#7: Darwinism in the End Times
Elaborations on the Medea hypothesis.
Why Lucretius Missed The Mark
Darwinism is essentially a theory of biology as endlessly compacting trauma. Its domain of applicability is usually restricted to inter and intra-species differentiation, but its claims are essentially ontological and metaphysical. To construct Darwinism, God has to die as a benevolent creator and be reborn as sleek and simple Spinozist hardware. A product of pure logical necessity, this hardware immediately sets to work producing abominable messes according to a remarkably straightforward algorithm. These abominable messes, which we call living beings, have been trying to clean themselves up ever since. There is an optimistic interpretation of Darwinism which tells us that life is beautiful—this interpretation deserves contempt and humiliation, not least because it comes from Darwin himself in one of his more obsequious moments.
If Darwinism is trauma, life is a panic attack. At some indeterminate time and by some miracle, inorganic and inert matter was organised into self-replicating and active matter. The moment it appears, life is compelled to proliferate and repeat or slip back into the emptiness of non-existence. In fact, there’s no reason to suppose life came into being on Earth just once—it could have happened many times before it managed to set a long-lasting evolutionary chain in motion. As Lucretius (died ~55 BC) wrote in Book V of his De Rerum Natura:
“In those days, again, many species must have died out altogether and failed to reproduce their kind. Every species that you now see drawing the breath of life has been protected and preserved from the beginning of the world either by cunning or by prowess or by speed.”
Lucretius is an unlikely precursor to Darwin, but a precursor he is. Lucretianism, or poetic Epicurean atomism, manages to assemble many of the machine parts necessary to construct evolution by natural selection. He conceives of the universe as a self-organising arrangement of atoms plummeting through infinite space, endowed with the ability to swerve and come into combination with one another, with no need for a creator God to bring things into order. The Earth, once assembled, births many monstrous forms:
“Creatures bereft of feet or dispossessed of hands, dumb, mouthless brutes, or eyeless and blind, or disabled by the adhesion of their limbs to the trunk, so that they could neither do anything nor go anywhere nor keep out of harm’s way nor take what they needed. These and other such monstrous and misshapen births were created. But all in vain. Nature debarred them from increase.”
That is, unfit forms were selected out of existence, preserving species more fit to compete in the game of life. In Darwinist terms, this is differential reproduction. In Book IV, Lucretius writes that a person is conceived when the maternal and paternal seed come together during sex. Lucretius explains that the reason ancestral traits from the grandparents or great-grandparents can recur is because each seed is a random assortment of parts of other seeds in the lineage. He not only gives us a unit and a mechanism of heredity here—albeit a crude one which evokes Venus as explanatory principle—he also supplies us with a mechanism of variation, both thanks to his recognition that traits are distributed randomly in seeds, but also in the untapped potential that a universe composed of self-assembling atomic fluxes offers to the perceptive Lucretian. Even Malthusian scarcity features in Lucretius’ schema, so why didn’t he beat Darwin to the punch?
The answer lies in Lucretius’ pessimism. Convinced that the Earth was due to end after a long process of decay and exhaustion, he argued that it had long since ceased to produce novel forms and was barely able to sustain life any longer. To believe that evolution can still be taking place so long after the generation of the world, one has to be either an audacious optimist or a painfully grim pessimist. Charles Darwin, of course, was both. He dared to imagine a world in which the organisms that live do so by virtue of their parents’ victory in the struggle for survival, but whose progeny live at the mercy of their own efforts. What is missing in Lucretius but present in Darwin is dynamism, the ability to imagine worse. Only a truly dynamic pessimism is capable of grasping the world as a nightmare.
Medea as Motor
It is a gross and naïve archaism to call the eye an organ of truth. In reality, it is a bungling adaptation essentially improvised on the spot. Evolutionary biologists have long noticed the eye’s many faults and imperfections. This fundamental shoddiness extends to every organ and organism on the planet, and even any organism on any planet, evolution by natural selection being a process of mindless revision, ceaselessly discarding and accumulating replicators and their vehicles with no aim whatsoever—certainly nothing to be praised.
