance. Precisely the infinite, accidental differences between individuals within a single species, differences which become accentuated until they break through the character of the species, and whose immediate causes even can be demonstrated only in extremely few cases (the material on chance occurrences accumulated in the meantime has suppressed and shattered the old idea of necessity), compelled him to question the previous basis of all regularity in biology, viz., the concept of species in its previous metaphysical rigidity and unchangeability. Without the concept of species, however, all science was nothing.”
In other words, the changes from generation to generation within a population, as well as the genome-wide changes brought about by gene exchange between closely related populations, cannot be predicted in each instance, but over time these processes produce a new species that becomes reproductively isolated from its progenitor species. Thus, a barrier forms between the related species, which can be defined by certain limitations on the possibility of producing viable offspring. Thus nature, natural selection, has produced and continues to produce, unique species which are thought to be reproductively isolated entities, even though from the standpoint of anatomy and physiology they are very nearly identical. Darwin, writing in the 1860s, knew nothing of the gene, nor of its chemical composition or structure, nor even of the genetic factors that the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, had analyzed in the same historical period.
The speciation process is ongoing, so we must keep in mind that the current levels of classification of species: (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) are only an approximation and do not provide for the intermediate forms that are still in process of determination, or straddle the boundary line between one species and another. As Engels has said on this point:
“Hard and fast lines are incompatible with the theory of evolution. Even the borderline between vertebrates and invertebrates is now no longer rigid, just as little is that between fishes and amphibians, while that between birds and reptiles dwindles more and more every day. Between Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx only a few intermediate links are wanting, and birds’ beaks with teeth crop up in both hemispheres. “Either-or” becomes more and more inadequate. Among lower animals, the concept of the individual cannot be established at all sharply. Not only as to whether a particular animal is an individual or a colony, but also where in development one individual ceases and the other begins (nurses).
“For a stage in the outlook on nature where all differences become merged in intermediate steps, and all opposites pass into one another through intermediate links, the old metaphysical method of thought no longer suffices. Dialectics, which likewise knows no hard and fast lines, no unconditional, universally valid “either-or” and which bridges the fixed metaphysical differences, and besides “either-or” recognises also in the right place “both this-and that” and reconciles the opposites, is the sole method of thought appropriate in the highest degree to this stage. Of course, for everyday use, for the small change of science, the metaphysical categories retain their validity.”
As with biological evolution, the same contradiction involving chance and necessity comes into play when considering the transformation of inorganic chemical reactions into self-perpetuating, self-renewing cycles of reactions. As in the biology of living systems, so also in those prebiotic chemical cycles that first showed the potential to become self-organizing systems, it became necessary—but only in hindsight—to overcome the chaotic thermodynamic obstacles that constantly favor dissolution and disorganization. The process was spontaneous and must have only occurred after millions of near misses. So, was the process that led to the origin of life on the planet foreordained or necessary in any sense? This is like the story that, if 100 monkeys make random keystrokes on 100 typewriters, given sufficient time, the complete works of Shakespeare will eventually be produced. Maybe, maybe not. How much time is left in the universe? As for life on the planet, how much time was available? Only about 10 billion years.
As we study biology, we come to recognize that the process of natural selection demonstrates the potential for new adaptive traits providing improved adaptation of populations to their environment, but at the same time, other populations experience the growth of maladaptive changes which widen the gap between their survivability and the environmental conditions. The road to the emergence of a new species is also the road to the extinction of the same species, having grown old.
Given that scientists do not have any concrete evidence of the transitional forms that preceded the first life form, then we are left with calculated guesswork. Jamie A. Davies, in his book Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself, begins his approach to the explanation of life’s beginnings by introducing the term “adaptive self-organization” to indicate the range of physical possibilities that embrace inorganic chemistry as well as the evolution of life itself and the physiology of plants and animals. On page 5 he refers to this term:
“‘Adaptive self-organization’ is a description grounded in the components and looks upwards, describing how the application of simple rules to these components can result in their collectively doing something large-scale, clever, and subtle. The way in which adaptive self-organization allows non-living molecules to produce a living cell, and allows cells with very limited individual abilities to produce a very able multicellular body, will form a theme that runs through this book because it is the core of development. Adaptive self-organization and emergence go far beyond biology, and some very readable books on its wider implications are listed under ‘Further reading’.”
