This would at first seem to contradict the one thing that evolutionists insist upon most: that life is not responding to anything but the survival of the fittest process of natural selection. But survival of the fittest is one of those catch-phrases like mutants or misfits that sounds best when you don’t ask precisely what it means. Fittest for what? Fittest for survival? That reduces to survival of the survivors, which doesn’t say anything. Survival of the fittest is meaningful only when fittest is equated with best, which is to say, Quality. And the Darwinians don’t mean just any old quality, they mean undefined Quality! As Mayr’s article makes clear, they are absolutely certain there is no way to define what that fittest is.
Good! The undefined fittest they are defending is identical to Dynamic Quality. Natural selection is Dynamic Quality at work. There is no quarrel whatsoever between the Metaphysics of Quality and the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Neither is there a quarrel between the Metaphysics of Quality and the teleological theories which insist that life has some purpose. What the Metaphysics of Quality has done is unite these opposed doctrines within a larger metaphysical structure that accommodates both of them without contradiction.
The river was opening up now into a broad lake that the chart beside Phædrus identified as the Tappan Zee. Like the Zuider Zee, he supposed. Nice that they’d kept the old Dutch name. He turned and looked behind him and there was the mountain range that he’d passed through. The last range. The American continent was coming to an end. Soon this strong heavy boat would be out in the Atlantic for the first time, where it really belonged. That felt exciting after all these weeks. The boat was built to cross oceans and circumnavigate continents, not just run the buoys down placid inland waterways.
It was still early afternoon. The boat was making ferocious speed. He supposed that contraction of the river by the mountains must have made it speed up. Now, according to his calculations, the tide would begin to reverse and it would be slower going.
Anyway, that migration of static patterns toward Dynamic Quality he’d been thinking so much about seemed to hold up so far. In the past when ideas like it had been defeated they were always knocked down by the assumptions of a conventional metaphysics of substance, but with the Metaphysics of Quality behind it, it stood up. He’d tried dozens of times to think of how it could be knocked down with one argument or another but he’d never found anything that worked. And so in the months since it had emerged he had tried to work out various refinements.
The explanation of life as a migration of static patterns toward Dynamic Quality not only fitted the known facts of evolution, it allowed new ways of interpreting them.
Biological evolution can be seen as a process by which weak Dynamic forces at a subatomic level discover stratagems for overcoming huge static inorganic forces at a superatomic level. They do this by selecting superatomic mechanisms in which a number of options are so evenly balanced that a weak Dynamic force can tip the balance one way or another.
The particular atom that the weak Dynamic subatomic forces have seized as their primary vehicle is carbon. All life contains carbon yet a study of properties of carbon atom shows that except for the extreme hardness of one of its crystalline forms there is not much unusual about it. In terms of other physical constants of melting point, conductivity, ionization, and so on, it does just about what its position on the periodic table of the elements suggests it might do. Certainly there’s no hint of any miraculous powers waiting to spring chemistry professors upon a lifeless planet.
One physical characteristic that makes carbon unique is that it is the lightest and most active of the group IV of atoms whose chemical bonding characteristics are ambiguous. Usually the positively valenced metals in groups I through III combine chemically with negatively valenced non-metals in groups V through VII and not with other members of their own group. But the group containing carbon is halfway between the metals and non-metals, so that sometimes carbon combines with metals and sometimes with non-metals, and sometimes it just sits there and doesn’t combine with anything, and sometimes it combines with itself in long chains and branched trees and rings.
Phædrus thought this ambiguity of carbon’s bonding preferences was the situation the weak Dynamic subatomic forces needed. Carbon bonding was a balanced mechanism they could take over. It was a vehicle they could steer to all sorts of freedom by selecting first one bonding preference and then another in an almost unlimited variety of ways.
And what a variety has been chosen. Today there are more than two million known compounds of carbon, roughly twenty times as many as all the other known chemical compounds in the world. The chemistry of life is the chemistry of carbon. What distinguishes all the species of plants and animals is, in the final analysis, differences in the way carbon atoms choose to bond.
But the invention of Dynamic carbon bonding represents only one kind of evolutionary stratagem. The other kind is preservation of what has been invented. A Dynamic advance is meaningless unless it can find some static pattern with which to protect itself from degeneration back to the conditions that existed before the advance was made. Evolution can’t be a continuous forward movement. It must be a process of ratchet-like steps in which there is a Dynamic movement forward up some new incline and then, if the result looks successful, a static latching-on of the gain that has been made; then another Dynamic advance, then another static latch.
What the Dynamic force had to invent in order to move up the molecular level and stay there was a carbon molecule that would preserve its limited Dynamic freedom from inorganic laws and at the same time resist deterioration back to simple compounds of carbon again. A study of nature shows the Dynamic force was not able to do this but got around the problem by inventing two molecules: a static molecule able to resist abrasion, heat, chemical attack and the like; and a Dynamic one, able to preserve the subatomic indeterminacy at a molecular level and try everything in the ways of chemical combination.
The static molecule, an enormous, chemically dead, plastic-like molecule called protein, surrounds the Dynamic one and prevents attack by forces of light, heat and other chemicals that would prey on its sensitivity and destroy it. The Dynamic one, called DNA, reciprocates by telling the static one what to do, replacing the static one when it wears out, replacing itself even when it hasn’t worn out, and changing its own nature to overcome adverse conditions. These two kinds of molecules, working together, are all there is in some viruses, which are the simplest forms of life.
This division of all biological evolutionary patterns into a Dynamic function and a static function continues on up through higher levels of evolution. The formation of semi-permeable cell walls to let food in and keep poisons out is a static latch. So are bones, shells, hide, fur, burrows, clothes, houses, villages, castles, rituals, symbols, laws and libraries. All of these prevent evolutionary degeneration.
On the other hand, the shift in cell reproduction from mitosis to meiosis to permit sexual choice and allow huge DNA diversification is a Dynamic advance. So is the collective organization of cells into metazoan societies called plants and animals. So are sexual choice, symbiosis, death and regeneration, communality, communication, speculative thought, curiosity and art. Most of these, when viewed in a substance-centered evolutionary way are thought of as mere incidental properties of the molecular machine. But in a value-centered explanation of evolution they are close to the Dynamic process itself, pulling the pattern of life forward to greater levels of versatility and freedom.