Introduction

The title of my essay, ‘Can the fundamental laws of nature be the results of evolution?’, may suggest to some people that I shall discuss the history of science. This is not my intention. We have attained our present state of knowledge (presumably not the final state) of fundamental laws by an intricate historical process, and it is interesting to inquire how accurately, and with what reservations, the term ‘evolution’ in the Darwinian sense applies to the historical process of scientific development. (Tangentially, I remark that I have strong reservations about characterizing the development of the natural sciences as ‘evolutionary’, since that development is driven by a final cause – to find out the truth about nature – while the elimination of teleology is central to Darwinism.) My intention, however, is to discuss the laws themselves, as matters of fact concerning nature, rather than the knowledge of these laws by human beings. I wish to honour Michael Redhead by sharing his priorities: giving precedence to questions about the constitution of the world over questions about human knowledge.

But many people are baffled by this clarification. They willingly admit that secondary or derivative laws of nature may be the products of evolution, but cannot see how the basic laws themselves can evolve. Thus, the genetic code is certainly a law of biology, but it is presumably the result of billions of years of trial and error on the part of interacting molecular species; such, at any rate, is the thesis of prebiotic evolution.