We set our sights on a famous and brazen enemy: the Gaia hypothesis. Formulated by Lovelock and Margulis, this theory states that life reproduces the conditions for its renewal once it comes into being, acting as a sort of administrator for the Earth system. This process isn’t agental (no processes are, of course—first principle of Spinozism) but emerges out of Darwinism, or at least a laissez faire interpretation of it. Each individual replicator pursues its own self-interest but, as if guided by an invisible hand, ensures the overall longevity of the biosphere. This is Gaia’s answer to the Faint Sun Problem, which asks how it is that Earth has managed to stay within the temperature bracket to retain liquid water at its surface for the last 3+ billion years despite the fact the Sun has become 30% brighter over its lifespan. There’s good reason to think the carbon cycle, that is, the interaction between living organisms and inorganic Earth systems, acts as a planetary thermostat, modulating the atmospheric CO2 downwards in order to prevent runaway warming as the solar flux increases. As one group of researchers put it, the Faint Sun Problem is no longer a “problem” at all, but is essentially solved.
That life is capable of producing feedback effects like this, however, is not sufficient to demonstrate that it is fundamentally Gaian. If the biological-geophysical solution to the problem of a warming Sun demonstrates that life is self-preserving, what are we to make of the morbid history of mass extinction events on Earth? That is, if we bracket our view of life, it certainly looks Gaian, but on a wider view it appears to be something far less benign. What if life produces the conditions for its own demise, reducing the overall habitability of the planet? What if life’s continued survival is a matter of dumb luck?
As I’ve discussed before, this is the fundamental insight of the palaeontologist Peter Ward, who wrote The Medea Hypothesis. This remarkable text argues that a feature of Darwinian life is that it self-terminates on long time-scales, and that terrestrial deep time gives plenty of examples of this tendency. Ward calls these Medean events, episodes in Earth’s history that should not occur if the Gaia hypothesis is correct, including:
The “DNA Takeover”, ~4 Billion Years Ago: A speculative but likely Medean event. Ward imagines that early DNA life on Earth came in many forms, with a variety of different nucleotide-based languages, before Darwinian competition led a single kind of life to prevail.
First Oxygenation Event, 2.5 Billion Years Ago: Aerobic photosynthetic microbes arrive on the scene, their numbers exploding exponentially as they take advantage of the methane rich atmosphere. The free oxygen which accumulates as a result of their metabolic process poisons the anaerobic organisms and triggers a major mass extinction.
First Global Glaciation, 2.3 Billion Years Ago: Another consequence of the success of aerobic life was a fatal change in atmospheric composition: free oxygen oxidises methane into CO2 and water, causing temperatures to plummet and the entire planet to freeze over.
The list goes on. While none of this can “disprove” the Gaia hypothesis, it certainly leaves us with little reason to believe it. If Gaia is Lucretian, that is, conservative and homeostatic, then Medea is truly Darwinian, insurrectionary and heterofluxic, positing no transcendent teleology or arrow of progress in the evolutionary process. It is nothing but a coincidence that the biosphere has preserved itself this long. It is an inexorable tendency of life, however, that it regularly attempts to kill itself off.
Medea is the elephant graveyard of utopianism, representing life’s irresponsible disinterest in its own long-term survival. The relative brevity of our time here on Earth is no objection. That Medean events normally happen over millions of years is only due to nature’s previous inability to generate organisms quite so efficient as homo sapiens.
