Column
Biology
Creed
7 min read

Not just red in tooth and claw: biology's big debates

In the second of a series, biologist and priest, Andrew Davison, examines why it’s important to keep up with biology’s big debates.

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

An osprey, in flight, holds a fish in its claws.
‘Wherever there’s water or air to navigate, the laws of fluid dynamics are bound to throw up wings, and bodies shaped like fish.’
Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash.

There’s hardly been a livelier time for evolutionary science than today; indeed, passions can run high. It’s not that Darwin’s vision of evolution is fundamentally in doubt: species adapt by natural selection, there’s variation between individuals, and those better adapted for their environment survive more often, passing on their genes to their children. In that, the theory of evolution stands, but many other parts of the evolutionary picture from the second half of the twentieth century are coming under criticism. That includes the following maxims:  

‘the only significant form of inheritance involves genetic code’, 

‘nothing that happens to an organism during its lifetime is passed on to its progeny’,  

‘we agree what we mean by “species”’,  

‘genes pass down the branches of the tree of life, not between them’,  

and ‘evolution is fundamentally all about competition, not cooperation’. 

Among the excellent crop of writers on these themes, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb stand out for their elegant prose, and a gift for communicating complex ideas clearly. As they recognise, the standard mid-twentieth century model of evolution might be worth criticising, but it’s also landed all sorts of important basic points. (They list ten.) The shortfall of the earlier, dominant theory was in being too narrow, with each insight too quickly eclipsing others.  

Here are two examples. First, the classic twentieth century picture saw inheritance in terms of DNA and genes, passed on by ‘germline’ cells, such sperm and pollen. That’s all true, but it shouldn’t restrict our wider view of inheritance to that. Today, writers such as Jablonka and Lamb stress that organisms inherit from their parents (or parent) in all sorts of ways.  

A second plank of the twentieth century picture is that evolution involves descent from a common ancestor. Again, that says something vital, even central, accepted by evolutionist old and new. The twentieth century position, however, added a restriction: that’s all that’s important on this score. The newer perspective recognises that while genes are – of course – central, and passed on from parent to child, organisms also swap genes between themselves (between branches of the tree of life, not just along those branches), even between very different species. 

If we’re not careful, what’s written and taught (not least by theologians), even with the best will in the world, will be thirty or even fifty years out of date. 

There’s a lot of excitement around these sorts of claims (and, remember, Jablonka and Lamb make eight more), and that can get quite noisy. Defenders of the older, narrower picture typically say that the newer themes are simply fuss over minor points. Advocates of the newer perspective disagree, saying that the twentieth century picture risks missing some important features of biology, which are now coming into better focus. 

Why such debates matters 

Why might this ferment among biologists matter for a site like this one, and for theologians, and discussions of religious matters? Well, for one thing, as I pointed out in my previous article, nothing quite dissolves the supposed animosity between science and religion (which is, after all, a relatively recent invention) like theologians and religious people getting excited about biology. It’s also important that any humanities scholar, the theologian among them, who’s engaging with science should keep up to date. If we’re not careful, what’s written and taught (not least by theologians), even with the best will in the world, will be thirty or even fifty years out of date. 

But there’s more at stake. As we have seen, the twentieth century picture, for all it brought an admirable clarity to evolutionary thought, was reductionistic. We see that in Jablonka and Lamb’s exhortation to scientists: ‘yes, stress x, but don’t think that means you have to deny y.’ A religious vision tends to be an expansive one. It wants to recognise the reality and value of all sorts of things. Yes, there’s matter, atoms, molecules, and genes, but there’s also organisms, agents, cultures, groups, economies, hopes, loves. They’re all real. We can’t reduce one to the other: not organisms to genes, or agents to economies. A turn from reduction is welcome. 

More than that, almost everything in the emerging twenty-first century view of evolution is fascinating from a theological perspective.  

Take convergence, for instance. It turns out that evolution isn’t just driven by randomness, or by the demands of the surroundings. Also important are various features of physics, or mathematics – the contours of reality – that throw up elegant solutions to evolutionary problems, which are adopted by evolution time and again. Wherever you need to sturdy and space-efficient packing of cells (as in a honey comb, or a a wasp’s nest), the hexagon is ready and waiting.  Wherever there’s water or air to navigate, the laws of fluid dynamics are bound to throw up wings, and bodies shaped like fish, dolphins, and penguins (which are all quite similar in shape).  