Deacon devotes a significant portion of his book to the question of how complex self-regenerating systems can emerge and persist without violating the second law of thermodynamics. Systems that are in thermodynamic equilibrium are systems that can just as easily lose order as gain order, but life is a phenomenon of persistent self-organization that continuously reproduces itself in a far-from-equilibrium state. Life is highly ordered. As Deacon explains (p. 223), in an isolated system, such as a gas trapped in a flask, thermodynamic equilibrium will remain undisturbed:
“This is made explicit in the classic thermodynamic model system: A gas in a container that can be isolated from all outside influences. Asymmetrically heat the container, using an external heat source, and the majority of molecules in one region are forced to move more rapidly than the majority at some other region. But as soon as the external influence is removed, the gas will begin an inevitable transition back to equilibrium, redistributing these local differences. In the one case, the cause must be imposed from without for change to occur, in the other the cause is intrinsic; change will happen unless it is impeded by outside intervention.”
[But the world is not composed of isolated systems.]
“Because the world is structured and not uniform, and because there are many distinct dimensions of orthograde change (change of status toward equilibrium) possible, involving different properties of things, such as temperature, mass, movement, electric charge, structural form, etc., certain of these tendencies can interact in relative isolation from others. Contragrade change is the natural consequence of one orthograde process influencing a different orthograde process—for example, via some intervening medium. This implies that in one sense all change ultimately originates from spontaneous processes.”
Inorganic chemistry involves constant perturbation of systems that impinge on one another. The perturbations create chemical reactions and cycles that harbor a tendency to create mutually interdependent cycles that push away from thermodynamic equilibrium and give rise to self-limiting and self-renewing systems. Deacon introduces terminology and concepts that try to examine what were the possible ways in which interdependent, self-perpetuating chemical processes might spontaneously emerge.
What is the ongoing activity in the inorganic world that makes the emergence of life a possibility? In Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos, Peter M. Hoffmann explains the source of energy that drives the creation of life as well as its persistence (p. 7),
“As we enter the microscopic world of life’s molecules, we find that chaos, randomness, chance, and noise are our allies. Without the shaking and rattling of the atoms, life’s molecules would be frozen in place, unable to move. Yet, if there were only chaos, there would be no direction, no purpose, to all this shaking. To make the molecular storm a useful force for life, it needs to be harnessed and tamed by physical laws and sophisticated structures—it must be tamed by molecular machines. The fruitful interaction of chance and necessity also explains how these chaos-harvesting machines were designed by evolution.”
Speaking of the great strides taken in the course of the development of modern scientific knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Friedrich Engels remarks (Dialectics of Nature, Introduction):
“The new outlook on nature was complete in its main features: all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity dissipated, all particularity that had been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature was shown as moving in eternal flux and cyclical course.”
Both random chance and determinate order are necessary for the emergence of life. Life requires the mutual interdependence of chemical cycles whose chemical products provide reactants for other cycles. The primordial chemical processes are not the same as those which later evolve to become metabolic processes within living organisms, although the same physical laws constrain both organic and inorganic systems. The physical laws governing the bonding of chemicals have to do with physical distance, the presence or absence of catalysts (whether biological or inorganic), the electronegativity of the elements in question, the presence or absence of free energy for energy of activation, etc. These are described in any chemistry textbook. The intermediate systems are transitional forms in a double sense. First, they represent a transition from unconnected cycles of chemical reactions to complexes of mutually interdependent systems. Secondly, they represent a transient stage on the road to becoming what we now call “life.” As of this point in history, scientists can neither work out what those stages were, nor recreate them in laboratories.
Ian Hacking, in his book The Taming of Chance (Cambridge University Press, 1990), a very readable history of scientific creation, speaks of the erosion of determinism and the advance of statistical thinking (p. xiii):
“Determinism was eroded during the nineteenth century and a space was cleared for autonomous laws of chance. The idea of human nature was displaced by a model of normal people with laws of dispersion. These two transformations were parallel and fed into each other. Chance made the world seem less capricious: it was legitimated because it brought order out of chaos. The greater the level of indeterminism in our conception of the world and of people, the higher the expected level of control.”
Here Hacking seems to express the same judgment on the probabilistic nature of control as Schrodinger (ibid., above): “Only in the cooperation of an enormously large number of atoms do statistical laws begin to operate and control the behavior of these assemblies with an accuracy increasing as the number of atoms involved increases.”
Imagine a bell curve as a way of evaluating a population’s height. The curve rises to the mean and then falls as it proceeds along the range of possibilities. The extremes are considered the opposites: short on one side, tall on the other, with the average height in the middle. Opposites are seen as “mutually exclusive” entities, yet there is a continuous gradation separating them. The recognition of “infinitesimal magnitudes” in natural differences is the starting point for differential calculus. Engels pointed out (MECW, vol. 25, p. 111):
“But, regardless of all protests made by common sense, the differential calculus under certain circumstances nevertheless equates straight lines and curves, and thus obtains results which common sense, insisting on the absurdity of straight lines being identical with curves, can never attain. And, in view of the important role which the so-called dialectics of contradiction has played in philosophy from the time of the ancient Greeks up to the present, even a stronger opponent than Herr Dühring should have felt obliged to attack it with other arguments besides one assertion and a good many abusive epithets.”
