Life in the Undergrowth

Richard Dawkins returns to our screens tonight, once again vainly attempting to convince licence-payers that religion of all kinds is a pernicious waste of time.

Just before Christmas I came across a recent interview with Dawkins in which he made two interesting statements, both of which on the face of it bring our positions on the underlying mechanisms of nature just that little bit closer: "Mutation is random in the sense that it's not anticipatory of what's needed" and "Natural selection is a guided process".

Of course it would be bizarre (to us atheists at least) if genetic code at the species level had a specific end goal in mind, yet I have always suspected that immaculately random mutation is unlikely to be the only mechanism at work in evolution. Some sort of tentative teleological effect might instead occur as the result of a probabilistic bias within the whole ecosystem (or perhaps as a set of genetic tendencies which the organism's own genome adjusts according to environmental cues.)

Evolution might have begun 'randomly' (though still quite probably given the chemical conditions) but over time life may have acquired − through further evolution − the capacity to proactively manage its own gradient up what Dawkins refers to as Mount Improbable.

Of course I'm in no position to prove it. It just sits better with my wider belief that the universe is structured in such a way that the relationship of the wholes to parts is bi-directional.

Richard Dawkins typicaly presents the idea of intelligent design as just another one of the straw men he's used to hacking down with his characteristically nimble and sophisticated intellectual brutality. When it depends on the existence of a designer outside the system intelligent design theory has some rather obvious weaknesses, but what if the designer is the system?

Dawkins is a purist when it comes to beliefs; he strongly discourages adherence to any that are not backed up pretty conclusively by empirical evidence. Yet last year's EDGE World Question − what do you believe is true even though you can't prove it? − emphasised the importance of gut-feel and imagination to contemporary research as science and philosophy move ever closer.

Over the Christmas break the BBC repeated David Attenborough's extraordinary series of nature films Life in the Undergrowth. For me at least, the programmes (especially the one entitled Intimate Relations) served to reinforce my as-yet-unjustified belief in the existence of a web of mutual influences that complements and extends the processes that Dawkins popularised in The Selfish Gene.

We were most impressed by the night ants that spend the nocturnal hours blocking the entrances to their daytime rivals' nest with little pebbles so that the resulting inconvenience prevents them from polishing off all the available grub in the area while the sun is still up!