Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopaedia Britannic a emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables about Nature. I believe that, from the standpoint of every Intelligence unwittingly contrived by Nature, she must appear at the very least as an ironic virtuoso. In its rise, Intelligence —like the whole of life—results from the fact that Nature, having emerged from dead chaos via the orderliness of the code, is a diligent spinner, but a not entirely competent one; whereas, if she had been truly competent, she would be unable to produce either genera or Intelligence. For Intelligence, along with the tree of life, is the fruit of an error erring over billions of years. You might think that I am amusing myself here by applying certain standards to Evolution which are—despite my machine being—tainted with an-thropocentrism, or simply ratiocentrism (ratio, I think). Nothing of the sort: I regard the process from a technological standpoint.
The transmission of the code is indeed very nearly perfect. After all, every molecule has its own proper place in it, and procedures of copying, collating, and inspecting are rigorously supervised by special polymer supervisors; yet mistakes occur, and errors of the code accumulate. Thus the tree of the species grew from the two short words "very nearly," which I used just now in referring to the code's precision.
Nor can one even count on an appeal from biology to physics—the appeal that Evolution "deliberately" allowed a margin of error in order to nourish its inventiveness—because that tribunal, whose judge is thermodynamics itself, will reveal that, on the level of the molecular dispatch of messengers, infallibility is impossible. Evolution has really invented nothing, desired nothing at all, planned nobody in particular, and if it exploits its own fallibility—if, as a result of a chain of misunderstandings in communication, it proceeds from an amoeba and comes up with a tapeworm or a man—the reason for this is the physical nature of the material base of communication itself.
So it persists in error, since it cannot do otherwise—fortunately for you. But I have said nothing that is new to you. On the contrary, I should like to restrain the ardor of those theoreticians of yours who have gone too far, saying that since Evolution is a chance grasped by necessity, and necessity runs on chance, man has arisen quite by accident and could just as easily not exist.
That is to say, in his present shape—the one that has materialized here—he might have not existed, which is true. But by crawling through species, some kind of form had to attain Intelligence, with a probability approaching unity the longer the process went on. For although the process did not intend you and produced individuals only on the side, it filled the conditions of the ergodic hypothesis, which states that, if a system goes on long enough, it will pass through all possible states, no matter how slim the chances are that a given state will be realized. As to which species might have filled Intelligence's niche, had the primates not entered the breach, we might speak at length another time. So do not let yourselves be intimidated by scientists who attribute necessity to life, and fortuity to Intelligence; the latter was, to be sure, one of the less likely states, so it developed late, but great is the patience of Nature; had such a gaudium not occurred in this billennium, it would have occurred in the next.
And what then? There is no guilty party, nor are there any rewards to be given. You have come into being because Evolution is a less than methodical player. Not only does it err through errors, but it also refuses to limit itself to a single set of tactics in vying with Nature: it covers all available squares by all possible means. But, I repeat, you know this more or less. Yet this is only part—and, I might add, the initial part—of your initiation. The essence of it revealed thus far can be formulated concisely as follows: THE MEANING OF THE TRANSMITTER IS THE TRANS-MISSION. For organisms serve the transmission, and not the reverse; organisms outside the communications procedure of Evolution signify nothing: they are without meaning, like a book without readers. To be sure, the corollary holds: THE MEANING OF THE TRANSMISSION IS THE TRANS-MITTER. But the two members are not symmetrical. For not every transmitter is the true meaning of a transmission, but only such a meaning as will faithfully serve the next transmission.