The Myth of Compassion
If you would like to see the delirium to which the over-socialised can be driven, look no further than David Pearce’s essay, ‘Compassionate Biology: How CRISPR-based "gene drives" could cheaply, rapidly and sustainably reduce suffering throughout the living world.’ Undoubtedly a cornucopia of joys to the optimist, the pessimist knows better than to look at cheap and easy gene editing as a boon. The basic claim is this: CRISPR gene editing, a technology that enables the removal and addition of genes at any point in a living organism’s genome, combined with “gene drives”, genes which rig the odds in favour of their own propagation and ensure they are almost always inherited, could be used to completely eliminate suffering for all sentient life. The biosphere could be moved to a “low-pain” state, in which pain is no longer an excremental curse on the living, but a signal no more distressing than haptic feedback from a phone. Pessimistic human beings who continue to whine after this treatment may well be missing the ADA2b gene, which can be easily corrected for their own good. The optimist-pessimist axis is, of course, a function of the way the world shows up for Dasein, that is, sapient being considered ontologically:
“A mood assails us. It comes neither from ‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being. But with the negative distinction between state-of-mind [Befindlichkeit] and the reflective apprehending of something ‘within’, we have thus reached a positive insight into their character as disclosure. The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something.” [Additions in square brackets my own: commentators have noted state-of-mind is an inappropriate translation for Befindlichkeit, which Heidegger means to designate not a state of mind, but the sense in which Dasein is always-already attuned to the world in a meaningful way.]
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 176.
It is really quite something to imagine the humanist physician saying to us, ‘Ah, your Befindlichkeit appears to have malfunctioned. That’s certainly no way to be-in-the-world, don’t worry, we’ll sort that out for you . . . ,’ before forcibly modifying our genes. This speaks to a profound inauthenticity on the part of the gene-editing optimist, though, since I am not a Heideggerian, I can’t condemn anyone merely for being inauthentic. The real issue seems to be a certain reality-blindness characteristic of the optimist. Considering the potential pitfalls of CRISPR unbound, Pearce has this to say:
“Mankind's dark historical track-record suggests that gene drives are more likely to be used for genetic terrorism, ethnic bioweapons and entomological warfare than harnessed to promote the welfare of other sentient beings . . . Hence the need for multiple safeguards, well-drafted regulations and effective enforcement mechanisms before an engineered gene drive is unleashed in the wild. In the post-CRISPR era, all that intelligent moral agents can responsibly do is weigh risk-reward ratios and then act accordingly.”
Who can fail to laugh at this insipid shit? Safeguards? Regulations? Effective enforcement mechanisms? Anybody with a 3D printer and a brazen attitude can print a gun or, if they’re really nasty, custom Funko Pops. Just think what a sufficiently clever featherless biped can do with a DIY gene editing kit. Hundreds of years of complexity explosion as humanity fails to get a grip hasn’t taught the technophiles a thing—technological progress is a tale of cruel experimentation and mass extermination, and you have to be breathtakingly naïve to imagine it is any likelier that this technology would be used to erase suffering rather than ramp it up. We can’t even stop ourselves from stockpiling nuclear bombs. For every idealistic research group wondering how to sterilise malaria-carrying mosquito populations, there is almost certainly some misanthrope working on a world-exploder. Though to the pessimist, that may well be an upside.
Technological optimism is fundamentally a product of the failure to think cruelly. We are quite tired of your utopian bleating, your so-called emancipatory usages of technology, and your dreams of liberation. One is tempted to say that no matter how dark you are willing to go, no obscenity you can imagine being enabled by technology is as horrific as what someone cleverer than you is already creating. 200 years after Hegel, human beings still dare to imagine their imagination counts for anything. When one invokes a hypothetical as limit, one remains fundamentally Lucretian. Imagining technological progress as a motor of unknowable weirdness requires Darwinism. Other than a reflexive revulsion based on noble but objectively worthless ethical considerations, there’s no reason to deny that CRISPR will end up being used, at best, to enhance the phenotypes of the wealthy. It could also be used to induce hyperalgesia in torture victims, permanently domesticate slave castes, sterilise and exterminate entire populations, engineer ecosystems into death traps, manipulate the minds and bodies of the public and, in every case, bring the most horrific forms of repression to bear on the social body. The possibility space is vast—and people are unimaginably cruel.
