The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [117]
Once we widen our focus, the claim that almost everything significant in human affairs and its history has or had a function, is or was an adaptation, becomes much more obvious.
The second premise treads familiar ground: only Darwinian processes can produce adaptations, whether biological or social. The only apparent alternative to Darwinian processes producing adaptations is intentional human design. But Chapter 10 showed that there is no such thing, just the illusion of planning and intentional creation. What individuals do, alone or together, over a moment or a month or a lifetime, is really just the product of the process of blind variation and environmental filtration operating on neural circuits in their heads.
People overestimate the scope or effectiveness of what they think is intentional planning in human affairs. They underestimate the degree to which human life requires the emergence of adaptations that no one could ever have designed. The best example of how adaptations arise that no one ever designed, or even could have designed, is the price system that springs up wherever markets are established. It was the (ersatz) Nobel Prize–winning realization of Friedrich Hayek that the price system is a vast information storage and distribution device—a virtual computer. It runs a program that forces buyers and sellers to reveal the prices they are really willing to sell for and buy for. It sends each buyer and seller only the information the individual needs to make decisions about what to buy and what to sell. It’s even self-repairing. Sometimes it breaks down. But no individual or group can permanently hijack or otherwise exploit the market price system to enrich themselves, although people are always trying. No individual agent dreamed up this wonderful institution. No individual or group could do the job as well (that is the reason the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet empire collapsed). That makes it the prime example of a social organ “of extreme perfection” that can only result from a Darwinian process.
The two premises—everything significant in human affairs is an adaptation and Darwinian processes are the only ones that can produce and maintain adaptations—ensure the blindness of history because they ensure the ubiquity of arms races everywhere and always in human history. These arms races get faster and faster as time goes by. When and where an arms race breaks out cannot be foretold, since it is always the unforeseeable outcome of adaptive variations. Nor can the outcome of an arm’s race be anticipated, since the environment filtering for outcomes in arms races is human culture, something that is itself moving too rapidly to be the target of prediction.
How can we be certain that both cultural variations and cultural environments are unpredictable? It’s not enough that they could not have been predicted in the past. Lots of things science couldn’t predict with accuracy in even the recent past it now does a great job at predicting. If you live where it snows, when was the last time you were surprised by a snowstorm? In fact, better weather prediction is a good example of why the future of human culture really is becoming increasingly unpredictable, more and more unpredictable than it was in the past. Increasingly over the last 500 years, and now predominantly, the source of the most significant variations and environmental filters in human culture has been science and technology. That’s how weather prediction got to be so much better in our lifetime. For predictions about human affairs to be at all accurate, they must be based on expectations of where the next moves will be made at the frontiers of the sciences and at their points