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4 - Complexity in context: the metaphysical implications of evolutionary theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2009

By
Edward T. Oakes
Edited by
John D. Barrow ,
Simon Conway Morris ,
Stephen J. Freeland  and
Charles L. Harper, Jr
Edward T. Oakes
Affiliation:
University of St. Mary of the Lake-Mundelein Seminary
John D. Barrow
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Simon Conway Morris
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Stephen J. Freeland
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, Baltimore
Charles L. Harper, Jr
Affiliation:
John Templeton Foundation
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Summary

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists. And physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms.

– George Wald, Introduction to Lawrence Henderson's The Fitness of the Environment

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems, as man…. To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell.

– E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

We keep forgetting to go right down to the foundations. We don't put our question marks down deep enough…. What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view…. A curious analogy could be based on the fact that even the hugest telescope has to have an eye-piece no larger than the human eye.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Science is the midwife of metaphysics. However much it might protest that it confines itself to physical realities only, science cannot help but provoke metaphysical questions in the human mind. To be sure, when it confines itself to its own specialized sphere, each science is strictly physical, physical both in the scope of its investigation and in the results and data those investigations produce. But science's ultimate import is always metaphysical.

Type
Chapter
Information
Fitness of the Cosmos for Life
Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning
 , pp. 49 - 69
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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