What happens is the emergence of something that did not exist before. Whatever entity it might turn out to be is something that “crossed the line” between potentially existent and really existent. But where is that line? Is there a way to locate the exact point in time when something changes from “potential” to “real”? If you could pinpoint the exact moment of change, then you would no longer need the concept of “potential” at all. You would only be positing an instantaneous transformation of the one entity into the other. Instead of “emergence” you would only be falling back on the idea of an “external force” that substitutes the one for the other. In using the concept of “potential” you recognize that there is a contradiction between two internally generated forces, between birth and death, between being and nothing, and between what is coming into being and what is passing away.
Nature is fluid. The world is not only composed of objects linked or separated by forces; it is also made up of constantly emerging, evolving, and interacting processes, which create and recreate what are defined for analytical purposes as “objects,” but which themselves are only momentary and transitional incarnations of the world movement. The natural processes of “emergence” have been topics of study and debate since the early 19th century, since it is not easy to imagine something that didn’t exist before without divine intervention, nor is it so easy to discern the causes of emergent phenomena.
Deacon emphasizes that life was not created, nor did it suddenly appear. It emerged spontaneously, out of the accumulation of evolving chemical cycles. But how are we to understand “emergence”? Deacon explains the challenge:
“This is the problem of emergence: understanding how a new, higher dimension of causal influence can be woven from the interrelationships among component processes and properties of a lower dimension.”
It is Deacon’s goal to help us try to understand the myriad ways in which order can emerge spontaneously from the chaos of the mass of molecular collisions, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of magical thinking. His book is not necessary for understanding the progress of biology or anthropology, but it provides valuable lessons on how to develop scientific hypotheses for questions that are as yet unresolved, while at the same time upholding a strictly materialistic outlook in the approach.
Our species is one of the products of evolutionary development, which was first biological, then became social. We think of evolutionary change as a slow process, moving in tiny increments, and only over long periods of time do we see changes that seem to make a difference. Continents drift apart. The flat plain becomes a mountain range. The fish becomes an air-breathing tetrapod. Homo erectus becomes Homo sapiens. Evolutionary science allows us to trace the continuity between the ancestor and the descendant. Paleontology relies on evidence, carbon dating of artifacts, analysis of fossils, studies of comparative vertebrate anatomy, etc., and more recently the study of ancient DNA using various molecular genetic methods and DNA resources. Lineages can be traced through a combination of these different approaches. Many gaps can be filled in with hypothesized intermediate forms.
We human beings are the only species capable of thinking about and studying our own origins and history, as well as planning our future social development. With the scientific knowledge gained by humanity, we are learning how to manage the resources on our planet, resources that provide the basis for all life, and for our human civilizations. We are the only species that has the capacity to become the steward of nature, the guarantors of the health of our planetary ecosystems, and the makers of our own future as integral members of the planetary biota. But in order for us to fulfill our roles as protectors of the planet and molders of our common life together, we must first carry through the changes in our own social organization that will allow us to achieve these goals.
“A socialist revolution will be the first and most important task faced by humanity to open the door to the future, a future which will fulfill the guiding principle: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” (Marx).
The evolution of life on earth has brought forth the human capacities needed to emerge from the preparatory stage of development of our social development. We are now in an age of revolutionary transition from a lower stage of society to a higher one. The national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party of the U.S., Jack Barnes, describes this perspective in the following words, taken from the journal New International, No. 13. (p. 57):
“The establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat won’t bring socialism. It will create the conditions in which the working class can begin to take ever-greater strides toward workers’ control of industry together with the opening steps toward the management of industry and economic planning. In which farmers, no longer threatened by foreclosure on the land they till, can begin, with the help of toilers in the cities, to revolutionize agricultural production in the interests of humanity today and tomorrow (and can teach the urban population a thing or two, enriching our lives and broadening our culture). In which Blacks can organize under the aegis of the new state power to take rapid, giant strides toward ridding social relations of every vestige of racist prejudice and discrimination. In which women, together with powerful allies, can organize themselves to advance the struggle for their complete emancipation from the oppressive legacy of millennia of class society. And in which the entire weight of the new workers and farmers republic in the United States will be brought to bear to advance every struggle for national liberation and for socialism taking place anywhere in the world.”
Barnes’ conscious activity is within the tradition of Marx and Engels, who asserted in the Communist Manifesto:
“We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
“Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
“… When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
