Will Evolution’s New Synthesis Be Hard or Soft Magic?
The popular fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson likes to divide magic into two categories: “soft magic” and “hard magic.”
In a hard magic system, the rules of the magic are made explicit to the reader: If you do x, y happens. If Harry Potter points his magic wand at someone and says, “Stupify!” then that person will be knocked unconscious.
In a “soft” magic system, by contrast, everything is left vague. If Gandalf raises his staff and hollers, then…something will happen. Possibly.
Sanderson points out that soft magic is best used for creating a sense of awe and wonder, while hard magic is best used for moving the plot forward and solving problems. Hard magic is not ideal for stirring up those magical feelings, because there is less mystery involved. Soft magic is not good for moving the plot, because if the reader doesn’t understand how the magic works, using it to solve the characters’ problems will feel like cheating.
This leads to Sanderson’s First Rule of Magic: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
For example, this is why J. R. R. Tolkien had to keep Gandalf well out of the way for the most crucial parts of his plots. If Tolkien had made Gandalf simply magic the ring into the fires of Mount Doom and save the day, the readers would have lost interest.
Some scientists could stand to apply Sanderson’s First Rule.
These days, quite a few biologists are saying that the neo-Darwinian synthesis has failed as an explanation for life. The magic just isn’t working anymore. There’s a lot of talk about a new synthesis to replace it. Ideas like emergence, self-organization, self-construction, panpsychism, teleonomy, and more are being put forward.
The question is: Will this new synthesis be soft magic, or hard?
Darwin’s Hard Magic
Darwin’s theory, for all its flaws, was “hard magic.” It had clearly defined rules: Self-reproducing organisms experience tiny, random variations. The beneficial ones accumulate over (practically limitless) time. This causes the organisms to slowly diversify into countless species, with each one suited to its environment.
It was clear what this could explain, and what it couldn’t. For example, it could explain the gradual diversification of the species, but not the origin of life, or any sudden changes in the fossil record.
Because the rules were clear, the explanation was satisfying to many people. The only problem was that it didn’t take into account some things Darwin didn’t know:
First, it turned out that the universe is probably not eternal. Darwin didn’t know that.
Second, DNA and the genetic basis of “random variation” were discovered, and it became possible to compare the amount of time needed to have a reasonably high chance of getting a given variation with the time actually available to get it.
Third, better microscopes revealed the mind-boggling sophistication of life at the molecular level.
Fourth, tying all these together, the molecular biologist Michael Behe noticed that many molecular structures are characterized by a high level of interdependency among parts, meaning that tiny changes on the path to creating one of these structures would not yield any survival advantage (and therefore not be selected for) until the whole structure was complete. He ran the math on the number of mutations you would need to get a typical complex feature functioning (and therefore visible to natural selection), and found that quite literally all the time in the world is not enough.
Darwin’s theory was well-formulated and explicit. He just didn’t understand what we do now.
The Hard Magic of ID
I would say that evolution’s oldest rival, intelligent design, is also in a sense “hard magic.”
That may be a surprising assertion. If the designer is God, per Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis, God is certainly a Gandalf-like figure who can do whatever he wants. (Correction: Gandalf is a God-like figure.) In fact, that is one of the main criticisms of ID: that because God is inherently unpredictable, you can’t legitimately do science on him.
This is correct, actually. There can never be a formal science of God, or even a science that says definitively when some effect was caused by God and when it wasn’t. God — by definition — can do whatever he wants. Unlike natural phenomena, he has no limits, and therefore cannot be studied as a natural phenomenon.
But intelligent design is the study of design, not of God.
It’s possible to infer that something was designed, and this inference can be made mathematically rigorous, given enough data. This is not even controversial; the design inference is applied to non-deific minds in many uncontroversial fields, such as forensics, despite the facts that human minds are not much better understood by science than God’s mind is.
That’s because, while minds are not well understood, one of the only things we do understand about them is that they can design things that would not have otherwise arisen by chance and contingency, and that they do this to achieve goals. Based on this (universal) observation, intelligent design posits that if something has a specified, identifiable function, then the likelihood it was designed by a mind is the inverse of the likelihood that it arose by chance and contingency.
But that doesn’t mean that ID theory can say who the designer was. Forensics can’t tell you whether a person or a supernatural genie of infinite power murdered someone. (You can find DNA, but the genie could have faked it.) But it can tell you that they didn’t die by chance. Whether a murderer or a devious genie is more likely is a question for philosophy. Likewise, mathematical analysis of proteins can’t tell you whether those proteins were designed by God, or a genie, or Jack the Ripper. But it most certainly can tell you that the proteins didn’t emerge by chance.
Gandalfing the Ring into Mount Doom
So much for Darwinism and ID. What about the new contenders to replace/modify neo-Darwinism?
Well, they’re certainly good at creating magical feelings.
Take the self-construction theorist Stuart Kauffman, waxing poetic on the theory. He says:
I invite you to do something. Go into a forest, by yourself — with some animals and some plants and some bacteria and stuff — and look around and say, “All that’s happened is that for the past 3.5 billion years the sun’s been shining, there’s been a few other sources of free energy, and all this stuff came to exist with nobody in charge.” That’s true. How much do you want for God? It’s so awesome, mysterious, grand. That’s God enough for me.
It is indeed a very cool feeling. For me, it’s similar to the feeling I get watching Mickey Mouse struggle with the animated brooms in Fantasia. Very magical.
It cannot, however, “move the plot.”
How, exactly, do these theories make the emergence of life more likely than by chance? And by how much more likely? What are the odds of any specific feature emerging through teleonomy, synergism, self-organization, self-construction, autopoiesis, or emergence? How would one go about calculating these odds?
Hard to say.
It seems that kind of math Behe applied to neo-Darwinism simply can’t be applied to the new theories, because there is nothing solid to run the numbers on. To the extent that hard details are actually given, you usually find that the scientist is either (1) sneaking in an unexplained mind (for example, positing unaccounted-for intelligence in bacteria), or (2) merely describing the developing sophistication of life without actually accounting for it.
Of course, it’s only fair to expect that an idea will start out vague. Even Darwin’s theory didn’t become really “hard” until it was integrated with Mendelian genetics after his death. I hope that these new hypotheses will be filled out with concrete details soon. Then they can become actual competitors with neo-Darwinism and ID.
But until that happens, they will continue to leave their intended audience unsatisfied. Even in a fantasy novel, you need to do better than that.
