Sam Han | Eportfolio

Kelly is strangely keen to tie his theory of technological development to biological evolution. I am not sure why; perhaps he thinks his progressive view of technology is more credible if it’s seen as an extension of the established scientific vision of evolution. But his take on biological evolution is one that, while beloved of creationists, is completely rejected by scientists: he sees it as teleological, driven by external forces to achieve certain goals.

Sadly, evolution doesn’t work this way. In fact, the distinguishing feature of evolution is the complete absence of “laws” or “forces” that push it in a single direction. As Stephen Jay Gould tirelessly argued, evolutionary change is a highly contingent process, critically dependent on environmental uncertainties and random mutations. According to Gould, you would not be reading this article were it not for an entirely serendipitous event 65 million years ago: the meteorite impact that eliminated the dinosaurs and allowed mammals, previously marginalized by their reptilian mega-cousins, to take off evolutionarily, a process that eventually yielded our own species. True, evolution shows some trends — species are on average more complex now than at the beginning of life — but does that mean that there is a consistent evolutionary impulse toward complexity, with natural selection always favoring the more complex over the less? Not at all. After all, that increase in complexity is a default trend: because the first organism was simple, any change must have resulted in greater complexity. A large proportion of all life on the planet (albeit a slice of life we tend to overlook) is microbial, and has accordingly remained simple. And some species, like fleas an