LIVING ON EARTH : Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World
By
Peter Godfrey-Smith
William Collins. 322 pages. £22. ISBN-13 : 978-0008321260; pbk. £10.99
ISBN-10 : 0008321280
I seem to be moving crabwise through the work of Peter Godfrey-Smith, the
Australian philosopher of science whose primary interests lie in biology and
mind. I had read his Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness
(2020) and was busy with the latest edition of the excellent Theory and
Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science when his latest book,
Living on Earth, arrived. It is the third part of a trilogy which began
in 2018, although each can be read independently of the others. The first two
books addressed the mind-body problem: “Other Minds was organized around…
an ancient split in the genealogical tree, leading on one side to us and on the
other side to the octopus... The second book, Metazoa, looked at a wider
collection of animals and gave a fuller account of the evolution of felt
experience. This third book is mainly concerned… with another side of the story,
the mind as cause rather than product... But when we reach humans… it becomes
possible to return to the mind-body relationship and make further progress on
it.’
Godfrey-Smith’s appeal lies in the fact that he combines natural history and
philosophical speculations in a winning, commonsensical way. Also central to the
popularity of his trilogy is the fact that ‘the scuba-diving philosopher’ offers
illustrative anecdotes and atmospheric moments from his own experience where the
professional and the enthusiast are one: ‘Up top it was blustery, messy, with
waves rolling in. But below, in late-afternoon light, all was calm. Soft corals
unfurled their fingers, a few big fish roamed. I came across an octopus perched
in a mixture of soft corals, sponges, and trumpet-like ascidians [sea squirts],
holding a shell.’
He reacts with awe at what he sees and learns and writes prose of such
conversational clarity that these descriptions and his explanations hold the
attention of the reader. One example of the latter can be found in Theory and
Reality, where he gives a working definition of common-sense
realism: ‘We all inhabit a common reality, which has a structure that exists
independently of what people think and say about it, except insofar as reality
is comprised of, or is causally affected by, thoughts, theories, and other
symbols.’ Another instance, this time from Living on Earth, offers
accessible science with feeling: ‘The full story about color, in outline, looks
like this. Visible light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. That radiation
exists on a wide spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, with color in the
middle. The differences along this spectrum involve the wavelength, the distance
between peaks in the wave. This to me is such a surprise —that radio waves,
visible light with its colors, X-rays, and gamma rays are all essentially the
“same stuff,” differing just in wavelength (and with definite scare quotes
around “stuff”).’
Godfrey-Smith’s writing has the attractive quality of seeming to capture thought
in action in this way. He clarifies the ideas he favours and offers reasons for
his reservations about alternatives. He will regularly recap and return to
expand on ideas (‘Now it is thought likely that the initial role of feathers, at
least in part, was something more extravagant: display.’) Further, he adopts &
adapts others’ ideas: ‘In outlining how all this works, I’ll make use of ideas
from the American philosopher Larry Wright, who wrote about the scientific place
of teleological ideas in a very insightful way. I augment his ideas with
modifications of my own.’ This leads on one occasion to an envisaged
conversation (‘I can imagine [Jakob von] Uexküll replying…In response, I say…’).
And he is honest about his own understanding: ‘Am I exaggerating the
differences? Perhaps, and exceptions might be more numerous than I realize. My
picture is no doubt shaped by what I’ve seen.’
In Living on Earth he first explains the basic science: ‘From the sun
comes energy in the form of radiation. Some of this is transformed into chemical
energy by photosynthesis, and some of this, in turn, is transformed into
movement, especially in animals.’ His interest is in the latter, specifically
with how living things transform and engineer change in their environments by
activity. Sponges, for example, filter water when feeding, and while this
transforms the water quality that is a by-product of its activity, not a
feat of engineering. To engineer, in his terms, is to change the environment
consciously, as an animal or bird does when it builds a den or nest. The
distinction is not always easy to maintain, he admits, citing the actions of
earthworms and coral polyps, which do both.
Looking at the ‘evolutionary history of action’ Godfrey-Smith identifies ‘five
rough categories: movement, feeding, interaction between individuals (other than
feeding), engineering, and information gathering.’ Interestingly, communication
(‘interaction’) in its broader sense involves bacteria ‘releasing and absorbing
chemicals’ and includes animal colours, signals and displays. (Here the author
points out that white magnolias existed on the planet before bees and evolved to
be fertilized by beetles, hence their lack of display.)
He gives us a drawing of a communicating octopus with two upwardly, outwardly
raised tentacles (’arms to heaven’) which he speculates might mean ‘I’ve seen
you’ or ‘Here I am!’ There is humour in such momentary anthropomorphisms, as in
the cunning of flowers: ‘Attracting insects, birds, and bats allows flowering
plants to interact, plant to plant, over long distances.’ There is black humour,
too, in the idea of dolphins protecting their noses from the sea floor with
sponges, or orcas sweeping seals off ice floes by generating waves.