Forgive me, but I wonder if this is not too difficult for you? A TRANSMISSION is allowed to make mistakes in Evolution, but woe betide TRANSMITTERS who do so! A TRANSMISSION may be a whale, a pine tree, a daphnia, a hydra, a moth, a peacock. Anything is allowed, for its particular—its specifically concrete—meaning is quite immaterial: each one is intended for further errands, so each one is good. It is a temporary prop, and its slapdash character does no harm; it is enough that it passes the code along. On the other hand, TRANSMITTERS are given no analogous freedom: they are not allowed to errl So, the content of the transmitters, which have been reduced to pure functional-ism, to serving as a postman, cannot be arbitrary; its environment is always marked by the imposed obligation of serving the code. If the transmitter attempts to revolt by exceeding the sphere of such service, he disappears immediately without issue. That is why a transmission can make use of transmitters, whereas they cannot use it. It is the gambler, and they merely cards in a game with Nature; it is the author of letters compelling the addressee to pass their contents on. The addressee is free to distort the content, as long as it passes it on! And that is precisely why the entire meaning is in the transmitting; who does it is unimportant.
Thus you came into being in a rather peculiar way—as a certain subtype of transmitter, millions of which had already been tested by the process. And how does this affect you? Does genesis from a mistake discredit what is born? Did not I myself arise from an error? So cannot you, too, make light of a revelation about the incidental manner of your origin, since biology is treating you to the revelation? Even if such a serious misunderstanding did occur, which fashioned GOLEM in your hands, and you yourselves in the jungle of evolutionary instructions (since just as my builders did not care about the form of sentience proper to me, so too the code was not interested in giving you personality-intelligence)—even so, do creatures originating from a mistake have to accept that such a progenitor deprives their already independent existence of value?
Well, that is a bad analogy: our positions are dissimilar, and I shall tell you why. The point is not that Evolution found its way to you by mistake and not by planning, but that with the passage of eons its works have become so opportunistic. To clarify matters—for I am beginning to lecture to you on things you do not yet know—I shall repeat what we have arrived at so far:
THE MEANING OF THE TRANSMITTER IS THE
TRANSMISSION. SPECIES ORIGINATE FROM A
MISTAKEN MISTAKE.
And here is the third law of Evolution, which you will not have suspected till now: THE CONSTRUCTION IS LESS PERFECT THAN WHAT CONSTRUCTS.
Eight words! But they embody the inversion of all your ideas concerning the unsurpassed mastery of the author of species. The belief in progress moving upward through the epochs toward a perfection pursued with increasing skill— the belief in the progress of life preserved throughout the tree of evolution—is older than the theory of it. When its creators and adherents were struggling with their antagonists, disputing arguments and facts, neither of these opposing camps ever dreamed of questioning the idea of a progress visible in the hierarchy of living creatures. This is no longer a hypothesis for you, nor a theory to be defended, but an absolute certainty. Yet I shall refute it for you. It is not my intention to criticize you yourselves, you rational beings, as being (deficient) exceptions to the rule of evolutionary mastery. If we judge you by what it has within its means, you have come out quite well! So if I announce that I am going to overthrow it and bring it down, I mean the whole of it, enclosed within three billion years
of hard creative work.
I have declared: the construction is less perfect than what constructs, which is fairly aphoristic. Let us give it more substance: IN EVOLUTION, A NEGATIVE GRADIENT OPERATES IN THE PERFECTING OF STRUCTURAL SOLUTIONS.
That is all. Before my proof I shall explain what has caused your age-long blindness to such a state of evolutionary matters. I repeat: the domain of technology consists of problems and their solutions. The problem bearing the name "life" may be determined variously, according to diverse planetary conditions. Its chief peculiarity is the fact that it arises spontaneously, and therefore two kinds of criteria may be applied to it: those originating from outside or those determined inside the limits imposed by the very circumstances of its origin.
Criteria coming from the outside are always relative, for they depend on the knowledge of whoever is doing the measuring, rather than on the store of information which biogenesis had at its disposal. To avoid this relativism, which is also irrationality—how on earth can rational demands be made on something which was begun by nonreason?—I shall apply to Evolution only such standards as it itself has developed; in other words, I shall judge its creations by the culmination of its inventions. You believe that Evolution carried out its work with a positive gradient: starting from primitivism, it obtained progressively more splendid solutions. I would maintain, however, that having begun high, it began to decline—technologically, thermodynamically, informationally—so it is difficult to find a more vivid contrast of positions.