How do we know this? Because evolution has converged on wings and that body shape independently, many times, as also on eyes, and everything else that Simon Conway Morris lists in the nine closely printed columns of convergences in the index to his book Life’s Solution. Evolution certainly involves randomness and need, but alongside them is something more like Plato’s forms: timeless realities, there to be discovered and put to work. Among the more theological of these eternal verities, covered in Conway Morris’s book, are perception, intelligence, community, communication, cooperation, altruism, farming, or construction 

 Exceeding a zero-sum game 

Then there’s cooperation. Ever since Darwin’s Origin was published, and, even more, ever since Tennyson wrote about nature ‘red in tooth and claw’, theologians have been embarrassed about the place of cooperation in their vision of the world. Now, however, it turns out, competition isn’t the only force at work in biology or evolution after all. One of the features of reality that evolution discovers and puts to work again and again is cooperation, and ways to exceed a ‘zero-sum’ game. We see that in cooperation within a species, but also in cooperation between species, which is ubiquitous in nature: called mutualism, it’s found everywhere. As a rule, once two species stick around in proximity for the long run, down many generations, their relationship will turn to mutual benefit.  

Ethicists are often wary of the suggestion that we can look at the way things are, and read a moral code there (getting an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’), but it’s an unusual person whose vision of right and wrong isn’t shaped, to some degree, by a sense of what the world is like. Well, it turns out that nature bears witness to the enduring worth of cooperation, and not only to competition.   

In the first of these articles on biology, I pointed out the significance of ethics in thinking about biology, and about evolution in particular. For better or worse, and often for worse, thinking about evolution has been an ethical, social, political story. The evolutionary has been put to work for immoral, ends. It turns out to be wrong twice over to suppose evolution commends only competition. It’s wrong, first of all, because we are rational creatures, who can aspire to an understanding of good and evil that transcends the realm of nature. But also, as we now see, it’s wrong even to suppose the nature is only red in tooth and claw. There’s competition, but there’s also a lot of cooperation.  

 

Suggested further reading 

Archibald, John. 2014. One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An accessible introduction to biological mutualism, with an emphasis on the role of hybrid organisms (one living inside another) in major evolutionary transitions. 

Bronstein, Judith L., ed. 2015. Mutualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The new standard treatment of biological mutualism. 

Morris, Simon Conway. 2008. Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A comprehensive discussion of convergence in evolution. 

Day, Troy, and Russell Bonduriansky. 2018. Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. An engaging introduction to a broadened picture of inheritance. 

Davison, Andrew. 2020a. Biological Mutualism: A Scientific Survey. Theology and Science 18 (2): 190–210. An accessible survey of some of the science of biological mutualism. 

———. 2020b. Christian Doctrine and Biological Mutualism: Some Explorations in Systematic and Philosophical Theology. Theology and Science 18 (2): 258–78. A foray into some of the significance of mutualism for Christian theology. 

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion Lamb. 2020. Inheritance Systems and the Extended Synthesis. Cambridge University Press. A short discussion of many of the more expansive aspects proposed for contemporary evolutionary thought. 

Jablonka, Eva, Marion J. Lamb, and Anna Zeligowski. 2014. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. One of the most substantial discussions of the new perspective. 

Laland, Kevin, Tobias Uller, arc Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Müller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka, et al. 2014. Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink? Nature 514 (7521): 161–64. MA short two-sided piece, asking whether a transformation in evolutionary thinking is under way.  

Column
Books
Culture
Music
Space
6 min read

Magnificent or mundane: how do you react to the overview effect?

Creators of a book, an album and a game, can’t agree.
A small white space capsule orbits around the earth.
A SpaceX Dragon capsule orbits above Earth.
NASA.

As I write this, two Nasa astronauts – Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore (possibly the most USA-sounding name imaginable) – are preparing to leave the International Space Station to return to Earth. They were supposed to stay on the space station for eight days, but a technical problem with their spacecraft meant they’ve been stranded in space for nine months.  

Nine. Months.  

It sounds like the premise for a horror film. Two stranded astronauts slowly descend into madness as they become increasingly isolated and cut off from humanity. Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, probably. 

That’s a lot of time to be stuck orbiting Earth, gazing at the pale blue dot, contemplating our little corner of the universe. There’s a phenomenon called the overview effect: a shift in thinking astronauts go through when they see Earth from space. Putting the planet into the wider context of the entire cosmos leads observers to rethink humanity’s place in the universe, and what it means to be human.  I imagine Suni and Butch have had quite a bit of time to do just that in recent months.  

And the overview effect is currently having a bit of a moment in wider culture, too.  

If you went into any bookshop in the weeks before Christmas, you likely saw stacks of Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital. It tells the story – although there’s not much by way of traditional ‘story’ in Orbital – of six astronauts on the International Space Station, pondering the nature of humanity from their lofty vantage point. 

Having won the booker prize, booksellers were keen to encourage readers to buy Oribtal. Praised by the Booker Prize judges for its “beauty and ambition”, I was looking forward to reading it, when I could. (And, let’s be honest, it’s a short book, which probably helped sales. Who has the time to read Ulysses or Infinite Jest in between school runs and weekly shops?) 

