A Transcendent Selectionism

Can selectionism inspire? I think so. The following is the wrap-up to my review of Human Accomplishment, submitted for publication.

Secularism and a Transcendent Selectionism
Murray awakened old ghosts who once tried to teach me about Socrates, Aquinas, and Augustine, and later, Camus, Sartre, and Eliot. I lied of course, respectfully parroting answers to questions that I had not lived. My teachers, knew of my pretense but never confronted me with it, investing in me because it was the good thing to do, and, consequently, my loyalty to them is now the greater. I ask their questions almost a half-century later, but from within and without first raising my hand. I also feel guilt: I repay their patient investments with the unfeeling currency of emergent networks and biophysics, scavenged at the divide between living and non living.

Selectionism, nonetheless, inspires today as it inspired Darwin and his army of supporters and there is plenty more inspiration. Lewontin remarked somewhere that evolution is a long history of organisms? finding devious means around constraints. While living creatures may be hammered by environment over generations, but within any single generation, each creature swings its own hammer and arranges its environment. Tennyson who reacted to ?Nature, red in tooth and claw? should also have reacted as he did to Ulysses: ?...strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.? (There are many who make this point. Lewontin, 2000, and Turner, 2000, do it better than most.)

I believe in our union with other living creatures but also believe that, contrary to Sagan?s ramblings, humans may be unique in the universe. I find purpose and transcendence not in God or gods but in being one of selection?s children: heir, guardian, and advocate for the work of 500 million years, expecting that secularists will make the same opportunities for our faith that Christians sculpted for theirs.

My aspirations, thus, are the same that Murray admires: individual purpose, responsibility, and autonomy, an inner hunger for the ideas and choices that satisfy not only my peers and Murray but, most importantly, my parents? genes and examples. Secularism did not kill these things for me but makes them possible as I, too, seek and try to define the good, the true, and the beautiful. I have my own form of personal will; I think, dream, anticipate my future, and pursue sometimes noble, sometimes base goals. But I think that my cat does, too, especially when we make parallel trails, separated by 20 feet, through a grassy field under a cool October moon. Murray and I hunger for excellence and we may yet find it crafted once more, still by living forms, first here on Earth but some day in the stars.

copyright, 2004, James Brody, all rights reserved.

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