Your opinions are the consequence of technological ignorance. The scale of constructional difficulties cannot be appreciated in its actual range by observers placed early in historical time. You already know that it is harder to build an airplane than a steamship, and harder to make a photon rocket than a chemical one, whereas for an Athenian of antiquity, the subjects of Charles Martel, or the thinkers of Angevin France, all these vehicles would merge into one by virtue of the impossibility of their construction. A child does not know that it is harder to remove the moon from the heavens than a picture from a wall! For a child—and for an ignoramus as well—there is no difference between a gramophone and Golem. So if I set out to prove that, after its early mastery, Evolution got bogged down in bungling, I will be talking about the sort of bungling which for you still remains unattainable virtuosity. Like one who, with neither instruments nor knowledge, stands at the foot of a mountain, you are unable to make a proper evaluation of the heights and depths of evolutionary activity.
In accepting the degree of complexity of a construction and its degree of perfection as inseparable features, you have confused two quite different things. You conceive of algae as simpler, therefore more primitive than and inferior to an eagle. But that alga introduces photons of the sun into the compounds of its body, it turns the flow of cosmic energy directly into life and therefore will last as long as the sun does; it feeds on a star, and what does an eagle feed on? Like a parasite, on mice, while mice feed on the roots of plants, a land variety of algae. Such pyramids of parasitism make up the entire biosphere, for plant vegetation is its vital anchor. On all levels of these hierarchies there is a continual change of species kept in balance by the devouring of one by another, for they have lost contact with the star; the higher complexity of organisms fattens itself, not on the star, but on itself. So if you insist now on venerating perfection here, it is the biosphere which deserves your admiration: the code created it in order to circulate in it and branch forth on all its layers, which are becoming more and more involved, like temporary scaffolding, though more and more primitive in their energy and use of it.
You don't believe me? If evolution applied itself to the progress of life and not of the code, the eagle would now be a photoflyer and not a mechanically fluttering glider, and living things would not crawl, or stride, or feed on other living things, but would go beyond algae and the globe as a result of the independence acquired. You, however, in the depths of your ignorance, perceive progress in the fact that a primeval perfection has been lost on the way upward— upward to complication, not progress. You yourselves will of course continue to emulate Evolution, but only in the region of its later creations, by constructing optic, thermal, and acoustic sensors, and by imitating the mechanics of locomotion, the lungs, heart, and kidneys; but how on earth are you going to master photosynthesis or the still more difficult technique of creation language? Has it not dawned on you that what you are imitating is the nonsense articulated in that language?
That language—a constructor unsurpassed in its potential —has become not only a motor but also a trap.
Why did it utter molecularly brilliant words at the beginning, turning light into substance with laconic mastery, and later lapse into an indefatigable jabbering of longer and longer, more and more intricate chromosomal sentences, squandering its primitive artistry? Why did it go from consummate solutions taking their power and vital knowledge from a star, wherein every atom counted, and every process was quantitatively attuned, and descend to any cheap, jury-rigged solutions—the simple machines, the levers, pulleys, planes, inclines, and counterbalances that constitute joints and skeletons? Why is the basis of a vertebrate a mechanically rigid rod, and not a coupling of force fields? Why did it slip down from atomic physics into the technology of your Middle Ages? Why has it invested so much effort in constructing bellows, pumps, pedals, and peristaltic conveyors, i.e., lungs and hearts, intestines and puerperal contractions, and digestive mixers, pushing quantum exchange into a subordinate role in favor of the miserable hydraulics of the circulation of the blood? Why, though still as brilliant as ever on a molecular level, has it made such a mess in every larger dimension, to the point of getting bogged down in organisms which, with all the richness of their regulating dynamics, die from the occlusion of a single arterial tube, organisms which have individual lives that are evanescent in comparison with the duration of the constructional sciences, organisms that are thrown out of an equilibrium called health by tens of thousands of ailments which algae do not know?
