Harding said to Thorne, “I’m going to clean this out now. Hold his leg for me.” More loudly, she said, “What didn’t Darwin know, Ian?”
“That life is a complex system,” he said, “and everything that goes along with that. Fitness landscapes. Adaptive walks. Boolean nets. Self-organizing behavior. Poor man. Ouch! What are you doing there?”
“Just tell us,” Harding said, bent over the wound. “Darwin had no idea…”
“That life is so unbelievably complex,” Malcolm said. “Nobody realizes it. I mean, a single fertilized egg has a hundred thousand genes, which act in a coordinated way, switching on and off at specific times, to transform that single cell into a complete living creature. That one cell starts to divide, but the subsequent cells are different. They specialize. Some are nerve. Some are gut. Some are limb. Each set of cells begins to follow its own program, developing, interacting. Eventually there are two hundred and fifty different kinds of cells, all developing together, at exactly the right time. Just when the organism needs a circulatory system, the heart starts pumping. Just when hormones are needed, the adrenals start to make them. Week after week, this unimaginably complex development proceeds perfectly – perfectly. It’s incredible. No human activity comes close.
“I mean, you ever build a house? A house is simple in comparison. But even so, workmen build the stairs wrong, they put the sink in backward, the tile man doesn’t show up when he’s supposed to. All kinds of things go wrong. And yet the fly that lands on the workman’s lunch is perfect. Ow! Take it easy.”
“Sorry,” she said, continuing to clean his wound.
“But the point,” Malcolm said, “is that this intricate developmental process in the cell is something we can barely describe, let alone understand. Do you realize the limits of our understanding? Mathematically, we can describe two things interacting, like two planets in space. Three things interacting – three planets in space – well, that becomes a problem. Four or five things interacting, we can’t really do it. And inside the cell, there’s one hundred thousand things interacting. You have to throw up your hands. It’s so complex – how is it even possible that life ever happens at all? Some people think the answer is that living forms organize themselves. Life creates its own order, the way crystallization creates order. Some people think life crystallizes into being, and that’s how the complexity is managed.
“Because, if you didn’t know any physical chemistry, you could look at a crystal and ask all the same questions. You’d see those beautiful spars, those perfect geometric facets, and you could ask, What’s controlling this process? How does the crystal end up so perfectly formed – and looking so much like other crystals? But it turns out a crystal is just the way molecular forces arrange themselves in solid form. No one controls it. It happens on its own. To ask a lot of questions about a crystal means you don’t understand the fundamental nature of the processes that led to its creation.
“So maybe living forms are a kind of crystallization. Maybe life just happens. And maybe, like crystals, there’s a characteristic order to living things that is generated by their interacting elements. Okay. Well, one of the things that crystals teach us is that order can arise very fast. One minute you have a liquid, with all the molecules moving randomly. The next minute, a crystal forms, and all the molecules are locked in order. Right?”
“Right…”
“Okay. Now. Think of the interaction of life forms on the planet to make an ecosystem. That’s even more complex than a single animal. All the arrangements are very complicated. Like the yucca plant. You know about that?”
“Tell me.”
“The yucca plant depends on a particular moth which gathers pollen into a ball, and carries the ball to a different plant – not a different flower on the same plant – where it rubs the ball on the plant, fertilizing it. Only then does the moth lay its eggs. The yucca plant can’t survive without the moth. The moth can’t survive without the plant. Complex interactions like that make you think maybe behavior is a kind of crystallization, too.”