What do development and evolution have in common?
Any system that starts off simple will tend to get more complex. It has nowhere else to go. Natural selection does not have a lot to do except act as a coarse filter that rejects utter failures. So we get a description of evolution in terms of dynamics and stability, which always belong together.
— Goodwin (1994, 157)
Since both development and evolution proceed toward greater complexity, it’s a natural guess that life must have begun with the simplest possible self-organizing process. As we know that the physico-chemical conditions of the early earth are no longer current, a spontaneous process that was possible then may no longer be possible now. Even if it could occur, the relatively simple systems it would produce would probably get consumed by ubiquitous life on earth before they could reproduce. If all forms now living have evolved from previous forms, they have also changed the conditions and the very process which produced them. In order to explain how it could have happened, then, either on this planet or elsewhere, we need an account of the process which is general enough to be possible in a broad range of conditions yet specific enough to generate testable predictions.
There are of course alternatives to the guess that life began by self-organizing. We might guess that life, or indeed the whole cosmos, could have been created artificially by some pre-existing entity – as we create buildings and machines, only more arbitrarily (and without depending on existing resources as we do). This has the advantage of casting the Creator in our own image, and thus containing creation within the familiar cognitive bubble. This kind of anthropomorphizing may even be instinctive, as Peirce claimed, seeing no more adequate way for man to conceive the Creator ‘than as vaguely like a man’ (CP 5.536). But the hypothesis of an omnipotent, unconstrained yet purposeful Creator can’t be investigated, since there is no way it could ever be refuted by observable events. Appealing to an inexplicable Creator does nothing to explain the origin of anything, but rather blocks the road of inquiry – to which we are drawn just as instinctively as we are drawn to the idea of an intentional Creator. The instinct of inquiry calls us to use the best method of investigation we can find, one that is honestly self-critical and self-correcting, and above all, capable of learning from experience. That’s the scientific method outlined in Chapter 7, and it requires a testable theory to explain how self-organization could arise from unorganized energy flows. Deacon (2011) is an attempt at such a theory (see Chapters 10 and 11).