A Tale of Two Pessimisms
When you wring your hands over how society should be organised, which arbitrary moral system should be enforced on the public, what should be invested in and divested from, you assume that there’s going to be a society to organise in the mid-term. When you look at the facts, this assumption doesn’t look reasonable. We regard the Liberal Climate Denier with infinite disgust: there is something putrid about the way they will tell you that there are five trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean, that the best theoretical global recycling rate possible still sees the amount of plastic polluting the environment double, before advising you to skip single-use plastic to beat plastic pollution. Quite simply, these people are demented.
Sober assessment demands we return to a Lucretian eschatology, that is, an eschatology of decline and decay. We imagine the Earth system as closed and life’s progression as immanently entropic: “The earth, which generated every living species and once brought forth from its womb the bodies of huge beasts, has now scarcely strength to generate animalcules . . . ” This is pessimism as burnout, a lifeless ebbing away towards a peaceful sleep = death. But reasonable as it is, this is also pessimism as religion.
Irreligious pessimism is Darwinian: the Earth system is open, at least with respect to the solar flux, and entropy is of no immediate concern to us. A dynamic pessimism does not recognise collapse as limit, but as the impetus for a brutal renewal. As temperatures rise and food chains collapse, as states fail and populations scatter, one can imagine a vicious revitalisation of the despotic state, aided by the latest technologies and the most violent methods of extraction. Where Lucretianism imagines humanity fading away with a weary sigh, Darwinism imagines a merciless cull of the humanist state structures, engendering authoritarian metastasis in the polities that succeed the globally-integrated nation states of today. From this standpoint, Lucretianism appears as a sort of slave morality or wishful thinking: ‘Everything is reaching its end, thank goodness . . . ’ From the Darwinian perspective, this is an unacceptable attempt by a subject who knows nothing of the outside to legislate its activity.
None of this is to say that Lucretianism is wrong and Darwinism is right. It may well be that hard structural limits will materialise or already are materialising in the Earth system such that we can finally speak of a world soon reaching its end. There is plenty of good reason to think so. But one does well to remember that every Lucretian so far has been wrong, and it always pays to dare to be Darwin.
Lucretius’ Coda
That we should always imagine worse, however, does not mean we should liberate reason from ecology. There are structural limits to humanity’s continued existence on a grand scale. After all, we are animals, we are products of the same evolutionary nightmare as every other Earthling, and we therefore have an adaptive niche. That niche is rapidly disappearing, and though technological augmentation is a tantalising possibility, there’s likely no beating temperatures so high you sweat to death in the shade, something already happening in regions across the globe. To ignore the wealth of opportunities for gloom pouring out of the academy every day is to reveal oneself as the most unambitious kind of Lucretian.
‘But what can we do about this?’—Nothing. When we understand that life is Medean, we understand that the metabolic process cannot be subordinated to life’s interests. It simply proceeds. Human beings poisoning the environment with plastic pollution and greenhouse gases are fundamentally no different to cyanobacteria mindlessly turning the Earth into a snowball. It isn’t even appropriate to say we were once in balance with nature until capital or industry came on the scene: human beings have been changing the climate and driving species extinctions for thousands of years. When you ask what we can do, or when you insist that the pessimist has “given up”, you are taking a stand on an incredible hubris, that you, a self-conscious nothing, can help upset the Medean order, that is, the very structure of life itself.
When Darwin wrote that “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” he was invoking a strange kind of beauty, one austere and mathematical, that is, terrifying in its simultaneous simplicity and infinity. It is the beauty of an incomprehensible object brought down to our level. It is a beauty that sings like a Siren—and drowns the beholder.
Once upon a time, clever animals looked up at the stars and saw their finitude reflected in those glistening constellations.
They have been dealing with that mistake ever since.