How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [142]
THE FULL IMPACT OF CONTINGENCY
It is not surprising that the idea of glorious contingency does not have a wide following among the religious. But what is unexpected is that many scientists still cling to a more sophisticated notion of progress as “trends,” where humans—or sentience, cognition, big brains, or some other form of advanced mentation—sit atop the phylogenetic bush because evolution “moves” in this direction. In more extreme versions, such as in Freeman Dyson’s Infinite in All Directions or Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality, it seems as if the universe “knew” we were coming, as argued in the strong anthropic principle. Even more modest progressivists manage to find a special place for humans on an evolutionary pedestal. Evolution does not “know” we are coming, but run that tape of life again and a species very like us would once again sit atop the heap. Philosopher of science Michael Ruse calls such evolutionism the “secular religion of progress.” Surveying the writings of some of today’s leading evolutionary biologists, and reading “the message between as well as on the lines,” Ruse concludes: “If one came away thinking that evolution is progressive and that natural selection is the power behind the throne, one would be thinking no more than what one had been told.” The full impact of contingency is that even this belief in progress is wrong. There is no evolutionary trend toward us.
As Gould shows in his 1996 book, Full House, these “apparent trends can be generated as by-products, or side consequences, of expansions and contractions in the amount of variation within a system, and not by anything directly moving anywhere.” Gould claims that things like .400 hitting in baseball are not “things” at all, in the Platonic sense of fixed “essences.” They are artifacts of trends, which disappear when the overall structure of the system changes over time. No one has hit .400 in baseball since Ted Williams did it in 1941 (for every ten times at bat he got four hits), and this unsolved mystery continues to generate arguments about why it hasn’t happened since. The mystery is now solved, says Gould. It is not because players were better then (what he calls the Genesis myth: “There were giants on the earth in those days”—or as Williams himself put it: “The ball isn’t dead, the hitters are, from the neck up”), or because players today have tougher schedules, night games, and cross-country travel. (Rod Carew says night games are easier on the eyes and travel by jet beats a train any day.) It is because the overall level of play—by everyone from Tony Gwynn and Eddie Murray to Backup Bob and Dugout Doug—has inexorably marched ever upward toward a hypothetical outer wall of human performance. Paradoxically, .400 hitting has disappeared because today’s players are better, not worse. But all of them are better, making the crème de la creme stand out from the mediocre far less than before. The best players may be absolutely better (better training, equipment, diet) than players fifty years ago, but they are relatively worse compared to the average level of play. It was easier for Ted Williams to “hit ‘em where they ain’t” fifty years ago than it is for Wade Boggs today, because every position in the field is manned by players whose average level of play is much better than before. Consider these numbers: Only seven other players have hit .400 since 1900, and three of those in one year (1922). Add Williams in 1941 and the list is complete at eight, out of tens of thousands who have played. And the difference between .400 and George Brett’s .390 in 1980, for example, based on his 175 hits in 449 at-bats, is five hits! That computes to only one hit in every thirty-two