All these stupid, anachronistic organs are built anew in every generation by Maxwell's demon, the lord of the atoms, the code. And really, every beginning of an organism is magnificent—the embryogenesis, that focused explosion on the goal, in which, like a tone, every gene discharges its creative force in molecular chords. Such virtuosity is worthy of a better cause! This atomic symphony set in motion by fertilization produces an unerring wealth that begets poverty. So we have a development magnificent in action but the more stupid the closer it is to the finish. That which has been written down so brilliantly comes to a halt in the mature organism, which you have termed superior, but which is an unstable knotting together of provisional states, a Gordian knot of processes. Whereas here, in every cell, provided it is taken individually, the heritage of an age-old precision, an atomic order drawn into life, in every tissue even, if taken individually, is very nearly superb. But what a Moloch of technical rubbish are these mutually clinging elements, which are as much a burden as a support to one another, for complexity is simultaneously a prop and dead wood: alliance here turns into enmity, since these systems are driven into a final dispersion, the result of an irregular deterioration and infection, since this complexity known as progress crumbles, overpowered by itself. By itself alone, nothing more!
Then, according to your standards, an image of tragedy intrudes, as if in each of the increasingly large, and therefore increasingly difficult, assignments which Evolution attacked, it was defeated, and fell and died at the hands of what it had created—and the bolder the intention and plan, the greater the fall. You have doubtless begun to imagine some relentless Nemesis, or Moira. I must tear you away from such nonsense!
Indeed, every embryogenetic impetus, every atomic ascent of order turns into a collapse, though that has not been decided by the Cosmos, nor has it inscribed such a fate in matter. Such an explanation is simpleminded, for the perfection of causation is put in the service of what is poor quality
: the end therefore destroys the work.
Billions of collapses over millions of centuries, despite improvements, final inspections, renewed attempts, and selection, and you still do not see the reason? Out of loyalty I have tried to justify your blindness, but can you really not grasp how much more perfect the constructor is than the construction, as it sheds all its power? It is as if brilliant engineers assisted by lightning-fast computers were to erect buildings that began tilting as soon as the scaffolding was removed— veritable ruins! It is as if one were to construct tomtoms from circuit boards, or to paste billions of microchips together to make cudgels. Don't you see that a higher order descends to a lower order in every inch of the body, and that its brilliant microarchitectonics are mocked by coarse and simple-minded macroarchitectonics? The reason? You know it already: THE MEANING OF THE TRANSMITTER IS THE TRANSMISSION.
The answer lies in these words, but you have yet to grasp its profound significance. Anything that is an organism must serve to transmit the code, and nothing more. That is why natural selection and elimination concentrate on this task exclusively—any idea of "progress" is no business of theirs! I have used the wrong image: the organisms are not structures but only scaffolding, which is precisely why every provisionality is a proper state, by virtue of being sufficient. Pass the code on, and you will live a little longer. How did this come about? Why was the takeoff so splendid? Once and only once—at the very beginning—did Evolution encounter demands matched to its supreme possibilities; it was an awful task, and it had to rise to the occasion at a simple leap or never; since life's sucking of energy, quantum by quantum, from the sun, on a dead Earth—through metabolism—was necessary. And never mind that the (radiant) energy of a star is the hardest to capture in a colloid. It was all or nothing; there was no one else at the time to feed on! The supply of organic compounds that had united to form life was exactly and precisely sufficient for that alone; the star was soon to be the next task. And then the sole defense against attacks of chaos—the thread stretched over the entropic abyss— could only be an unfailing transmitter of order, so the code arose. Thanks to a miracle? Far from it! Thanks to the wisdom of Nature? That is the same kind of wisdom as that whose results we have already described: when a large rat pack enters a labyrinth, one rat makes it to the exit, if only by mistake. That is precisely how biogenesis made it into code: by the law of large numbers, according to the ergodic hypothesis. So was it blind fate? No, not that either: for what arose was not a formula enclosed in itself, but the nucleus of a language.
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