Like all good naturalists, he offers deft touches of imagery to enliven his
observations. The worm, for instance, acts as a ‘subterranean plow’; the
emerging cicadas offer a ‘soft papery sound, a crumpling of paper’; the
Gang-gang parrots’ calls resemble ‘corks being pulled from wine bottles’. The
talents and oddities of so many of these organisms are in themselves
entertaining: the lyrebird with its dinosaur aspect and its ability to fool
other species with mimicry of them;
the bowerbirds building ‘nests’ just for display and favouring blues and
yellows. Then there are the delicate tiny seahorses, whose ‘implausible bodies
look like they were designed on a whim by a jeweler’, one of whom Godfrey-Smith
saw hold calmly to a sponge while he himself failed to battle the strong tide.
By way of leading into the subject of human beings, the author visits a Rwanda
forest to see our relatives the mountain gorillas. He is interested in
collaboration and the cultural spread of behaviour. As with these animals,
communication does not require language, but language in man has been the
deciding factor in transforming everything, both in its spoken and then written
forms. This leads Godfrey-Smith to Darwin, to Chomsky (on language structure),
to Harari (Sapiens), to Claude Lévi- Strauss, who saw writing as a
controlling mechanism for the authorities, and back to Plato’s Socrates, who
feared reading and writing clouded memory. On the positive side, there is a
wonderful quote from the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, whose father
‘never ceased to marvel till the end of his days that you can divine the
universe with these 26 symbols. People who come from generations of literacy
might have lost that sense of its transcendent and liberating power.’
Godfrey-Smith then takes us into the biological basis of ‘felt experience’
(subjectivity) and some oddities of the brain and nervous system. ‘Human
conscious experience is a joint product of our animal nature and the infusion of
our lives with culture,’ he affirms. Consciousness itself has to have been
essential for animals with agency: ‘Mobile animals have to process information
they get from the senses in a way that takes account of the consequences of
their own actions for what they sense. In this way a tacit “self-other”
distinction is embedded in a mobile animal’s dealing with the world.’ (This
reminded me of Ted Hughes’s poem about the inquisitive, human-like ‘Wodwo’:
‘I seem / separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped / out of
nothing casually I've no threads / fastening me to anything’).
Exploring our nervous systems and this ‘felt life’, he explains, ‘As well as
containing those node-to-node connections [neurons] brains contain rhythms and
patterns of electrical oscillation that span the whole system, or large parts of
it.’ These have long evolutionary roots. The significance of this is, according
to Godfrey-Smith, that the feel of being aware is the consequence of
multiple sensations: ‘It’s affected by other things you are sensing, by your
mood, by how your body is arranged, your energy level, and more.’ And then, with
the reader reeling, we enter the fascinating, disturbing subject of interbrain
synchrony, illustrated among other things by identical twins.
In the final part of Living on Earth we turn to other animal lives and
our ethical dilemmas. I cannot fault his conclusions regarding our behaviour and
our responsibilities in farming, food production and animal testing. Of pigs and
chickens he writes, ‘the only good thing that can be said about their lives is
that they are short’. Their lives are hell. ‘Some uses of our powers are
grotesque in the relationship they establish to the other animals who have come
through this history with us, perhaps especially those who have lived among us.
Factory farming of pigs and chickens, together with the worst practices used
with cattle; the use of dogs, cats, and primates in harmful experiments —these
are the most important cases.’ Industrialized farming, as he observes, is
harmful also to the environment and potentially disease ridden. His answer –and
probably the only sound, short term answer— is humane farming. We need all
animals to have had a life —before we take it.
Godfrey-Smith finally turns to wild nature and the ‘Anthropocene’, the time of
human activity and its impact. Here his key point is that rather than focus
totally on the immense problems of climate change, we need to be more
locally pragmatic; we need to protect habitats. He agrees we should urgently
mitigate the effects of climate change, reducing our dependence of fossil fuels
(severely limiting diesel) and assisting poor countries. But he sees great, more
readily achievable value in local
activity. He cites the cleaning of New York Harbor and the saving from mining of
the Great Barrier Reef by conservation action as realistic successes. His
argument for the protection of ‘wild nature’, he says, is ‘more a matter of
identifying with a process than appreciating it as an onlooker.’
If you want Godfrey-Smith’s end of the world scenario: eventually the carbon
cycle will fail. There will be too little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to
support photosynthesis and plant life. Or, the oceans will lose too much water
to evaporation, ‘followed by the engulfing of the Earth by an expanding sun’.
How does he feel about his own death? He first discusses views by other recent
philosophers: Derek Parfit (death as an opening of one’s life toward the lives
of others), Thomas Nagel (death as a ‘curse’ on a hitherto-continuing self) and
Bernard Williams (qualifying Nagel’s idea of the self’s views over time). But to
Godfrey-Smith, ‘this coming and going is part of the Earth’s history with all
its creative character. I identify with that process, including the turnover and
renewal, the flow of new rivals who then depart and leave room for more.’
Living on Earth
is popular science at its best: knowledgeable, entertaining, informative and
thought-provoking. We should at least take away from it the recognition that
humane farming and the protection of habitats must be our future.