When I finally read it in January, I was left disappointed. I found a surprising lack of humanity in Orbital. With the exception of one astronaut – who spends her time mourning her recently deceased mother some 250 miles up in the sky – the characters feel somewhat paper thin; barely human. As the story meanders from person to person, never really settling on one character long enough to really develop them, it feels a bit … insubstantial?  

Maybe it’s a victim of its own hype. Maybe the not-quite-humanness of the astronauts and the listless quality of the narrative are intentional, designed to capture the ungrounded nature of life in space in both form and content. Maybe that’s being generous. Either way, I was left closing the book and shrugging my shoulders. If Orbital was supposed to offer a glimpse into that overview effect, it left me nonplussed. 

By coincidence, Steven Wilson has just released his eighth solo album: The Overview. Who is Steven Wilson, you ask? Only “probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of” according to The Daily Telegraph. With Wilson’s album currently sitting at #1 in the UK album charts, it doesn’t seem an unwarranted title.  

In The Overview, Wilson explores the overview effect across just two lengthy pieces of music. In the first, Wilson contrasts the mundanities of life on Earth with the chaos of space, calling us to attend to miracle that is humanity, thanks to lyrics written by the annoyingly talented Andy Partridge of XTC: 

“And there in an ordinary street  

A car isn't where it would normally be  

The driver in tears, about his payment arrears 

 Still, nobody hears whеn a sun disappears in a galaxy afar.” 

With Partridge’s help, Wilson manages to capture that humanity so sorely lacking in Orbital. Amid a sea of seemingly barren space, there is life here on this small, pokey planet, and the dramas and stresses of a man fretting about his debts don’t seem out of place, even when compared to the implosion of a star on the other side of the universe.  

All this makes a recent interview with Wilson all the more odd.  

When speaking about the overview effect, Wilson says “Your life is futile, it’s meaningless – and isn’t that a wonderful thing?” before doubling down: “And I do mean that. We spend so much of our time anxious, stressed, worried about things that sometimes we just need an injection of perspective.” 

For Wilson, this perspective – this overview effect – is liberating. It allows to stop navel-gazing, to pick our heads up and to realise our freedom to do whatever we want. After all, everything’s just matter in varying different arrangements:  

“The clouds have no history 

And the sea feels no sorrow 

The oxygen recycled 

And the atoms are just borrowed,”  

At the climax of the album’s second epic, Wilson sings – with more glee than it warrants –  

“There's no reason for anything  

 Just a beautiful infinity 

 No design and no onе at the wheel.” 

 Cheery stuff. 

It's easy to see why, in the same interview, Wilson rails against the concept of religion: “Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo … To even understand even the very simplest, most basic facts about space, should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion of God. But apparently it doesn’t.” 

It all sounds a bit like an angsty teenager encountering the New Atheists for the first time. And this edge to Wilson’s work jars uncomfortably with the humanitarian streak that runs through his music. Wilson wants (rightly) to celebrate the mundane, the ordinary, and the human. And simultaneously wants to tell us that we’re just … stuff. Just atoms arranged in one way or another. Wilson pays lip-service to the humanity missing from Orbital, but it’s superficial.  

And all this reminds me of my favourite video game ever: 2019’s The Outer Wilds. (Not to be confused with 2019’s also-space-based-but-decidedly-mediocre The Outer Worlds). In The Outer Wilds, you play as an alien with a ramshackle spaceship who sets off to explore their solar system. Except every 22 minutes, the sun explodes. When it does, you wake up on your home planet and start again. 

You use these 22-minute loops to explore the solar system, flying manually from planet to planet, and exploring every nook and cranny of them in the process. You see awe-inspiring sights and are confronting with the absolute otherness and horror of the vastness of space.  

And yet. As you explore, you come across notes left by long-forgotten civilizations. Mundane lists and frustrated exchanges between colleagues. You come across life, in other words, even if you don’t meet many other actual people. I can’t say much more than this without ruining the game: The Outer Wilds depends on your real-world knowledge to progress, and so, the more I tell you, the more I ruin.  

But, suffice it to say that this is exactly what is missing from Harvey and Wilson’s work. While they both ostensibly want to remind us of the value and the miracle of humanity, both leave me feeling cold. Both leave me with the impression that life is little more than atoms arranged one way and not the other. Just stuff.  

But in The Outer Wilds, the sun’s implosion – and all that is lost with it – is a genuine heartbreak every single time. I think about all the stories I’ve read, and the people I’ve met, and how it’s all about to be lost as a bright supernova washes over me. And then I wake up again at the start of the cycle, relieved that all is not lost.  

If you can, you should play The Outer Wilds. It’s beautiful. Really, really beautiful. More so than Orbital or The Overview. Our place in the universe can be overwhelming; we’re small, and the universe is strange and scary. But we’re not just insignificant stuff. Our stories and the people we share them with matter. And Outer Wilds captures this tension impeccably. Only it captures life’s miraculous nature in the way it deserves. 

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